Those defending the Census’ mandatory long form have clothed their arguments in the public interest. We need, they argue, a detailed, fair and statistically accurate count of the population to ensure that government services and programs are effectively delivered to Canadians. Without going into how useful many of these programs really are, let’s agree that the Census provides an enormously valuable store of data. Data that is used not only by all three levels of government, but also market researchers, academics, corporations and charities.
The data gathered by the Census is a vital resource for both the public and private sector. But it is not the only valuable product or service used by governments. Governments also large use large quantities cement, asphalt, paper, sophisticated electronic equipment and the services of tens of thousands of Canadians. Yet it is expected that government pay for these products and services, from Canadians who voluntarily exchange their talents and energies.
If employees of the federal government started randomly seizing cement trucks, or conscripting people off the streets to build roads, such conduct would be rightly denounced. It would be the sort of behaviour one expects of thugs like Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro, not the government of a free country like Canada. The Census, for the all the recent beating of breasts and furrowing of brows, is just another service the government needs to conduct its affairs.
A mandatory cenus is less about some hazy notion of the public interest, and more about governments, corporations, academics and other consumers of Census data getting a free ride. Rather than having to conduct their own research, and make careful adjusts to compensate for possible distortions between samples and the overall popualtion, these data consumers get the government to force ordinary Canadians to save them the bother.
Publius, “The Census: Government Information Theft”, Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2010-07-16
July 17, 2010
QotD: The census as legalized theft of time and resources
July 12, 2010
QotD: Silly census fuss
[. . .] isn’t it just the slightest bit embarrassing for a government whose leader has trashed libertarians for their ethical myopia to have minions and media partisans present a libertarian pretext for an action that is not literally among the first 200 policy changes that would be implemented by an intelligent libertarian given plenary power?
Colby Cosh, “Census squabble: weak arguments shouldn’t have even worse foundations”, Maclean’s, 2010-07-12
June 16, 2010
Air pollution: unseen (and statistically unlikely) killer
Air pollution is bad, and the computer models used to determine how bad it is show that more than 100% of all deaths were due to pollution!
Air pollution cuts a deadly but invisible swath through Canada. We know this because the Canadian Medical Association says there were 21,000 deaths from exposure to air-borne pollutants in 2008. Of these, 2,682 Canadians were instantly struck down by the acute effects of pollution. By 2031, 710,000 people will have been slain by this unseen killer.
The evidence on this epic death toll is chillingly precise. According to the Ontario Medical Association, exactly 348 people died from air pollution in Waterloo Region in 2008. In Hamilton, 445 lives were cut short. And Manitoulin Island tragically lost 14 residents due to pollutants that year.
In Toronto, the Big Smoke of Canada, the figures are appropriately larger. Calculations by Toronto Public Health claim air pollution kills 1,700 people annually and sends 6,000 to the hospital. Ten percent of all non-trauma deaths in Toronto are directly attributed to air pollution.
Did you know that? I certainly didn’t. Oh, and wait . . . neither of us knew it because it’s junk scientific bullshit:
Consider what happens when you take Toronto’s computer model and use it to determine the death toll in previous eras, when the air was far more polluted than today. For example, average sulfur dioxide levels in downtown Toronto were more than 100 parts per billion in the mid-1960s. It’s now less than 10 ppb. No surprise then, that the death toll was much greater in the bad old days. Across the 1960s, half of all non-trauma deaths were the direct result of air pollution, according to Toronto’s model. And in February 1965, more than 100% of all deaths were due to pollution!
In other words, air pollution killed more people inside the computer model than actually died of all causes in the real world. How’s that for deadly?
I can confidently assure any modern day pollution-panicked worrier that things were much, much worse in the 1960s and 70s: the air was much more difficult to breathe in downtown Toronto, the water was disgustingly polluted, and (we were assured) things could only get worse in our little slice of environmental hell. The air is far less polluted now than at any time in my life, the lakes are largely recovered from the worst environmental damage we inflicted on them.
February 24, 2010
Rechecking the data (where it still exists) is the only solution
Given all the “missing”, “normalized”, and “cherry-picked” data in the climate change debate, this is the only rational way forward:
More than 150 years of global temperature records are to be re-examined by scientists in an attempt to regain public trust in climate science after revelations about errors and suppression of data.
