Chinatown

Tim Harford [prev] writes for the Financial Times and hosts the More or Less podcast through the BBC. I found a copy of his Undercover Economist and arranged for https://www.kennys.ie/ the amazon-free outlet in Galway to ship it to Dau.II in Cork for her bday last month.  We are both partial to the More-or-Less podcasts, which often hinge on a listener's query like "I've been told there are more beetles in a mole's stomach than there are islands in the Orkneys; can this be true?" The answer necessarily involes a shrewd amount of defining of terms "before or after breakfast? how big is an island? islandSwitha beach? which species of mole? does the tide mratter? You can spin out pretty much any topic to 15-20 minutes if you ask some experts to free-associate and let them off down a rabbit-hole.  After a while you can echo Oscar Wilde with "b'god Harford, I wish I thought like that" and the answer comes back "you do already" but everyone can always devote time to polishing their crap-detector.

Whatevs! Tim Harford reads really easily and economics is surprisingly interesting. This is partly because Economics is surprisingly everything as anyone who has heard Steve Levitt [car-seats, bad] or Steven J Dubner [artificial insemination in turkeys vs chickens] talk; or read their first book Freakonomics will appreciate. Harford is a big believer in market forces: if we leave everything to them, then prices will equilibrate where both the seller and buyer feel that they've gotten a good deal. His position is that, if politicians put their oar in with tariffs or taxes [or regulation? health&safety??] against the flow of the market, then it is inefficient. Which means that somebody ends up paying too much as special interests get preferential treatment. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) called economics the dismal science but Harford [and Levitt and Dubner] make it rather jolly and edutaining.

The last chapter in Harford's book is about how China was transformed from a centralized, cultist, communist crazy-state into the global economic powerhouse which is now scaring the bejabers out of Western capitalist democracies. It was largely due to Deng Xiaoping [L.R. with US President Jimmy Carter L.L.] who was an early adherent of Communism - he was Mayor of Chongqing [prev] 1949-1953 - but twice purged from the central praesidium and survived The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution [although purged millions didn't] to become Top Gun in the People's Republic in the late 1970s. Through the 1980s he changed the economic policy and incentives of the country without [unduly] alienating the still powerful Communist Party. It's a bit like the current Pope recently making pro-BLT statements; he's got to get any real changes past The Curia.

Deng had seen the effects of economics by decree under Chairman Mao, who had some truly daft bees in his bonnet about how best to re-distribute wealth and opportunity. By imposing quotas on the steel industry, he incentivised mill bosses to turn shovels into steel billets so that they were available for the shovel factory. If there weren't enough steel-workers for the quotas, then the government would round up the members of some peripheral ethnic minority and ship them East.

Deng's insight was to leave the central-control part of the economy to creak along in its rut: everyone maintained their job-for-life if they wanted it. But Deng allowed a parallel market-led economy to flourish: if an entrepreneur was able to get 5 blades of grass to grow where only 3 blades had been previously then s/he got to keep the extra 2 leaves. That extra disposable income lubricated the growth of other entrepreneurial ventures. He also allowed foreign multinationals to get their start in the market and thereby shake up the [smug, complacent, insiders who ran the] indigenous competition to be more efficient . . . which led to further opportunities for economic growth.

In the ten years of the 80s, the Chinese market-economy out-stripped the tired-old, same-old komintern economy, so that the latter became an almost irrelevant wart on the economic bubble. Economic liberalisation didn't go hand-in-glove with political and ideological liberalisation as The Disappeared of Tiananmen Square [4th June 1989], Falun Gong and the Uyghurs have found to their cost.

Topical footnote: listen to Steve Levitt talk about incentives, Google, data and pandemics . . . in 2008.

