How unlikely was that!?

I was very tempted to call this post 'Spot the Maths/Stats Mistake #5', however there is a big difference between this post and the others I have made so far about the use, misuse and abuse of statistics.  The difference is that this time, the mistake was my own.

On Thursday, I was travelling back from a work event by train.  I didn't realise that I had a reserved seat, so just sat in a seat which was available.  I then discovered that I actually did have a reserved seat, and that I was in fact sat in it.  I thought to myself what an amazing coincidence this was - highly unlikely, I thought.

Cross Country Trains 'Voyager' Seating Plan

However, when I hear that something very unlikely has happened, I try to think about how unlikely it really was.  I genuinely believed that it was highly unlikely that this should happen.  There are 296 seats on this particular type of train, so I thought that the chance of this occurring was 1 in 296.  I was wrong.  Here is why.

• About 70% of the seats were already occupied.
• I didn't have a first class ticket, so 40 of the seats were unavailable to me.
• I sat in the same carriage as a colleague, who had booked his ticket separately to me, but who did have a reserved seat.

So even with those first two observations, the 296 seats I had to choose from were reduced to around 77.  All of the reserved seats were in the front 2 carriages of the train, and since I deliberately sat in the same carriage as my colleague (although I couldn't sit next to him as the seat was occupied) this meant that I selected almost exclusively from the unoccupied reserved seats.  These constituted around half of the total number of unoccupied standard class seats, reducing my choice of seats further, to around 38.  I also know that I booked my tickets at around the same time as my colleague.  Assuming that seats are allocated approximately sequentially (e.g. filling up the train from the front) it was very likely that my reserved seat was in the same carriage as his.  Perhaps this means I had something resembling a 1 in 19 chance of sitting in my own seat.

This is a bit of a rough-and-ready approximation, based on some perhaps unreasonable assumptions and estimates, but I hope it illustrates the central point.  I thought that the probability of me sitting in the right seat was close to 1 in 300.  In fact, it was possibly less than 1 in 20.  Still unlikely, but we often tend to overstate just how unlikely things truly are.

Dear Mr Javid

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke to a Conservative Party member was canvassing in North Devon (a seat they seem highly likely to win from the Liberal Democrat incumbents at next year's UK General Election).  In talking to him, I made a critical error.  Namely, I gave him my email address.

Today, I received my first email from the Conservative Party.  It was trying to win my vote, I'm sure, but more pressingly they were trying to get me to donate money.  This is what it said:

"Whatever you did over the summer, I'm guessing you didn't go on a £21 billion spending spree. But, unbelievably, that's exactly what Labour did.

They made a host of promises - including more spending on benefits - which analysis shows would cost hardworking taxpayers £20.955 billion. In return, they only set out £105 million worth of spending cuts to pay for them.

£20.955 billion of spending minus £105 million of savings = £20.850 billion of unfunded spending commitments, which hardworking families would pay for with higher taxes and more debt.

We've got to stop Labour getting into power and wrecking our economy again. Donate £20 today and let's make sure Ed Miliband never gets into No. 10.

Labour STILL haven't learnt their lesson.

After taking Britain's economy to the brink and opposing every spending reduction we've made, Labour have spent the summer promising billions of pounds of inefficient and ineffective spending.

With just eight months to go until the General Election, it's clear that all Ed Miliband offers is more spending, higher taxes and more debt than our children could ever hope to repay.

We can't let him get his way.

Donate £20 today, and let's carry on working through the long-term economic plan that is building a stronger, healthier economy and securing a better future for Britain:

Thanks, 

Sajid Javid MP 

PS Every pound you give will help to keep Ed Miliband out of No. 10 - so please donate today."

Naturally, I was only too happy to reply to Mr Javid, who I regard as probably one of the least-worst Conservative MPs:

"Dear Mr Javid,

Having considered your request for £20, I have been unable to set out any spending cuts to pay for such a donation.

£20 of spending minus £0 of savings = £20 of unfunded spending commitments.

In keeping with the spirit of your party's campaign, I therefore feel that the correct decision would be for me not to donate. 

Yours sincerely,

 Edward Russell"

 Perhaps I should also have added

"PS every pound I don't give will help to give smaller and less well-financed political parties a more level playing field on which to compete against the old behemoths of British politics".

Maybe next time.

Spot the Maths/Stats Mistake #4

I saw an article the other day from the Wall Street Journal's Japan Realtime blog.  I typically have nothing but praise for Wall Street Journal (WSJ) blogs, but this time was rather different.  WSJ pushed this on their social media platforms using the illustration below, and wrote about how they had established which countries had the cleanest hotel.

