“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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Diaspora Politics and PM Trip to Ukraine – My CBC Interview

2014/03/24 Leave a comment

In case interested, my short TV interview on how diaspora politics is a factor in Canada’s response to the crisis in Ukraine and the PM’s trip.

http://www.cbc.ca/player/News/ID/2443812861/

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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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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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Who Speaks for a New Canadian Community? – New Canadian Media – NCM

2014/03/19 Leave a comment

Good reflections on media and public spokesman for different communities (also applies to groups within the “mainstream”):

When I produce religious and spiritual TV, I can usually locate pious types with an agenda of growth or political advancement, eager to proclaim their messages.  In fact, they find me before I find them. It’s not so easy to find ground-level community types who include women and youths in their productions.  It is harder animating liberal voices.

It’s too easy to mischaracterize a community by who comes forward to speak for it.   Media coverage and official political acknowledgement imparts a sort of legitimacy.  You have to wonder, without media coverage would there have been prominence for such figures and organizations as the Rev. Al Sharpton in the U.S., or the late Dudley Laws in Canada, Canadian Punjabi separatist groups, and the official-sounding, yet marginal, Canadian Islamic Congress?

In all cases, part of their credibility derived from savvy use of the media.  The media are willing participants.  Some lazy reporters and producers choose guests and sources on the basis of who is readily available on a moment’s notice, who’s articulate, or worse yet, who has the most anti-social, outrageous or activist point of view.

It is in our nature to be drawn to radical voices. Many of us love a fight.

Thus the militant voices start to punch far above their weight.  The mainstream starts to accord them special status that they haven’t really earned.

Who Speaks for a New Canadian Community? – New Canadian Media – NCM.

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Your Ancestors, Your Fate – NYTimes.com

2014/02/24 Leave a comment

A somewhat controversial study by Gregory Clark on how ancestry is the best predictor of success. Much more sophisticated analysis than the pop-culture Amy Chua “Triple Package” theory. Suggests greater policy modesty at the individual and governmental level:

Culture is a nebulous category and it can’t explain the constant regression of family status — from the top and the bottom. High-status social groups in America are astonishingly diverse. There are representatives from nearly every major religious and ethnic group in the world — except for the group that led to the argument for culture as the foundation of social success: white European Protestants. Muslims are low-status in much of India and Europe, but Iranian Muslims are among the most elite of all groups in America.

Family resources and social networks are not irrelevant. Evidence has been found that programs from early childhood education to socioeconomic and racial classroom integration can yield lasting benefits for poor children. But the potential of such programs to alter the overall rate of social mobility in any major way is low. The societies that invest the most in helping disadvantaged children, like the Nordic countries, have produced absolute, commendable benefits for these children, but they have not changed their relative social position.

The notion of genetic transmission of “social competence” — some mysterious mix of drive and ability — may unsettle us. But studies of adoption, in some ways the most dramatic of social interventions, support this view. A number of studies of adopted children in the United States and Nordic countries show convincingly that their life chances are more strongly predicted from their biological parents than their adoptive families. In America, for example, the I.Q. of adopted children correlates with their adoptive parents’ when they are young, but the correlation is close to zero by adulthood. There is a low correlation between the incomes and educational attainment of adopted children and those of their adoptive parents.

Your Ancestors, Your Fate – 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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Former PBO Kevin Page says federal government should reveal plans for public service

2014/02/05 Leave a comment

Hard not to agree with Page on accountability and transparency grounds. I recall working on implementation of the Conservative government’s Accountability Act, and particularly the role of Deputy Ministers, and it is hard to square that with the refusal to release information on spending plans (PBO should not have to file ATIP requests to get this info):

Page said the big problem is that the government hasn’t revealed its spending plans, including the nature of the cuts and their impact on service levels. While at the PBO, Page waged a public battle with Privy Council Clerk Wayne Wouters and deputy ministers over their refusal to turn over information on the government’s spending plans.

The closure of veterans’ offices and libraries — and the resulting political backlash — is what happens when departments live under steady cuts and everyone has been kept in the dark about their impact.

“You can look more productive … but we don’t know for the most part whether service levels are being maintained or the same quality of service is maintained because we don’t get that information from the government. They won’t allow the public servants to release it,” said Page.

“I would think if you asked public servants working at those regional veterans offices … if they were maintaining the same quality of service, I am pretty sure they would say ‘ no, we’re not but we are better off fiscally because we’re taking people out. So productivity gets a bit of boost but if service goes down and outputs go down, Canadians aren’t getting the same quality of services, and in the long run we are not better off.”

Former PBO Kevin Page says federal government should reveal plans for public service.

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