Self Refuting Columns: Guardianista's Congratulate Selves On Intellectual Superiority.

The two most commented stories on the Grauniad website at the moment are:

The right's stupidity spreads, enabled by a too-polite left- George Monbiot

When the Daily Mail calls rightwingers stupid, the result is dumbogeddon- Charlie Brooker

These are both referring to a "study" by a Canadian academic that has already been described as “A contender for the worst use of statistics in an original paper ever” by a serious academic.

Studies "proving" the superior intelligence of liberals have a staple among well, liberals, for a few years. Some of them have turned out to be hoaxes, some to be based on such laughably poor methodology that they are actually worse than the mere hoaxes.

Tim Worstall points out that the study itself doesn't even prove what it purports to. Later today or tomorrow I'll use some genuine numbers (mostly American) to look at the actual question of who is smarter*.

* The answer will be "Neither really" but I'll expand upon that.

Cluelessness Or Comic Genius

The England rugby team's defence coach, Mike Ford, has quit. In an interview with the Daily Telegraph we get this:

Comments critical of Ford, given anonymously by some England ­players, were published, saying “his analysis was like a white wall of jargon”, “defensive and line-out drills were two to three years behind” and “he was full of pointless stats.”

Ford maintains these comments only represented “11 per cent” of the feedback and a number of players have been in contact to say as much. He is disappointed mostly because those who held critical views did not feel they could approach him.

{observation nicked from someone in the comments to the article}

British Universities- More Dangerous Than The Congo

Julie Bindel is writing about her favourite subject- the mass rape than female British students are subjected to- "one in seven women students had experienced a serious physical or sexual assault while at university or college".

I've been denounced By Ms Bindel for questioning the source for the statistic- a scepticism derived from both the sisterhood's previous misuse of studies and the specific similarity of Bindel's statistic to the discredited campus rape myth in the USA- and am inevitably accused of denying rape exists for my troubles (as I said it's a Julie Bindel piece.)

Sure enough the actual source for the figure reveals that they got the figure by- an online survey.

Dodgy Stat Of The Day

According to Time's Healthland column:

In numerical terms, people with red hair are a decided minority. They comprise just 2-6% of the population of the northern hemisphere and 1-2% worldwide.

Given that the Northern Hemisphere has about 90% of the World's population I don't see how if the red menace comprises 2 to 6 % of the North's population they could only comprise 1 to 2% of the total population. even if there were zero gingers in the South.

Ludicrous Spinning Of The Day

Guido Fawkes tries to play up the effect of his non story about William Hague and his former SPAD:

Well Over Half Query Hague

Well the poll in question actually shows that 46% believe Hague's denial of any impropriety, 12% disbelieve and 42% couldn't give a shit. For a politician to be only disbelieved by 12% of the population is extraordinary and shows that even partisan anti-Tory voters aren't buying the story.

Guido also reports that "Even the loyalists at ConservativeHome have registered a drop in approval. ". Which is true, his approval there has plummeted all the way from 92% to er 91% (which could mean support has fallen from 91.5% to 91.4%).

This absurd misrepresenation makes Staines look as though he is floundering, not Hague.

Caviar For Every Child

According to the "Left Foot Forward" blog, Michael Gove is the "regressive of the week" for:

scrapping Labour’s plans to lift 50,000 of the poorest children out of poverty, failing to extend free school meals to 500,000 of the poorest working families. The move will cost families up to £600 more a week – the equivalent of an extra penny in income tax per child.

Leaving aside the shamelessness of complaining about cuts when you supported the policies that made them inevitable just consider the figures.

Who the hell spends £600 a week on school meals? Given that children are only at school 5 days a week, LFF must believe that spending £120 a day on food is reasonable, I realise that the site's main man Will Straw is the son of an MP but even for MPs that's excessive.

Ok it does say the cost is per family, and many families have more than one child. Even then though if you assume that an acceptable lunch costs about a fiver (probably less actually) one would need to have around 24 school age children to be spending £120 a day.

Fake Statistics Harm Victims.

Baroness Stern has released a report into how the justice system handles rape:

The figure for convictions of those charged with rape as the term is normally used is actually 58 per cent.

'There is concern that the six per cent figure can make victims feel it is not worth reporting.'

Lady Stern added: 'The conviction rate has taken over the debate to the detriment of other important outcomes for victims.

