“Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence”

2014/04/01 Leave a comment

An interesting column from Errol Morris on evidence, using the logic of Martin Rees with respect to the existence or not of extraterrestrial life (“absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence”) to the question during the Bush Administration on whether or not weapons of mass destruction existed or not.

Part of the evidence vs anecdote challenge. Public service evidence on macro-trends can conflict with anecdotes from the political level, but the political level could also argue that the absence of evidence in our studies and research did not mean it did not exist. But still, better to operate with as sound evidence as possible:

What do I take from this? To me, progress hinges on our ability to discriminate knowledge from belief, fact from fantasy, on the basis of evidence. It’s not the known unknown from the known known, or the unknown unknown from the known unknown, that is crucial to progress. It’s what evidence do you have for X, Y or Z? What is the justification for your beliefs? When confronted with such a question, Rumsfeld was never, ever able to come up with an answer.

The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld (Part 4) – NYTimes.com.

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How Kijiji’s data threw off Ottawa’s math on skills shortages – The Globe and Mail

2014/03/28 1 Comment

Interesting story on the difficulties of getting accurate information, and the weaknesses of some of the social media sites like Kijiji and double counting. Bad data can lead to faulty conclusions:

Kevin McQuillan, deputy provost and professor of sociology at the University of Calgary, has written a paper challenging claims of a Canadian labour shortage and says the move to online job postings continues to give statisticians headaches.

“We are struggling to deal not only with changes in the labour market, but changes in how people hire,” he said. “We haven’t really gotten on top of this new way of hiring that’s done in online postings, [where] the same notice of a job appearing on multiple sites, or social media. So counting that can be difficult.”

How Kijiji’s data threw off Ottawa’s math on skills shortages – The Globe and Mail.

And a follow-up piece with the Government’s reaction to the story:

Mr. Kenney said critics should recognize the challenge of producing reliable labour data in a world of online job boards.

“Here’s the bottom line, everyone who is dealing with this debate should have a little bit of humility and admit that none of us know exactly what is going on in the labour market of today.”

Economist Don Drummond said better information can be produced at a cost of about $39-million a year. He was part of an advisory panel in 2009 that made dozens of recommendations to improve labour-market data, yet few suggestions were implemented.

The former TD chief economist would like to see one entity, such as Mr. Kenney’s department Employment and Social Development Canada or Statscan, “pick up the baton” and take responsibility for more detailed and current labour market data at the national and provincial level.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/tories-defend-use-of-kijiji-data-in-face-of-opposition-ridicule/article17690737/

Better for the government to spend some money for better data than, as it did in the change from the Census to the National Household Survey, spend more for poorer quality data (couldn’t resist!).

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Jonathan Kay: Scotland shows Quebec what an intelligent and mature independence movement looks like

2014/03/26 Leave a comment

Good piece contrasting the approach by the Scottish nationalist and the PQ:

Quebec’s modern sovereigntist movement has been around, in its modern form, since the 1960s. Yet to this day, its leaders (including Parti Québécois Premier Pauline Marois) are fantastically vague about what sort of “independent” country they want. Extraordinary claims — Quebec will keep the dollar, and, oh, yes, have a seat on the Bank of Canada — are casually made and then forgotten. The question of how the most per-capita indebted province in Canada will pay its way (including its share of the Canadian federal debt) while forsaking the $16-billion that the rest of the country sends its way every year is entirely ignored.

In Scotland, by contrast, such meat-and-potatoes questions about what will happen in a newly independent nation are the meat and potatoes of this year’s campaign — and are explored in great detail in a lengthy text published by the Scottish government entitled Scotland’s Future — Your Guide to an Independent Scotland. As Jonathan Freedland writes in the March 20 edition of The New York Review of Books, the 649-page document “is short on the rhetoric of self-determination, long on the quotidian details of self-government. In a ‘Q & A’ section, the third question — after ‘Why should Scotland be independent?’ and ‘Can Scotland afford to be independent?’— is ‘What will happen to my pension?’ There are few rousing calls to Scottish pride or the spirit of Bannockburn, their place taken by information on postal services and the administration of drivers’ licenses.”

Jonathan Kay: Scotland shows Quebec what an intelligent and mature independence movement looks like | National Post.

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Margaret MacMillan: How today is like the period before the First World War

2014/03/24 Leave a comment

Good interview with Margaret MacMillan with some interesting reflections:

Do you not see any developments in modern diplomacy that keep countries away from the precipice?