The obvious thing to note straight away is that this is not actually a comparison of countries, but a comparison of cities.  However, that's not my main issue with this analysis.

Although hotel rooms in Toyko, Moscow and Helsinki are more expensive than in Athens and Kiev (more on this later); it seems striking that in general the 'dirty' side of the list looks like a considerably more expensive set of cities than those on the 'clean' list.  This made me wonder whether there was anything more to this observation than just pure curiosity.

I began by looking into a bit more detail on how these 'cleanliness' numbers had been arrived at.  The obvious place to look was the source they kindly mentioned, so a quick bit of googling gave me this press release from hotel.info.  This opened up a whole can of worms.

The article begins by using UK cities, almost as a case study, to discuss the way that hotel cleanliness varies within a country.  We don't know whether this is because the UK is typical of the situation globally, however the press release does tell us that the UK is neither the cleanest (citing Switzerland and Austria as cleaner) nor the dirtiest (citing Denmark).

The comparison of the 10 largest (i.e. most populous) UK cities was presented in the following table:

The 5 best cities Position City Evaluation of cleanliness (Best score: 10.0) 1. Sheffield 8.15 2. Liverpool 8.12 3. Bristol 8.10 4. Leeds 8.10 5. Edinburgh 7.97

The 5 worst cities Position City Evaluation of cleanliness (Best score: 10.0) 1. Birmingham 7.42 2. London 7.52 3. Leicester 7.64 4. Manchester 7.75 5. Glasgow 7.90

So there we have one more city which could have featured as 'dirtier than London' on the list produced by the WSJ which, remember, claims to list "the dirtiest 10 cities".  In fact, Leicester could also feature on that list, absolving Brussels and Kiev of the dubious honour of appearing on it.

Of course, the WSJ don't want to do that, because they'd rather discuss capital city locations than they would Leicester, which most of their readers probably don't know how to pronounce (it's pronounced Lester, incidentally) let alone know anything about*.  That the list was only about capital cities would be a fair argument, were it not for the inclusion of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in their list.

The most obvious conclusion would be that the countries included by the WSJ (and compiled as part of the hotel.info press release) were chosen to make a point.  They could surely have found 10 cities dirtier than all of those on their list, but chose not to.  They also omitted the entire of North America (and indeed Africa and Oceania also).  One may well have wished to argue that cities in North America were simply neither the cleanest nor the dirtiest, but as we know from the exclusion of Birmingham, they could have made some North American cities feature in the list by simply excluding an arbitrary selection of others.

Having concluded that the article was meaningless due to the arbitrariness of the cities included, I also wanted to find out whether there was anything behind the observation that the cities on the 'dirty' side were often more expensive.

Finding out average hotel prices for each city was not as easy as I had thought, but I eventually came across this Bloomberg report, which did fulfil my needs, more or less.  I am convinced it must omit low-budget hotels, but I will forgive it on two counts:

1. They actually give their methodology
2. I suspect that low-budget hotels in Sao Paulo get far fewer reviews on hotel.info anyway, so the cleanliness ratings we are looking at may be more about the mid-to-high end hotels, at least in those poorer cities.

So, using their data for the prices (omitting Bern, whose average price was not available), I plotted the prices against cleanliness ratings to get the following:

It would be a little crude to draw a straight line through these data points given that I haven't made any argument involving linearity (and I don't intend to, for the purpose of this discussion does not require it), however I did calculate** the correlation between the two variables (price and cleanliness) and found, as I suspected, some negative correlation between the two.  For those who are interested, the correlation coefficient was -0.49.

What this means is that the more expensive the hotel room, the more likely its customers are to give its cleanliness a weak score.  I propose that this could be for either one of two reasons:

1. The more expensive hotels are dirtier (which seems to be the WSJ's interpretation)
2. People who stay in more expensive hotels expect a higher standard of cleanliness, and are more likely to give a poor rating when they find something wrong with the room than customers of cheaper hotels.

What I am arguing is that if two rooms were equally clean, but one was more expensive than the other, we may expect the cheaper of the two to have a favourable cleanliness rating by its customers.  This is something which the WSJ failed to consider.

--------

*This is less a criticism of WSJ readers, and more simply an acknowledgement of Leicester's low international profile.
**By which I mean, I made the statistical package R calculate

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Many will be familiar with the title of this post.  It is better known either as a part of a joke, or as part of the title to Lynne Truss' bestseller 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation' (a book which I am yet to read, and which readers of this blog may opine that I need to read with some urgency).

