Monday, January 6, 2014
Cardinal Richelieu is supposed to have said
"Qu’on me donne six lignes de la main du plus honnête homme, j’y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre"
usually translated as something like
And one of the easiest ways to prove the cardinal right is to condemn someone through guilt by association - for example, comparing the policies of the person you want to attack with something beyond the pale, such as Adolf Hitler's nazis or Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech.
If someone says something offensive or xenophobic, then by all means criticise them for what they have actually said, but you should never need to use guilt by association. Hitler is rightly loathed because he started one of the most terrible wars in history and because he was a racist and antisemite who murdered six million Jews and millions of other people including Gypsies, Slavs, Poles, people with disabilities, Freemasons and his political opponents - not because he built autobahns and wanted to stop inflation and get the unemployed back to work. If someone else supports building motorways, reducing inflation, or increasing employment, this is not sufficient to prove that they are a fascist.
There are many excellent reasons not to vote for Nigel Farage, but comparisons like this (which appeared in the Guardian) between Nigel Farage and Enoch Powell will not cut it.
Among potential UKIP voters this sort of guilt by association tactic is more likely to win Farage a sympathy vote. Perhaps that's exactly what Dermot Murnaghan and the Guardian are trying to do, and encourage Tory/UKIP switchers to go over to Farage's party in the hope that this will let Miliband and Balls into Downing street.
It will, of course, serve them right if they end up by pushing votes from the Labour pile into the UKIP one instead ...
Incidentally, without having previously known any of the ten statements in the Guardian quiz, I correctly guessed who had said nine of them, so in my case at least the premise of the quiz doesn't work.
"Qu’on me donne six lignes de la main du plus honnête homme, j’y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre"
usually translated as something like
“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him”
And one of the easiest ways to prove the cardinal right is to condemn someone through guilt by association - for example, comparing the policies of the person you want to attack with something beyond the pale, such as Adolf Hitler's nazis or Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech.
If someone says something offensive or xenophobic, then by all means criticise them for what they have actually said, but you should never need to use guilt by association. Hitler is rightly loathed because he started one of the most terrible wars in history and because he was a racist and antisemite who murdered six million Jews and millions of other people including Gypsies, Slavs, Poles, people with disabilities, Freemasons and his political opponents - not because he built autobahns and wanted to stop inflation and get the unemployed back to work. If someone else supports building motorways, reducing inflation, or increasing employment, this is not sufficient to prove that they are a fascist.
There are many excellent reasons not to vote for Nigel Farage, but comparisons like this (which appeared in the Guardian) between Nigel Farage and Enoch Powell will not cut it.
Among potential UKIP voters this sort of guilt by association tactic is more likely to win Farage a sympathy vote. Perhaps that's exactly what Dermot Murnaghan and the Guardian are trying to do, and encourage Tory/UKIP switchers to go over to Farage's party in the hope that this will let Miliband and Balls into Downing street.
It will, of course, serve them right if they end up by pushing votes from the Labour pile into the UKIP one instead ...
Incidentally, without having previously known any of the ten statements in the Guardian quiz, I correctly guessed who had said nine of them, so in my case at least the premise of the quiz doesn't work.
Chancellor George Osborne writes ...
"I've just given a speech setting out the long-term economic plan that the Conservatives are working through."
"Our economic plan builds a stronger, more competitive economy and secures a better future for Britain by:
- Reducing the deficit so we deal with our debts, safeguard our economy for the long term and keep mortgage rates low
- Cutting income taxes and freezing fuel duty to help hardworking people feel more financially secure
- Creating more jobs by backing small business and enterprise with better infrastructure and lower jobs taxes
- Capping welfare and reducing immigration so our economy delivers for people who want to work hard and play by the rules
- Delivering the best schools and skills for young people so the next generation can succeed in the global race
The plan is working. For the first time in a long while, there's a real sense that Britain is on the rise. But it's far too soon to say job done - it's not even half done.
So this year Britain faces a choice: to go on working through the plan that is delivering for Britain, or to squander what we've achieved and go back to economic ruin.
George Osborne
Simon Hoggart, who died of cancer today at the age of 67, was an immensely funny man whose parliamentary sketches in the Guardian and Punch must have made what was going on in the House of Commons accessible and of interest to many people who otherwise would not have bothered.
He managed to criticise MPs in a way which was often both insightful and sympathetic, pointing out their faults in a way which was likely to inspire understanding rather than hatred.
That must have been good for the health of democracy and he will be missed.
Rest in Peace.
He managed to criticise MPs in a way which was often both insightful and sympathetic, pointing out their faults in a way which was likely to inspire understanding rather than hatred.
That must have been good for the health of democracy and he will be missed.
Rest in Peace.
