Statistics are altogether too bourgeois for the public sector elite

I've been thinking for a while about Graeme Archer's article on how 'getting' statistics is as important as 'getting' Shakespeare yet people still, in that giggling way, exclaim how they were never any good at maths.

There is no “either/or” between words and numbers; at the same time, of course, there is. CP Snow’s two cultures exist, most clearly in the words/numbers dichotomy, but only because we structure them into existence through conscious decisions about how to educate our young. It’s a human choice, not a law of the universe. Good with words or good with numbers is a story we tell about ourselves, and like all stories it has its heroes, and villains.

Now I'm a social scientist (if I'm anything properly academic) who once gloried in the title of Research and Planning Director and I recall a number - see what I did there - of stories about folk dumbfounded by maths and stats. We once prepared an analysis of customer geography for a knitting wool company (sexy, eh!) based on a simple index and had to spend the first twenty minutes of the presentation explaining what indices were. And when I did my 'Research Methods' module for my MSc, we were told to avoid quantitative research because (I summarise) maths is hard and you don't need to do it.

Such is the reality of a world where my personal experience of buying a railway ticket is a better guide to policy than statistics explaining why I am an outlier in buying such an expensive ticket. Or where - as I put it in a debate at last year's Battle of Ideas:

We’d reckon on uplift in response of around 2X or maybe 3X compared to a random selection. Great until you realise that the response to random was around 0.2% - all that clever technology means that, instead of getting ignored by 998 out of 1000 people, you only get ignored by 994.

Only the 2X or 3X gets reported not the actual numbers even though they tell us we needn't fret so much.

Statistics matter yet the extent to which we understand them or appreciate them is troubling. I recall being told - in very definite terms - that my comments on the relative poverty line were wrong because I was using the median household income not the mean and "median isn't an average". This is despite the fact that median is the right measure where there's a lower bound (i.e. you can't have a negative household income - which might come as a surprise to bankrupts).

The thing with Graeme's article, however, is not that people don't know enough maths and statistics but that they are proud of this fact. And, you know, I might have just found a little glimpse at the reasons why this is the case - numbers, counting, accounting are terribly bourgeois things. Here's a chunk from a chapter in Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Equality (the chapter is entitled 'Aristocrats Scorned Measurement'):

In England before its bourgeois time Roman numerals prevailed. Shakespeare's opening chorus in Henry V...apologises for showing battles without Cecil B. DeMillean numbers of extras: yet "a crooked figure may/ Attest in little place a million/ And let us, ciphers to this great accompt, / On your imaginary forces work." The crooked figure he has in mind is not Arabic "1,000,000" but merely a scrawled Roman M with a bar over it to signify "multiplied by 1,000": 1,000 times 1,000 is a million.

McCloskey - like Graeme Archer - quotes Samuel Johnson (albeit a different reference):

"To count is a modern practice, the ancient method was to guess; and when numbers are guessed they are always magnified."

And that modernity was, in Johnson's time, the advent of Bourgeois England - Capitalist England (although McCloskey would be cross at the sloppiness of this latter designation). Before this time, accounting was a grubby thing of merchants, pursers and bursers not something the great and good should be bothered with. Indeed, McCloskey goes on to note that, prior to 1803, students arriving at Yale were expected to be fluent in Latin and Greek but not to be qualified in arithmetic. Such mundane things as statistics were beneath such grand folk.

We appear to have come full circle with quoting poetry and qualitative (for which, usually, read anecdotal) analysis given greater credence than any sort of proper measurement, analysis and appraisal based on statistics, probabilities and other scary number-crunching things. As Simon Jenkins disdainfully put it (when it seemed his basic statistical knowledge was found wanting):

I seriously doubt this poll, since it implies that two-thirds did know the answers. All on whom I tested it failed, including myself. Nor could they see the point. With one voice they replied: “That’s the sort of thing you learned at school.” So what is the point?

What were the sorts of question? Calculating the mean, median and mode - terms used every day in the Guardian where Jenkins writes. The area of a circle. And even long division and multiplication. Not even GCSE maths, not much advanced on what we'd like an eleven year old to know. We don't need to know this stuff, say the bookish elite, it's smelly maths.

Yet how can you know whether government policies - reducing poverty, improving health and so forth - are effective if you've no idea how the things we're reducing or improving are measured? I'll tell you how - we use anecdote, stories. So, rather than look at the statistics we relate the tale of someone's grandma or how a single mum is struggling on benefits. We sometimes gather together several of such stories and embellish them with commentary from 'experts' relating their own understanding based on further anecdote - or 'qualitative research' as they like to call it.

Statistics, maths, measurement, accounting, calculation - these are the tools of the capitalist, the merchant, the city trader. Thing to be disdained and dismissed in favour of our, often pre-judged, opinion founded on at best a reasoned assessment but more commonly on a collection of tales. We might then hold our noses and wander into the world of maths seeking out some numbers that seem to match what we've found from our tales. People compare apples with pears, use percentages when the numbers are too small for this to make sense, and calculate means when the bounds make the mean meaningless. Journalists - often with the title Science Editor or Health Correspondent - present headlines that bear no relationship to the research they report on. Not because they want to mislead but because they've no idea what 'statistical significance' means let alone what a p value is.

