Banditry

Here’s a nice report by a real statistician on how London’s low murder rate is nothing to worry about unless you’re a gibbering paranoid ignorant fool.

Unsurprisingly, it’s received almost no media play at all. I mean, what news value is there in a study proving that the ‘OMG t3H knife crime!!!!’ narrative is bollocks and that there’s nothing to worry about…?

RBS:

As part of our implementation of FSA guidelines around Anti-Money Laundering activities, we introduced questions on Politically Exposed Persons as part of our account opening procedures.

Genius financial columnist Nelson:

what on earth is a Politically Exposed Person?

The FSA anti-money-laundering guidelines, which have been in force for three years:

customers who, by virtue of their position in public life, are vulnerable to corruption

This isn’t earth-shattering stuff; any professional or financial services firm has to ask those questions of its clients, and RBS would be remiss for not doing so. Taking UK political party membership as an indication of PEP status was technically incorrect, but fair enough I reckon – if you’re a member of a UK political party, you’re either corrupt, stupid or massively over-optimistic…

Nelson then goes off into an insanely paranoid rant about banks asking people whether they occupy any political offices. Oh noes! A majority-government-owned institution is asking me whether I’m a political party member. The gulags surely do beckon…

If you’re worried about this, you’re a moron.

In England and Wales up until 1986, there were two sorts of exam a child could take at the compulsory school leaving age of 16.

CSEs weren’t very academically rigorous and were aimed at kids who weren’t planning to take further academic qualifications. O-levels were more academically rigorous; they were aimed at kids who were planning to take A-levels at 18, and possibly head on to university.

After 1986, the system was – officially – changed to have a single qualification at 16 encompassing both streams of kids, known as the GCSE.

However, almost all GCSEs are divided into two tiers of paper, Foundation and Higher, which are separate exams based on related but different syllabuses [*]. All kids who would have taken an O-level in a particular subject, and some who would have taken a CSE, take the Higher paper; the highest grade possible in the Foundation paper is a C.

(I note, in passing, that 1986 fulfils the criterion of ‘being a year that happened after the current generation of crusty old farts finished compulsory education’.)

For more or less the following 23 years non-stop, commentators born before 1970 have failed to point out the fact that nothing has really changed – whether this is due to their idiocy or their dishonesty is not quite clear – and instead have had great fun comparing Foundation GCSE (i.e. rebadged CSEs) papers with O-level papers. They discover, shock-horror-ish-ly, that the paper the thick kids take is harder than the paper the bright kids used to take.

For example, this post from the Libertoonian Alliance links to a GCSE physics paper, fails to point out what the foundation/higher distinction means, and labels it ‘for intelligent 16 year olds’. Since the foundation questions, answered by the dumb kids, make up the first 16 pages of the test, most readers will end up skimming those, assuming they represent ‘bright kid’ questions, and hence that the paper is moronic.

But it isn’t, for the ‘higher’ section at least [**]. It’s a reasonable test for bright-ish kids of theoretical knowledge on energy and electricity, with a couple of fluffier ’social impact of science’ questions thrown in for a total of approximately 2 marks.

So, a fail, then. But the attempts to mislead get better. In the comments section, the post author, a (but not the, one would assume) David Davis, says:

In the “further” physics papers (only for the really bright people doing what is called “separate” sciences

This is what is known as ‘grossly misleading’.

Later, he says:

Yes [this linked paper is the equivalent of an O-level paper]. Passing this, is what those who will go on to do “A” levels in the sciences will have to do.

This is what is known as ‘grossly misleading’.

In a final and epic demonstation of his elite science-y skills, he says:

I don’t know [why the paper spells sulfur correctly]. It has sort of crept in the last year or so. I thought like you do that these people were supposed to hate America, but they adopt its spelling of “sulfur”.

If you’re going to mouth off about the ignorance and evils of people setting science exams, perhaps you might want to check the conventions actual scientists have agreed with each other on how to spell words. Or not.

There might, possibly, be an actual case that there has been a dumbing-down in educational standards (damn unlikely given relative skill and literacy measures by cohort, but possible). This paper, dramatically and massively, certainly doesn’t present it, and the dishonest codgers putting it forward do themselves no favours.

[*] English words don’t require Latin plurals. Fact.

[**] with the exception of the rather bizarre question 4D (the actual answer, given the levels of ignorance of more or less everything held by people who object to planning applications for wind turbines, is ‘all of the above’; but I’ve no idea what answer the exam board wants).

