Research disproves a study that Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson cited as’racial correlation ‘
A recently released study from a professor at Harvard University refutes a widely cited study that claimed dark children had better success rates when given care by dark doctors.
When taking into account infant birth weights, Manhattan Institute Fellow Robert VerBruggen and Harvard Kennedy School Professor George Borjas ( pictured left ) discovered the study’s conclusion was a failure.
Borjas told The College Fix in a new email that” Robert and I are both engaged in the weakness of experimental results in cultural science.” The classic paper disappeared as a result of doing the statistical analysis and adding a number of settings, according to both of us.
Their study, published in the” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” book Sept. 16, used the same information as the 2020 review to replicate the results, but even controlled for lower birth workouts.
” The estimated cultural correlation effect is significantly weakened, and usually becomes statistically negligible, after controlling for the effect of extremely low birth weights on mortality”, the researchers found.
The idea that doctors who are the same competition as their individuals provide better care is known as racist concordance.
The 2020 review was cited as evidence to support the theory. According to the study, “racial coherence between the doctor and the kitten person may reduce differences in success rates across Black and White newborns during birth.”
It received widespread media coverage, and interest from other universities and medical organizations. However, organizations like Do No Harm Medicine have warned that medical institutions may prevent embracing the idea because it is “flawed.”
Borjas, when asked if he expected to find different benefits than the 2020 study, said he was not surprised.
” I may say that in my situation, I am not at all surprised by the fact that the effects change when you examine the information from a different position,” he said.
” However, I never thought that the outcome would change was because there was a left out changing, which was evidently the kind of changing that never ought to have been left out,” he told The Fix.
” I did my job and I think our paper is pretty conclusive. According to him, “people will interpret the evidence however they want to.”
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Borjas mentioned that he was in contact with Brad Greenwood, the lead author of the original study, who was helpful.
Borjas said,” He helped us guide us through some of what they did in the original paper.”
He told The Fix,” [ We] Had]e responded within a few days after sending him the original draft of our paper with an acknowledgement that we were making an important point and urged us to send]it ] to PNAS.”
When asked about the new study, Greenwood responded to The Fix by saying he was “glad that there is a continued and robust dialogue in the scholarly community” about the subject of racial concordance.
” It is important work that needs to be continued”, he said in a recent email.
VerBruggen, a policy researcher at the institute, told The Fix over email that he had been interested in the 2020 study since it came out.
” At the time, I was skeptical — but the models had a lot of control variables that did seem to address some of the obvious criticisms, so I was n’t entirely sure what to think”, he said.
After U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson mentioned the study in her dissention to Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, VerBruggen said he began looking into the data once more. The 2023 decision overturned race-based college admissions policies.
” That’s when I started looking into getting the data and asked Prof. Borjas if he’d be interested in working on the issue”, VerBruggen said.
He and Borjas wrote an additional report, published Tuesday at the Manhattan Institute, that explains their research in more detail:
The authors ‘ treatment of the infants ‘ health conditions had a significant impact, we found. Using “diagnosis codes” that are reported for each patient, the analysis effectively compares the race of the doctor and the race of the newborn among newborns who are “equally healthy” in terms of those top 65″ comorbidities” using “diagnosis codes” that are used to account for the 65 health conditions that are most prevalent in the data set. However, there is no single indicator for whether a newborn has a very low birth weight, which is a significant factor in infant mortality, in the top 65 comorbidities. ]3 ]
Controlling for very low birth weight—i. e.g., compares newborns who are within the same weight class to eliminate the racial concordance result in the most in-depth statistical models.
VerBruggen also said the 2020 study’s authors were “extremely helpful” as they conducted their research. The authors included Greenwood, from George Mason University, Laura Huang from Harvard, and Aaron Sojourner and Rachel Hardeman, both from University of Minnesota.
They provided us with the information they had on doctor races and responded to numerous inquiries regarding how technical matters were handled. They encouraged us to publish the findings as well as give us feedback on a draft of our paper, he said.
He told The Fix,” It was a good illustration of how research can advance and advance when scientists are open to replication and challenge.”
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IMAGE: Harvard University, Manhattan Institute
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