Hardly a day passes without us witnessing people in powerful and influential positions dismissing the evidence of statistics in favour of anecdote and conjecture. And, so long as people can respond by quoting Disraeli - lies, damned lies and statistics - without being laughed at, there is little chance that we'll see the proper use of measurement in the formulation of public policy. Meanwhile, out in the world of markets, capitalism, trade and investment, people have no choice but to use measurement and statistics, without them they would fail. For the public sector elite, however, such concerns are just too bourgeois and instead they make policy inspired by stories in the Guardian or Daily Mail.

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Quote of the day: On knowledge...

From Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek:

Too many are the people who, having mastered econometrics and gathered lots of data, wrongly suppose themselves thereby to possess knowledge. Likewise, too many are the people who, having mastered mathematics and memorized the mechanics of lots of theoretical models, wrongly suppose themselves thereby to possess knowledge. Too rare are the people who correctly understand that, no matter how smart they are and how much they might genuinely learn about economics, econometrics, and ‘the data, neither they nor others can ever hope to come close to knowing the details of economic reality in the same way that, say, a physicist can know the details of some physical material under his or her investigation.

What we call facts (and they aren't always facts, especially in social sciences) do not constitute knowledge. That knowledge comes from thinking about those facts and what they mean, what they tell us about the world.

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So is Bradford part of Leeds? On rebranding our Combined Authority

Tomorrow I'll be toddling across to Leeds where, among other momentous matters, the West Yorkshire Combined Authority with consider whether to change its name to Leeds City Region Combined Authority. This has caused a ripple of disgruntlement in my city as people ask quite why this decision is being taken now and whether it marks the end of Bradford's separate and individual identity.

I don't like the proposal. Mostly this is because it is totally unnecessary. We're told by officers that the current brand (essentially 'West Yorkshire') is confusing because there's another brand - 'Leeds City Region Local Enterprise Partnership' - within the purview of the combined authority and having two brands might be confusing for high-powered, multi-million pound wielding international business folk wanting to invest. That and all the others are named after cities (well Sheffield, Manchester and Liverpool at least but not Birmingham and Bristol).

The report tells us that the basis for the change results from 'comprehensive research':

"...benchmarking the WYCA against other combined authorities nationally or internationally, an audit of existing communications activity by the organisation, and substantial engagement with audiences including elected members, local authority chief executives, private sector business leaders, central government officials, partner organisations and WYCA employees."

Sounds good - just the sort of paragraph I'd have put into a client presentation about research when I didn't have any budget. What we have here is a series of chats with existing connections such as members of the LEP, political leaders (but not opposition leaders) in the West Yorkshire councils and senior officials who we work with. There's no script, no presentation of findings, no suggestion that we've done anything other than ask the opinion of a few people who we already know.

In the grand scale of things all this probably doesn't matter much. Except that, for us in Bradford at least, we'll begin to recognise that plenty of decisions previously made by councillors here in Bradford are now made somewhere else (Leeds) by a different organisation. This - as councillors on Bradford's area committees have discovered - includes mundane and very local stuff like whether or not to put speed bumps on a street in Cullingworth.

What annoys me most about this stuff is that we are gradually replacing accountable political decision-making with technocratic, officer-led decisions. So us councillors, for example, get pressure to put in speed cameras but have precisely zero say in whether and where such cameras are actually installed. Somewhere in the documentation of the soon-to-be Leeds City Region Combined Authority there'll be a line of budget referring to the West Yorkshire Casulaty Reduction Partnership. That is what 'member decision-making' means most of the time these days.

So to return to the name change. I'll be opposed because it's unnecessary nd divisive. But when it goes through (I love that they're planning an extensive 'member engagement' after they've made the decision) it will at least be a reminder that most of the big investment decisions out there are being made on the basis of Heseltine's 'functional economic geography' rather than using the democratically-elected local councils we all know and love. OK, not love- that's going too far - but you know what I mean.

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On the manufacture of fake news

I know others have commented on this but it's pretty important that we understand that fake news is not simply something manufactured by 20 year old Macedonians or Russian spies. Throughout our media stories are created based on the flimsiest of evidence. Or indeed on evidence that really doesn't exist at all.

Here, from that impeccable establishment media source, The Economist:

The report does not say what proportion of the 53,000 sample tweets related to Ms Cox’s murder, and what share concerned Brexit more generally. When The Economist asked the authors for help, they declined to share their data with us, citing death threats they said they had received since the report’s release. So we undertook our own analysis, examining tweets from June and July that included the terms “Jo Cox” or “#JoCox”—some 341,000 unique messages. Of a random sample of 800 of these, none was celebratory, and just four seemed to be derogatory toward Ms Cox, criticising her support for Syrian refugees, for instance. From this, simple statistics suggest that the true number of tweets cheering the politician’s murder would lie between 0 and 1,500. (The Hope Not Hate report reproduces about 30.) Mr Awan notes that our sample did not include tweets that mentioned only the killer, Mr Mair; it is also likely that some tweets were deleted before our collection.

Now, as the report notes, it's terrible if even one Tweet celebrates a murder but the thrust of media coverage - driven by the original Hope Not Hate press release of this shocking study - was that such activity was commonplace when it wasn't.

