Just a few links and announcements:

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Anyone who’s been following recent discussion of the US economy will be aware that the Bureau of Labor Statistics produces employment statistics from two different surveys, and that the results have diverged radically since 2001. The BLS preferred numbers on employment growth come from a survey of employers (the Establishment Survey) while other numbers, including the unemployment rate are derived from a survey of households (Current Population Survey). As the BLS Commissioner’s latest statement notes (PDF file)

From the trough of the recession in November 2001 through January 2004, payroll employment decreased by 716,000. Over the same period, total employment as measured by the household survey increased by about 2.2 million (after accounting for the changes to that survey‚s population controls).

Not surprisingly supporters of the Administration have been pushing hard to discredit the Employment Survey in favour of the CPS. While noting some reasons for the discrepancy, the BLS seems to be sticking with the payroll survey, noting that there are a lot of problems in estimating employment growth from the CPS, and that the payroll data is consistent with data on new claims for unemployment benefits.

If that’s the case though, the implication appears to be that the CPS results are unreliable, and therefore that the unemployment rate (derived from the CPS) is an underestimate. Allowing for the fact that non-employed people are divided between unemployed and those not in the labour force, the discrepancy could easily be a full percentage point, implying that unemployment is now higher than when the recovery (as measured by output) began. This seems consistent with anecdotal impressions.

Someone needs to explain to me why I haven’t been reading The Decembrist for the last six months.

The deaths of “nineteen Chinese illegal workers”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lancashire/3464203.stm who were cockling on the treacherous sands of Morecambe bay has generated much comment in the British press. Much of that comment has focused on their illegality, the exploitation of such workers by gangmasters, the need or otherwise for tighter immigration controls, globalization and so on. Indeed. There was a similar burst of indignation when “some immigrant workers were hit by a train back in July”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000204.html . But one thing that needs saying is that such tragedies are a normal and predictable consequence of capitalism and not simply the result of coercion and abuse by a few criminals. In his “Development as Freedom”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385720270/junius-20 , Amartya Sen discusses two examples where workers, in order to assure basic capablities (such as nutrition and housing) for themselves and their families, have to expose themselves to the risk of injury or death. Jo Wolff and Avner de-Shalit have “a paper on this theme”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/spp/download/seminars/Wolff_De-Shalit_disadvantage.doc (Word format) that is on the “programme”:http://www.ucl.ac.uk/spp/seminars/seminars_2004.php of the UCL’s School for Policy Studies for this Wednesday, they recount Sen’s examples:

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Since the discussion on Chris’ post on mumbo-jumbo went straight from the ludicrous Edward de Bono to the Flynn effect, I thought I’d repost a lightly edited version of a piece on the Flynn effect and The Bell Curve that was on my own blog a couple of months ago, but might be of interest to CT readers.

The Bell Curve got a thorough hammering on statistical grounds when it came out (this review by conservative economist Jim Heckman in Reason is damning, and it was one of the polite ones). But the thing that most annoyed me when I read it was their discussion of the Flynn effect, namely that average scores on IQ tests have risen steadily over time, by amounts sufficient to wipe out the differences between racial groups on which Murray and Herrnstein rely. As Thomas Sowell points out in this review (reproduced by Brad de Long), it’s hard to see how any claim that differences in IQ test scores observed in Western societies are mostly due to genetic factors can stand up in the face of this observation. But Murray and Herrnstein slide straight past it, saying that they are concerned with contemporary inequality, not with time trends. This is about as reasonable as a “nurturist” deciding to ignore twin studies on the grounds that most people aren’t twins.

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A cautionary tale – over the last couple of years, my wife and I have been using cheap prefix companies in Canada and the US to make long distance and international phonecalls. In the US we’ve been using 101-6868, a fairly popular – and cheap – service, which bills indirectly (you see the charge on your monthly phone bill from your carrier). No more. My wife changed phone carrier a few months ago, which apparently meant that “PT-1 Long Distance”:http://www.pt-1.com/, the proprietor of 101-6868 wasn’t able to charge us properly (I presume they didn’t have a relationship with our new carrier). PT-1’s reaction wasn’t to phone us, or to send us a bill – it was to refer the matter (involving the princely sum of $8.93) directly to a debt collection agency, which then sent my wife a dunning letter threatening the usual kinds of nastiness. A couple of very irate phonecalls seem to have sorted the problem out – but other users of the service (or its competitors) may want to take this under advisement. All the more so, as we’re apparently “not the only people”:http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~tien/consumer/pt1-others.html who’ve had this experience with PT-1 Long Distance; indeed, it appears that we’ve gotten off quite lightly in comparison.