I saw something today which reminded me of this.  Namely, it was the title of a YouTube video:

"George Galloway on Losing It with Griff Rhys Jones"

 I wonder what you think this was about.  Was it

1. George Galloway becoming very cross with Griff Rhys Jones, or
2. George Galloway talking to Griff Rhys Jones on the subject of becoming very cross?

Thailand's Development

I should begin with an apology.  The reason why posts on this blog were a little sparse for a while was because I have been travelling.  I scheduled some things to be published while I was away, but then took a while to get back up to speed with it afterwards.

Anyway, the place where I spent most time on my travels was Thailand.  A beautiful country in many ways, and clearly developing quickly.  Today, the city of Bangkok looks something like this.

That would have been unimaginable a couple of decades ago.  Economic growth has been impressive.  In the decade 2003-2013, GDP grew from $142bn to $385bn (in current US dollars).  Not far off a three-fold increase inside a decade, even given the 2009 slump with which we all are familiar.

Compare that with the countries where most of the readers of this blog are from:

• The USA saw GDP increase from $11.5tn to $16tn inside that same decade: a 39% increase.
• The UK  saw GDP increase from $1.87tn to $2.52tn: an increase of just under 35%.

You may be inclined to say that I have not adjusted for population growth, and indeed I haven't, but this has not been the primary driver of rising Thai GDP.  Comparing this time with the UK and France (because their populations are similar to that of Thailand) we will see why:

Although it's still very far behind, it's catching up with the leading economies, and that's why scenes like the one of Bangkok shown above now exist.  But then on the other hand scenes like the following also exist.

Lahu Tribal village, Northern Thailand

Given that only one third of Thailand's population live in urban areas, the latter is probably a little closer to the experience of a typical Thai, however the tribes-people in the north of the country are particularly poor, and are not recognised as Thai citizens.

Anyway, I digress.  The point which I wish to make is that Thailand is clearly a fairly rapidly developing country, however I doubt it will catch up in the way that South Korea and Japan were able to.  The reason for this, I believe, is the astounding lack of planning that goes into their development.  Take for example pedestrians.  Where would you expect them to walk?  Presumably a pavement (sidewalk) and sometimes across a bridge or through a subway (underpass).  In Thailand, however, it seems that people's properties extend right up to the street, so the few pedestrians, fewer cyclists, and many motorbikes and cars all fight over the same space.  This may seem fine for now, but would any developed country put up with this?  When Thailand eventually decides this is a problem, and that they really ought to come up with something better than cramming everyone into the same space, they will be stuck.  There is no more space to work with.

The poor planning doesn't stop at things like that, either.  Take for example the (actually very nice) sky train in Bangkok, which is the main form of commuter rail transport in the city.  For a start, it doesn't visit the main tourist attractions.  It also doesn't visit vast swathes of the western side of the city - home to literally millions of people.  These areas are poorer, so there would presumably be less demand for the train, but it's something of a vicious circle - areas have no trains because they're poor (I assume) but then they stay poor because they have no trains.  So the mayhem continues - cramming more and more vehicles into really limited space.  Bangkok has the worst traffic congestion I have ever seen, and the number of buses is very limited, especially when you realise that this is a city larger than London or Paris (it's urban population is typically estimated at around 15 million, compared to 10.8 million for Paris or 9.5 million for London, although all of these figures are quite contentious).

So my conclusion?  Thailand is in some senses a wonderful place - lush greenery, the densest tree coverage I have ever seen, wonderful hospitality.  However, I can't escape the conclusion that Thailand is its own worst enemy.  I suppose that a good step on the way towards that might finally be to get a stable elected government.  I hope for their sake that they manage it.

Another phase in my Leftwards journey

A theme which may come up many times in this blog is the way in which my personal politics are changing.  I'm definitely more left-wing than I was in the past.  I wrote a previous blog post about how the 'Millennials' identify politically (and another still about who the Millennials actually are) and the lack of certainty about where we stand politically definitely carries over to me.  However, I reached new territory today.  Possibly for the first time ever, I actually agree with something the TUC (Trades Union Congress - England & Wales' federation of trades unions) have said.

Today I read this article in the most unabashedly left-wing of newspapers, The Guardian.  In it, the TUC's General Secretary, Frances O'Grady, argues that the reason why productivity levels are still low despite rapidly falling unemployment is the

"result of too many low-pay, low-skill and low-productivity jobs in low-investment workplaces".