The Met Office has submitted proposals for the reassessment by an independent panel in a tacit admission that its previous reports have been marred by their reliance on analysis by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU).
Two separate inquiries are being held into allegations that the CRU tried to hide its raw data from critics and that it exaggerated the extent of global warming.
In a document entitled Proposal for a New International Analysis of Land Surface Air Temperature Data, the Met Office says: “We feel it is timely to propose an international effort to reanalyse surface temperature data in collaboration with the World Meteorological Organisation.”
As I’ve said several times, we may actually have a global problem with rising temperatures, and if so we need to consider the potential impact and possible ways to address it. However, the science is far from settled — in fact, it’s more unsettled now than it was at any time in the last fifteen years. Without reliable data, we can’t pretend to make any predictions or recommend any course of action because we don’t know whether global temperatures are rising or not.
February 23, 2010
Statistics can tell a lot . . . but not always truthfully
Brian Lilley looks at a recent report which critiques the federal government’s claim that women earn only 84% of the wages that men earn. The report uses a different set of statistics to show that women only earn 70 cents for every dollar a man earns in Canada:
Were this true it would be a shocking and appalling state of affairs, the type of thing that government regulations must be called upon to rectify. I truly do not know anyone who would advocate that a man earn 42% more than a woman for working the same job, for the same number of hours. Of course this is not the case.
The report, dubbed a reality check by its authors, looks at the government’s claim that women earn 84 cents for every dollar a man makes and they dismiss it. Their reason for doing so? The government does not use the correct data. In the government report, the 84 cents on the dollar claim is arrived at by looking at wages on a dollar per hour basis using Statistics Canada’s July 2008 Labour Force Survey. In July of 2008 women earned an average of $19.14 per hour while men earned an average of $22.80 per hour, thus the 84 cents on the dollar figure.
In any argument over statistics, the chosen measurement is always the one that best supports your argument. This is fair play, when the statistics are comparable. It isn’t when your choice of stat measures something quite different:
The collective report by the labour and activist groups does not use dollar per hour compensation to show that women earn less than men, they use total year compensation. It is easy to understand why the group uses this formula, it will always show that women are being discriminated against while the other formula is showing improvements. A quick look at Stats Canada’s monthly Labour Force Survey shows one reason why men make more money than women; they work more hours. While this may not justify a difference in hourly wages, it would justify a difference in year end compensation. In the report cited by the government, men worked an average of 38.7 hours per week, a full five hours more than women who clocked in for 33.7 hours. For full-time workers, rather than all workers combined, there was still a difference, men working 40.7 hours per week to 38 hours for women. In reviewing several months of these reports over the past two years a consistent pattern emerges, men in full-time jobs work two to three hours more per week than women.
There may still be parts of the economy where male bosses or business owners irrationally discriminate against women (equally, there may be other forms of prejudice in play). Where laws exist to prohibit this, they should be enforced. However, trying to paint the numbers to show discrimination where it does not exist does not help anyone, and it makes it harder to achieve truly equal rights.
Update, 21 October: Ilkka at The Fourth Checkraise mentioned a related story from Finland:
Speaking of the male-female wage gap, I don’t know how I could forget the recent study by the Finnish emeritus researcher (who is thus free to speak his mind) Pauli Sumanen about this very issue. It concluded that Finnish men earn more on average (again, not the median) than Finnish women simply because they work more: if you control for actual hours worked, women get paid more than men so that a woman’s euro is not 80 cents but closer to 104. And if you look at the net salaries after the heavily progressive taxation, and include the fact that women live and receive pensions seven years longer on average (Finnish women pay 45% of total health care costs yet use 59% of health care), these numbers become vastly more dramatic for women.
Canadian women beat Finns 5-0, will face Team USA for gold on Thursday
Photo by Julie Jacobson
Finland provided much more challenge for Canada, with excellent goaltending turning back many shots, but eventually they broke through. Cherie Piper scored the opening goal on a pass from Meghan Agosta, while Agosta broke the single Olympics scoring record with her ninth of the games. Haley Irwin scored twice, and Caroline Ouellette got the other goal for Canada.
They will face Team USA on Thursday for the gold medal. This matchup was expected, as both Canada and the US have been dominant in their respective games through the preliminary and semi-final rounds, tallying 86 goals between the two teams, and allowing only 4.