We have better international institutions and more of them. And we do have the capacity now to talk quickly to each other. But what we don’t have are the experienced diplomats who used to really know a country. There’s been a tendency in most countries to downplay the role of the diplomatic corps and to say, ‘do we really need diplomats?’ You’ve got it in the Harper government: ‘Do we really need all these people? They just hang out and go to cocktail parties.’

By the same token, diplomats did not prevent the First World War.

No, they didn’t. But they did actually deal with quite a few crises before World War One. You could argue that they had shown their value. I think good diplomatic services are very very useful. It’s also worrying to me what’s happening to newspapers. The media generally are closing down their overseas bureaux because they’re too expensive. What that means is we’re getting huge amounts of information but we’re not really getting the analysis and expertise that we all need.

We mistake being able to get lots of information from everywhere very quickly with actually getting knowledge.

Margaret MacMillan: How today is like the period before the First World War – The Globe and Mail.

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Paul Wells: How to get inside Harper’s head – The Globe and Mail

2014/03/22 Leave a comment

I found Well’s book, The Longer I’m Prime Minister, a compelling and informative read. He really does try to understand the philosophical and ideological foundations, with empathy, not just dismissing them. The section on the census – which apparently Well’s editors wanted shortened – is one of the better sections, as is some of the background of thinkers like Brimelow that have been influential:

It’s the empathy thing again. I was actually preparing to deliver a sustained critique of the census changes. But there were a lot of people telling you why it was a bad idea, and not an awful lot of people telling you why he would have thought it was a good idea. And the answer is because there’s this rich intellectual heritage in Western conservative circles of mistrusting the census man. When Jed Clampett, at the beginning of the Beverly Hillbillies, takes a shot and hits oil, he thinks he’s shooting at a revenuer. That persists in our culture, and I wanted to trace that at some length so that people would see that where Harper comes from has been there along – and has been ignored by a lot of people who now suddenly can’t ignore it because he’s running the joint.

A great para on Jason Kenney:

Jason Kenney’s a spectacular exception to that. Jason Kenney says what he wants. His staff say what they want. The autonomy of being a junior staffer in Jason Kenney’s office is greater than the autonomy that most cabinet ministers enjoy. And the answer is because Harper knows, or believes, that Kenney would never turn that fire-hose on him. James Moore is another good example. We draw these facile distinctions between loyalists and a strong personality with something to say. But of course there are all kinds of examples of loyalists who have a strong personality. And as long as you’re a loyalist first, Harper’s happy to let you stay around.

Paul Wells: How to get inside Harper’s head – The Globe and Mail.

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Evidence vs Anecdote, Trust and Distrust

2014/03/22 Leave a comment

Some good pieces in The Citizen picking up on some of the these in my book, Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias: Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism,

Starting with Stewart Prest, who goes too far in praising the neutrality and impartiality of public servants, neglecting that we public servants also have our own perspectives, bias and ideologies that we need to be more aware about to provide our best and most neutral advice:

However, in modern democratic states one of the most important sources for non-partisan information and expertise is the government itself. Government bureaucracies are the only institutions in the world today with the access, the resources, and the motivation to systematically monitor and study the entirety of a country’s population and the extent of its human and natural environment.

Examples are legion, from statisticians to health officials to diplomats to environmental scientists. They exist throughout the much maligned but nonetheless vital bureaucracy of the country. Crucially, their professional incentives push them to resist conclusions that may even be perceived as partisan. After all, a long-serving civil servant will work under different parties and political masters. Their professional success comes from striving to provide politically neutral advice and support for political decision-making, and engaging in equally neutral policy implementation. Though part of the machinery of the state, these experts are — or ought to be — distinct and largely independent from the particular partisan interests of the government of the day.

Such bureaucrats are, among other things, keepers of tradition: a reservoir of knowledge about how Canadians have governed themselves over previous years and decades. They know and can speak to what works, and what does not. In this regard, theirs is a deeply conservative (small-c) form of expertise, one that has played no small part in whatever good government Canadians have enjoyed since confederation.

That is not to say that his overall message of suppressing speech, undermining data, eroding science, and increased partisanship has more than an element of truth.

Op-Ed: The war on experts

The Public Policy Forum in its recent study, Flat, Flexible and Forward-Thinking, focusses on declining levels of trust in the public service:

Mitchell said part of the problem is that some public servants have taken the traditional principles of a neutral and non-partisan public service too far.

“I think we prided our public service on being politically neutral and non-partisan to a fault because it has persuaded some to think they cannot even engage in meaningful dialogue with elected representatives or their staff.  That is an extreme view but I think it may have been taken to the extreme and we have to build stronger understanding and more trust.”