We see this pattern repeated by newspapers again and again with the thread of fake news creation often going back to a press release from a worthy organisation like a charity or campaign group. From sugary drinks and booze through to vaping and fracking the misuse of evidence, even the creation of evidence simply to generate a news story, is widespread. Journalists used to challenge and question the claims made by those issuing press releases but it seems today that there's either no time or no inclination to do that basic journalistic job of checking the facts before publishing.

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How to respond when your precious theory is debunked. The case of farting cows.

"Who're you blaming for climate change, matey?"

We should stop eating meat because of climate change. All the cow farts, pig trumps and sheep letting one rip are contributing to greenhouse gas emissions thereby leading to the end of civilisation as we know it closely followed by the earth ceasing to be a viable ecosystem for anything more sophisticated than cheese mould. It is of course nonsense - it's lettuce that should bother us:

Lettuce is “over three times worse in greenhouse gas emissions than eating bacon”, according to researchers from the Carnegie Mellon University who analysed the impact per calorie of different foods in terms of energy cost, water use and emissions.

Published in the Environment Systems and Decisions journal, the study goes against the grain of recent calls for humans to quit eating meat to curb climate change.

Collapse of the vegetarian's strongest argument (global warming is because we eat meat). Except for the noble soul who has the job of defending the cow fart argument because the funding of his institution depends on it:

The initial findings of the study were "surprising", according to senior research fellow Anthony Froggatt at Chatham House, an independent think-tank which is currently running a project looking at the link between meat consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr Froggatt told the Independent it is "true lettuce can be incredibly water intensive and energy intensive to produce", but such comparative exercises vary hugely depending on how the foods are raised or grown.

"We usually look at proteins rather than calories, and as a general rule it is still the case that reducing meat consumption in favour of plant-based proteins can reduce emissions," he said.

Watch that spin there Froggatt old chap! Especially since his argument that these naughty scientists haven't taken everything into account is quickly debunked too:

But surprisingly, even if people cut out meat and reduced their calories to USDA-recommended levels, their environmental impact would increase across energy use (38 per cent), water (10 per cent) and emissions (6 per cent).

Dang and double dang! Poor Froggatt is left with just the weakest of weak arguments - akin to sticking out his bottom lip, stamping his foot and insisting he is right:

"We do know there is global overconsumption of meat, particularly in countries such as the US," he said. "Looking forward that is set to increase significantly, which will have a significant impact on global warming."

We can expect more along these lines - a narrow focus on what the actual animal does (fart mostly) rather than a proper appraisal of the entire production process. It is, sadly, how science goes these days - look at vaping, at sugar taxes, at overweight girls or indeed almost any public health or climate change research and you'll find assumptions, ad hominem, lousy methods and the reliance on simply repeating a given mantra regardless of the actual evidence.  But then pointing at critics shouting heretic has always been an effective tactic in the short run.


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So most academic research is pointless?

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This was really striking:

In his new book “Higher Education in America,” former Harvard president Derek Bok notes that 98 percent of articles published in the arts and humanities are never cited by another researcher. In social sciences, it is 75 percent. Even in the hard sciences, where 25 percent of articles are never cited, the average number of citations is between one and two.

We are conducting research because the system says you must research. We are publishing - and supporting a vibrant academic publishing industry - simply because we're measuring performance on that basis.

We privilege academics as specially clever people but the reality is that many of them spend their time doing things that serve no real purpose, conducting research that no-one (bar the journal editor and the academic's mum) will read about.

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Nope, 'food porn' isn't making us fat.

Some 'food porn' what I made

Salivate, dear reader. Salivate. Look at the oil, the cheese. Imagine the flavours as they explode in you mouth, savour the thought of that yolk as it bursts open running down onto the plate. You're hungry now aren't you?

The argument is that, when we see an attractive image of food, blood rushes to the parts of our brain associated with taste. We experience the desire to eat, even if we’re not hungry. According to one of the authors of the review, Professor Charles Spence of Oxford University, this has been measured in brain scans.

“The taste cortex lights up,” he says. “There’s an increase in blood-flow and, depending on the state of the person, or how realistic the image is, it might be triggering restraint mechanisms. You’re seeing it and thinking: ‘I shouldn’t be eating that.’

Apparently the proliferation of food images - each one lighting up the 'taste cortex' - is one of the things making us fat. Or so says Dr Spence:

“What we’re trying to say in this paper is that there are consequences from food porn. It’s a term that hints at the way that it depletes our resources of self-restraint. When we sit down for a meal at home after watching a cookery programme maybe we eat more than we would otherwise have done.”

And so on in this vein culminating in an orgasm of nannying fussbucketry:

Should we be protected, then, from over-exposure to “food porn”? “Should OFM, Delicious and all those food magazines be moved to the top shelf? I don’t think it’ll go that far,” he says, “but I do think government agencies should think seriously about our exposure to visual food cues."

The problem here is that while it seems entirely reasonable for our brains to light up at 'food porn', Dr Spence and his colleagues really don't show any direct link between "eating with our eyes" and obesity. Here from the conclusions to the original article in Brain and Cognition:

Crucially, the question that has yet to receive a satisfactory answer is just what the impact of all those appealing food images is having on the consumption behaviour of those in the Western world who are both flooded with opportunities to eat, and at the same time bombarded with gastroporn.

