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.