Update: Colby Cosh is pessimistic about the men’s team making it all the way to the top podium:
Even on the explicit, historically derived premise that Canada has the strongest team in the tournament, it would be hard to peg our chances of winning gold at much higher than 25%. On Desjardins’ pretty reasonable estimates of underlying national team strength, the figure is not close to 25%. I crunched the numbers, leaving room for the possibility of being helped somewhere along the way by an upset of a strong rival, and I get about 19%. That’s assuming we have a 100% chance of beating Germany tonight, when the real figure is probably more like 93-95%.
February 11, 2010
Nobody knows how many died in the Haiti earthquake
I can only assume it’s a slow news day for this to be a headline: “Differing death tolls raise suspicions that no one really knows how many died in Haiti quake“. Of course nobody knows: the Haitian government was barely functioning even before the quake hit, and not at all afterwards. They had no accurate idea of how many people lived in the area beforehand, and they still haven’t been able to recover all the bodies. Any death toll estimates will be inaccurate, almost by definition:
Wildly conflicting death tolls from Haitian officials have raised suspicions that no one really knows how many people died in the Jan. 12 earthquake.
The only thing that seems certain is the death toll is one of the highest in a modern disaster.
A day after Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue raised the official death toll to 230,000, her office put out a statement Wednesday quoting President Rene Preval as saying 270,000 bodies had been hastily buried by the government following the earthquake.
A press officer withdrew the statement, saying there was an error, but then reissued it within minutes. Later Wednesday, the ministry said there was a typo in the figure — the number should have read 170,000.
Even that didn’t clear things up. In the late afternoon, Preval and Lassegue appeared together at the government’s temporary headquarters.
Preval, speaking English, told journalists there were 170,000 dead, apparently referring to the number of bodies contained in mass graves.
Lassegue interrupted him in French, giving a number lower than she had given the previous day: “No, no, the official number is 210,000.”
Preval dismissed her. “Oh, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” he said, again in English.
What is not in dispute is that the death toll was very high, and that even with all the disaster relief efforts from other countries, there will still be many more deaths in the quake’s aftermath. Food, water, and medical aid is still not reaching everyone. That fact reduces the importance of the squabble over macabre numbers to a little bit of political theatre.
Update, 24 February: Radio Netherlands is claiming that the death toll has been vastly over-estimated and thinks the number of casualties will be under 100,000:
Haiti has buried an estimated 52,000 victims since the earthquake on 12 January 2010. More bodies still lie under the rubble, but the total number of casualties will not surpass 100,000 — that’s according to observation and research on the ground in Haiti, carried out by Radio Netherlands Worldwide.
This number is considerably smaller than the number of 217,000 victims the Haitian government claims to have counted so far, and far fewer than the estimated final count of 300,000 mentioned by President René Préval just last Sunday.
February 8, 2010
Further skepticism warranted
If, as I believe, China’s official economic statistics are not to be depended upon, even more skepticism is required whenever the topic of military spending is discussed:
In Asia, China is increasing its lead in defense spending. China does not release accurate data on defense spending (a common trait in all communist nations), but admits that its defense spending has doubled in the last decade. Current Chinese defense spending is believed to be $90 billion a year. That’s nearly ten times the $9.2 billion Taiwan spends. China spends twice what Japan does, and more than three times South Koreas’ $24 billion. Tiny Singapore spends nearly $6 billion a year, and has one of the most effective, man-for-man, forces in the region. India, which is increasingly becoming a military rival of China, spends about $30 billion a year. Australia spends about $24 billion a year. All the other nations in the region spend relatively small amounts, barely enough to keep threadbare forces fed and minimally equipped. China’s only allies in the region; North Korea and Pakistan, together spend less than $5 billion a year on defense.
China increased its defense spending 14.9 percent last year. That’s down from the 17.9 percent jump in 2008. China claims that its defense spending is only 1.4 percent of GDP (compared to 4 percent for the U.S. and 1-2 percent for most other Western nations.) But China keeps a lot of defense spending off the official defense budget, and actual spending is closer to three percent of GDP. Currently, the U.S. has a GDP of $13.8 trillion, Japan $4.4 trillion and China, $3.5 trillion.