So all that research hasn't answered the question? Probably because there isn't much of a link. It seems reasonable to use tests of links between food advertising and obesity as a proxy for what Dr Spence and his colleagues are saying:

Based on a reading of the literature, it appears clear that there is no evidence for a direct causal relationship between food advertising and obesity levels.

or:

Despite media claims to the contrary, there is no good evidence that advertising has a substantial influence on children's food consumption and, consequently, no reason to believe that a complete ban on advertising would have any useful impact on childhood obesity rates. Again, Hastings et al. appear to concur with this judgment: 'there is no prima facie reason to assume that promotion will undermine children's dietary health; it can influence it, but this influence could just as easily be positive as negative.'

It's true that there's also a great deal of research that sort of says "children watch more TV food advertising, children are fatter, therefore food advertising is causing obesity". Some of this research has very precise numbers as to the amount of obesity that banning food advertising would prevent even though each time it fails to demonstrate any actual link between the pictures of food and the fat children.

This whole idea - sometimes (and unattractively) called the 'obesogenic environment' - is very convenient if you are an adherent of the church of public health or an enthusiastic nannying fussbucket. This is because is suggests that fatties aren't to blame for their fatness but are victims of wicked advertisers, manufacturers and retailers with their cunning marketing tricks. So instead of sending a message to the obese that perhaps it might be a good idea for them to eat less and move more (and maybe even helping them do this), we send them a message that the reason they're fat is the food industry and its agents in advertising or retailing. Unsurprisingly that message works all too well with calls for bans matched only by an ever more intense panic about an epidemic of obesity.

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How left wing academics are killing the business school

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For many years business schools and management faculties were the bastions of sanity in academia. Places where such concerns as robust research methods, consistency and applied knowledge were more important that ideology or the revolution. Business schools were, so to speak, the engineers or social science - sensible places producing graduates who could actually contribute something to the world once they left the groves of academe.

Sadly this is now under threat. A thing called 'critical management studies' has grown like a sort of parasitical maggot within the body of the business school:

As an umbrella research orientation CMS embraces various theoretical traditions including anarchism, critical theory, feminism, Marxism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism and psychoanalysis, representing a pluralistic, multidisciplinary movement. Having been associated mainly with business/management schools in the United Kingdom and Scandinavia earlier, CMS as a research approach has presence all over the world and is not confined to management/business schools. This suggests that CMS is an approach to doing research rather than a school or tradition, and there is no particular 'right' way of doing CMS.

I am reluctant to do anything more than just peek at this hideous growth upon an otherwise sensible part of our higher education system. But that peek reveals the usual - and more-or-less incomprehensible - left wing wibble. We encounter a world focused on 'alternatives to growth driven neo-liberal capitalism', on 'critical performativity' (whatever that might be), and on 'challenging the...power structures in the university workspace'.

And in doing this work, such ordinary stuff as scientific method and detached, dispassionate research are to be dismissed:

We do not believe that good social science is always detached, objective and quantitative in its approach. Nor do we think it should routinely borrow from the natural sciences in its investigations. Instead we favour the use of a wide range of methods in attempting to understand and unpick management and organisations. This is why the School of Management at the University of Leicester houses the largest body of heterodox researchers across the core disciplines of accounting and finance, marketing and organisation studies in the world.

We are now beginning to churn out from university management schools the same deluded, evidence-light, ideological research (I call it research because I'm kind) has we've seen for generations from sociology and social studies departments. This isn't to say that left wing views have no place in the study of business and management but rather to observe that the application of that ideology seems to trump any reasoned or rational consideration of the things being taught and studied.

What we see here is the continued debasement of academia as the unchallenged hegemony of 'progressive' delusions gradually infects the whole body of research. To be fair there's a way to go before the UK's business schools are so corrupted by the sort of ideological non-research those unfortunate students at Leicester are suffering. But, just as there is no space for any challenge to this progressive hegemony across much of the social sciences, it seems that it will be only a matter of time before the BSc in management becomes just as uselessly impractical as the typical BA in Sociology or Social Policy is today.

The most frightening thing about the progressive left isn't just that it is out of touch with reality but that its academics reject structured, quantitative research methods (mostly because - as I was told by my research methods lecturer - 'maths is hard') in favour of the recycling of shared opinions and the gradual translation, without any real evidence, of those opinions into a 'research' corpus. Worse, if organisations are recruiting new managers infected by this 'business is bad' ideology, then instead of new and improving techniques in business adminsitration we will see the corruption of our businesses from within.
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Does sociology need to be rubbish?

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I'm not a sociologist. Indeed I have on many occasions criticised the discipline of sociology for its lack of rigour, its preference for anecdote (OK "qualitative research") over robust experiment and quantitative analysis. But, given that 'society' (whatever we may mean by that cursed term) is central to us human animals, we should perhaps give its study a little more credit and attention.

This thought was prompted by yet another of those trite poster slogans that people recycle and share as if they are some sort of great insight into the human condition. It went:

'How about we live in a society rather than an economy?'

A moment's thought reveals the inanity of this gloriously sweeping observation - we live (and have no choice in this) in both a human society and an economy. But beneath this specious statement there might be a little glimmer of real insight from whoever penned the aphorism. We spend a great deal talking about economics and the economy. Economists are the particle physicists of social science, feted and celebrated simply for the fact of their being such masters of an impenetrable subject that brings such knowledge to our world.

