The Wondering Mind

I just had the misfortune of reading an article on Car’s website about an apparent proposal for reducing speed limits in the UK. This is one of the sadder examples of a rabid advocate and partisan trying to disguise their writing as “reporting” for unsuspecting readers. Somthing we see far too frequently in what passes for public discourse today. So as a long time reader of the magazine, I’m going to dissect why this piece should have been ripped up by the editor.

First of all, the title: “Growing opposition to UK 50mph speed limit plan.” If you actually read the consultation paper here, it actually recommends an accelerated review of speed limits on British roads, on the premise that the limit on some roads might then be reduced as a result of reclassification of some types of roads. So right at the start, the “reporter” actually gets the facts wrong.

Then he claims that opposition to these (fictional) plans “is gathering momentum.” How can we tell? There is a petition with 34,000 signatures opposing the plans. To put that in perspective, according to the CIA World Factbook, the estimated population for the UK in July 2009 is over 61 million. That means that the people who signed this petition, if all are genuine, represent approximately 0.05% of the population. Or to put it another way, Old Trafford, the stadium for Manchester United, will seat over twice that many people in a sold-out match. Wow! What a momentum!

The reporter then claims these plans are being “steamrollered through” and are really just “a revenue raising scam.” And the basis for these claims? I have no idea, since there is no evidence provided. I guess we’re supposed to just take the reporter’s word for it, what with him having gotten everything else right so far.

But finally, we get some more support for this reporter’s bias.

A recent CAR Online poll showed a similar dissatisfaction among our regulars. An overwhelming 62% of you thought the 60mph limit should remain in force on rural roads, 31% said the limit should be raised and only 7% backed the Government’s plan.

This is, obviously, a voluntary poll among people who read a magazine about fast cars. To expect a different result than the one presented would be like polling the NRA on gun control. Would you expect too many NRA members to say guns should be banned?

In fact, as a voluntary poll, as in one which you volunteer to participate in, it is likely to attract participants who hold particularly extreme views, as they are more likely to be riled up enough to spend time responding to a poll which actually impacts nothing.

Our hapless reporter then appeals to the Association of British Drivers. I refer you to my previous comparison to the NRA. This is clearly a group of sad and crazy fanatics who people avoid at parties. If you want to evaluate the bona fides of this organisation, you can check out their website. There, among other things, they cling to the fiction that global warming is real. Even many American Republican politicians don’t claim to believe this rubbish any more.

And yet, Brian Gregory, the “association’s” chairman appeals to scientific principles.

On higher quality roads, the speed limit should even be raised. They need to use scientific principles. Speed limits should be based on the 85th percentile [between the speeds where 80 to 90% of road users drive]. On the motorway, many people drive at 85 to 90mph, so 85mph would be a safe speed limit.

He even appeals to economic consequences.

Each mph you slow the average speed down by costs the economy £800 million to £1 billion each year.

I haven’t bothered to test this man’s economic claims. I stopped after checking out the association’s webpage on the “scientific principle” of the “85th percentile.” I won’t explain here what’s wrong with this quasi-scientific sounding nonsense, but anyone who has any training in any science (natural or social) or statistics will immediately recognise that Brian Gregory lacks any such training or understanding.

I’m really sick and tired of lazy, stupid, and partisan hacks pretending to journalism and laying on a screed. Either write an editorial or report the news; don’t conflate the two. Which is not to say that there are not bad policy ideas which should be exposed as such. But my experience in such cases has been that laying out an honest, fair, and thorough analysis and reporting of facts will do more to convince an intelligent person than an obviously biased manifesto.

As it stands, all this article does is to convince me that the reporter is a sad fanatic, and not a very bright one at that. And the fact that he is clearly riled up about this position paper is in no way a mark against it. If anything, you can’t help suspecting that it’s got to have something to recommend it if the crazies are against it.

The NY Times had a wonderful article last week on the Section 8 housing program and how it’s not really working as people expected. I’m not sure if the article was inspired by a story in the Atlantic Monthly, but that piece is also an excellent report on Section 8.

The Atlantic Monthly story is like a little history lesson on the development of econometrics in the last several decades and the limitations of using econometrics in social sciences. The cited study by James Rosenbaum appears to suffer from many of the limitations of econometrics my professors admonished me against in my econometrics and economics classes.

First time the study is mentioned, the Atlantic article mentions that the study started with 114 families, but were left with only 68 by the time the study was released. Researchers are now generally very leery of studies with such high attrition rates for good reason. Chances are good that the reasons for the attrition are not random, meaning that the types of families who dropped out are likely to be systematically different from those who did not. It’s extremely difficult to estimate how the results would have been had you not experienced such attrition.

It is also possible that such problems of self-selection existed in the selection of the original sample of families. That is, the families who participated may have been more motivated to move, and more motivated to do something to better their lives than the “average” family who now qualify for Section 8. Obviously, you might expect such a motivated family to be different from the average family and for the effects of Section 8 on them to be different also.

Examples of such limitations are documented in the piece, with later studies showing that the initial euphoria over the results of the original study were premature and not accurate. One sentence is especially telling:

For instance, while Gautreaux study families who had moved to the suburbs were more likely to work than a control group who stayed in the city, they actually worked less than before they had moved.

This tells us that it is more than just possible that the apparent effects observed in the results of the study of Section 8 policies were probably more a function of the characteristics of the participating families, rather than being the result of the policies.

These types of studies are notoriously difficult to conduct well because of the problem of obtaining good counterfactuals. Counterfactuals are the controls you use to test the effect of your policies on the treatment group. The easiest illustration of this idea is in trials of medicines. In such trials, a group of patients are randomly assigned to receive the real drug or to receive a placebo (a “dummy” drug that has no medicinal effect but which is otherwise indistinguishable to a casual observer, such as the patient). You compare the difference between the patients given the drug versus those patients given the placebo to try to ascertain the effects of the drug.

The problem with social science is that social experiments are very difficult to conduct. For one thing, the subjects knowing that they are part of an experiment tends to contaminate the results. And it is rare that natural conditions exist which proximate a good experiment (what social scientists call a natural experiment). For example, if you change a law or regulation and observe how people react, it is often difficult to know how they would have acted if nothing had happened (the counterfactual).

For these reasons, the original study appears to have been not as strong as the initial reaction to it might have you believe.

(To be fair, I have not read the original study. It is published in a book, and I currently have neither the time nor the money to buy and read it. So it is entirely possible that the authors were well aware of the limitations of their study and pointed them out; others may have simply chosen to ignore them. It is also possible that social scientists at the time were either unaware of these limitations in econometrics, or they knew but had no better techniques to use and people got carried away with the results.)

Which tells us why perhaps the Section 8 program was never going to have the spectacular results its advocates expected. But that’s not the whole story. As Rosenbaum says,

“People were moved too quickly, without any planning, and without any thought about where they would live, and how it would affect the families or the places.”

As the Atlantic Monthly article and the NY Times articles both illustrate, the Section 8 program pretty much just gives poor families a housing subsidy, and not much else. They do not provide any additional support programs to help the welfare recipients to get jobs, or get better jobs, support for the family, etc. The attitude seems to be, “we’ve taken you out of the ghettos, so now pick yourselves up and join the middle classes.”

I’m not sure when or why we started to believe that we could do welfare on the cheap, but this is an appallingly lazy, and bad, way to practice public policy.