A couple of weeks ago was some news I thought I’d never hear: someone in the higher echelons of our government / state said that ‘class’ was more important for inequality / life chances and so on, than other inequalities such as race and gender. Trevor Phillips broke rank with the Blairite rhetoric that we live in a ‘classless society’ (see this for optimism about class).

Of course, the idea that background differences (of wealth/education/’standing’) is common knowledge and common sense. Money can buy better education, good manners help one to ‘get on’ (see Pierre Bourdieu), and the idea of a kid from a council estate becoming a minister or a senior business figure makes the news because it’s so unusual.

Way back in 2002 I did some work for the Equal Opportunities Commission (now part of Trevor Phillips’ organisation) and the general public, in a survey and focus groups, told us that the circumstances (class / area / poverty) of growing up were more important than other inequalities. But this would suggest we need to do something about those inequalities caused by material facts, not arbitrary inequalities of gender and race. If you made the world so that black middle-class people were just as likely to get middle-class jobs as their white equivalents, there would still be lots of working-class people who wouldn’t get the chance.

Unfortunately, any equal opportunity for the poorest people would require some middle-class people to fall down the class ladder - only half of us can be in top 50% - and this wouldn’t be a popular measure. To make things fairer we’d also need to make the differences smaller: again politically difficult.

Instead, the political consensus has addressed inequalities that, although real, are more about symbolism than improving the lot of society as a whole. Letting Oxford educated women into government didn’t do much for women at large. Letting posh black people get posh jobs doesn’t help the kids on rough London estates. At the bottom, anti-discrimination means letting the working-class compete on equal terms for a limited number of minimum wage jobs. That won’t solve the problems of an unequal society.

David Cameron, possible future Prime Minister, has had his bike nicked. He foolishly left it on Portobello Road locked only to itself, so it was easily picked up and carried away.

This is a great photo of Cameron just after. I like the fact that he’s outside a bookmakers, with it’s implications of risk and reward, unfettered markets, using knowledge to make money out of money, and all that the neoliberals love.
Unfortunately, markets like this always have losers as well as winners, and so some people end up poor, and nick bikes or deal drugs for a living. Not that the Labour party have a better record on the issue of gambling, what with their support for super casinos…

This is the story that’s made me the most angry in recent months, but I missed writing about it because I was on holiday (better late than never). It’s the Observer story with the headline: most Britons doubt cause of climate change. It was based on a Ipsos Mori survey that can be found here and if you read the original data and the Observer analysis, you’ll discover how far from the data the news story is.

I sent a letter to the Observer, funnily enough not printed, pointing out that their claims weren’t backed up by the survey data:

…If 42% of people think climate change might not be as bad as people say, they might still think it’s bad or even very bad. The 60% of people that agree that ‘many scientific experts’ question the causes of climate change could believe that these scientists are wrong. Indeed, does ‘many’ mean 10 scientists, 10% of the scientific community or most scientists? Respondents don’t know what the question means…Your poll, and its subsequent analysis, is bad social science.

For the ‘fact’ that ‘Most Britons don’t believe climate change is man-made’ they asked the public to guess the state of play of the world scientific community, instead of asking them if they themselves thought humans were responsible.

As pointed out by those sceptical of climate change, the survey is used to show that the population don’t believe in climate change, and therefore more needs to be done to ram it down people’s throats (the sceptics arguing that it’s already rammed down our throats enough, but that it’s not true). But if you look at the data, and I don’t think many people have, you’ll find a story of most people (77%) being very or fairly concerned about climate change, most people thinking that something can and should be done, including most people saying invest in renewable energy. Just because people can’t be cast-iron certain how bad climate change will be, and how many scientists agree and disagree, doesn’t mean they believe it’s a hoax. Remember, even when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says global warming is real, they still put out a range of scenarios (six in IPCC AR4) because scientists, individually and collectively can’t know exactly how it will pan out.

And finally when asked ‘what is reasonable to expect people to do to tackle climate change’, only 6% of Britons chose ‘There is no need to take any action - climate change is natural/humans are not having that much impact’. Not many sceptics there.

