George Borjas on Mortality Rates Among Black Infants

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in her dissent on the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action in 2023, cited a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) concluding that black infants are more likely to survive if they are cared for by black doctors than white doctors. But a recent study using the same data suggests that race was not the real factor.

This week, Naomi and Ian are joined by George J. Borjas, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, to discuss his recent paper co-authored with Robert VerBruggen, “Do Black Newborns Fare Better with Black Doctors? The Limits of Measuring Racial Concordance.” Originally part of a project analyzing the fragility of empirical findings in social science, George’s study reanalyzes the same data used in the PNAS study to see whether the same result emerged. He and VerBruggen found that if the data is adjusted for low birthweight, the correlation between race of the doctor and infant survival disappeared. Their research has now been published by the National Academy of Sciences. George discusses how the narrative about the original study persists even when new data has called it into question.

Resources

● Do Black Newborns Fare Better with Black Doctors? The Limits of Measuring Racial Concordance | George J. Borjas and Robert VerBruggen

● Are Black Newborns More Likely to Survive with Black Doctors? | George J. Borjas and Robert VerBruggen

Show Notes

● 00:47 | How did you become interested in the topic of mortality rates among black newborns? What did you find in your study?

● 05:50 | Why did your study find different results using the same data as the earlier one?

● 07:57 | Why did the original authors not include low birthweight as a factor in their study?

● 08:48 | What did you find about the distribution of doctors to women whose infants had low birthweight?

● 11:01 | Have you shared this new finding with the original authors of the study?

● 13:35 | Given that low birthweight is a universally accepted factor in infant mortality, are you surprised that the original result that black infants do better when they are matched with black doctors was so widely accepted?

● 17:17 | Has your study received the same kind of attention as the original study?

● 18:40 | Can we empirically answer the question of whether the specialties of doctors and their respective races is the driver of better results for black infants, rather than just the race itself?