You may have heard of the study published in PNAS in 2020 concluding that Black newborns have higher survival rates when Black doctors attend to them

Progressives should worry more about their favorite scientific findings

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2024-10-22 11:00:05

You may have heard of the study published in PNAS in 2020 concluding that Black newborns have higher survival rates when Black doctors attend to them. It got a huge amount of coverage in the popular press. It was even cited by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent last year on the court’s ruling against racial preferences in college admissions. The newborn research, Brown Jackson claimed, shows the benefits of diversity. “It saves lives,” she wrote.

The same journal just published a reanalysis of the data. It turns out that the effect disappears once you take into account that Black doctors are less likely to see the higher-risk population of newborns that have low birth weight.

I wasn’t surprised when I saw the re-analysis because I didn’t believe the original finding. It’s not like I thought: “Oh, that has to be bullshit!” It was more: “Meh—I reserve judgment.”

To see the problem, compare these findings to those without political import. Suppose I read a paper in Nature Human Behaviour claiming that