alt Hacker NewsI just looked at the study for one claim "might be a fluke, but it also showed up in a study where researchers wiped out a bunch of people’s medical debt and it maybe made them more depressed".
The paper's abstract says "First, we find no impact of debt relief on credit access, utilization, and financial distress on average. [...] Third, we find no effect of medical debt relief on mental health on average, with detrimental effects for some groups in pre-registered heterogeneity analysis." which is exactly the kind of meaningless result you'd expect from doing ~20 statistical tests over random numbers. (The paper lists hundreds of p-values.)
Medical debt with a face value of $169 million was wiped out for 83,401 people, yet the study failed to find any benefit. I suspect this is representative of the quality of the reasoning in the rest of this article.
> which is exactly the kind of meaningless result you'd expect from doing ~20 statistical tests over random numbers. (The paper lists hundreds of p-values.)
On page 20 they describe using the Westfall and Young method to adjust for multiple hypothesis testing and report adjusted and unadjusted p-values.
They also pre registered their analysis with depression as a primary outcome and breaking down by medical debt quartile as pre registered subgroup analysis.
In the highest quartile of medical debt group, 45.9% percent in the no debt forgiveness group had at least moderate depression vs 58.3% in the debt forgiveness group, p=0.002
Dismissing this as a meaningless result seems unfair given that they preregistered their analysis and adjusted for multiple comparisons.
I’m not a stats expert and haven’t spent much time with the paper, but I’d suggest checking the methods section before making claims.