Try this for size

Years and years ago, my boss, his daughter and I were on a field trip to The Azores, Cabo Verde and the Portuguese mainland. We hopped about the islands of Cabo Verde by plane because the tickets were absurdly cheap and were too short of time to be cruising about by local ferry. Arriving to the broiling dry heat of Sal, the international terminal, we hung around waiting for the short-hop prop-plane to carry us to Praia, the capital on the island of Santiago 200km to the SW.  We amused ourselves by looking at the local people (the landscape was an uninviting mix of sand, sandstone, salt and salt-bush). One woman dominated the scene - an enormous black woman in  a wide black dress decorated with a discrete scatter of black sequins. We dubbed this redoubtable Cabo Verdean fellow-traveller "Her Vastness" and speculated whether the engineering of the seats of the small plane would be up to the challenge. Imagine our chagrin, and indeed anxiety for our knees, when she sat down into the row of seats in front of us. The seats gave ground with an ominous creaking sound . . . but held. My friend El Asturiano's grandmother was so shaped that her family used to tease that it was quicker to jump over her than go round her. There's a lot of obesity about nowadays and that's a lot of extra weight for flight-planners allocating fuel to optimise the loading of planes. Nobody wants to run out of fuel if there is a slight delay in-flight and the flight-planner has been using a ready-reckoner of passenger weights from the 1950s which says that 100 people weigh 7,000 kg.

Running out of fuel??  That's what happened on 24th August 2001 on Transat Flight 236 [Toronto-Lisboa] in the middle of the Atlantic. Captain Robert Piché, the pilot, demonstrated The Right Stuff when a fuel-line leak drained the last drop of fuel from the engines when he was still 100km from his emergency destination at Lajes Airbase in the Azores. He glided in! taking in a 360 degree turn to shed some height and further slaloming to shed speed and bring the airplane to the runway.  Everyone survived, the most serious injuries occurring in the evacuation. If you can't imagine what it might have been like on board, you can get a flavour from a participant (and check out the comments for other views on the same events). On returning to Toronto Captain Piché said curtly ''I don't consider myself a hero, sir. I could have done without this.'' These pilots: ice-water in their veins. It's in the movies.

The Boy, who through hard graft at Open University made himself an an engineer, is working on the railroad these last several years. In particular his company has had relatively tiny chunks (mere millions!) of the £15 billion which has been allocated to Crossrail - Europe's biggest engineering project driving new railway lines right through London from West to East. I'll do something to bring the propaganda videos to your attention later on this year - it's a HUGE project with some interesting ways-of-thinking. Mais revenons nous a notre fils: for the last year he's been doing a MSc in Railway Systems Engineering and Integration at U.Brum.  Since the book Freakonomics came out, it's been clear that all sorts of human behaviour can be investigated by economists and they can have a ball while doing it. Talking to The Boy, it seems that a similar case can be made for engineers: machinator sum humani nihil a me alienum puto.  

He led a group research project in the Masters investigating how trains can cope better with the obesity epidemic.  Because fat people are going to be using mass transport along with the rest of us. One element of the research was discovering what it is like to be overweight on today's trains. Being engineers they made up an Obese Body Enhancer OBE suit with a 117cm circumference and took turns wearing this on trains. Unaccountably this neoprene uber-jumpsuit [R above taking up a seat-and-a-half] had a Union Flag on the front. They designed a staggered seat arrangement [L] that was reasonably efficient seating everyone within the 95th percentile for girth and also successfully accommodated those beyond this limit. I think that's just great; it's silly and counter-productive to use obviously discriminatory blunt instruments like charging large people for two seats - especially as seat assignment is done at the last minute at the airport.  If we can adjust the engineered world to the reality of the people who are out there, travel will be more efficient and ultimately cheaper and more convenient for all users.

