Payday Loans and the Christian Power Rankings (Pt. 4)

Behold! Christian Power Rankings!

How the authors' Christian Power Rankings should have been determined...

Welcome back. Last time, I looked at how Lawrence Meyers critiques Graves and Peterson’s thoroughly biased, pointlessly religious anti-payday loan paper. Let’s continue with the analysis of Meyers’ views on “Usury Law and the Christian Right: Faith Based Political Power and the Geography of the American Payday Loan Regulation.” Apparently, the authors were pious enough to devise a stat called “Christian Power Rankings.”

CPI: Kokomo

Could be a new CSI, but it’s much less dramatic and the acting falls well below the Caruso threshold. Graves and Peterson have created “Christian Power Rankings” (CPI) that take three factors into account. As Meyers sees it, two of these are taken from “incomplete data and sampling bias.” The authors have this to say about criteria number one (per capita density):

The per capita density of Evangelical Christians and Mormons involved trying to rank states based on the simple percentage of people whom we believe are prone to use their Christian Faith to guide them as they vote for public officials.

And Meyers calls the authors’ sampling bias bluff. How can statements like “whom we believe” head in any other direction? This is a thoroughly biased editorial Graves and Peterson have written, not an objective academic paper on the religious ills of payday loans. How can religion and objectivity co-exist, anyway? If you hold to the tenets of your religion, you are supposed to see things in no other way, which eliminates the possibility of objectivity. Either you buy the story or you don’t; fundamentalists don’t like buffet customers.

“How can scientific conclusions be obtained when the experimenters randomly and subjectively apply their opinion to something,” Meyers asks. The authors admit that “obtaining good data based on religious affiliation is not easy.” Valueless information makes the CPI score a valueless statistic.

Getting a representative sample

Criteria number two for the CPI is “the opinions of conservative Christian Groups actively engaged in the political process.” Voting scorecards were used by the authors. They intended for the voters to score members of each state legislature, and individual state governments are largely responsible for drafting payday loan and installment loan legislation. However, the voters limited their scoring to Washington D.C. legislators, which is far from a representative sample of the entire nation. Yet the authors simply throw up their hands and pretend it is a representative sample. Here is Meyers’ response:

One cannot assign a proxy, such as this, when it dismisses the differences that exist between state and federal party affiliation. Also, legislative decisions made at the state level are subject to infinite political variables that differ from those at the federal level. As it is, with current attempts at federal legislation, the April 2nd hearing of the House Finance Subcommittee, showed broad differences between federal legislators opinions on payday loans and those at the state level.

No scientific accuracy equals another worthless measurement. Graves and Peterson have only one more left to save the CPI from Sheol…

Congressional voting records on… other issues?

The third leg of the CPI tripod is the authors’ attempt to take “an average statewide Congressional delegation voting record on social/cultural issues as published online by Poole and Rosenthal.” The authors used data from the 108th Congress, which was the last session they could obtain data from before publication. Since a wide range of other issues are covered by Congress, it is faulty reasoning to believe that all of these can in some way be applied to payday loan issues. Meyers doesn’t spend much time with this third point, perhaps in that in falls under the banner of being non-representative (just like the last point).

I can almost imagine the authors with a “good/bad” list in front of them as they’re pre-planning their payday loan study. “Vandalism is bad, the war on drugs is bad, and the Bible tells us (or someone read it and sold us a bill of goods) that payday loans are bad, so they all fall into the same category of analysis! Eureka!”

CLICK HERE and see how Meyers wraps up his critique of the dubious Misters Graves and Peterson…

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