February 5, 2010
Crying “Wolf!” about China
Jon, my former virtual landlord sent me a link to this article by Robert Fogel, suggesting that it was “time for another one of your ‘whistling past the graveyard / you can’t trust the numbers’ posts”. And he’s quite right.
As with just about every other “forward looking” report on China, Fogel focuses on current trends which cannot continue in a straight line:
In 2040, the Chinese economy will reach $123 trillion, or nearly three times the economic output of the entire globe in 2000. China’s per capita income will hit $85,000, more than double the forecast for the European Union, and also much higher than that of India and Japan. In other words, the average Chinese megacity dweller will be living twice as well as the average Frenchman when China goes from a poor country in 2000 to a superrich country in 2040. Although it will not have overtaken the United States in per capita wealth, according to my forecasts, China’s share of global GDP — 40 percent — will dwarf that of the United States (14 percent) and the European Union (5 percent) 30 years from now. This is what economic hegemony will look like.
Maybe. Or maybe the demographics that this ultra-expansionist scenario depends on won’t play out the way Fogel thinks. There’s also the problem of depending (in any meaningful way) on official government statistics:
Most accounts of China’s economic ascent offer little but vague or threatening generalities, and they usually grossly underestimate the extent of the rise — and how fast it’s coming. (For instance, a recent study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace predicts that by 2050, China’s economy will be just 20 percent larger than that of the United States.) Such accounts fail to fully credit the forces at work behind China’s recent success or understand how those trends will shape the future. Even China’s own economic data in some ways actually underestimate economic outputs.
[. . .]
though it’s a common refrain that Chinese data are flawed or deliberately inflated in key ways, Chinese statisticians may well be underestimating economic progress. This is especially true in the service sector because small firms often don’t report their numbers to the government and officials often fail to adequately account for improvements in the quality of output. In the United States as well as China, official estimates of GDP badly underestimate national growth if they do not take into account improvements in services such as education and health care. (Most great advances in these areas aren’t fully counted in GDP because the values of these sectors are measured by inputs instead of by output. An hour of a doctor’s time is considered no more valuable today than an hour of a doctor’s time was before the age of antibiotics and modern surgery.) Other countries have a similar national accounting problem, but the rapid growth of China’s service sector makes the underestimation more pronounced.
Well, then, at least Fogel accepts the notion that the official data may not be accurate. That’s better than a lot of commentators, although he’s still looking at it as if the official numbers were some sort of “baseline”. They’re not (although he does make a very good point that GDP numbers don’t capture improvements in quality . . . but that’s true for all economies, not just China’s). They’re even more pure fiction than the Climate Research Unit’s imaginary data.
It’s not even a deliberate lie: it’s a natural artifact of the current Chinese economic model. China’s economy is much more free now than it was ten years ago, but it’s not a free market economy yet. The central planners still attempt to control the “levers” of the economy — and they have some pretty crude ways of doing that. During the modernization of the industrial sector, probably the biggest driving force was the Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA). They needed huge quantities of equipment, and the government didn’t want to buy everything from former Soviet and Warsaw Pact inventories (for one thing, the quality was generally poor and the technology was at least a generation behind the West).
This meant that the PLA needed — and got — much more say in what was produced and where it was produced. In other centrally planned economies, the state handled this sort of industrial policy. In China, the PLA got directly involved. A Soviet arms factory might have a military liason office with a general, several staff officers, and some GRU/KGB/NKVD oversight. The Chinese equivalent would have the general directly in charge of the factory, running it like a division of the army.
In this way, the PLA stopped being just the customer/end user. They cut out the middleman and absorbed the entire supply chain. The PLA became a significant economic player in the Chinese industrial economy . . . and this is still true today. The generals aren’t formally in charge, but they own the companies that do military production.
So what? So let’s look at how a civilian corporation’s incentives differ from one owned directly by the army. In a civilian corporation, the CEO runs the business with an eye to generating the largest profit possible while staying (for the most part) within the law. A CEO who deviates from this to ride a favourite hobby horse will eventually face the wrath of the stockholders who want that maximized profit. There are natural limits on how much freedom to invest in uneconomic activity any CEO will be given. Sensible stockholders don’t try to micromanage the firm, but do raise questions if too much of the company’s efforts are devoted to things clearly not related to the company’s long term benefit. Company accounts can be rigged, for a time, to show misleading results, but eventually (Enron, Worldcom, etc.) the truth will out.