Frances O'Grady

I still generally view these kinds of jobs as better than no jobs at all, however somehow it rings true.  Someone recently tried to persuade me that the new plans of the Liberal Democrats to increase paternity leave by 4 weeks would only be affordable to large corporations, but not to small businesses.  My response to criticisms like these is much the same as my response on the kind of issues that O'Grady is talking about.  Namely, if a business can only compete by providing poor working conditions, it's the business which needs to change.  We should not tone down any ambitions for a fairer society to placate those who are providing these low-value jobs.

The changes which O'Grady is pushing for (chiefly a rise in the minimum wage: her article was entitled 'Why Britain needs a pay rise') and the kinds of changes desired by the Liberal Democrats (at least until a future coalition leads to their abandonment) quite possibly will be tougher on small businesses.  This is a fair criticism up to a point, but the introduction of almost all workers rights that already exist were tougher on smaller businesses too, and I can't think of too many of them which we would willingly give up!

Paying for Children

I recently read an article in the Guardian which cited research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation which suggested that a couple with two children now needs to earn £40,600 for an 'acceptable standard' of living, in the UK.

The Guardian posted this article to Facebook, where the masses began to comment on it.  Many of the comments took one of the following two forms (I'm paraphrasing, but not exaggerating):

1. "If people can't pay for their children, they shouldn't have them."
2. "I have five children and a mortgage, my wife has no job, I earn £27,000 per year.  It's a hard life, but we're happy."

Both of these amused me (although not enough that I was able to doubt their severity).

The first charge I find morally problematic.  I made the following comment:

"Suppose, aged 30, I earn £40,600. I decide to have two children. By the age of 40, I have lost my job and had to change career, now earning £25,000. I can no longer afford to keep my children in an 'acceptable' condition. By what I'm reading above, I would be criticised for having children I couldn't afford. Does this not strike as a problem?"

I also responded to the second, but only by posting a video, as it reminded me of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch, courtesy of Monty Python!

Less a book review, more a question

A really interesting book I finished reading recently (mentioned in a previous post) is What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, by Michael Sandel.

I'm not going to review the book here, however I will note that I decided to give it 4 stars on my GoodReads page.  One of my criticisms is that one of the moral arguments it covered made very heavy use of a sports analogy (baseball) which required some knowledge of the game in order that the argument may be followed. This led me to question what the role of sports analogies is in books.  Sandel had a worthwhile point to make, which was well illustrated by the commercialisation of baseball.  It would be a shame for him not to be able to make the argument at all.

How should he have done it?  Do you know of any books which use sports analogies successfully?  I'd be keen to know.

Identifying a Generation

Something I've mentioned in previous posts without an explanation, despite the fact it perhaps deserves one, is the name for my generation - the Millennials.  I will talk a bit about the naming of generations now.

The most famous 'named' generation is surely the Baby Boomers.  These were the generation born in the years immediately after WW2, when the birth rate in developed countries 'boomed'.  By various definintions, this generation includes those born up until various dates in the late 50s or early 60s.  The most common consensus seems to be about 1960.  What interests me is the nature of the debate about when one generation ends and the next one begins.  Suppose that we took the babies of 1960 as being the last birth year of the Baby Boomers.  In that case, we should expect to find many ways of easily spotting differences between those born in 1946-1960 versus those born after 1961 (who are known as Generation X).

So what of the Millennials?  By the same reasoning as for the Baby Boomers and Generation X; in order to identify the Millennials (or Generation Y) as a distinct generation, they need not only to have a different range of birth years, but there also ought to be a number of easily identifiable differences in their lives.  Perhaps they vote differently, have different educational or employment prospects, or different financial wellbeing.  They could usher in a new type of music or consumerism, fashion or food.  Preferably, almost all of these would be evident in order for us to identify them as a separate generation.  Moreover, if I were to choose arbitrary years as the start and end points for a 'generation', it ought to be rather harder for me to do the same thing.

The consensus that seems to be building across the media articles and blog posts I read is that the Millennials - those who entered adolescence in the new millennium rather than the old one - satisfy a lot of these properties.  I will leave it to the rest of the media, as well as perhaps some of my own future blog posts, to identify the ways in which our generations differ, however I will finish here with one observation.

Using Google NGram Viewer (a powerful tool which looks at the frequency of words in books) we can investigate how these distinct generations come to be recognised in published works (the data series currently only runs to 2008).  The first illustration I give below shows very clearly that the amount that is written about the baby boomers is certainly growing, however we really can't ignore the trends associated with the other generations.



My favourite is the following one.  Sadly Google Ngram Viewer currently only has data going as far as 2008, but from this, it does begin to look that our generation is rather more discussed, possibly easier to identify, than the one which went before!

