(FORTUNE Magazine) – ADVOCATES UNLIMITED

Hey, how do you get to be an advocate around here? Or rather, how do you get to the point where the media routinely use the high-minded "A" word to characterize your role in planetary affairs instead of just calling you a hustler, or promoter, or lobbyist? We mention that last term because it has had inescapably pejorative connotations ever since high school civics, and the corporate sector has long needed a replacement. And guess what: We have our first sighting of "business advocates.'' The Roanoke Times & World News thusly labeled the guys in Virginia who dealt with Governor George Allen on income tax cuts.

The media being what they are, most folks labeled advocates are still identified with causes deemed progressive. Early in February, Nexis was offering to show you 27,832 stories mentioning consumer advocates. Homeless advocates scored 7,099, abortion rights advocates 6,045, civil rights advocates 4,068, children's advocates 2,401, advocates for the disabled 2,330, gay rights advocates 2,163, animal rights advocates 1,655, and women's rights advocates 1,323.

But a few conservative groups are beginning to put numbers on the board. We found all of 62 stories about homeowner advocates, 33 about taxpayer advocates, and--a special favorite--46 about landlord advocates. (The news stories suggest that their main role in life is to weep over the decisions of local rent-control boards.) Business rights advocates score only three thus far, and in two of the cases the term seems to be used as a smear of one politician by another. But you have to start somewhere.

GREAT MOMENTS IN EDITING

Grammatik, a computerized writing aid...made by...WordPerfect, not only zooms in on incorrect word usage and punctuation but seeks out offensive terms...

Grammatik is loaded into an estimated ten million computers worldwide...

Some have already pointed out the limits of style and usage checkers...

A California newspaper...inserted the preferred "African American'' instead of "black'' in an article. It subsequently ran this correction:

"An item in Thursday's Nation Digest about the Massachusetts budget crisis made reference to new taxes that will help put Massachusetts 'back in the African American.' The item should have said 'back in the black.' "

-From an article in the Salt Lake Tribune.

VOODOO ECONOMICS, MINIMUM WAGE DEPT.

"His desk was ever a mess, but he always knew where the New York Times stood on the minimum wage.'' Or do you think that's a bit wordy for a fellow's tombstone inscription? One increasingly yearns for some kind of recognition in this area, where tracking the Timesian flip-flops--the latest came a few weeks ago, in a January 26 editorial--is no breeze and one often eerily senses that he is more concerned about the editorial board's logical consistency than are the boarders themselves.

Just to show what a person is up against here, consider the record since the late Seventies of the world's arguably greatest newspaper. Back then, the paper's editorials routinely lent support to the minimum wage. On one occasion in 1977 an editorialist went so far as to cluck affirmatively over some loony proposals for a global minimum wage. In 1980 the Times suddenly seemed much less sure of itself. An editorial in September praised presidential candidate John Anderson for proposing a two-tier minimum wage (one that would be lower for teenagers), yet the line three months later was that "the best course would be to abandon the minimum wage altogether,'' since it generated inflation and reduced job opportunities for unskilled workers. But then in 1982 the editorialists were extolling retiring Representative Shirley Chisholm for battling to extend the minimum wage to domestic employees, whose job opportunities have evidently been forgotten. And in 1983, having also forgotten about Anderson, they were denouncing Reagan for proposing a two-tier minimum. In 1987 the Times had it just about perfect in an editorial titled "The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00.'' Title over the highly imperfect January 26 effort, which was enthusing over Clinton's State of the Union call for a boost in the minimum: "A Proposal Worth Fighting For.''

The economics profession as a whole has always believed what the Times sometimes believes: that increasing the minimum wage decreases employment. For unskilled workers, as for computers and lollipops, price increases in market economies tend to reduce demand. Here on the messy desk right now is an analysis of the employment effects of the 1990-91 increases in the federal minimum wage (which rose in two steps from $3.35 to $4.25). Composed by Donald Deere and Finis Welch of Texas A&M and Kevin M. Murphy of the University of Chicago Business School, and soon to be published in the American Economic Review, the study examines the state-by-state employment of groups with high levels of low-wage workers: males, females, and blacks who are either teenagers or high school dropouts. After controlling for over-all job levels in each state, the study found that all six of these groups had lower employment rates after the minimum-wage hike than before. The decline for teenage blacks was 10%, and the authors observe at the end: "The regression estimates have no surprises.''