Hat tip to political betting at
http://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2014/01/03/how-strong-political-views-can-impact-on-our-ability-to-analyse-data/
for an American article which attempted to provided objective and measurable evidence that people are more likely to make mistakes in their mathematical calculations if the result of those mistakes is to reinforce rather than contradict their strongly held views.
As a statistician I have significant concerns about the way the results of the study are presented, so I would not take the results as gospel. In particular the suggestion that people were 18% more likely to get a calculation wrong if this reinforced their personal particular opinions is rather oversimpllified on the evidence quoted. Nor would I agree that if the study is right - and the jury is well and truly out on that - it would only prove that "politics ruin our ability to think." Any other set of strong opinions, be it about about religion - believer or atheist - or about sport, or tastes in music, might well show the same effect.
What made me sit up an take notice of the article was not the statistics quoted but the graphs.
For a non-political question, (on skin cream) the graphs showing how accurately people with different levels of numerical ability interpreted two sets of data were very similar for Democrat and Republican members of the sample group and irrespective of what conclusion should actually have been drawn from the data.
However, for a political question (on gun control) the four lines on the graph were all different. The great majority of those Democrat voters in the sample of 1,111 respondents who generally had good numeracy skills correctly interpreted the set of data which supported gun control, but about half even of the most numerate Democrats wongly misinterpreted the set of data which did not support gun control.
By contrast the great majority of those Republican voters in the sample who generally had good numeracy skills correctly interpreted the set of data which did not support gun control, but about half even of the most numerate Republicans wongly misinterpreted the set of data which did support gun control.
The moral of this story is that if you are analysing a set of data and the results come out exactly with what fits your prior beliefs, you should try to check your analysis as carefully and objectively as possible to make sure you are not convincing yourself that the new evidence conveniently fits what you were already disposed to believe.
http://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2014/01/03/how-strong-political-views-can-impact-on-our-ability-to-analyse-data/
for an American article which attempted to provided objective and measurable evidence that people are more likely to make mistakes in their mathematical calculations if the result of those mistakes is to reinforce rather than contradict their strongly held views.
As a statistician I have significant concerns about the way the results of the study are presented, so I would not take the results as gospel. In particular the suggestion that people were 18% more likely to get a calculation wrong if this reinforced their personal particular opinions is rather oversimpllified on the evidence quoted. Nor would I agree that if the study is right - and the jury is well and truly out on that - it would only prove that "politics ruin our ability to think." Any other set of strong opinions, be it about about religion - believer or atheist - or about sport, or tastes in music, might well show the same effect.
What made me sit up an take notice of the article was not the statistics quoted but the graphs.
For a non-political question, (on skin cream) the graphs showing how accurately people with different levels of numerical ability interpreted two sets of data were very similar for Democrat and Republican members of the sample group and irrespective of what conclusion should actually have been drawn from the data.
However, for a political question (on gun control) the four lines on the graph were all different. The great majority of those Democrat voters in the sample of 1,111 respondents who generally had good numeracy skills correctly interpreted the set of data which supported gun control, but about half even of the most numerate Democrats wongly misinterpreted the set of data which did not support gun control.
By contrast the great majority of those Republican voters in the sample who generally had good numeracy skills correctly interpreted the set of data which did not support gun control, but about half even of the most numerate Republicans wongly misinterpreted the set of data which did support gun control.
The moral of this story is that if you are analysing a set of data and the results come out exactly with what fits your prior beliefs, you should try to check your analysis as carefully and objectively as possible to make sure you are not convincing yourself that the new evidence conveniently fits what you were already disposed to believe.
Sunday, January 5, 2014
I didn't catch the name of the female member of the panel who were reviewing the papers today on the BBC News channel.
I was not tremendously impressed with her - she described the NHS as suffering "savage cuts" when in fact the NHS is one of only two areas of government spending which the present government has protected in real terms. She referred to the "coalition government" as "underfunding" the NHS which presents at least two problems
1) To describe any given level as "underfunding" and for that statement to be meaningful you have to define a level of funding you would regard as adequate, and as demand for NHS spending is for practical purposes infinite I don't believe this can be done, and
2) singling out the coalition government spending on the NHS as inadequate when Labour's shadow secretary of state, Andy Burnham, said that the present government was irresponsible in NOT cutting the NHS is a little slanted to say the least.
But the more serious problem I have with this lady is that she appears to think it is "ideological" to try to get the country's finances into a more sustainable position.
Now, there is room for some genuine debate about how much a government can afford to spend. But there is no reasonable doubt that when a government's spending gets way out of line with what can effectively be raised from taxation, this has to be corrected or the long term consequences are very serious.
This is as well known to intelligent Democrats in the USA - as shown in today's quote of the day - and intelligent members of the Labour party such as Alistair Darling and Jim Callaghan as it is to people on the right.