Today’s Guardian has a review of Francis Wheen’s How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions. There are also extracts “here”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1131153,00.html and “here”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1131917,00.html . Crystals, astrology, rebirthing etc all get explored, as well as management guruism. Philosophers and civil servants both have reason to enjoy Wheen’s acccount of Edward de Bono (from the 2nd extract):

bq. In the autumn of 1998 more than 200 officials from the Department of Education were treated to a lecture from De Bono on his “Six Thinking Hats system” of decision-making. The idea, he explained, was that civil servants should put on a red hat when they wanted to talk about hunches and instincts, a yellow hat if they were listing the advantages of a project, a black hat while playing devil’s advocate, and so on. “Without wishing to boast,” he added, “this is the first new way of thinking to be developed for 2,400 years since the days of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle.” So far as can be discovered, the education department has yet to order those coloured hats, but no doubt it benefited from his other creative insights: “You can’t dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper”; “With a problem, you look for a solution”; “A bird is different from an aeroplane, although both fly through the air.”

“Unlearned Hand”:http://www.enbanc.org/archives/000634.html wonders what we’ll think about America in a hundred years:

bq. Here’s the game I’d like to play, if you’d all be so obliged: name the one thing about America as it is now that the America (if it exists as such) of 2104 will look back on with the most admiration/envy/nostalgia, and the one thing the America of 2104 will look back on with the most disgust/pity.

I’d like to say that we’ll be disgusted by the amount of poverty in the 21st century–and how little Americans did to alleviate it. But that’s probably too optimistic. We’ll pity our inability to cure diseases that will have been eradicated over the next century. Much harder, I think, to decide what we’ll admire. Maybe we’ll be nostalgic for the days before our permanent attachment to computers.

This makes so much more sense to me than this. I certainly appreciate the goal of getting more women in the White House and other political positions, but I think it’s a stretch to suggest that the gender of a candidate trumps all other factors including a candidate’s position on all issues. (I came across the EMILY’s List Web site by clicking on this ad in the NYTimes.)

Last week, the New York Times had a piece about the potential monetary losses resulting from bad spelling. The author discusses how some misspelled auction items on eBay sell for very little because few bidders find them.

Reading about the frequency of spelling mistakes on the Web was no shock to me. In fact, the geek that I am, I even ran analyses [pdf] in my dissertation to see what explains whether and how often people misspell words during their online actions.

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In the middle of a generally reasonable Newsweek article about the failure to find WMDs, I came across the following para

But if Saddam didn’t have weapons of mass destruction, why didn’t he come clean? After all, he could have given U.N. inspectors free rein; he could have allowed them to interview all of his scientists in private—even outside the country—and let them rummage through his palaces. Faced with war, wasn’t that the sensible option?

But, but …(lapses into stunned silence)

I’ve just finished watching Sorious Samura’s documentary “Living with Hunger”:http://www.insightnewstv.com/hunger/ on the UK’s “Channel 4”:http://www.channel4.com/news/2004/01/week_4/30_hunger.html . It seems to be screening worldwide over the next few days including on “CBC in Canada”:http://www.cbc.ca/passionateeyemonday/feature_090204.html and repeatedly on “Discovery/Times”:http://dtc.discovery.com/schedule/episode.jsp?episode=0&cpi=105681&gid=0&channel=DTC in the US. It is an extremely vivid portrait of how some of the world’s poorest people live, how hard they work, and their dignity in conditions tougher than most of us will ever face. Highly recommended.

Apologies in advance because this edition of RFHE is not really going to be all that good. It’s a grab bag of things I’ve picked up relevant to personal hobby horses of mine. Lots of people sent me some really good stuff in response to the last one, for which thank yoyu very much. Unfortunately, my chaotic email management habits came through a minor MyDoom infestation about as well as I thought they were going to. I should be able to find all the stuff I had pretty soon; otoh, if any of you were to resend it, that would be just lovely. So, apologies, promises of something better next time, and please regard this inconsistency in quality as charming rather than annoying.

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Framing effects, again:

Question 1: Would you support the Canadian courts if they decided to “ban spanking in most circumstances?

Question 2: Would you support the Candian courts if they decided to tighten the current loophole in the law on common assault which allows some kinds of physical violence against children?

Question 2 is actually the better description of the facts; the question at issue is the definition of “reasonable chastisement” of a minor by its parents, which is a carve-out from the law on assault.

For additional credit, could someone explain to me why it is that my wife and my child are both insolent and disobedient to me, but I am only within my rights to impose reasonable physical chastisement on one of them (these days) , specifically the one who is less able to defend themselves and utterly unable to stop living in my house if they so choose? Don’t even get me started on the servants …