The Boy's solution to the seating problems of the Great Travelling Public made me think of the flap last month about hexagonal seating on airplanes. This is a patent taken out by Zodiac Seats France for a novel arrangement of seats for coach-class passengers in the future. The HD31 design [R with mannequins masquerading as sardines Sardina pilchardus]  inter-digitates forward- and rearward-facing seats to give more shoulder room; to do away with shared arm-rests; and pack more passengers in the tube of 3+3-seat, single-aisle, short-hop aeroplanes. The commentary has been filled with words like cram, horrible, personal space, awkward, and no thanks.  But these are just the negative reactions of people who are terrified of The New. Me, I'd give it a go if presented with a choice; especially if allowed to book the rear-facing seat - famously better to occupy if you desire to survive when the plane hits the deck off piste.

Note added in proof: A paper including the "Thinking Big" project has been accepted for the
Fifth International Rail Human Factors Conference in London next Month

Someone's telling porkies

I was digging through a pile of old Natures, still in their mail-wrappers since 2014!  In the 4th December 2014 issue, there's an article and a News&Views on the cultural dishonesty of bankers. It had a certain resonance because I've just written a bit about codes-of-conduct whereby a group of people formally write down what they stand for and what is beyond acceptable limits. The primary research was carried out by a trio from the Dept Economics at the University of Zurich. It's the sort of study that has a good chance of making the cut at the weekly editorial meeting at Nature. As a general science publication, they have to include some copy that is accessible to a wide tranche of their readers - which is a very broad church from Astrophysics to Zoology. A neat little paper which plays on what everyone knows to be true - either to confirm our bias or to counter-intuitively rubbish it - has a chance.

It's a psychometrical study, such as economic researchers have been doing both before and after Freakonomics was published. They recruited 128 bankers from a multinational financial institution and split the sample into two groups: experimental and control. Each group was asked a series of questions and then put in a closed room and asked to toss a coin 10x and report how many heads came up. To encourage them to be bothered with such a trifling task the researchers incentivised everyone by saying they would be given $20 for every H that came up . . . provided that the total was more than the average score of a [fictional] pilot study. The punters were on a honour system to report the result accurately.  The experimental group's priming/prior questionnaire included questions about their work and work-practice in the banking industry while the control group were asked more neutral questions about TV and soccer.  Here are the results:

If you toss a coin ten times there is a very precise, symmetrical expected distribution based on the binomial theorem: 5H:5T is much more likely than 9H:1T.  This theoretical distribution is shown as blue bars in the histograms above.  The pink bars represent the distribution reported by N=67 controls on the Left and N=61 experimentals on the Right.  Do you think that the pink bars are shifted to the right=money-winning end of the distribution? Well, so do the boys from Zurich and the result is statistically [p=0.033] significant. (4 or 5)/61 of the experimental group report getting 10H:0T and winning $200 from U.Zurich's research fund. By chance alone you'd expect only 1/1024 to get a result so extreme. The neat thing about such studies is that you can't call any individual a liar but you can put money on the fact that someone(s) has been economical with the truth.  You might also wonder whether $200 was a sufficient incentive for a financial whizz kid who could pull that much down in 10 minutes by finagling the market in Thai Bahts.

The study was very widely picked up and reported by the world media: Les banquiers, tricheurs par culture (Le Monde); Banks breeding dishonesty (Sydney Morning Herald); Folk med dette job snyder mere end andre (avisen.dk); Bankers think they have to behave badly (Grauniad).  This reportage will doubtless have pleased the publicity department at U.Zurich and launched young Alain Cohn's career and Nature can be a bit of a whore for news-coverage, so they're happy.  And everyone who likes to put the boot in for bankers, which is pretty much everyone, is happy because their prejudice is confirmed.

But reflect. In science we use 1/20 or p<0.05 as a purely conventional level of statistical significance. If the chance of getting your result by chance is less than 1/20 then you may be on to something. But the corollary is that for every 20 such studies you carry out you can expect one result to be that extreme.  p=0.033 would certainly not be enough to convince your line manager that the company should invest $1 billion in developing a new cure for cancer based on your weeny pilot-study N=61+67 experimental result. If you were Brian Nosek you'd make the graduate student do the whole thing again in a different bank before rushing such a marginal result into print.  Or you could ask my friend Tony, who is a leader in his field because he has a good crap-detector to say v e r y  s l o w l y "extraordinary claims require extraordinary levels of proof". 

