Why UNICEF are wowzers

Sorry for not posting earlier as Femme-de-Resistance had promised. The UNICEF report (pdf) helpfully presents its raw data in a format that I couldn't just paste into Excel, so I had to do a lot of typing to understand what was going on.

The first point to make is that trying to produce a "league table" by combining indicators as disparate as relative income poverty and smoking rates is an inherently absurd exercise. Precisely what percentage of average household income is it worth not to smoke? The report tries a sensible approach (normalising every indicator to have the same mean and standard deviation) but still has to decide which indicators are most important.

The report weasels this by saying

Equal weighting is the standard approach used in the absence of any compelling reason to apply different weightings and is not intended to imply that all elements used are considered of equal significance.

which is rubbish. If the overall indicator is a measure of how well a country treats its children, then the weighting of the various elements reflects how important a certain indicator is to measuring this. In any case, the report doesn't weight each indicator equally. It rather arbitrarily divides the indicators into six dimensions, and three components within each dimension. Each component then gets equal weighting. This allows the report to (among other wierdnesses) give a three times higher weight to relative poverty (which gets its own component) than absolute poverty (which is merely one of three indicators of "reported deprivation"), thereby "proving" that children in Greece are better off economically than children in the UK.

So lets look at the six dimensions.

We start, reasonably enough given that poverty prevents children from reaching their potential, by considering poverty. The "component" system exaggerates the weight of a relative poverty measure that the report admits is close to meaningless, because it uses 50% of national median household income as a poverty line. The standard reasons given for why relative poverty matters, given that Bill Gates does not in fact make me any poorer, are

1. Not being able to afford the same brand of trainers as their peers means children get picked on.
2. Seeing images of incredible affluence in the mass media makes children envious and therefore unhappy.

Number 1 suggests that local rather than national incomes should be used to define the poverty line, whereas number 2 implies that international standards should be used (which makes relative and absolute poverty look remarkably like the same thing). Both of these changes would benefit the UK's position - a lot of income inequality in the UK is due to a north-south divide, with incomes being more equal within regions.

Next up is "Health and Safety". Here the UK does badly mainly because of a low rate of childhood immunization due to the MMR scare. However, patriotic Britons need not worry - British children are actually healthier and safer than foreigners, with a death rate 41% below the OECD average. Based on weighting vaccinations equally with not dying, the UK places 12th out of 21.

Then on to "Education". English children do better than the OECD average in native-language literacy, maths and science. But the UK nevertheless places 17th out of 21, because the "component" trick is used to give participation in further education (with no quality measure included) twice the weight given to the quality of primary and secondary education. "Achievement" is only one component, whereas participation in FE counts under both "Beyond basics" (where it gets a whole component to itself) and "Transition to employment" (where it reduces the number of 15-19 year olds not in employment, education, or training). FE in the UK is a national scandal, but it isn't 50% more important than getting the basics right. The last indicator in this dimension shows another unhealthy pattern in the report - it treats a value judgement by the authors as an objective measure of well-being. Countries are marked down if not enough children aspire to highly skilled work. Given that not everyone will get a highly skilled-job, this raises the question of whether aspirations which may well be unrealistic are an unalloyed good thing.

The dimension of "Relationships" is where the report starts getting silly. One of the indicators (heavily weighted, getting a whole component to itself) is "percentage of 11,13 and 15 year olds finding their peers kind and helpful". This is a completely subjective measure, and belongs in the dimension on "subjective well-being". The other two indicators both reflect value judgements - that children are best brought up by two biological parents, and that families should eat together. While I agree with these judgements, plenty of people dont, or don't think that these things are important.

Next comes "Behaviours and risks", on which the UK comes bottom by a country mile. Equal weighting has some interesting consequences here - using cannabis even once is considered as bad for a child's well-being as getting addicted to tobacco, or getting seriously drunk twice. My favourite value judgement is taking off points for 15-year olds having sex. When I was 15, sex would probably have improved my well-being. I imagine that is true of most 15-year olds, just as it is true of almost all adults. Apart from laughing at this point, I can't argue with the overall conclusion - that British children are more likely than foreigners to do the kind of things their mothers tell them not to do.