If you spend much more than your income, you have to print or borrow money or liquidate your savings. Printing lots of excess money leads to hyperinflation: if you are not going do that you have to borrow the money or spend your past savings and your net debts go up. That isn't ideology, it's a mathematical fact, as obvious as stating that 2 + 2 = 4.
Keynes and some other economists have argued that in some circumstances a government can have quite a bit more flexibility in this area than an individual household in the short and medium term. But no serious economist has ever argued that governments are totally exempt from the need to keep some kind of balance between income and expenditure.
A government can no more sustain for year after year expenditure of four pounds for every three coming in without serious consequences than you or I can in our own household finances.
If you dramatically increase your debts, you will have to pay dramatically more interest to service those debts. Again, this is not ideology, it is a mathematical fact as obvious as the fact that 2 + 2 = 4.
Hence if you try to run a country for any length of time by spending much more than you are prepared to raise in taxes, first your debts, then the interest rates you have to pay on those debts, will go through the roof. And your failure to correct the imbalance will only delay the pain, because within a few years you will be needing more money, not for schools or hospitals, but to pay the interest on the debts you have already incurred.
This is exactly what Gordon Brown did to the British government's finances, which is why the national debt doubled under his stewardship and is now £1.2 trillion. And trying to correct that problem is not the action of an ideologue, it's the action of any responsible government who have the ability to do basic arithmetic. The alternative is national bankruptcy and the sort of measures we have seen in Greece and Cyprus.
The real argument is not whether the government should have made efforts to cut spending. The real argument is whether it has cut spending by enough.
I was not tremendously impressed with her - she described the NHS as suffering "savage cuts" when in fact the NHS is one of only two areas of government spending which the present government has protected in real terms. She referred to the "coalition government" as "underfunding" the NHS which presents at least two problems
1) To describe any given level as "underfunding" and for that statement to be meaningful you have to define a level of funding you would regard as adequate, and as demand for NHS spending is for practical purposes infinite I don't believe this can be done, and
2) singling out the coalition government spending on the NHS as inadequate when Labour's shadow secretary of state, Andy Burnham, said that the present government was irresponsible in NOT cutting the NHS is a little slanted to say the least.
But the more serious problem I have with this lady is that she appears to think it is "ideological" to try to get the country's finances into a more sustainable position.
Now, there is room for some genuine debate about how much a government can afford to spend. But there is no reasonable doubt that when a government's spending gets way out of line with what can effectively be raised from taxation, this has to be corrected or the long term consequences are very serious.
This is as well known to intelligent Democrats in the USA - as shown in today's quote of the day - and intelligent members of the Labour party such as Alistair Darling and Jim Callaghan as it is to people on the right.
If you spend much more than your income, you have to print or borrow money or liquidate your savings. Printing lots of excess money leads to hyperinflation: if you are not going do that you have to borrow the money or spend your past savings and your net debts go up. That isn't ideology, it's a mathematical fact, as obvious as stating that 2 + 2 = 4.
Keynes and some other economists have argued that in some circumstances a government can have quite a bit more flexibility in this area than an individual household in the short and medium term. But no serious economist has ever argued that governments are totally exempt from the need to keep some kind of balance between income and expenditure.
A government can no more sustain for year after year expenditure of four pounds for every three coming in without serious consequences than you or I can in our own household finances.
If you dramatically increase your debts, you will have to pay dramatically more interest to service those debts. Again, this is not ideology, it is a mathematical fact as obvious as the fact that 2 + 2 = 4.
Hence if you try to run a country for any length of time by spending much more than you are prepared to raise in taxes, first your debts, then the interest rates you have to pay on those debts, will go through the roof. And your failure to correct the imbalance will only delay the pain, because within a few years you will be needing more money, not for schools or hospitals, but to pay the interest on the debts you have already incurred.
This is exactly what Gordon Brown did to the British government's finances, which is why the national debt doubled under his stewardship and is now £1.2 trillion. And trying to correct that problem is not the action of an ideologue, it's the action of any responsible government who have the ability to do basic arithmetic. The alternative is national bankruptcy and the sort of measures we have seen in Greece and Cyprus.
The real argument is not whether the government should have made efforts to cut spending. The real argument is whether it has cut spending by enough.
"If the Nation is living within its income, its credit is good. If, in some crises, it lives beyond its income for a year or two, it can usually borrow temporarily at reasonable rates. But if, like a spendthrift, it throws discretion to the winds, and is willing to make no sacrifice at all in spending; if it extends its taxing to the limit of the peoples power to pay and continues to pile up deficits, then it is on the road to bankruptcy."
F.D. Roosevelt
F.D. Roosevelt
Wednesday, January 1, 2014
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