Mindless Activities

I like some mindless activities.  Moreover, I think it's probably more common than we may acknowledge for people to indulge in mindless activities not simply due to idleness, but actually due to the opportunity it brings to think about absolutely anything.

Take for example the following three activities:

1. Long train or bus journeys on your own
2. Long walks
3. Shelf-filling jobs in supermarkets

All of these are something I have some experience of, and all of them I find in some sense either quite pleasant, or at least not as bad as their reputations!  I must caveat this: I have sometimes sought to avoid doing 1 and 3 to excess, but only because I value my time in a way which makes them unjustifiable, or because (in the case of number 1 in particular) you can have too much of a good thing.  I like to laugh, but I imagine I'd find it pretty painful to laugh solidly for many hours.  Similarly, the entire days I have spent on the trains between Leuchars and Barnstaple were rather painful.

What do I find pleasant about them (or at least not as bad as their reputation)?  I feel sure that it is the fact that while doing an activity which may require some physical work, but certainly only a small amount of mental work, allows me to think about all kinds of other things, for long periods, undisturbed.  When else, during our waking hours, do we give ourselves these opportunities?  For some - Douglas Adams for example, or (according to legend) Archimedes - the answer may be 'in the bath'.

In any case, aside from a nod to the title of the 'Cameron Counts' blog of one of my former university lecturers (Professor Peter Cameron), this may in some way begin to explain the title of this blog.  Many of the things I will discuss are indeed just as it says - things I have wondered about while wandering about.

dot UK

Last month, several new web domain extensions became available.  One of these was .uk (until now, you could have .co.uk, .org.uk, etc., but not just .uk on its own).  I decided that I would try to get a more professional domain for this blog, chose 'russell.uk', and tried to pay.  After all, I thought, if I ever set up an eponymous business, the £4.55 investment would surely seem worthwhile!

I was soon to be disappointed, however.  Until 2019, you can only buy one of the new domains if you already own the .co.uk, .org.uk, or similar.  The same kind of rules also apply to other new domains, such as  dot london.

I'm not a fan of these restrictions, but it seems that there are two issues at play which should guide our decision about whether they are justifiable.  Given that these new domains were released because so many of the old ones were taken, which of the following is the more important?

1. The right of the owners of the existing domains not to lose traffic to recent upstarts
2. Giving the said upstarts the opportunity to compete for web traffic.

Interestingly, given my own career choices, russell.co.uk is the domain of a business which sells services to actuaries.  There certainly is a non-zero probability that I might one day want to use russell.uk for something not totally unrelated.  What is more important: my opportunity to do that, or their right to spend the next 5 years deciding whether to stop me?

It feels in many ways that the generation who are now middle-aged took all of the good domain names for a steal, used them to fuel the expansion of their businesses, and then pulled up the ladder behind them.  We can have the same opportunities, but only for a lot more money.  It reminds me of the student fees debate!

Political Attitudes

I feel I have only just written a post about how today's voters identify themselves on the political spectrum.  My central thrust of my argument was intended to be that major parties becoming too similar to one another over the two or three decades leading up to the 2008 financial crash has meant that identifying as belonging a particular side of the political spectrum is not as easy as it once was.  I didn't expect to write any more on the topic particularly soon, but then I came across the British Social Attitudes Survey.  The particular edition I read was a couple of years old, but it had some illustrations which actually served to back up my earlier points remarkably well.

The one I want to focus on is my assertion that the difference between the largest Left and Right Wing parties grew too small, disguising, for many younger voters, where on the political spectrum they actually lay.

So here we see that while almost all voters in the 1980s identified a clear difference between Conservative and Labour parties, this was eroded almost entirely by the dawn of the new millennium.  I would be interested to see what the view of the public is by the time of the 2015 election.  If I were to predict, I would say that a rise, perhaps to something approaching 1992 levels, in the proportion of people identifying a difference between them may occur.

This has a number of consequences.  I'm very interested in what it may mean for the many smaller parties which we now have.  Many will surely be drawn to the politics of Messrs Farage or Galloway.  Others will vote Green, but I suspect that a large number will cling to the familiarity of the two old behemoths of British politics.  As some distance is put between them, it will be interesting to see which way the confused Millennials will go.

Spot the Maths/Stats Mistake #3

This one is just a quick observation, but is the kind of mistake I see very often.

I was reading an article in the Washington Post about the carbon footprint of meat-eaters versus vegetarians and vegans, called 'How much your meat addiction is hurting the planet'.  This is something I have been concerned about for some time (although I am still in the morally hard-to-justify position of eating meat regardless), and I certainly don't dispute the article's central point.

