Quotulatiousness

October 4, 2009

Totally unbiased study says “Guns=bad”

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 23:48

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

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:33

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.

July 22, 2009

Tinkering with “the engine of poverty”

Filed under: Economics, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:42

Jon sent me this link with the comment “Don’t know if the article is bloggable, but I liked the opening salvo”:

Natural disasters can cause enormous human misery, and require massive relief operations, to provide food and medical aid. To cause serious, long-term, grinding poverty, however, you need government involvement.

I have to agree with Jon, the opening to the post is quite good. After digging into some of the examples (the Ukraine under Stalin, Ethiopia in the 70s-80’s, and the US experiment with the “Great Society”), the first point at which an apolitical or undecided reader would say “Now, hold on there . . .”

Of course, the meaning of “poverty” has changed a lot over the years. The poor of the United States have a higher standard of living than the middle class in much of the rest of the world. They also have a higher standard of living than the filthy rich of a hundred years ago, or the crowned royalty of the centuries before that. This improved standard of living has very little to do with the government.

Poverty is something any civilized society wants to reduce and then eliminate, but it never seems to happen. The reason for that, aside from the vast amounts of time, effort, money, and resources being wasted through inefficiency, incompetence, and bureaucratic delay, is that the problem cannot be solved in most countries by definition. Most of the time when people use the term “poverty” they mean relative poverty. For most of the western world, absolute poverty affects a vanishingly small number of people (it’s not gone, but it’s lower than it’s ever been for any civilization in history). Relative poverty, however, is usually linked to a formula (like a set percentage of the average family income), which means that even as individuals’ and families’ financial situations improve, they will still be proportionally lower than the average (which will have improved over the same relative period of time). Statistically, no improvement will appear.

Popular belief, shaped by the official statistics, is that many people live in dire circumstances. Some do, but most who are technically below the poverty line are doing better than the average family from a few decades back. Proportionally, they’re still below the line, but from the standpoint of access to food, shelter, health care, and transportation, they’re better off.

If you are motivated by a humanitarian desire to help the poor – the ostensible mission of much of the modern liberal state – you must realize that nothing helps them more than the increased standard of living and economic opportunity brought about by the private sector.

However, the public perception is quite different: that it is the modern liberal state that has made these improvements against the active resistance of the private sector.

Here, in a nutshell, is the crucial difference between reality and the perception of most voters:

The value of every wasted government dollar must be judged by what free enterprise could have accomplished with it.

Most westerners think that General Motors, Chrysler, and AIG are the perfect exemplars of the free enterprise system, replacing the earlier capitalist icons of Enron and Worldcom.

When you say “capitalist”, most people hear a very different word than the one you’re using. “Free enterprise”, to far too many people, means vast corporations with dozens of legislators (or even legislatures) in their back pockets, using their tame politicians to obtain tax credits, advantageous labour codes, or “eminent domain-ing” their way through neighborhoods. The “private sector” decodes to “rich, secretive plutocrats”.

What you say and what they hear bear very little resemblance to one another. You’re not speaking the same language.

Then, the touching statement of hope:

If the six long months of this Administration serve any constructive purpose, it should be permanently dissolving the illusion that a small group of political appointees can predict what the economy will do, and control it to produce an improved outcome.

Most people, in times of stress, look for that man on the white horse. Most Americans still think they found one.

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