Even those who seek to popularise economics fall into a trap - they'll smugly post something prefaced with a parenthesised observation: "wonkish". This usually means filled with either some chunky maths or, more usually, a dense forest of entwined jargon. And for all that we read the author's other stuff and imbibe of their wisdom, we have a sneaking suspicion that behind that innocent word "wonkish" lies the real truth. If we could only get to see through the pea-souper of indulgent jargon then the scales would fall from our eyes and we would ascend to a higher plane of understanding.

Sociologists are different. They are the botanists of social science, a bunch of folk who flit about the world saying, "ooh, that's interesting. look at that!" Except that sociologists, rather than just looking and describing have taken the idea of participant observation to the point of the ludicrous - they want to reform society in some way that would end sin and perfect mankind.

I spent a happy few years reading the output of marketing academics. And especially those writing in the field of consumer behaviour. In this field you'll find loads of quantitative research, experiment, ideas hypothesised and tested - everything you expect from a robust social science. These researchers help us understand how we respond to advertising (it's not as simple as you think), the manner in which we make in-store choices and how colours or images affect behaviour. And this is - in a manner not grasped by the actual discipline - sociology.

So here's a challenge to sociologists. Put aside the Alinsky-light social activism, step back from relating the sorrows of interviewed sufferers and embrace something more interesting and exciting. Something you can learn from those studying the behaviour of consumers. Stop with the political posturing and campaigning. And actually study society. Explore how we respond to the multiple stimuli of modern communications, poke away at why social capital declined rather than just saying it has, and explore the world as it is rather than as it would be in your perfect sub-Marxist utopia. In simple terms do the -ology bit of the sociology.

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Shock as prohibitionist finds Drinkaware and British Institute of Innkeeping are funded by the drinks industry!

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There is an academic called Jim McCambridge at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who has written some stuff about charities receiving benefit from the drinks industry. Specifically, this tin-pot health fascist suggests that somehow we can't trust these charities because of their links to the drinks industry:

The Alcohol Industry, Charities and Policy Influence in the UK, published this week, looks at major charities in the UK that are both active in alcohol policy and funded by the industry.

These are Drinkaware, which receives 98 per cent of its funding from the industry; the Robertson Trust, which is almost completely funded by the whisky-maker Edrington, itself controlled by the trust; and the British Institute of Innkeeping, which is funded by membership fees and member services.

According to the LSHTM researchers, Addaction and Mentor UK also receive industry funding as well as public sector grants. The study notes that these two charities share office space above a pub.

In Mr McCambridge's somewhat warped world, funding from corporations is always self-serving and that support for these charities is part of a wider strategy to pull the wool over our eyes about the evils of alcohol. Now Mr McCambridge, despite working at a medical institution, isn't a medic but a sociologist and social worker. Nothing wrong with this of course but it rather muddies his authority to speak of these matters. So far as I am aware nothing in Mr McCambridge's study suggests particular expertise in business strategy or charity law. And, just for completeness, Mr McCambridge's main funder (for his substantive research into drugs policy) is the Wellcome Foundation, a charity entirely funded from the pharmaceuticals industry.

What this report has done is pretty straightforward - Mr McCambridge has visited the public site of the Charity Commission and looked at the report and accounts for the charities his disapproves of and has found out what he already knew - they receive all or part of their funding from the drinks industry. It wasn't exactly a secret but from this public information, Mr McCambridge has manufactured a sinister world where charities funded by the drinks industry are having a major influence on the setting of policy in public health.

Central to this argument is that Addaction and Mentor UK didn't join in when various organisations walked out of the government's Public Health Responsibility Deal in a huff. Now I'm pretty sure the government would welcome Mr McCambridge and his pals back onto the panel looking at alcohol policy - alongside representatives of the drinks industry, the retail business and the food industry. So moaning that Addaction and Mentor UK influence policy is frankly a bit pathetic - all the bodies that walked out could influence that responsibility deal if they just got their knickers untwisted.

This report is just another example of dissembling by the prohibitionists and killjoys who want all of us to pay because a few people have a problem with booze. And the saddest part of Mr McCambridge's pathetic little rant is that the charities he attacks are all doing dreat work either funding research and social programmes, delivering drugs and alcohol support or lobbying on responsible drinking. These are the good guys - Jim McCambridge isn't.

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"White Hat Bias" - fixing results to support what you think is righteous

When we look at research in public health fields - those matters relating to lifestyle choices especially - we often see what we suspect is a search for evidence to substantiate an ideologically-predetermined position. So, for example, the ideology decides that standardised packaging would be a way to reduce the uptake of smoking among the young and this is followed by a set of studies that appear to show just how much packaging influences the decisions of young people considering taking up smoking. Except that, when we pull these studies apart, we find that they show nothing beyond the (rather obvious) fact that people prefer attractive, bright colours to drab unattractive colours.

This is "white hat bias" - a term coined by US biostatistician Professor David Allison:

It was Professor Allison and Dr Mark Cope who coined the phrase in relation to obesity research. They defined it as: “bias leading to the distortion of information in the service of what may be perceived to be righteous ends”*

 

It seems to me that this problem is endemic in evidence-gathering for the development of public policy and especially social policy. Examples would include starting with the presumption that inequality is a negative indicator of health - there isn't any consistent evidence to support this contention yet is remains an assumption in healthcare planning and, in particular, planning around public health.