Last is "Subjective well-being". Wowze wowze wowze. Seriously, there is a whole field of happiness economics which starts with the assumption that asking people "How happy are you?" generates useful information, and goes downhill from there. As the linked article points out, individual answers to this question tell you more about who has a sunny and optimistic disposition than who has a good quality of life. The wowzer claims that when you do large-sample comparisons between countries then disposition should cancel out, but this assumes that there are no differences between national cultures. Since the English are notoriously a nation of grumblers, it is unsurprising that we come out bottom. I don't see what this says about how well our children are treated. My favourite riposte to the happiness wowzers is figure 5 of this report which shows subjective well-being being completely flat throughout the economic collapse of the 70's, the social collapse of the 80's, the unemployment and reposessions of the early 90's, and the recovery from all the above under Major and Blair. Perhaps it just isn't a very useful indicator.

Just for fun, I tried reanalysing the data in a slightly less wowzerish way. I excluded all the purely subjective indicators, as well as the ones based on controversial value judgements. I also weighted all indicators equally, without dividing them between components. This left three themes: poverty, health (including behaviour indicators like smoking) and education. The UK comes out below average in all three areas (only just in the case of education), but is nowhere near the bottom. You might think that the report was rigged so that the UK did badly.

For the real cynics out there, Peter Preston points out that the report's author, being a Brit involved in campainging on a number of issues that the report deals with, has an incentive to make the UK look as bad as possible because it gives his campaigning more impetus. I'm not that cynical - I just think that the report reflects the subconcious biases of the kind of authoritarian lefties who love to work for the UN and think that individualism is an ilness.

Think of the children

LibertyCat has read the full UNICEF child poverty report and was planning to blog about it.

However, as a taster... Femme-de-R notices that of the 6 dimensions used to measure child poverty, material well-being was measured as 'relative' comparative to conditions in that country (the report acknowledges that this is controversial).

It is for this reason that Grauniad is on debatable ground when it claims that:

Today's findings will be a blow to the government, which has set great store by lifting children out of poverty...

In addition, at least two of the dimensions are entirely subjective (family relationships and subjective well-being). Is 'eating a main meal around the table with parents' a good indicator of family bonds? And are the responses of children to a survey asking them about their well-being an adequate indicator of variations in well-being between countries or reflect something else entirely (e.g. culture norms or media messages)?

Hopefully LibertyCat will blog on this further...

Would you trust your lawyer to fix your car?

The Adam Smith Institute link to this post that makes the point that climate scientists are probably not the best people to comment on economics. This is somewhat self-evident - if I want my hair cutting, I wouldn't ask an architect (well, I might but that's a different story).

This point entirely conceded, I'm somewhat confused why Dr Alister McFarqhur (an agricultural economist) and Dr Madsen Pirie (an ex-professor of logic and philosophy) feel anyone should take them at all seriously when they comment on the science of climate change.

NB: LibertyCat questions Piers Corbyn's credentials as a meteorologist. A little judicious googling suggests Piers Corbyn may fall into that category of experts occupied by Gillian McKeith who has also made millions promoting untestable methods.

I would call them cretins, but I suspect they know exactly what they are doing

An "independent" lobby group calling itself the Taxpayer Alliance has commissioned a poll with some results which the major media found bizzarely newsworthy.

The Sunday Times headline is typical: "10 million want to quit overtaxed UK." Darell Huff provides some sensible questions to ask a lying statistic, so let's have a look.

Who says so?
The Taxpayer Alliance. Do they sound unbiased to you? We all know how easy it is to skew a one-off poll by asking biased questions. Would an advocay organisation really waste money commissioning an honest opinion poll when they could get better press coverage with a push poll?

How do they know?
By asking people if they have ever considered emigrating, towards the end of a poll in which they rile them up against this country and its political institutions by asking a lot of questions about how awful politicians are. Even if the poll wasn't bad, I fully expect that a lot of people have had idle speculations about leaving the country - I know I have. 6% of the population have plans to leave the country, according to this poll. Excluding immigrants returning home, only about one third of 1% actually will in any given year. (ONS data here, see table 1.3 for outflow by citizenship)

Did someone change the subject?
Yes. 80% of the population think taxes are too high. Thank you Captain Obvious - nobody likes paying taxes, although they will happily hound you out of office if you don't give them the schools, hospitals, roads etc. that these taxes are paying for. And 6% decide to emigrate, then don't. But these facts don't have to be connected, and almost certainly aren't - most emigrants head for similarly overtaxed countries with better weather (and an awful lot of them are retired or semi-retired, so tax is less of an issue).

So the emigration figure is bogus. The other results of the poll aren't exactly newsworthy - people think that politicians are liars (wow!), that Tony Blair is a smarmy git (double wow!), and that the public services need to be more efficient (no - really?).