Well, I’m just back from a holiday so I missed some news and haven’t posted here for a while. While I was away, though, I listened to a fair bit of radio news and so am well informed about this year’s moral panic, knife crime. Now don’t get me wrong - knives, guns and murder are definitely bad, AND there’s an issue re. young people and violence, but it’s been around for a while, but now it’s a London thing then it really hits the news (see this from 2003 for context).

Anyway, the bit that’s got my goat is today’s story about putting young criminals on projects where they’d find out about the impact of knife crime. A good bit of restorative justice? Not once the politicians and media and assorted experts have put their tuppence worth in.

According to the BBC’s PM programme today, a press release saying that young criminals would have to go to A&E to see the effects of stabbing, AND meet the families of victims (see here for quotes from the original press release), was translated by the media and the opposition to mean they’d be dragged around wards meeting stab victims in their hospital beds. A controversy was made from nothing and the government is now sounding apologetic for what was a good idea.

The Beeb, of course, played its part, interviewing Donald MacKechnie, clinical vice-president of the College of Emergency Medicine and letting him, with little challenge, say:

“When someone is brought in having been stabbed or assaulted with a knife, it’s a very emotive situation. Doctors and nurses first of all have got to assess the injuries and then manage those injuries,” he said.

“We certainly don’t think it would be a good idea if then potential or actual perpetrators of knife crime were marched through to see these patients, who are in an extremely vulnerable state.

“It’s tantamount to secondary victimisation of someone who has already suffered a horrendous insult to them. From a practical point of view, working in an A&E department, it’s very difficult to see how this would work.” (from the Guardian)

This gives the impression that the first person you’d see after waking up from a life-saving operation would be a smiling hoodie flanking by two coppers. Not likely.

Mackechnie is either an idiot or playing faux naive for political point scoring. Anyone working in the criminal justice, health, or even the public sector as a whole would know that:

a) you’d be having to get consent from all involved first

b) there’d be a whole load of risk assessment work first

c) it would be as part of a project or programme, with plans for getting the activity to work well around the other stuff

and so on and so on. It would most likely be a walk through and a focus group. The kids would be given a walk through the A&E area, getting some stats from the people on the desk, and some horror stories of the worst case scenarios. Then imagine one room, eight lads convicted of knife crime, four victims showing off their wounds, a mum and dad, some probation officers, and a surgeon who’d say ‘if it was an inch to the left, this lad would be dead, and the other would be a lifer’.

Allowing media/experts/politicians to ruin a good idea for point scoring, before the idea has even been fleshed out is no way to run a country. But that’s because a soundbite (or what they call a ‘quick win’) can easily be presented as ‘half-baked’.

I meant to write about this a month ago, but it slipped my mind. Anyway, a local news story of a bank job in my home town was ended with a quote from a member of the public beginning ‘this shows crime is getting worse’. Does it now?

The story was fairly standard. A number of men (in balaclavas) attacked a security guard as he made a delivery to Lloyds TSB. They drove off in a getaway car (Beemer, of course) which they dumped a few miles away, presumably getting into another car.

The police said ‘this is very unusual’, and yes crimes like this are. A local resident, in his 70s said it shows crime is getting worse… used to leave my back door open… it’s brazen to try a robbery in broad daylight.’

Funny thing is, most bank jobs are done in broad daylight, as far as I was aware. If you want to go in with a gun and a bag, you traditionally do this in the daytime, probably at opening or closing time ’cause the safes will be open for counting. Going at night is pointless, as the banks are closed. At night you need to break in, stop the alarm, do safe cracking and so on, unless it’s an inside job. If you’re going to rob the security van, you need to do this when it comes.

Indeed, the British Bankers’ Association said that last year saw more decline in bank robberies. The traditional ‘counter robbery’ has been in decline since 1992, and although this crime has been displaced to cash-in-transit robbery (as in this case) even this was lower last year. In this county there was one robbery like this in 2007, compared to two in 2006. (See here for some charts). Shocking!

Once again Terry Wogan is claiming that ‘political’ and ‘bloc’ voting stopped the UK from getting points in the Eurovision song contest. This may have been the case in the past, but now each country’s votes are decided by a phone poll, this seems unlikely.