A Chinese firm that’s owned by the army? Profit may be nice, but the “CEO” reports to a different master: the guys with the guns. The company accounts will show exactly what the guys with the guns want them to show . . . and the oversight and auditing committee members carry submachine guns. You’re told that your target is 10% growth? Don’t you think that the reported result will be at least 10%? Because your life may depend on the reported results being acceptable.
If the PLA had scaled back their involvement in the economy as the economy liberalized, this might only be a problem in old fashioned “heavy” industries. There’s not much evidence that this happened, however. The PLA’s portfolio may not include all sectors of the economy (even the PLA must have limits), but the official stats can’t indicate what portion of reported growth is from freer parts of the economy and what portion is from the 47th PLA industrial army.
Then there’s the other factor that will hobble China’s reported growth, demographics:
It’s the same story with the relative decline of a Europe plagued by falling fertility as its era of global economic clout finally ends. Here, too, the trajectory will be more sudden and stark than most reporting suggests. Europe’s low birthrate and its muted consumerism mean its contribution to global GDP will tumble to a quarter of its current share within 30 years. At that point, the economy of the 15 earliest EU countries combined will be an eighth the size of China’s.
Europe does indeed have a falling birthrate: most population growth in Europe these days is from immigration and the vastly higher birth rate of recent immigrants. Set aside the immigrants and the immigrant birth rate and most EU countries are well below replacement rate — they’ve stopped growing and started shrinking in population. Is it any wonder that Europe’s predicted share of the world GDP is poised to shrink as well?
China has a different demographic problem, and one that has the potential to cause disruptions far beyond their own borders: the aftermath of the famous “one child” policy. China has a vast disproportion of males, because Chinese parents opted to keep boy babies and abort girl babies. This may be another case where we can’t depend on the official numbers, but even if you do think they’re close to accurate, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture:
To say that China’s one-child family policy has been a disaster is an understatement. A report released earlier this month by the nation’s top think tank — the Communist Government’s Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) — says that the policy has created a huge gender imbalance with significant implications for future social stability.
Indeed, according to the report, 24 million men reaching marriageable age by 2020 will never marry because of the sex imbalance. Think of it in these terms: what if the entire population of New York City or of Australia was never able to marry. Imagine the social implications in a city or nation that large where no one can marry. Imagine if that city or country is comprised solely of 24 million men; men with no homes to return to at night; men without the responsibilities of a family to keep them engaged in productive pursuits.
Military adventurism may be in the near future for China’s neighbourhood. It’s one of the traditional ways to control and direct the excess of young males away from domestic social disruption. Fogel still prefers the rosy glow of the positive scenario, however:
Of course, China faces its own demographic nightmares, and skeptics point to many obstacles that could derail the Chinese bullet train over the next 30 years: rising income inequality, potential social unrest, territorial disputes, fuel scarcity, water shortages, environmental pollution, and a still-rickety banking system. Although the critics have a point, these concerns are no secret to China’s leaders; in recent years, Beijing has proven quite adept in tackling problems it has set out to address. Moreover, history seems to be moving in the right direction for China. The most tumultuous local dispute, over Taiwan’s sovereignty, now appears to be headed toward a resolution. And at home, the government’s increasing sensitivity to public opinion, combined with improving living standards, has resulted in a level of popular confidence in the government that, in my opinion, makes major political instability unlikely.
I’m not too sure that the Taiwan situation is even close to a peaceful resolution, but that’s a different topic altogether.
Anyway, speaking of hobby horses, I guess this topic counts as one of mine:
- August, 2004 – Rant: “The Chinese Economy”
- October, 2004 – More Economic Voodoo — or is that Feng Shui?
- April, 2007 – The Chinese economy
- May 2008 – Those untrustworthy Chinese economic numbers
- January, 2009 – China’s economic situation
- May, 2009 – Official Chinese statistics
- November, 2009 – Contrarian investment strategy: short Chinese stocks
November 11, 2009
Contrarian investment strategy: short Chinese stocks
I’ve been skeptical of the official Chinese government economic statistics for quite some time, so I find articles like this one to be quite believable:
Chanos and the other bears point to several key pieces of evidence that China is heading for a crash.