 

Alongside this prejudiced approach to evidence we also find the use of 'evidence' that is not supported by the facts -  so one of Bradford Council's public health consultants presents as 'fact' that, without further intervention, hazardous drinking will increase in the City. This ignores another fact - that alcohol consumption (especially among the young) has fallen significantly. It seems odd, given this change, to make an argument stating that 'hazardous' drinking will increase unless 'something is done'. We see an intelligent, well-informed man allowing his presumptions about health to run ahead of the actual evidence simply because he believes that drinking is something to be discouraged.

This problem would be fine if it wasn't the case that lay people can be easily dismissed when they challenge this 'white hat bias'. From sweeping statements such as 'we have evidence to support this from the literature' (I got that one when I challenged some facts), to simply ignoring the challenge and falling back on the logical fallacy of 'I'm the expert so I'm right'. We also get 'Macclesfield is in Greater Manchester' answers where the 'white hat bias' allows the person to simply ignore a fact. A good example here is the fact that consumption of non-dairy extrinsic sugars (that's all the sugar we add to stuff plus honey) has fallen significantly over the past 30 years. Meaning, of course, that sugar cannot be isolated as the guilty party in rising rates of obesity.

The problem of 'white hat bias' isn't limited to public health - I've seen it in work around regeneration, local economic development and retailing - but it is that case that such bias is now so ingrained in public health research as to cast doubts on the entire corpus. As the researchers at the University of Alabama pointed out:

UAB researchers examined ways in which scientists writing new research papers referenced two studies reporting the effects of sugar-sweetened beverages on body weight. They found that less than one-third of the papers that cited the beverage studies accurately reported the overall findings, and more than two-thirds exaggerated evidence that reducing sugar-sweetened drink consumption reduced weight or obesity. The UAB researchers also found several examples in breastfeeding studies in which the authors selectively included some data and discarded other research to support the theory that breastfeeding decreases the risk of obesity.

 And the result of this is that we get public policy initiatives that are not appropriate to the problem - plain packaging for cigarettes is unlikely (indeed one year on in Australia evidence now supports this argument) to make any difference to either the take up of smoking by teenagers or the overall consumption of tobacco. Yet the bias of researchers means that the only studies considered are those limited, qualitative studies showing that kids like bright colours.

The same problem can be seen with policies to limit or control fast food takeaways despite there being little or no evidence linking fast food to obesity. However, we still get Councils pushing through planning controls (banning takeaways near schools, for example) that won't change anything. 

We went through a time when 'evidence-based policy-making' was all the rage. What we should now realise is (as those cultural studies students could have told you from the start) that scientists and researchers wedded to a particular position will be selective in their interpretation and presentation of evidence so as to provide support for that position. 

 

The researchers who coined the phrase 'white hat bias' should be commended for their efforts and for the warning. But I fear it will fall on stony ground - the ideologues of public health are simply uninterested in any evidence that questions or contradicts their prejudged policy prescriptions.

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On research and policy...

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This is a comment on research in education (from Tom Bennett) but it could apply across the whole of social policy:

I'm sure these people are engaged in the most rigorous of science, but the area that it addresses is devilled with darkest, emptiest aspects of bad educational research: small intervention groups, interested parties, cognitive bias, short term studies, conclusions that don't necessarily follow from the data, an aversion to testing a theory to destruction, etc. This matters, because huge and enormously expensive wheels are turning in education ministries around the world. Children's lives are chained to this wheel. Poor children can't afford to fix the mistakes of state education, as middle-class children can, through tutoring and familial support.

Yet we persist with allowing ideological bias and personal preference to be presented as research by social scientists. As we keep saying, if you really want evidence-based policy you need to start with robust evidence not ideological bias.

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Is £5 a lot of money?

I know it's an odd sort of question but it's one that has, from time to time exercised my mind. I think it helps to show how our understanding of value is shaped by perceptions and circumstance.

The story starts back in, I think, 1990 or 1991 when John Hinchcliffe and I has a heated debate about this very question - "is £5 a lot of money". Now at the time we were the account planning and research boffins at a leading direct marketing agency - the issue had arisen during a 'meeting' (I use the word loosely here) to talk about a savings product we promoted with the line 'only £9 per month'.

So, given that we had the skills and resources available we conducted some research. Not the most scientific piece of research but rather better than much of the rubbish that masquerades as public policy research these days. And our findings were significant - some people though £5 was a lot of money and some people didn't. However, we'd expected those answering 'yes' to the question would be the less well-paid employees of the agency (and any clients we stumbled across in the couple of days we were paying attention to our vital study).

What we found (you'll have to trust me on this because we didn't keep the results) was more interesting - the only factor that appeared to correlate to thinking £5 a lot of money was age. The older people were the more they thought £5 a significant lump of cash. The 55 year-old agency director saw £5 a more valuable that the 17 year-old receptionist. We concluded - before moving on to more important things (that we were actually paid to do) - that this might have something to do with inflation.

So for all those clever behavioural economists and such here's the question again:

"Is £5 a lot of money?"