To be sure, there are always a certain number of economists off at the Reichian-Galbraithian end of the spectrum trying to prove that it all ain't so--that you really can raise the wages of competence-challenged workers without reducing demand for their services. The case invariably incorporates an argument that our labor markets are not really competitive. Currently onstage with a variant of this case and giving solace to certain editorial boarders are Princeton economists David Card and Alan Krueger, whose views are lengthily argued in the just-published Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage. Krueger is now working for Robert Reich in the Clinton Administration's Department of Labor.

As that title implies, he and Card are positioning themselves as empiricists challenging tired old theories. They are putting forward data said to prove that in many situations, minimum-wage increases do not destroy low-wage jobs. How can it be? In some cases, they argue, the employers (typically fast-food chains) have been able to pass along the additional costs to their customers. An obvious implication of this story is that the employers as a group did not notice they had the market power to raise prices until the minimum-wage law came along--a scenario that seems counterintuitive in these greedy times. The authors also seem to believe that employers need the government to tell them which kinds of wage strategies maximize profitability. Or so one has to assume when Card and Krueger argue that the higher wages mandated by Congress and resisted by business are what enable companies to reduce turnover, attract better employees, and generally thrive despite managerial dumbness. All very implausible, one might say, depending on which editorial board he worked for.

ASK MR. STATISTICS

Dear Normalcurver: My wallet unfortunately levitated on New York's IRT subway line the other morning, and I blame an article I was absorbedly reading in the Ecology Law Quarterly (Vol. 21, No. 2) by Professor Stanley Rothman of Smith College, who unfortunately got to the most fascinating details of all just as the passengers started milling about preparatory to debouchment at Grand Central.

The details are in a table wherein representative samples of (a) scientists and (b) environmental activists express opinions about the dangers associated with 11 different carcinogens. Four of these (e.g., dietary fat) were created by nature, while the other seven (e.g., dioxin) were created by humankind. The two groups were asked to rate the dangers of each carcinogen on a scale from zero to ten.

Now here is the part that caused my pocket to get picked. In rating the four natural carcinogens, the activists were very close to the scientists. In no case did the two groups' ratings vary by more than 1.31. But in rating the industrial carcinogens, the two groups diverged widely and always in the same direction: The activists always rated the man-made carcinogens far more dangerous than did the scientists, and in no case was the difference less than 1.9. Professor Rothman encourages one to suspect the activists of antibusiness bias, but given the rather small sample of carcinogens, I wonder if those differential ratings may reflect naught but chance. Are the data really telling us anything about levels of intellectual honesty among the activists?

SWITCHING TO THE BMT

Dear Undergrounder: The data strongly imply that expected honesty among environmental activists is comparable to what one experiences on the Lexington Avenue line. Look at it this way. If you measure the gap between scientists' and activists' danger ratings on each of the 11 carcinogens, and then rank-order the differences from smallest to greatest, you have a possibility of 39,916,800 sequences. But only 120,960 of them--1/330th of the total--allow for the arrangement in which the seven largest differences all involve manufactured carcinogens. So anyone maintaining that the activists are honestly representing what scientists know about man-made carcinogens is betting on a 329-to-1 long shot.

Dear Oddsperson: As the pro football season wound down in December and the playoffs loomed, we couch potatoes of America received endless expert testimony on the transcendent importance of the "home-field advantage.'' But none of the pigskin pundits chatting away on the tube ever got around to stating exactly how large the advantage is or even to proving that it actually exists. Quantitatively speaking, what gives?

SOFA SPUD

Dear Longuechaiser: Although conceptually difficult to distinguish from the visiting-team disadvantage, the home-field advantage does indeed "exist'' in the strict phenomenological sense of the term. The empirical evidence supporting this unastounding statement currently resides in a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet it took a weekend to create. The spreadsheet incorporates data on the 8,489 games played over the years by the 28 teams currently in the National Football League. The news is that when you take all those games together, you find yourself looking at a "home win percentage'' of 57.8%.

Of possibly equal social utility is a figure derived from another data set: the scores of all 224 NFL games played during the 1994 regular season. A few teams did better on the road than at home--the hapless Washington Redskins scored all three of their wins on the road--but in the aggregate, the home teams outscored the visitors by 365 points, a figure that translates into an average home-field advantage of 1.6 points per game.