Her point about how the use of misleading statistics like the supposed 6% conviction rate can harm victims is a good one and is probably not emphasised enough. All too often the overwhelming impression is that a lot noisiest commentators (who will no doubt be denouncing Baroness Stern in the Guardian later today) view it as an ideological tool to beat the patriarchy.

This matters because this ideology creates a barrier to actually dealing with the problem. See here for other examples of how ideologues don't have the interests of victims at heart.

Fake Statistic Watch.

How many people watch the Oscars? I don't know anyone who does yet the most cited figure for the events ratings is:

• "a predicted billion people watching the Oscars"
• "You always have to be apprehensive when you stand up in front of a billion people"
• "the one billion who are said to watch the Oscars worldwide".

This is complete and utter bullshit that narcissistic Hollywood types tell themselves to convince everyone that the world is transfixed by them.

First of all that is more than 1 in 7 of the world's population, and when you consider that many people on the planet are from countries where Hollywood is not the dominant film producer or where English isn't the first language or where televisions are rare or from places in really inconvenient time zones then that eliminates a most of the planet.

Furthermore even in the strongest market for the event, the USA, scarcely more than 1 in 10 of the population watch it.

Finally there is no organisation that provides viewing estimates for international events anyway (even for genuinely popular events like the World Cup the supposed viewing figures are nonsense).

Anyway with only aroung 30 million viewers in the USA it is highly unlikely that the global figure is over 100 million let alone anywhere near a billion.

Social Problems All Intertwined.

Some stuff about the increase in teenage pregnancy rates here. Last time I wrote about teenage pregnancy I did a comparison between the nation American rate of 15-19 year olds getting pregnant and the homicide rate and found a positive correlation of 0.85.

This is a very strong correlation and I think an important point can be inferred from it that needs reiterating. Whilst public discussion of crime rates focuses on things specifically related to crime, such punishment, policing and rehabilitation, and teenage pregnancy rates are discussed in terms of sex education, family values and access to contraception; there is clearly a common factor at work that does not appear to directly relate to either problem.

I don't claim to know what that factor is, but assuming that we don't think that abstinance programs decrease stabbings or that the death penalty has an effect on whether teenagers have unprotected sex there is clearly something else at work. It could be the economy, education or something I haven't thought of but that isn't the point.

I just picked two indicator to compare but I'd guess that if other social indicators were compared we'd find more examples of good things correlating with other good things and bad things with other bad things.

Society is complex and trying to evaluate the causes and effects of ideas is extremely difficult to do. It is not effective to try to ascertain what causes x cannot be done soley by looking at things which were explicitly done to effect x.

Meaningless Statistic Of The Day.

A huge rise in the number of children calling to report sexual abuse by women has been revealed by Childline.

Over the past five years, the charity says the number of such calls has risen five times faster than youngsters reporting abuse by a man.

This is a useless figure on its own and the fact that it is being used as the headline figure suggests to me that the useful figures aren't nearly as scary sounding.

Sure enough the actually useful statistics aren't that dramatic, female abusers make up about 1/8th or the caseload of Childline. However even that is misleading because as Esther Rantzen says "we specifically targeted boys, hoping to reassure them that it was not a sign of weakness to ask for help with a difficult or painful problem.". So after targetting boys the number of boys who contacted them rose.

The thing is I'm sure much of what Childline and the NSPCC say is true- that sexual abuse by females is probably underreported due to a reluctance to acknowledge that it exists- however the use of dubious shock stats makes me think that someone is attempting to mislead me.

Three Times Is A Pattern.

Is it me or is there a pattern here?:

1. Government rebuked for using misleading figures to demonstrate the supposed gender pay gap.
   
2. Government rebuked for using misleading figures to demonstrate low rape conviction rates.
3. Government rebuked for using bogus figures to demonstrate the extent of sex trafficking.

In each case the government has politicised an issue and allowed a militant feminist grouping to issue bogus information. The false information is then used to create the impression of a crisis which can be used to attempt to push through laws which would be recognised as transparently unfair otherwise (compulsory 'equal pay' audits & lower standards of evidence in rape trials for example).

Fun With Numbers.

Is the Guardian taking maths lessons from Gordon "0% rise" Brown. I only ask because I read this:

Teenage pregnancies and syphilis have risen sharply among a generation of American school girls who were urged to avoid sex before marriage under George Bush's evangelically-driven education policy, according to a new report by the US's major public health body.

