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From: email list for Radical Statistics [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Penelope Mullen [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 16 June 2010 11:13
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: How to lie with statistics [was: The state of the nation]
Two people?
The areas of the circles appear proportional to the figures before page 33. After page 33 the radii appear proportional to the figures.
Penny
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From: email list for Radical Statistics [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Wells, Julian [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 16 June 2010 09:02
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: How to lie with statistics [was: The state of the nation]
Yikes! The Cabinet Office people might profitably be directed to the ONS house style guide or its predecessor “Plain Figures”, not mention that old faithful “How to Lie with Statistics” (I see from Wikipedia that the latter has been claimed to have sold more copies than any other text on statistics).
Julian
From: email list for Radical Statistics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Paul Spicker
Sent: 15 June 2010 19:11
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [RADSTATS] The state of the nation
The Cabinet Office has issued an illuminating report on poverty, The state of the nation: poverty, worklessness and welfare dependency in the UK, which can be found at http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/410872/web-poverty-report.pdf (it's a one-megabute download). A picture is worth a thousand words, and the graphs on page 34 and 35 are models of their kind. Here's one by way of illustration:
[cid:image001.jpg@01CB0D32.37DEB820]
Perhaps the size of the last disk reflects an alarming increase in obesity among DLA claimants?
Quite apart from the creative use of graphics, the report's use of statistics might excite some comment:
* there is no definition of what an "out of work" benefit is (it's not, it seems, the same as an "earnings replacement" benefit for people of working age, but it does seem to include JSA, IB and Income Support);
* the figures don't quite tally with figures for Great Britain on NOMIS - my guess is that they relate either to England or to England and Wales;
* the claim that long term dependency is increasing is a little surprising when the numbers of claimants receiving JSA for over 2 years fell from from 141,000 long-term claimants on JSA in 1999 to 25,000 in 2009, and
* I'm not sure that it is "strong evidence" of an intergenerational cycle of disadvantage to claim that 27% of children of multiply disadvantaged parents (deprived on six counts) have at least disadvantages of their own. That seems to me to imply that 73% don't, that by the third generation the expected continuity will be 27% of 27%, which is 7.3%, and that even if we can't be confident of that calculation, by the fourth generation the dilution of the cohort will leave the pattern indistinguishable from the rest of the population. Which, of course, is pretty much what long-term cohort studies have told us before.
Paul Spicker
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