I watched it with friends, and yes most of the music was terrible and not my cup of tea. But when we discussed who and how people vote, we remembered that one of us actually voted last time, for a song they liked. Who exactly is going to sit and watch and then vote for country X, because it’s an ally. As though this was going to have any impact on politics at all.

Of course there are voting blocs (countries that often vote for each other) and you can see how they measure up here. However, there’s a non-political, non-controversial explanation for these. Culture (including language, ethnicity, musical traditions) is what makes us like one song and not another. So the Ukrainians will vote for a Russian song because it’s in their language, sounds like their recent pop chart, and so on. If Westlife represented Ireland, the UK would give them 12 points too. In an ideal world, the votes available would be evenly balanced across the spread of European culture. If all the songs were equally good countries would still vote for their neighbours, but they’d all tot up the same. Any slightly better song would pick up some extra votes and then win.

Unfortunately for the UK, however, the break up of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union means there are now two blocs of countries, each with a lot of members. This has meant a lot more points to go round to the Eastern bloc and Balkan nations. This is the main reason the UK find it difficult to get points.

But… we could do well if we tried harder too. A UK song would appeal in the former USSR if it was good enough. Whereas the UK song was by a runner up in the X Factor who has since got to 18 in the singles chart, the Russian entry was an all-star affair. Dima Bilan’s done a few albums and been number one across the ex-USSR nations. He was accompanied by Evgeni Plushenko, a figure skater who won gold at the last winter olympics. The song was produced by Jim Beanz (one of Timbaland’s people, and producer of Nelly, Britney, and Whitney Houston). I wouldn’t buy it, but I can see why it would be very, very popular, especially in the countries around Russia. If Coldplay or Kylie represented the UK, we’d pick up votes everywhere.

All day I’ve heard and seen headlines stating ‘crimes by girls rise by a quarter’. And all day they’ve been wrong.

The BBC said ‘The number of crimes committed by girls in England and Wales has gone up by 25% in three years, according to figures’. What they should have said is the ‘number of offences committed and resulting in a disposal by young females rose by 25%’ (the Youth Justice Board’s report). That’s not the number of crimes committed, but those detected by police, with enough evidence and a known suspect, and so a official caution or conviction in a court. Definitely not the same thing.

It might be because girls are committing more crime. Or it could be because the police are getting better at catching girls, or previously let them off with a ticking off (because they were female), or because the nature of their offending is changing, or because policing is changing, and so on. Indeed, it’s even possible that changes in the law mean that some things young women were more likely to do are now crimes, whereas ten years ago they weren’t: if you were to make playing football where there are ‘no ball games’ signs a criminal offence, the number of boys committing crime would increase.

Funnily the report begins the relevant section with:

‘It is important to note that apart from this table, all figures in this section represent the number of offences resulting in a disposal and not the number of young people offending.’

This was to point out that number of offences isn’t the same as offenders (as some offenders get caught more than once), but it also reminds us that many people offend without ‘resulting in a disposal’.

This reminds me of all the problems with police statistics and fear of crime. The more effective policing is, the worse crime seems. Even in a situation where crime is stable, or even falling, more effective policing means more crime detected and prosecuted. It’s only detected crime that makes the statistics or the news: if you’re robbed and don’t bother with reporting it to the police it won’t make the news. Furthermore, it’s prosecutions that make most headlines: there’s stuff to report when the story is being discussed in the courtroom. So the more criminals the police catch, the more crime there is on the telly and in the papers. And so improving the police increases fear of crime…

This week saw much discussion of a statement of the bleedin’ obvious. The Fatherhood Institute believes that dads should be able to stay in hospital after a baby’s birth, to support mother and child, and that they should be encouraged to do so. It seems sensible, especially when the mum would need food and drink fetching, or help getting comfortable, or someone to hold the baby while she sleeps (etc. etc.) which the staff can’t do because they are too busy.

However, here I’m interested in the (also bleedin’ obvious) claim that ‘fathers who are highly involved with their babies from the start are more likely to remain so for life’ (BBC). A finding like this is as obvious as ‘people who stand outside offices on their breaks more likely to buy cigarettes’. It’s a correlation that may well have its original cause in whether someone wants to be a father or interested in being a good parent. It’s a self-selecting group, so causal relationships are hard to find.

