Thread by @jdportes

One interesting point: I have *never* in 35 years of both producing & consuming government reports seen one where the evidence & analysis has been so comprehensively discredited so quickly and completely across a *very* wide range of topics/domains.

bbc.co.uk/news/uk-565950…

There are now far too many twitter threads etc from subject matter experts to list; my own contributions here

https://twitter.com/jdportes/status/1377309415615954951?s=19

And here

https://twitter.com/jdportes/status/1377226087529385986?s=19

@kenanmalik

https://twitter.com/kenanmalik/status/1377525335848333312?s=19

@VictimOfMaths

https://twitter.com/VictimOfMaths/status/1377548868259360773?s=19

But there's many more

And worth mentioning this BMJ piece

blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/03/31…

Equally, I haven't seen anyone who does serious research in these areas seriously try to defend the Commission's analytical framework (indeed it's unclear the commissioners themselves want to or can)

But it's interesting to ask *why* both the report and the critics focus so much on what the evidence/analysis do and don't say. IMO its because this is *not* "policy based evidence making".

The actual policy proposals in the report are largely sensible, uncontentious - and have been mostly ignored both by those spinning the report and its critics.

Instead the report is more "rhetoric based evidence making" - (mis)-interpreting/misinterpreting existing research/evidence (much of it well-known/reliable), not to support specific policies, but rather to advance dubious rhetorical claims.

In that sense, the report is "not even wrong"; it's not giving us the wrong answer to the question "how should we address racial and other disparities" because it didn't set out to answer that question; it set out (and failed) to justify a particular type of rhetoric.