I’m not a fan of violence against anyone, irrespective of their gender.

But I don’t give a toss about ‘violence against women’, any more than I give a toss about ‘violence against ginger people’ or ‘violence against taxidermists’.

If women were disproportionately likely to be the victims of violence, then perhaps there would be some sanity in focusing campaigns about violence against them. The shooting of a young black man is no more or less bad than the shooting of an old white woman, but focusing anti-gun-crime efforts on young black men does make sense, as they’re the most likely to suffer from it.

But since men are twice as likely as women to be the victims of violent crime, that logic doesn’t seem to apply here.

So, while I’d urge anyone reading this blog who commits acts of violence against people to stop, I wouldn’t be backing Amnesty’s OneTen campaign even if it were honestly promoted and based on real evidence.

But it isn’t.

According to the press release for said campaign: “Each year, around 1 in 10 women in Britain experience rape or other violence”. This is an epic piece of dishonesty, and anyone with any integrity at all should rail against Amnesty for it, no matter how much they oppose wifebeating.

For one, we know, based on the most accurate data collated – the British Crime Survey linked above – that the figure is one in 40, not one in 10.

More importantly, even the one in 40 figure is for all violent crime. Bringing rape, which is perpetrated on less than one in 100 men or women, into the mix is tabloid chicanery at its absolute worst – it is the same literally true but completely misleading statistic as this piece’s headline. Anyone who quotes the incidence of something less serious, but mentions something more serious in the same sentence, is deeply suspect – no matter which particular political direction they’re trying to nudge you in.

And finally… shouldn’t Amnesty be campaigning against abuses of government power, rather than against crime? It’s as if the RSPCA were suddenly to start funding schools in Africa – whether or not it’s a good thing, it’s certainly not what they’re for.

In conclusion: 1:10pm, March 6, 2009 – Time To Finally Give Up on Amnesty International Forever.

Update: oops. Sorry. No, the people who tweeted this campaign aren’t idiots and don’t lack integrity – they’re well-meaning people who presumably didn’t expect a respected and generally good organisation like Amnesty to base its campaign on dishonesty, and who’ve been conned into repeating lies. And that’s precisely why I’m so fucking angry about it..

BNP apologists frequently claim that supporters of the group aren’t necessarily racist, they’re just misguided working-class souls who’ve been abandoned by the mainstream parties and feel the BNP speaks for them. Non-apologists suggest, with equal frequency, that perhaps if people weren’t racist then they wouldn’t vote for a party whose primary feature was racism, even if it did better match their views on employment policy.

As Alex Hilton points out, the leaking of the BNP membership list, including several thousand email addresses, provides an excellent opportunity to answer these questions: send out a surveymonkey to the people on the list, asking them to rate how racist they are on a scale of 1-10. Problem solved…

Once again, they’re running with the sort of content I’d normally put up here – an excellent piece on understanding debt/deficit statistics.

God-damn public sector bureaucracies crowding out private enterprise, etc etc…

(”in t’front room watching telly, what’s it to you?”)

An apparently valid study has shown that 25-34 year olds are best at using apostrophes correctly, while over-55s are worst. While this doesn’t fit with the traditional narrative of ‘it’s all gone to the dogs since trendy liberals took over teaching’, it does fit with the available evidence on functional literacy rates: it’s clear that the comprehensive system has provided its alumni with a more effective education than the grammar and secondary modern system did.

I’m aware that ‘bring back grammar schools’ is a dogmatic, rather than an evidence-based, position – but one might have thought the fact that older people are demonstrably worse-educated than younger people might impinge on their consciousness somewhere down the line…

It only seems like a few months since the biggest “idiots failing to understand numbers” issue was that of crime… oh, for those heady pre-recession days when people had nothing more to worry about than lamenting that crime was a major problem despite it generally not being one.

The latest row, which has unfortunately given ammunition to the ‘all crime stats are lies because my uncle’s neighbour’s nephew’s dad’s dog got STABBED! with a KNIFE!!!’ brigade, is about police forces wrongly classing minor-ish violent crime committed with the intent of inflicting majori-ish violent crime as ‘other violent crime’ (in line with how the courts treat these offences) instead of ‘most serious violent crime’ (in line with how the statistical guidelines say you should treat these offences).