However, I was prevented from fully agreeing with the article when I read this:

"The good news is that while Americans might still eat more meat than mother nature would prefer, they are scaling back, and especially so with the most environmentally unfriendly kind—per capita beef consumption has fallen by 36 percent since its peak in 1976, according to data from the USDA. The bad news is that the rest of the world appears to be headed in the opposite direction. Global demand for meat is expected to grow by more than 70 percent by 2050."

There are two main problems with this:

1. It is comparing beef consumption for the USA to meat (not just beef) consumption in general for the rest of the world.  Since I don't have comparable figures for the rest of the world, I'll not dwell further on this issue here.
2. With the journalist's choice of wording, the reader may be led to believe that this is a comparison between the USA and all countries aside from the USA.  In particular, it may appear all that all of the rest of the world is seeing increasing consumption, and that the USA is the only country with falling consumption (of either meat or beef: we are not sure which, as mentioned in the previous point).  In fact, neither of these are accurate.  What they meant to do was compare the USA with the global aggregate.  There may indeed be many other countries with falling meat consumption.  In fact a quick search says there are - this paper notes a decline in consumption for Germany, the Netherlands and Hungary.

So on this basis I feel that the article would have been much better had it said something like

"The good news is that while Americans might still eat more meat than mother nature would prefer, they are scaling back, and especially so with the most environmentally unfriendly kind—per capita beef consumption has fallen by 36 percent since its peak in 1976, according to data from the USDA. The bad news is that total global demand is headed in the opposite direction. Global demand for meat is expected to grow by more than 70 percent by 2050."

The Right Wing

Who are the political Right nowadays?

Contrary to what I imagine appears to be a statement about how everything was better in the 'good old days', I am not intending to bemoan the current state of politics, either here in Britain or around the world (needless to say, I could happily do either of those things).  What I have instead been led to wonder is whether we are currently succeeding in correctly labelling people as belonging to the political Left, or, more noticeably, the Right.

Let me explain.

I am currently reading What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, by Michael Sandel (more of whom in a later post).  In it, he posits the following:

"At the time, the financial crisis of 2008 was widely seen as a moral verdict of the uncritical embrace of markets that had prevailed, across the political spectrum, for three decades... The era begin in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher proclaimed their conviction that markets, not government, held the key to prosperity and freedom.  And it continued in the 1990s, with the market-friendly liberalism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who moderated but consolidated the faith that markets are the primary means for achieving the public good."

This made me think quite a lot.  When asked in a survey to place myself on a political spectrum, with '1' representing the far left, and 10 being the far right, I tentatively gave myself a '4'.  I had always thought that my (now-waning) belief in the market-triumphalist values which have dominated our politics in recent decades and, in Sandel's terms, have transformed us from market economies into market societies, meant that I was in some sense Right-wing.  In fact, I'm now not so sure, hence giving myself a score of '4'.  But how can this be?

To understand this, I think we need to ask what people think of when they hear the term 'Right wing'.  After a bit of searching around the internet (and again, a look at Quora), I found that the same ideas tended to crop up again and again.  In general, the Right are regarded as being:

• In favour of a reduction of social welfare
• In favour of a reduction of the role of state-funded healthcare
• Anti-abortion
• Against birth control
• Religious
• Climate sceptics
• Unwilling to stick up for the poor
• Against trades union rights
• In favour of 'trickle-down' economics
• Desirous that the free market be used for everything
• Pro big-business

and so on.  Sure enough, very little of this applies to me, and I don't think I'm alone in feeling this way.

The generation of my grandparents would have had no trouble in casting themselves as belonging to the political Right or Left, but things have changed.  No longer are we in a position where Left means Socialist, and no longer are we in a position whereby the non-Socialists all sit on the illiberal right.

The Blair-Clinton era injected a thorough dose of conventionally Right Wing market-centric thinking into the forefront of Left Wing policy making.  As a result, I suggest that we could have on our hands a very confused generation of voters - the Millennials - who are entering adulthood in an age where the very ethos of our major political parties is open to question, and when we have something of a duty to reconsider the role of market based thinking.

I cautiously diagnose what has happened: people who would naturally sit on the political left (e.g. myself) grew up in a post-Soviet era in which there was no 'natural left'.  Even the major Left Wing parties, such as the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, or the Democrats in the United States, were for a time unrecognisable as such.  Faced with a choice of the economic Right (in the guise of the rebranded traditional Left Wing) or the economic Right (in the guise of conservatism), we unsurprisingly were happy to accept our market based societies as being the only choice.  Then came 2008.  The Right and the Left are trying to put some distance between themselves again, and many of us who never had a real decision between Right or Left Wing politics suddenly need to decide which way to go.