First, they point to the enormous Chinese economic stimulus effort — with the government spending $900 billion to prop up a $4.3 trillion economy. “Yet China’s economy, for all the stimulus it has received in 11 months, is underperforming,” Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” wrote in Forbes at the end of October. “More important, it is unlikely that [third-quarter] expansion was anywhere near the claimed 8.9 percent.”
Chang argues that inconsistencies in Chinese official statistics — like the surging numbers for car sales but flat statistics for gasoline consumption — indicate that the Chinese are simply cooking their books. He speculates that Chinese state-run companies are buying fleets of cars and simply storing them in giant parking lots in order to generate apparent growth.
Back in 2004, I wrote:
While there is no doubt that China is a fast-growing economy, the most common mistake among both investors and pundits is to assume that China is really just like South Carolina or Ireland . . . a formerly depressed area now achieving good results from modernization. The problem is that China is not just the next Atlanta, Georgia or Slovenia. China is still, more or less, a command economy with a capitalist face. One of the biggest players in the Chinese economy is the army, and not just in the sense of being a big purchaser of capital goods (like the United States Army, for example).
The Chinese army owns or controls huge sectors of the economy, and runs them in the same way it would run a division or an army corps. The very term “command economy” would seem to have been minted to describe this situation. The numbers reported by these “companies” bear about the same resemblance to reality as thos posted by Enron or Worldcom. With so much of their economy not subject to profit and loss, every figure from China must be viewed as nothing more than a guess (at best) or active disinformation.
Probably the only figures that can be depended upon for any remote accuracy would be the imports from other countries — as reported by the exporting firms, not by their importing counterparts — and the exports to other countries. All internal numbers are political, not economic. When a factory manager can be fired, he has his own financial future at stake. When he can be sentenced to 20 years of internal exile, he has his life at stake. There are few rewards for honesty in that sort of environment: and many inducements to go along with what you are told to do.
Under those circumstances, any growth figures are going to be aggregated from all sectors, most of which are under strong pressure to report the right numbers, not necessarily corresponding with any real measurement of economic activity. So, if the economic office wants to see a drop in the economy, that’s what they’ll get.
Basing your own personal financial plans on numbers like this would quickly have you living in a cardboard box under a highway overpass. Companies in the soi-disant free world have shareholders or owners to answer to. Companies in China exist in a totally different environment.
Five years on, there’s not much (except a few outdated details) that I’d bother changing.
H/T to Ghost of a Flea for the link.
October 27, 2009
Statistical measurements are important
So why, especially right now, have the US government’s key players in the public health arena stopped counting swine flu cases?
Part of the mystery comes from a federal government in such a tizzy to spread its vaccine and declare “national emergencies” that it doesn’t think it’s necessary to keep counting. Via CBS News:
In late July, the CDC abruptly advised states to stop testing for H1N1 flu, and stopped counting individual cases. The rationale given for the CDC guidance to forego testing and tracking individual cases was: why waste resources testing for H1N1 flu when the government has already confirmed there’s an epidemic?
Given that regular seasonal flu causes thousands of deaths annually, you’d think it would be good statistical discipline to count the cases of H1N1 separately, both the gauge the severity of the disease and to chart the effectiveness of the vaccination program. Lumping seasonal flu and “flu-like symptoms” together with H1N1 seems a big step backward from normal public health practice.
October 6, 2009
Parachutes also seen as harmful . . .
Following up on a report I blogged about a couple of days back, Jacob Sullum uses the same methodology to prove that skydivers would be better off without parachutes:
In Philadelphia, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania find, possessing a gun is strongly associated with getting shot. Since “guns did not protect those who possessed them,” they conclude, “people should rethink their possession of guns.” This is like noting that possessing a parachute is strongly associated with being injured while jumping from a plane, then concluding that skydivers would be better off unencumbered by safety equipment designed to slow their descent. “Can this study possibly be as stupid as it sounds?” asks Stewart Baker at Skating on Stilts. Having shelled out $30 for the privilege of reading the entire article, which appears in the November American Journal of Public Health, I can confirm that the answer is yes.
[. . .]