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Why we shouldn't be banning vaping

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Via the estimable Dick Puddlecote comes the report on this piece of research:

Safety evaluation and risk assessment of electronic cigarettes as tobacco cigarette substitutes: a systematic review

The authors look at 97 studies examining the health impacts of vaping. And what do they find:

Currently available evidence indicates that electronic cigarettes are by far a less harmful alternative to smoking and significant health benefits are expected in smokers who switch from tobacco to electronic cigarettes. Research will help make electronic cigarettes more effective as smoking substitutes and will better define and further reduce residual risks from use to as low as possible, by establishing appropriate quality control and standards. 

Note that folks - "significant health benefits are expected in smokers who switch". We should be encouraging these things not trying to ban them or ban their promotion.

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More evidence that e-cigs don't need medical regulation

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From researchers who have connections to "manufacturers of smoking cessation medications".

There is very little risk of nicotine toxicity from major electronic cigarette (EC) brands in the United Kingdom. Variation in nicotine concentration in the vapour from a given brand is low. Nicotine concentration in e-liquid is not well related to nicotine in vapour. Other EC brands may be of lower quality and consumer protection regulation needs to be implemented, but in terms of accuracy of labelling of nicotine content and risks of nicotine overdose, a regulation over and above such safeguards seems unnecessary.

These are good things - people really are stopping harmful smoking with them. So let's encourage rather than carp and condemn, eh?


H/T Dick Puddlecote
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That minimum pricing evidence...or should I say lack of evidence?

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The 'scientific' argument (as opposed to the New Puritan or prohibitionist arguments) for minimum pricing of alcohol was based on data from Sheffield University. Data they've now revised with the result that rather than the policy 'saving' 2000 lives per year after ten years, it would only save 624. And the impact on consumption would be just -1.6%, a figure that would be lost in any general trends around drinking.

The policy is a nonsense and the estimates of impact and harm reduction from the SARG team at Sheffield have reduced with each iteration to the point where the impact of minimum pricing is little more than statistical noise - at least at the levels proposed for England and Scotland. However, I do admire the brilliance of SARG's spin on their reduced estimates - rather than say the policy isn't really that great they compare instead to the ban on below cost selling (something that simply doesn't take place) so will have zero impact:

Using a further developed and updated version of the Sheffield Alcohol Policy Model, the researchers predict that the impact on overall alcohol consumption is small – a reduction of just 0.04 per cent (which equates to 0.3 units or less than half a pint of beer per drinker, per year). The impact on the five per cent of the population who drink at harmful levels was an estimated 0.08 per cent reduction (which equates to three units per year from a harmful drinker's average consumption level of over 3,700 units per year).

We know banning below cost sales was a gimmick (because there really aren't any) but now we also know that minimum pricing - unless it's at punitive levels - really has little or no impact on health. We know this - despite the lives saved figure - because levels of consumption have fallen over recent years while 'alcohol-related' hospital admissions have continued to rise. Unless of course the public health folk would like to revisit those figures as well?

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The BBC's new class system - a vanity project of no value or purpose

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When you’ve been involved with direct marketing, marketing planning and profiling for as long as I have, you will know that every so often another ‘radical’. ‘ground-breaking’ and ‘innovative’ new scheme of social classification is launched. Usually this is from an advertising agency, a data management business or something called a “strategy consultancy” and is essentially a jolly good wheeze to get lots of press coverage and thereby to promote the business launching the classification.

To make this work we have to have funky names for the classes – none of that ABCDE malarkey, that’s far too boring. Instead we get value-loaded words that play on our stereotypes of certain ‘class’ groups – terms like ‘proletariat’ or ‘elite’ pop up thereby summoning up either gap-toothed ‘Shameless’ wannabes or waistcoated Bullingdon Boys. Such designations do not help in our understanding of social class and such studies do not guide our knowledge of how society changes over time.

Indeed, the BBC – who seem to think spending money on such work is what we pay a licence fee for – have fully understood the point. This creates some jolly headlines, a load of people on Twitter trill about which class they’re in and it fills in some gaps in an otherwise quiet week.

So folks, a great deal of fun has been had by everyone with the BBC’s new class system:

The BBC teamed up with sociologists from leading universities to analyse the modern British class system. They surveyed more than 161,000 people and came up with a new model made up of seven groups

This, says the BBC, replaces the three group system - the three group system that was replaced in the 1950s by a five group system of social class (ABCDE) and then, in the 1960s, with a six group system (ABC1C2DE). Apparently this is some sort of great advance in our understanding of social class in Britain, we are blinded by fancy on-line tools and the involvement of professorial types and told that this is so much better because it involves surveying 161,000 people!

The problem is that it’s nonsense. The size of the sample doesn’t make it better than, for example, a social classification system based on census data or one using transactional and behavioural data from millions of people. More to the point, the system encompassed information (cultural choices, for example, that more reflect affordability than class per se). Indeed, this wonderful new seven class system really doesn’t improve on the established and widely used six class system – a six class system that is used all over the world not just in the UK.

Compared to the well-known geodemographic systems – ACORN, MOSAIC, etc. – this new classification is useless. It is inflexible – fine for targeting mass market television advertising – but worse than useless if you want more precise analysis, say for retail location choices or direct marketing. For academics that system is interesting, there’s a lot of data to play with and it may contain some genuine insights. But it won’t replace the established social class classification (for all its flaws) because it largely fails to improve on that classification.