Is it surprising that many of us don't know how to politically identify ourselves?

Spot the Maths/Stats Mistake #2

This should be a very short post.

I've finally got round to watching BBC Question Time from 12th June, where Salma Yaqoob, despite her laudable contributions to public life over the last decade, failed as badly as anyone I've seen on there since Pik Botha's appearance following the death of Nelson Mandela to actually answer the questions put to her.  Her shameless disregard for the questions was not the end of the story, however.  There were also a great many false statistics littering her responses.  My favourite was her claim that 'one in two' British children is obese.  I suggest that perhaps she needs to look around, for that doesn't seem to be the case.

Salma Yaqoob

In fact, a quick fact-check shows that the Department of Health estimate that 28% of children aged 2 to 15 in England are overweight or obese (and so far fewer than 28% are obese, let alone a half of all children).  Their data seemingly came from the Health Survey for England, who had previously reported the same figure.  The National Child Measurement Programme's most recent report shows that around 9% of children are obese when they begin primary school, and around 19% are when they leave primary school.

I wouldn't claim that these are excellent health outcomes, but I would claim that Salma Yaqoob was a long way wide of the mark.

The Changing Face of Liverpool's Ethnic Diversity

Yesterday I was listening to Thinking Allowed on BBC Radio 4, when I heard it claimed by Professor John Belchem that Liverpool was now one of Britain's least ethnically diverse cities.  This is surprising because, as a significant sea port, it had once been one of the most diverse.  In the city's 700th anniversity celebrations, it was celebrated as "the great second city of empire", and possessed (relative) ethnic diversity to match.

City	% White British (2011)
Birmingham	57.9
Bristol	84.0
Cardiff	80.0
Leeds	85.0
Liverpool	88.8
Manchester	66.7
Newcastle-Upon-Tyne	85.6

Source: England & Wales census, 2011.

Although we think of Black British History as beginning 'post-Windrush', in Liverpool we can look back much further, with some Liverpudlians reportedly able to trace 10 generations of Black ancestors in the city.  The story of Black Liverpool cannot be separated from Britain's role in the slave trade (see yesterday's blog post for more on the slave trade in general!), however in terms of race relation in Liverpool, Belcham cites the turn of the 19th into the 20th century as "when things really begin to go awry".

Commentators noticed the ethnic diversity that once displayed itself in the city.  Referring to primary school children, J.B. Priestley said:

"All the races of mankind were there, wonderfully mixed....  A miniature League of Nations assembly, gone mad... They seemed like the charming fruits (as indeed they were) of some profound anthropological experiment." - J.B. Priestley, 1933.

Belcham claims that this description really only characterises the view of young children.  Adolescents and adults were held in much less high regard, as they found they had much lower access to more advanced education, and in particular to the labour market.  There was a very 'complete spacial segregation of Liverpool' - it was possible to live in Liverpool whilst never passing into areas with more than the occasional Black British person.

Added to that, Liverpool possessed a much greater level of sectarianism between Catholics and Protestants, with some firms refusing to employ Catholics.  Indeed even today, Liverpool is notable for its much higher Catholic population than other English cities.  It was asked whether this sectarian history may have discouraged newcomers, leading to Liverpool becoming one of the least ethnically diverse cities in the country.  Belcham's explanation is that the typical hard-done-by Irish Catholic migrant (who most historians have regarded as being from the most disadvantaged group) actually become, as Liverpool slipped down the hierarchy of British cities, the classic Liverpudlian, or prototypical Scouser - there is no room in that description for the Liverpool-born Black, who remains outside and marginalised.

Does this adequately explain to you why Liverpool has become so much less ethnically diverse than other British cities in recent decades?  Do you live in Liverpool?  Do you have another explanation?  Please comment with any suggestions!

Spot the Maths/Stats Mistake #1

This is the first in a series of posts I intend to make to flag up some of the very poor interpretations of facts which occur routinely in the mainstream media.

First up is one from the BBC, in an article entitled "Why do white working class pupils fail in school?".  Aside from pointing out the underachievement of white working class British children from coastal towns (much like myself, then), the correspondent claims:

"The Office for National Statistics showed that people without any qualifications were twice as likely to be unemployed as those with a qualification. That one single piece of paper, passing a single exam, halved the likelihood of unemployment."