Mark Eaton has an excellent piece on this, using the old stats, the new stats and BCS data to make the point that the reclassification changed nothing significant (not least, because only criminal justice wonks look at these subcategories anyway, with reporters and politicians alike dealing solely in ‘reported crime’, ‘reported violent crime’, and specific types of offence). Hooray for the BBC for hiring him and saving me a job…

If anyone uses the phrase ‘the cupboard is bare’ when referring to the UK’s current economic position, this is an excellent indicator that they are entirely clueless about it. For one, it’s an embarrassingly trite and twee metaphor, unlikely to be used by anyone literate; for two, it paints an entirely false picture of the government’s financial situation (also, note that the government precisely and exactly did pay down the national debt as a proportion of GDP, which is the only figure that matters, during the boom times, which makes criticising them for not doing so particularly weird).

As Chris highlights (while also, correctly, pointing out that the current ’sterling crash’ isn’t one at all – if it were, the pound would have fallen significantly against the euro, which it hasn’t. Rather, it’s a dollar/yen rally), people are still falling over themselves to lend the government money at very low interest rates. That’s an indicator that outside of cutesy-talking-point land, serious people accept there’s plenty of, err, cupboard-room.

While I’m here, a couple of points on the Centre for Policy Studies report that purports to show the UK has a ginormously terrifying public debt. For a start, it’s written by a Tory MP – aren’t think-tanks producing this kind of report supposed to maintain some vague pretence of not being entirely motivated by partisan hackery?

Content-wise, it’s the same report the CPS churn out every year, with the figures slightly updated. And as always, it’s spun ridiculously: the angle is approximately “when you include the PFI Enron accounting, Network Rail’s nationalised in all but name-ness, bank bits, various other dodges and public sector pensions, the national debt is enormous”. In fact, the only non-trivial sums it identifies are PFI payments – which it exaggerates by a factor of more than three by failing to follow anything even vaguely resembling accounting standards, as I’ve already pointed out here – and public sector pensions, which are an order of magnitude larger than any of the other factor, and are the only way authors of this kind of paper can get from “the national debt is 42% of GDP instead of 39%, nobody cares” to “oh my god, the national debt is 150% of GDP and we’re all ruined due to Evil Labour”.

Quite how the hell public sector pensions should be accounted for is a tough question, and not one which has been satisfactorily resolved anywhere by anybody. However, suggesting that the UK is particularly screwed because of Labour’s incompetence and dodging, when actually the problem has existed forever and in every developed economy, is grossly dishonest. It also doesn’t represent debt in the sense of ‘people who have pieces of paper saying you’ll pay them and who’ll sue you if you don’t’ – it’s just a promise from politicians to be nice to old people, and we all know about the iron-like unbreakability of politicians’ promises…

[*] Yes, Network Rail’s GBP20bn debt should be included in the headline figures, as it’s government-guaranteed and not secured against tradeable assets. So should the real PFI number of c.GBP30bn; together, these add an extra 4-5% of GDP to the official national debt figure. I’m happy to confirm for the benefit of readers who question my political neutrality that these should be classed in the national debt proper and that Labour are slippery sods for not doing so (although on the other hand, they were the first ever UK government to move to GAAP for public sector accounting and are one of the first globally to adopt IFRS).

The banks shouldn’t be: it doesn’t make sense to view debt backed by tradeable financial assets as part of The National Debt, since it doesn’t represent money that’ll have to be paid back out of future taxation. At worst, we’re on the hook for the difference between the value of the banks’ mortgage books now and the long-term value of the relevant houses, cushioned by homeowners’ wiped-out equity. Even if we have a two-year depression and house prices fall 40% from their peak, the loss potential isn’t high.

Every prediction I made in this piece from 2005 on 24-hour drinking has proved to be correct: on-trade alcohol consumption has fallen, levels of alcohol-related crime haven’t changed; pubs haven’t made any extra money; but puritan idiots have continued to rail against the rule change anyway.

The most offensively stupid puritan argument is that ‘24-hour drinking hasn’t cut violent crime, so it was a failure’. No – the point is, it means that law-abiding people can go out for a drink without having to obey insane rules created to stop soldiers in the trenches getting jealous of civvies back home during WWI. That is a good thing in its own right. If drink-related violence had risen, we’d need to weigh the good against the bad. Since it hasn’t, we can say that the licensing law changes are an unequivocally good thing, and crack open some booze to celebrate. Hurrah!

(it’s also worth noting that on this issue, the Tories are lying crooks who should be run out of town on a rail. Quelle surprise…)