Let’s make that appraisal by matching the seven BBC classes to those traditional six socio-economic classes:

• Elite - the most privileged group in the UK, distinct from the other six classes through its wealth – this is wholly indistinguishable from Socio-economic Class A
• Established middle class - the second wealthiest, scoring highly on all three capitals – ah, yes, this would be Socio-economic Class B
• The next three groups Technical Middle Class; Emergent Service Workers and Newly Affluent Workers fit less well but are essentially the old Socio-Demographic Classes C1 and C2
• Traditional working class - scores low on all forms of capital, but is not completely deprived Here we have Socio-economic Class D
• Precariat, or precarious proletariat - the poorest, most deprived class. That would be Socio-economic Class E

It’s not a precise comparison but it’s plain to see that this expensive piece of taxonomic research is essentially an indulgence that sheds almost no light at all on the issue of social class and how it affects the economic, social and cultural development of the nation.

Of course, it goes without saying, that the system ranks me as part of the "elite". I suspect this reinforces the system's daftness!

It really is a vanity project of no purpose and with the validity of a horoscope.

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Quote of the day...on ancient heart attacks

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He said the Ancestral Puebloans who lived in underground caves in modern-day Colorado and Utah, used fire for heat and cooking, producing a lot of smoke.

'They were breathing in a lot of smoke and that could have had the same effect as cigarettes,' he said.

Dr Randall Thompson, a cardiologist at Saint Luke's Mid America Heart Institute, clearly hasn't read the official New Puritan script! Tobacco smoke has a special and different set of poisons that make it uniquely deadly. Unlike diesel fumes, barbecues or bonfires.

However, the nannying fussbuckets got the last word - forget the evidence and carry on with the finger wagging:

Dr Mike Knapton, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, said calcified arteries could also be caused by other ailments including endocrine disorders and that it was impossible to tell from the CT scans if the types of calcium deposits in the mummies were the kind that would have sparked a heart attack or stroke.

'It's a fascinating study but I'm not sure we can say atherosclerosis is an inevitable part of ageing,'

Absolutely - how dare these researchers discover the fussbuckets might be wrong!

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Eating stuff doesn't cause cancer....

Pie. A very good pie. From Ellisons in Cullingworth

Over recent years assorted nannying fussbuckets and attention seeking "researchers" have bombarded us with tales that warn how those wonderful foods we love are giving us cancer. Not that I was taking any notice but it does seem that it was - to be polite - a little exaggerated. At least according to some American academics:

...US scientists have warned that many reports connecting familiar ingredients with increased cancer risk have little statistical significance and should be treated with caution.

"When we examined the reports, we found many had borderline or no statistical significance," said Dr Jonathan Schoenfeld of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

In a paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Schoenfeld and his co-author, John Ioannidis of Stanford University, say trials have repeatedly failed to find effects for observational studies which had initially linked various foods to cancer.

These foods included:

...flour, coffee, butter, olives, sugar, bread and salt, as well as peas, duck, tomatoes, lemon, onion, celery, carrot, parsley and lamb, together with more unusual ingredients, including lobster, tripe, veal, mace, cinnamon and mustard.

Plus, of course, as the Daily Mirror puts it - the "British breakfast":

A health warning on the British ­breakfast was lifted yesterday after scientists ruled that bacon, tea and burnt toast may not cause cancer after all.

After months of stories linking the ­nation’s favourite foods with the disease, US scientists now say there is in fact NO evidence that they are harmful.

What on earth will the Daily Mail publish now?

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So why is there less research into lung cancer compared to other cancers?

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Here are the statistics from the USA - which is the biggest spender on basic cancer research:

A

Which of course begs the question as to why this is happening:

The stigma of smoking is largely to blame. Anti-tobacco campaigns have, in a way, done their job too well, leading many to see lung cancer as self-inflicted. That stigma keeps some families and patients from speaking out, while corporate donors stay away from the disease, and some scientists and policymakers question whether scarce research dollars should be devoted to a smokers’ illness.

And, of course, the cancer research bodies wouldn't dare take money from the tobacco industry which might actually be interested in funding research into lung cancer! And the situation is the same in the UK:

In 2010 lung cancer attracted 5.5% of funding spent on research into specific types of cancer (£11.8m / £213m), an increase from 3.9% (£6.1m / £158m) in 2006.

Lung cancers are responsible for over 20% of cancer deaths yet research into the disease has lagged behind research into other cancers and especially breast cancer and leukaemia. We can also note that spending on pancreatic, bowel and stomach cancers also lags behind.

The reason for this relative underspend on lung cancer is that the "researchers" strategy has but one club - stop people smoking. Which is a bit tough on the 10-20% of lung cancer patients whose cancer isn't caused by smoking! And - more importantly - for the past ten years the 'stop people smoking' strategy has ceased to work quite as effectively (if at all):

Since 2000 overall adult smoking rates had been declining by around 0.4% per annum.2 Between 2007 and 2009, overall smoking prevalence among adults in Great Britain remained the same at 21%, dropping to 20% in 2010 (21% of men and 20% of women).

It seems to me that - notwithstanding our opinion of smoking - the purpose of public health would be better served focusing on harm reduction, early diagnosis and better treatment than on what seems a pretty futile process of "denormalisation".

But I guess no-one's listening. They prefer just to ban stuff.

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