What tends to happen when studying this kind of relationship is that the researchers control for indicators of good/bad parenting (e.g. class, age, poverty, marital status) to put it crudely. But what you can’t do is control for ‘wanting to be highly involved in child rearing’, unless you go for a randomised controlled trial, ordering some to stay in hospital and stopping others from getting in (not really ethical).

This, of course, is a problem of much quantitative social science. We can’t do ‘experiments’ keeping everything equal except a causal variable. Life’s too complicated… this doesn’t mean it’s not valid, but we should use other techniques (life course analysis, biography and other qualitative methods) to test and refine these theories.

‘They don’t come from the usual elitist white male cookie-cutter mould of French politicians. They have grassroots political experience rather than coming from the old boys’ club of grandes écoles [the elite universities that educate the bulk of France's high-flyers]‘

Vivienne Walt, the Paris correspondent for Time magazine quoted in the Guardian

After my last post I re-read the Observer article and found this quote I’d missed. Well I knew that Rama Yade was at Sciences-Po, so I thought I’d check how realistic this assessment was. Of the six female ministers mentioned in the article, five had been to the grandes ecoles, and the other is a doctor of pharmacy and an ex-MEP. One of them, Michele Alliot-Marie, was a lecturer in politics and law at the Sorbonne, and it doesn’t get much more grandes ecoles than that.

Interestingly, two of Sarkozy’s seven female cabinet ministers didn’t go to one of the grandes ecoles (Rama Yade isn’t a cabinet minister), and these were the ones not mentioned in the Observer piece. Christine Boutin probably doesn’t fit their story because she’s of the religious right and involved in the pro-life movement, and the other Christine Albanel, was a senior civil servant and worked for Chirac when he was PM and President, hardly grass-roots.

The analysis presented in the quote above is quite simply nonsense. Hold the front page, ‘government still populated by the posh and privileged’; even if one or two had humble beginnings.

This is slightly off topic for me, because it isn’t really about social science and its misuses, but a more simple issue of translation. Because people in different places/cultures, and even different people in the same ‘place’ see the world in different ways, use different systems and language, you have to be careful to dig behind the meanings. Today’s Observer has a feature on Sarkozettes, who look remarkably like Blair’s Babes all those years ago. At least it’s not just about Carla Bruni today! Anyway, under a photo of Rama Yade it said ‘31-year old Rama Yade was working as an administrator when Sarkozy promoted her to minister of foreign affairs’. Now, I’m not knocking her achievement, and 31 is very young to get a job like this, but the Observer’s language makes it sound almost unbelievable (particularly the UK’s got a really young foreign secretary in his early 40s) and I was also surprised I hadn’t heard of her. Of course, the journalist’s turn of phrase leads us to think of the minister of foreign affairs, who is actually the Bernard Kouchne, who’s 68 and not so young. More importantly, the word ‘administrator’ has very different connotations either side of the channel. Here it usually means someone carrying out tasks in an office on behalf of someone else, and often with little pay or responsibility. ‘Admin’ staff are often in the lowest ranks of an organisation, and usually undervalued and overworked. In France an administrator is a senior member of the civil service, as seen in the name of the Ecole nationale d’administration, which is their equivalent to our National School of Government. I don’t know if Rama Yade had time there while working as a civil servant, but she’s went to Sciences Po, which educates the French political elite, and was doing a high-flying job in government. This reminded me of two issues. First, the way comparing different places, cultures or whatever is fraught with translation problems. There was a story about French and British national identity (arguing that French national identity is stronger for immigrants to France), while forgetting that in Britain we’ve got England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, so if some people choose these the statistics are skewed. Second, it reminded me how sloppy journalism can be. I know next to nothing about French politics and imagine the author probably knows more than me, but she left ‘government administrator’ unexplained so that whoever did the photo caption, who probably knows less than me, just took it as written. Just as a statistic or social theory gets garbled by being passed from a researcher to a non-expert journalist to the public, a simple fact gets mistranslated because of a lack of expertise and a lack of care.