But Mitchell said rebuilding trust will take more than the effort of public servants. He said the government will have to be “political champions” for this change as well as for other sweeping reforms of the public service.

I think the trust issue goes deeper than that on both sides. Public servants may have viewed the new government as “barbarians at the gate” given how different public service and political perspectives were, and similarly the government viewed many public servants as “hopelessly compromised liberals.”

‘Trust gap’ a growing problem for public servants and politicians, think-tank warns

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How losing 18,000 people made Manitoba $100-million poorer – The Globe and Mail

2014/03/20 Leave a comment

Although the article doesn’t state it, hard to believe that the shift from the mandatory Census to the National Household Voluntary Survey didn’t have something to do with it:

In past years, many people in Manitoba were missed. It has a large aboriginal population and aboriginal people tend to be missed at higher rates. Immigrants tend to get missed, and Manitoba had its highest levels of immigration in decades between 2006 and 2011. In 2011, the province also faced massive flooding that forced many people from their homes. Yet once the results of the reverse record check were complete, Statscan concluded that the adjusted population was only 1,233,728. A year earlier, it was thought to be 1,251,690.

But when they looked more closely at that sample, they examined something called the T-statistic, which acts as a test of statistical accuracy. Manitoba’s T-statistic was extremely high, “way out of bounds,” Mr. Falk said. (Manitoba’s was 3.35. Next highest was Alberta at 1.61). It points to a bad sample in the reverse record check, he said.

“It’s the canary in the coal mine,” he said. “The probability of getting a more extreme result than we observed in 2011 … is nearly non-existent.”

Statscan agreed there was something unusual. “We took a rigorous look at this,” Mr. Smith said. “We found nothing, and we went over it with a fine tooth comb.”

How losing 18,000 people made Manitoba $100-million poorer – The Globe and Mail.

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Veiled voting furor’s unlikely ending: Delacourt | Toronto Star

2014/03/17 Leave a comment

Good piece on evidence vs anecdote with respect to Elections Canada and the veiled voting controversy. Also nice mention of my book:

It should remind us of the push and pull that former bureaucrat Andrew Griffith has described in his book, Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias, about his experiences at Citizenship and Immigration when Jason Kenney became the minister.

Griffith writes of how the public servants came to the table with reports and research, only to be met with anecdotes from the minister’s many, many meetings with cultural communities.

“While anecdotal in nature, the scale of ministerial outreach meant that public servants could not ignore what he was hearing from his ‘practicum,’ as he called it,” Griffith wrote.

Veiled voting furor’s unlikely ending: Delacourt | Toronto Star.

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How to Get a Job at Google – NYTimes.com

2014/02/24 Leave a comment

Good piece on Google’s hiring practices. Antitheses to how government hires:

To sum up Bock’s approach to hiring: Talent can come in so many different forms and be built in so many nontraditional ways today, hiring officers have to be alive to every one — besides brand-name colleges. Because “when you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people.” Too many colleges, he added, “don’t deliver on what they promise. You generate a ton of debt, you don’t learn the most useful things for your life. It’s [just] an extended adolescence.”

Google attracts so much talent it can afford to look beyond traditional metrics, like G.P.A. For most young people, though, going to college and doing well is still the best way to master the tools needed for many careers. But Bock is saying something important to them, too: Beware. Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The world only cares about — and pays off on — what you can do with what you know (and it doesn’t care how you learned it). And in an age when innovation is increasingly a group endeavor, it also cares about a lot of soft skills — leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn. This will be true no matter where you go to work.

How to Get a Job at Google – NYTimes.com.

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Nudges vs. Shoves by Cass R. Sunstein

2014/02/15 Leave a comment

For those interested in public policy and nudges, good discussion by Cass Sunstein on the benefits of nudges, which preserve choice, to mandatory measures. Another instrument in the public policy toolkit.

Dry abstract below:

Behavioral findings, demonstrating human errors, have led some people to favor choice-preserving responses (“nudges”), and others to favor mandates and bans. If people’s choices lead them to err, it might seem puzzling, or even odd, to respond with solutions that insist on preserving freedom of choice. But mandates have serious problems of their own, even in the face of behavioral market failures. Mandates might not be able to handle heterogeneity; they might reflect limited knowledge on the part of public officials or the interests of powerful private groups; and they override freedom, potentially producing welfare losses and insulting individual dignity. It is true that in some cases, a behavioral market failure (such as a self-control problem) might justify a mandate on social welfare grounds, but on those very grounds, it makes sense to begin by examining choice-preserving approaches, which are far less intrusive and often highly effective.

Nudges vs. Shoves by Cass R. Sunstein :: SSRN.

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