So why the hell does the Sunday Times consider this front-page news?

The POWER inquiry and the politician's cringe

For politics nargs, the big story of the week is the publication of the POWER inquiry report - of which the executive summary at least is well worth reading. In the same week, no doubt inspired by this, I also came across this Grauniad column by Campbell Robb of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, and went to a discussion with Steve Webb MP about some of the innovative ways he is engaging individual voters in his Northavon constituency.

My gut reaction is to make fun of the POWER inquiry. It is the kind of committee of the great and the good that the Liberator songbook dismissed as "A judge, an MP, Richard Holme, and a don, and a peer who is rapidly aging." Because this is the 21st century, they threw in representatives of (both black and white) pop culture, and left out the MP. In fact, the inquiry produced a very detailed and well argued report.

The most surprising thing about the report is how unradical its big ideas are. The inquiry's reccomendations fall under three main headings:
1) Reforming government so elected people (MP's and councillors) actually exercise power.
2) Reforming the electoral system so the electorate actually choose elected people.
3) Encouraging (forcing?) elected people to engage their electors in new and innovative ways.

The first two of these are the sort of things Liberals and Liberal Democrats have been banging on about since time immemorial. While it is nice to see yet another blue ribbon commission endorse the Single Transferable Vote as the best electoral system there is, this doesn't tell us anything we don't already know. And nor is this an exclusively Lib Dem thing. The faction of the Labour party which is serious about democracy has also known all these things since the early years of the Thatcher government, if not before.

Although some of the specific suggestions on point (3) are new and interesting, the basic theme of voter engagement is something that was part and parcel of community politics as the Liverpool liberals imagined it when they were putting the idea together. The extent to which community politics (a radical reinvigoration of local democracy based on engaging with the electorate in new and innovative ways) became FOCUS-style campaigning (a cynical attempt to garner votes by pretending to engage the local electorate) is unfortunate to say the least. The POWER report examines the differences between real and fake voter involvement, and if we want to play our part if reinvigorating democracy, we should pay attention.

To be fair to Liberal Democrat campaigners, one of the reasons why we rarely engage in real consultation with voters is that our elected officials do not generally exercise power. If Council tenants do not want their houses sold off, then any consultation on the issue will necessarily be fake because central government effectively forces Councils to sell off social housing. This goes back to the inquiry's point that all three reforms are mutually reinforcing.

By and large, the POWER report avoids the sort of politician-bashing that often accompanies discussions of political apathy. The report explicitly dismisses "the declining calibre of politicians" as a red herring. Nevertheless, some of the recommendations on public involvement suggest that the POWER commissioners don't trust elected representatives. There is a proposal that MP's should be required to hold AGM's and publish annual reports. This is exactly the kind of useless proposal that mistrust generates. The vast majority of MP's want to engage with their constituents, making the requirement unnecessary. For the minority that do not, a box-ticking process of fake engagement will not improve things. Ultimately, the if politicians do not seek new and innovative ways of engaging voters, the voters will seek new and innovative politicians (typically Liberal Democrats). Adopting STV makes it even easier for voters to enforce this kind of requirement without the need for rules.

Campbell Robb is even more willing to damn politicians with faint praise. Although he avoids saying that we are all scum, he suggests that "community groups" provide a better form of democratic involvement, and suggests that politicians need to adopt ways of working from the voluntary sector. Sorry, Mr Robb, but I'm involved with several voluntary organisations, and the way they conduct their internal affairs would be totally unacceptable if these organisations had the power to tax non-members and throw them in jail if they didn't pay. The formal processes of democracy exist for a reason.

My experience as a politician is that the main role of voluntary and community organisations in the formal political process is to ask for money. Robb's article is no exception - he argues that the government should give the organisations he represents grants so that they can create demand for democracy among the people. He looks forward to an era in which citizens empowered by an active (and rich) voluntary sector jump at the chance to be consulted by "a foundation hospital board or a school governing board". His distaste for politics blinds him to the fact that citizens can't be empowered when dealing with an unelected body. Empowerment requires you to have actual power. Both the POWER report and the experience of Liberal Democrat activists is that the voters already know what they want, and are already keen to be engaged with if politicians who can actually change things are prepared to engage with them - "community groups and volunary organisations" just get in the way.