This is not obviously false in itself, but to anyone who reads publications of this nature, it seemed an odd thing for the Office for National Statistics to report.  The correspondent also unfortunately failed to give any further details on which Office for National Statistics report he had read, but a bit of googling on my part led me to find another journalistic piece which much better reported the same claim. Indeed, what the correspondent should have said is that people without any qualifications were twice as likely to be unemployed as those with at least one qualification.  As such, his claim that a single piece of paper halved the likelihood of unemployment is false, as the comparison is with all of those who have any number of qualifications, and most of those have more than a single exam pass.

The Slave Trade

I've read a couple of books about slavery in the last year or so.  In particular, I've read

• Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup
• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself by Linda Brent

and watched the film

• Django Unchained

These have got me thinking.  The lives of the abolitionists is well documented, but most of us know far less about the logistical arrangements surrounding the abolition.  In particular, I have asked the following question on Quora, my favourite 'Q&A' website:

I understand how the slave trade, and later slavery, came to be abolished, but there are some more questions which I don't understand:

• When slaves were freed, the workforce grew.  Where did all of these slaves find work?
• When slaves were freed, former slave owners had a shortage of workers.  Who worked on the plantations?  Did their slaves return in a paid capacity?
• If free labour was replaced with paid labour, did this lead to a sharp rise in inflation, especially in the price of goods such as cotton?
• Were former slave owners notified in advance or compensated?  What if they bought 10 slaves, then the following day found they had to free them?  Were the transactions reversed?  Who took the financial hit?

Do you have any of the answers?  Please let me know on here, or by answering the question on Quora if so!  Any further questions on the topic would also be appreciated, as I'm sure that there's a lot of interesting questions to ask which are usually neglected.

Which charity?

So here's a problem I often run in to.  I'd like to give money to a charity.  I know what I want my money to achieve, but have no idea which charity I most trust to do it.

What I want to know is essentially:

• What type of work does the charity do?
• Where is it based?
• Does it have any religious affiliation?
• How much do they spend on charitable activities, fundraising activities, and on governance?
• How do they invest their assets?
• What are their revenues, assets, spending and overheads?

In the absence of a decent comparison tool for me to assess charities based on this (please let me know if you know of one!) I've looked around the internet for some ways to decide, and found the following:

In the UK, the Charities Commission website does quite a good job.  It is particularly good on the financials, and has links to each charity's accounts for the last few years.  It also generates some useful charts showing the breakdown of how they raise money, and what they spend it on.   A similar facility for Scotland is available here.

Finding out where charities invest is much harder.  There are reports that some major charities are investing funds in companies whose activities fly directly in the face of their charitable aims: take for example the Panoroma investigation from last year which strongly criticised Comic Relief for its investments in tobacco, alcohol and arms companies. Many other charities are likely to be in on the same game; however due to such a dearth of information available readily in the public domain, I would advocate not boycotting charities on this basis.  What we risk doing in this event is essentially boycotting charities whose information we can access, whilst turning a blind eye to the potentially questionable activities of those charities who have done a better job of hiding embarrassing financial information.

There are some other useful ways of drilling down into the activities of charities, too.  By reading the very informative blog of Charity Watch UK I found that Age UK have been criticised for an almost opposite problem to that of Comic Relief.  Whereas Comic Relief invested in companies with questionable ethical values, Age UK have taken donations from a company renowned for harassing pensioners.  This blog, and the associated organisation Charity Watch do a reasonably good job of holding the sector to account - something which the Charities Commission have been criticised for failing to do.

The other sites which try to make a useful impact in solving this problem I have mostly found disappointing.  I have so far tried Alive and Giving and Which Charity.  A factsheet was available from Ethical Consumer, but this only gave a very sketchy overview, and only for a very small selection of the most prominent charities.

If anyone knows of some other worthwhile resources, I'd be keen to hear from you!

Why blog?

As I write this first post in March 2014, I need to justify to myself why I think it is wise to start a blog.  I anticipate that in the first few months it will be largely a private affair.  Anyone will be able to see this blog, but I will not make it my business to seek a wide audience.

Ultimately, I intend it to do several things:

• Document my thoughts and ideas.  I will come back to these over time to develop them into more full and coherent arguments.
• Allow access to some of the documents I produce.
• Draw attention to things which I feel the media doesn't do justice to.
• Catalogue interesting innovations that I've heard about, and explore their progress.
• Pass on some knowledge about the places I've been to and the things I've seen.

None of these are things which I expect to make any money from at all, and certainly don't expect a mass market appeal, but if anyone finds any of the ideas which make their way onto this blog either informative or useful, I will be more than content.