Apropos of a Facebook comments conversation with a former Belmont University professor (who is now a colleague) on the Democratic Party infighting described in a reason Salon exclusive on Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s ravaging of the Obama administration on its failure to live up to the promise of holding Wall Street accountable for the 2008 financial crisis, here’s Bloomberg View‘s Megan McArdle in 2009 — then writing for The Atlantic — on the former Harvard professor’s sketchy past with medical bankruptcy scholarship:

What Warren et. al. neglect to mention is that bankruptcies fell between 2001 and 2007.  In fact, they were cut in half.  Going by the numbers Warren et. al. provide, medical bankruptcies actually fell by almost 220,000 between 2001 and 2007, a fact that they not only fail to mention, but deliberately obscure…

…in 2001, 1.45 million households filed for bankruptcy.  In 2007, that number was 727,167.   Had their paper done the basic arithmetic, readers would easily have seen that their own numbers imply a decrease in medical bankruptcies, from about 750,000 to slightly over 500,000.  Yet their paper does not merely ignore this fact; it uses language that seems deliberately designed to conceal it.  I invite any of my readers to scan the paper for any hint that medical bankruptcies had fallen significantly over 6 years.

This is elementary social science.  A huge change in the composition of your sample needs to be noted.  It certainly should not be artfully disguised.  If the 2005 bankruptcy form made it more difficult to file bankruptcy, the people who still file bankruptcy will largely be those who are forced to it by events totally beyond their control.  Medical bankruptcies seem to fill that bill.

Yet even so, their own work shows medical bankruptcies falling in the years between 2001 and 2007, which would seem to invalidate, not support, the claim that half of all bankruptcies in 2001 were driven by medical events beyond the household’s control.

McArdle elaborated on eight other methodological problems with that 2007 Warren paper on medical bankruptcies roughly a year later, also while still at The Atlantic.

Sen. Warren is currently something of a progressive darling, and it’s not surprising to see her raking the Obama administration over the coals as 2016 draws near. It gives her and her political team as a chance to gauge public sentiment on various issues before possibly declaring herself a candidate for the presidency, including and especially public sentiment about the potential candidacy of one former First Lady and former Secretary of State who might also run for president, and who served in the Obama administration. It’s pretty sad that people who once styled themselves as the “adults in the room,” after a controversial Bush presidency sent the Republican Party into the proverbial wilderness, now venerate someone who willfully misleads people in academia to persuade them of her conclusions. What happens when Warren no longer has to be accountable to peer review? Well, that’d be all to the good if my read on and study of the progressive movement in America is any indication. For them, the ends justify the means.