They are referring to this report from the CDC and I don't think that they have understood it.

For example they claim that teenage pregnancies have risen sharply, but these are the only figures the CDC gives, in table 29, show the rate of pregnancies among 15-19 year olds getting continuously lower:

2000- 84.8
2001- 80.4
2002- 76.0
2003- 73.7
2004- 72.2

This is what the Guardian describes as a sharp rise in teenage pregnancy.

I think I know what they have done, but I'll let readers guess for themselves.

(Report via Letters from a Tory)

Update: I suppose everyone is on tenterhooks waiting to hear my opinion on abstinence only education. If not then tough because I'm going to share my view anyway. I don't think it works well however neither does regular sex ed. I suspect that teaching children English, Science, Foreign Languages & Mathematics properly would have a greater effect in reducing teenage pregnancy than any form of Sex Education.

Update 2: I've compared the teenage pregnancy rate from 1972 to 2004 with the homicide rate for the same year. The correlation between the two sets of figures is .85, which for the benefit of those not familiar with statistical jargon means that there is an extremely strong correlation.

Who knew that murder rates were so strongly influenced by sex education programmes?

Update 3: At least 70 blogs (according to google blogsearch) are covering this story but I appear to be the only person who has spent 5 minutes to actually look at the figures.

Does Parliament Lead Or Follow Public Opinion?

Benjamin Disraeli once said something along the lines of "I am their leader, I must follow them". This seems more likely than the idea that the public follows the lead of the political class.

Oliver Kamm writes about a survey showing increased public acceptance of homosexuality:

Acts of Parliament turned out to be important in changing public attitudes. Given that Labour is shortly to lose office in a big way, it's worth noting what the Government has done to eradicate discrimination against homosexuals.

I don't think it is true that Acts of Parliament have been important in changing public attitudes because the exact same trends have occurred in every other Western country in the last 30 years. The World Values Survey asks the question " Is Homosexuality justifiable" and the numbers who think it is never justified have fallen steadily in every comparable country to Great Britain over that time scale (except Italy):




So unless the same processes have occured in all countries it looks to me more as though Acts of Parliament have been as a result of changes in underlying public opinion and not vice versa.

As Disraeli said

Britain Doomed.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the European election results has been the scaremongering that the success of Eurosceptic parties has led to. The perennially fact challenged Johann Hari writes that if we left the EU:

we would gain little, but we would suffer horrible self-inflicted wounds. Three million jobs would melt away to a Europe that would now be wrapped away behind tariff walls. The millions of Brits living elsewhere in the EU – one million in Spain alone – would be left stranded, and have to come home, or apply for immigration rights they were no longer entitled to.

This is quite impressively wrong. I won't deal with the 3 million jobs myth. You can guess how accurate it is by seeing how scrupulous he is with the other number he throws out, one million Britons living in Spain. Thankfully the OECD compile statistics, based on census data, for the residents of a country by national origin. According to their figures, at the 2001 Spanish census there were 88 415* British people resident in Spain. By my calculation this is less than a million, in fact if I claimed to be 60 feet tall I would be exaggerating by a lower ratio than Hari.

Also, Spain isn't 1970s Uganda so mass expulsions seem unlikely in any case.

* The database lists two sets of figures for Spain so I've used the higher estimate.

Update: In the comments Matthew points to there being other estimates of the British population in Spain that do approach 1 million. Whilst I'm not convinced by the methodology used, it is fair to note that whatever the case the figure wasn't invented by Hari.

Wife Beating Number Crunching.

Julie Bindel's latest column is relatively sane so I wouldn't normally blog about it, but she reminds me of a story that was making the rounds a few months ago:

As highlighted in The Way Forward, there is evidence that young boys consider it fine to hit a woman or force her to have sex; and that there are some young girls who think that this way of behaving is acceptable.

I think this refers to the Home Office report of a few months ago. They asked a bunch of questions as to how acceptable it was for a man to hit his girlfriend in a variety of circumstances, and usually there was 1 or 2 percent saying it was acceptable, 75% or 90% saying it is never acceptable and 10% to 20% saying it was sometimes acceptable.