While the reseachers took into account a few confounding variables related to this tendency (including having an arrest record, living in a rough neighborhood, and having a high-risk occupation), they cannot possibly have considered all the factors that might make people more prone to violent attack and therefore more likely to have a gun as a defense against that hazard. To take just one example, not every criminal has an arrest record. Yet it seems fair to assume that criminals in Philadelphia are a) more likely than noncriminals to be armed and b) more likely than noncriminals to be shot. That does not mean having a gun increases their chance of being shot. Certainly they believe (as police officers do) that having a gun makes them safer than they otherwise would be. Nothing in this study contradicts that belief.
Of course, most people will only see the headline, so the underlying purpose of publishing the “study” has been achieved.
October 4, 2009
Totally unbiased study says “Guns=bad”
In no way should you try to read the data from this study as being anything other than unbiased and objective:
Medical researchers in Philadelphia have conducted out a study which indicates — according to their interpretation — that carrying a gun causes people to get shot more often. “People should rethink their possession of guns,” say the medics.
“This study helps resolve the long-standing debate about whether guns are protective or perilous,” says University of Pennsylvania epidemiology prof Charles Branas. The Penn announcement is headlined “Gun Possession [is] of questionable value in an Assault”, so it’s pretty clear which way he’s leaning.
The Penn researchers carried out their study by randomly selecting 677 people in Philadelphia who had been shot in “assaults”. Apparently five people sustain gunshot wounds every day in the City of Brotherly Love, so there were plenty to choose from.
According to the profs, six per cent of the shooting victims were packing heat when they got plugged. They compared that to a control sample of Philadelphians who had not been shot, and concluded that “people with a gun were 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not possessing a gun”.
Of course, there’s no problem with basing your statistically valid sample on people who have already been shot: given the chance of being shot in Philadelphia, they could just have gone round to a few local bars and found the same numbers, right?
You know that the study has a certain, um, preference, when even the folks at The Register are pointing out that the data may not be randomly selected:
There didn’t seem to be any account taken of the fact that people with good reason to fear being shot — for instance drug dealers, secret agents etc — would be more likely to tool up than those with no such concerns.
The profs’ reasoning, however, would seem to be that if someone sticks you up in the street and you haven’t got a gun, you’ll just hand over your valuables and so escape with a whole skin. If you’ve got a gat, however, you might try to draw it and so get shot. Tactically, of course, it might be wiser to first hand over your wallet and then craftily backshoot the robber as he departed, but no matter.
September 24, 2009
Polls and the 25% nutty fringe
Over at The Crossed Pond, Brad put together an interesting statistical post contrasting the “Birthers” with the “Truthers”:
Generally, I out-of-hand dismiss poll results under, say, 25% meant to imply that a party, country, or demographic are stupid or out of touch. Because almost always, those poll results are entirely without context. X% of Republicans believe Bill Clinton killed Vince Foster. OMG! Y% of Icelanders believe in pixies! What morons!
The fact of the matter is, if you poll any demographic on the right question, you can find a good chunk of them who believe in really dumb things. [. . .]
But, according to my own general yardstick for such things, Trutherism falls about where I would expect it to — in the general range common to any nutty proposition. Roughly the same amount of Democrats believe in Trutherism as people believe in vampires. That says much less about Democrats than it does about the crazy shit people are inclined to believe.
On the Birther question, however, we’re pushing past the normal range of nuttiness, and are getting a bit more mainstream, at least in the Republican ranks. About twice as many people believe in Birtherism as I would expect them to applying my general rule of thumb. In other words, it’s something more than run-of-the-mill crazy.
What bothers me a bit more about this sort of thing entails my own assumptions about crazy thoughts, and is based on what one might call the galaxy of nuttiness that comes in the Truther/Birther package. For example, a Truther, and I’ve known many, will generally have a constellation of other beliefs that sort of goes part-and-parcel with Trutherism, and tends towards a fanatical skepticism about government in general. That often leads to them being “don’t tread on me” style libertarians, ala Ron Paul, or “the government is out to get you” conspiracy theorists ala Alex Jones. Birtherism, and I’ve known less but enough to generalize, tend towards a much more cultural/racial/religion based constellation of thoughts — there are Good Decent Americans and then there are the rest of them, from horrifying illegal immigrants to muslims demographically taking over Europe and about to instantiate Sharia law, etc. etc, which generally leads them into a weird tribalistic culture war crouch, ala “we are being taken over by Others” culturists/racists ala Lou Dobbs, or “there is a conspiracy to subjugate the American way of life” hysterics ala Glenn Beck.