Steve Webb agrees. We spent most of the meeting discussing the way he has used e-mail to consult his constituents about a range of local issues. He has over 10% of the electorate on a permission-based e-mail list, which he regularly "polls" on controversial issues. People (even busy people) are happy to read and think about the detailed arguments he presents on each side before replying with their view. In return, he lets them know how their views inform his Parliamentary work. There are a few obvious pitfalls - a poll on ID cards was an embarassment because Webb, as a Liberal Democrat, was not willing to accept the popular verdict in favour and instead asked the question again until he got the correct answer. But most of the questions MP's must deal with do not implicate basic values (the example he gave is whether wind turbines should be built in an area of outstanding natural beauty in his constituency), and engaging citizens directly pays dividends.

Unfortunately, too many politicians think like Robb and not Webb. Steve Webb does what he does because he thinks voters care about what he is doing, and want to take the time to read long serious e-mails and send considered replies. To say, "I'm a politician, it's my job to listen to you, can we talk about wind farms." requires politicians to admit that they are politicians, that it is politicians' job to listen to voters, and that politicians can legitimately exercise power on that basis. The third of these is the vital one.

A politician who cringingly accepts Campbell Robb's criticism of politicians allows power to be exercised by "non-political" quangoes and civil servants. Once politics leaves the equation, the views of voters are marginalised and the views of "stakeholders" and "community leaders" become paramount. Ordinary people who want to have their end up arguing with experts, in front of a decision-maker who shares the experts' worldview, and are therefore at a massive disadvantage. We are back to the fake consultation that the POWER inquiry dismisses.

Even deeper than the cringe about being a politician is the cringe about having an ideology. POWER identify "The main parties are too similar and lack principle" as one of the main reasons for political disengagement. An ideology is nothing more or less than an intellectually coherent set of political principles. And yet far too many politicians wallow in their lack of principles. "What counts is what works" says the Prime Minister, a man who also said, "We will not introduce top-up fees." Without an ideology, a political programme is just a laundary list of policies, with no reason to believe that they will be kept in office. No wonder that POWER finds that "Parties and elections require voters to commit to too wide a range of policies." Knowing that Menzies Campbell is a committed liberal tells me far more about how he will govern than reading a manifesto could. It also lets me know that those policy specifics we do agree on are unimportant.

Perhaps the most embarrasing sign of the politician's cringe is the need for the POWER inquiry at all. We should all know that democracy is good, and that politics is a necessary part of democracy. But somehow we need a QC and a DJ to tell us this. A major political tradition, operating through a political party with 63 MP's, has identified the problems with our democracy, proposed solutions, and is fighting elections on the basis of implementing those solutions. And yet it is still possible for a comission of the great and the good to make a splash by saying things we have been saying for twenty years.

On private schools and standardised tests

This post discusses recent research in the US, which implies that private schools are actually worse (as measured by a standardised maths test administered to 11 year olds) than public (i.e. state) schools after correcting for the fact that private school students are richer, more intelligent, and come from happier homes.

Actually, I'm not surprised. I went to a private school which did very well in the A-level league tables. Everyone there was quite open about the fact that this was entirely due to the selective intake. We didn't actually try to maximise A-level scores. For example, the school offered Economics A-level instead of Business Studies (which is an easier subject and marked more leniently, something top universities overcorrect for by binning any UCAS form with it on). State schools which play the league table game do not offer Economics because an A in Business Studies is as about as hard to get as a B in Economics, but worth more league table points.

Parents send their children to private school to get them into top univesities. Therefore private schools focus on cramming for top unversities' selection processes, which give a lot of weight to things like extra-curiccular activities which state schools downplay because they aren't worth league table points. American public schools have their performance measured on the basis of standardised tests, which aren't particularly correlated with what top universities are looking for. You teach to the test, you get better results. You teach to the entrance exam, your alumni get into HarvOxYaleBridge.

Another point is that most private schools featured in the study are religious schools. The main mission of religious schools is religious indoctrination, not education. So it isn't exactly a damning indictment that they do badly on standardised tests.

Finally, there is the issue of actual education - the imparting of useful knowledge, life skills, character etc. This is a very low priority at state and private schools, but private schools are more likely to devote some resources to it. Actual learning, as opposed to bamboozling test-setters or admissions tutors, cannot be pinned down by statistics, but is immediately obvious to anyone who cares to look for it. So top private schools provide genuine education to satisfy the minority of parents who want it. State schools are accountable to politicians, who go by the statistics, and so don't need to.

I am who I am because of opportunities I had which I would not have been offered at a state school. None of them affected my exam grades. They were still worth the money.