At first glance then it does look as if a significant proportion of people believe that it can be OK. However using my favourite survey of the week, it seems that something more subtle is going on. They asked 1000 respondents in Great Britain whether it is acceptable for a man to beat his wife, with a score of 1 meaning it is never acceptable and a score of 10 meaning that it is always acceptable. The results were as follows:

1. 87.6%
2. 7.0%
3. 1.6%
4. 0.6%
5. 0.9
6. 0.6
7. 0.2
8. 0.4
9. 0.3
10. 0.8

The majority of those who do not say that it never acceptable by selecting 1, choose 2 which looks to be as though they are saying that there are almost no circumstances in which it is acceptable. Whilst it would be better if the 2s chose 1, the fact they haven't doesn't necessarily mean that there is a large groundswell who support wife beating but could simply mean that 7-8% of people don't like being categorical in their answers so avoid saying that it is never justified.


More international data on the same sunject from the same survey can be seen here via here.

Durban 'Anti' Racism Fun.

The UN World Conference Against Racism, aka Durban 2, begins next week. The last conference in September 2001 was marred by the unfortunate fact that anti racist activists are actually racist loons.

This time around it looks as though the same process is going to occur so a number of governments have decided to boycott the event including those of Canada, the USA, Israel, then Netherlands, Australia, Sweden and Italy. They will inevitably be accused of being racist for doing so, therefore it seems like a good idea to examine how racist these countries are compared to the ones attending. The World Values Survey is probably the best place to start, they don't ask respondents a direct 'are you racist?' question, but they do ask:

'On this list are various groups of people. Could you please sort out any that you would not like to have as neighbors?'

and one of the groups is "People of a different race", so this will serve as a rough approximation for how widespread racism is in a country. Israel wasn't asked this question but the others were and these were their results for what percentage of respondents who said they wouldn't like to be neighbours to people of a different race:

USA: 8.0%
Canada: 3.4%
Sweden: 2.5%
Netherlands: 5.0%
Australia: 5.1%
Italy: 15.6%

The global average for this question is 18.3%, therefore all of the countries appear to be less racist than average, so really why should they go to a conference to be lectured to and denounced by the representitives of Iran (24.2%), Saudi Arabia (37.7%), Egypt (65.6%) and South Africa (23.6%)?

Department Of Made Up Statistics.

You may remember the great slapfight in the left section of the blogosphere over Amnesty's abuse of the data to make the claim that 1 in 10 women suffer from rape and violence each year, when as more numerate bloggers this was completely unsupported by any data.

Anyway one of Northern Ireland's hundreds of human rights quangos has produced a report claiming that 1 in 4 men in the province physically abuse their partners each year, because evidently 1 in 10 wasn't ludicrous enough. The actual evidence suggests that even the lifetime rate of abuse is substantially lower than that.

What is the motivation behind the absurd abuse of statistics to try and make out that violence against women is endemic? The actual figures suggest that it is a serious enough problem, but when they produce numbers that purport to prove that domestic violence is endemic within society they achieve three things- demonise all men, make domestic violence seem almost normal rather than deviant behaviour and to make sensible people sceptical of all claims made by the organisations that tell such big lies.

Incarceration Rates By Nationality In The UK

Following on from the government's spat with the ONS's population figures. I have decided to compare the number of foreign citizens from each country in the UK with the number of foreign citizens in prison in England & Wales.

Figures for for the incarceration and nationality are here, these refer to December 2006 so I'll use the 2006 population figures to compare them to.

Before I start I should note a few limitations of my comparison:

• The population figures are from the UK, whereas the prison figures are limited to England & Wales. This isn't a huge problem- except for the UK figure- because more than 90% of foreigners come to England & Wales
  
• I've made no allowance for the different age structures of the populations, older groups will have lower crime rates than younger ones.
• I've made no allowance for the sex ratio which will be different for each country. The low Filipino ranking is probably partly due to the fact that the most common reason for coming to the UK from there is to work in the, largely female, nursing profession.
  
• It only refers to adult prison, so youth crime isn't accounted for.
• Some countries are part of drug smuggling routes, as smugglers enter the country purely to commit a crime they are unrepresentative of their nation's citizens as a whole.
• Countries with whom we exchange prisoners will be under represented.
  
• The population figures only list the 60 most common nationalities in the UK. Some nationalities outside that top 60 would be at least in the top 10 if they were included, such as DR Congo, Serbia & Netherlands Antilles.
  
• There may be errors in the data. For example according to the prison stats there are no Ukrainian prisoners in England & Wales, which is obviously wrong. Others may also be suspect.

Having said all that it isn't a useless comparison as big differences will reflect something real regardless of all the provisos. So here is the list with the figures representing prisoners per 100,000 citizens of that country resident in the UK:

1. Vietnam-3320
2. Jamaica- 2674
3. Nigeria- 1516
4. Albania- 1064
5. Romania- 829
6. Sierra Leonne- 871
7. Trinidad & Tobago- 777
8. Iraq- 756
9. Iran- 754
10. Colombia- 712
11. Russia- 616
12. Uganda- 607
13. Somalia- 573
14. Turkey- 502
15. Cyprus- 500
16. Pakistan- 414
17. Ghana- 404
18. Lithuania- 366
19. Kenya- 353
20. China- 341
21. Sri Lanka- 322
22. Netherlands- 296
23. Latvia- 261
24. Zimbabwe- 252
25. Libya- 250
    
26. Belgium- 229
27. Bangladesh- 201
28. Portugal- 198
29. Ireland- 195
30. Brazil- 187
31. Czech- 185
32. Hungary- 183
33. South Africa- 165
34. Zambia- 160
35. Germany- 151
36. Spain- 149
37. France- 139
38. UK- 124
    
39. Austria- 120
40. Italy- 115
41. Poland- 113
42. India- 105
43. USA- 83
44. Malaysia- 69
45. Greece- 69
46. Bulgaria- 64
47. Hong Kong- 60
48. Canada- 58
49. Sweden- 55
50. Denmark- 53
51. Norway- 50
52. Slovakia- 48
53. Philippines- 34
54. Korea- 33
55. Switzerland- 33
56. Australia- 28
57. Honduras- 21
58. New Zealand- 17
59. Finland- 14
60. Japan- 0
61. Ukraine- 0

The overall trends are harder to see, citizens from rich countries tend to be locked up less frequently than those from poor countries but there are major exceptions (India, Zambia, Bulgaria). The largest source of immigrants in the last few years- Poland- has a fairly low incarceration rate. Recently war torn countries seem to have fairly high rates.

Where Johnny Foreigner Is From.

Update: The ONS have actually published updated estimates for the population by country of origin here. I can't open zip folders right now, so if anyone wants to open it and see where the new immigration since the last census has come from. feel free to paste it into my comments.


Original Post:

In the comments to my previous it is pointed out that the government is claiming that the '1 in 9' statisitic is misleading because many of the foreign born are actually people born to British forces families stationed overseas.

This seems implausible to me. Here is a list of the top 25 countries of birth for residents of the UK according to the 2001 census (rounded to the nearest 1000):

Great Britain: 53,923,000
Ireland: 537,000
India: 468,000
Pakistan: 321,000
Germany: 266,000
USA: 158,000
Bangladesh: 154,000
Jamaica: 146,000
South Africa: 141,000
Kenya: 130,000
Australia: 108,000
Italy: 107,000
Hong Kong: 96,000
France: 96,000
Nigeria: 88,000
Cyprus: 78,000
Canada: 73,000
Sri Lanka: 68,000
Poland: 61,000
New Zealand: 58,000
Ghana: 56,000
Uganda: 55,000
Spain: 54,000
Turkey: 54,000
China: 51,000

Of those countries it is fair to say that a fairly large proportion of the German and Cypriot births are from British forces overseas, as may smaller proportions of those from Kenya, Hong Kong and Canada, but it is clear that they only make up a very small percentage of all those born overseas.

Mind you the raw statistics also show that a considerable number of those not born here are from other reasonably wealthy english speaking countries, some of which are cultural off shoots of Britain in the first place, which is probably worth emphasisising.

Labour Now Officially Pro-Ignorance.

Immigration Minister Phil Woolas has accused the Office for National Statistics of "playing politics" with population figures.

He said he was "appalled" at the release of figures showing one in nine British residents was born abroad.

Huh?

Surely the problem with the immigration debate is that it largely takes place in the absence of sufficient factual evidence to support the assertions of either side. If even a dry statistic like this- which doesn't really tell us much in terms of the costs and benefits of immigration - is considered too appalling to reveal then you have to wonder whether more controversial topics surrounding immigration can even be researched, let alone be made public so they can be considered when it comes to setting government policy.

{via Mark Wadsworth}