Explanatory note for those not brought up in Greater London (the entire readership?): Porkie is from cockney rhyming slang: pork pie = lie.  Similarly tit for tat = hat; so a hat comes a titfer.

reductio ad absurdem

IF, in education, you privilege math and literacy as being the key markers for assessment, success & progress THEN all other criteria fade away: your child's dance, empathy, map-reading, cakes, songs, compassion, soccer, sheepdog, surfing, dress-sense . . . all become irrelevant or, at best, hobbies. Good at maths, down with Shagsper and you'll go far; those other attributes of the human condition won't help you. It's all so one-dimensional! and quite possibly self-destructive in a fast-changing world: ask Ken Robinson.

The divil of the free-market capitalist world we live in is that everything can reduced to price. Aldi's milk is cheaper = better than corner-shop's because it is 75c/lt rather than €1.00/lt. It's a lot of work to discover whether Aldimilch is so cheap because of economies of scale and efficiency of their supply chain OR because their volume allows them to nail dairy-farmers to a cross when negotiating the farm-gate price.

Here's an interesting piece-to-camera about supply-chains and globalisation . . . and slave-free chocolate, bitcoin, blockchain and the Internet of Things by Miriam Posner. It gives the lie to the convenient capitalist truth that money is money; nitrate is nitrate; worker is worker. Because some workers are more grossly exploited than others, gold is not gold: some diggings spew more mercury into the Amazon than others. Nobody wants children in Indonesia to work a 12 hour day adding decals to running-shoes. But if you have to buy shoes, would you tolerate a little work by children in the sweat-shop? Is the kid allowed to run 5 km to bring his mother her lunch? If you had to make a choice is it better that the workers are paid a few cents extra if the factory is allowed to dump their surplus glue in the drain out back?  In Ireland, Penney's is famous for its shoddy. You can buy clothing there so cheap that people come from the Third World to buy socks at €1 each; t-shirt, knickers cost a cappuccino; shoes, a pizza. You can go elsewhere and pay more. But you have to pay A LOT more for your socks to escape from guilt about sweatshops in Bangladesh. How do you find out so you can square your ethical conscience?

With difficulty is how! Back in 1958, before most of you were born Leonard Reed wrote I. Pencil [full text and introduction], his classic story about the complexities to economics and manufacture. It is Reed's contention that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make a pencil: so many different materials are required to make it; each combined with cunning and know-how peculiar to the operatives of the machines. The machines are, of course part of the equation, they were designed by an engineer, modified by another; made of parts turned on a lathe, from stock in the foundry, smelted in a blast furnace. And that's just the steel: there is also graphite, wax, cedar, castor-beans, cotton, hemp, zinc, copper, sulphuric acid, ammonium hydroxide. And that's just a pencil: don't even think of tracing your smart-phone or juicer back to its component parts. Freakonomics podcast with transcript about pencils.

Next Week

Last August compendium

• Fud
• We are awash with green beans 6-8oz = 175-225g every couple of days. 'Tis the season to ferment some veggies.
• Pastéis de Belém
• The Manufactory Bread in LA
• Fish&chips
• Cod
• Monty Python and the Ministry of Silly Walks: <python alert> Random walks and Monte-Carlo simulation.
• Fun
• Not exactly brain surgery. [Brain surgeon] [IBM engineer]
• Mun
• Harry Markopolis dishes GE. <fraud alert> Convincing, articulate take-down of one of the World's biggest corpos.
• Bom
• Lady with Alzheimer's dies. Son donates body to Alz charity for research. Chairity sells "most of" the body to the US military for experiments on the effects of IED blasts on the human body. [story] via. Bloboprev on uninformed consent use of [baby] cadavers.
• Bak
• Statement: When girls go out wearing tiny tight skimpy outfits I mean they have the choice to wear something else. some thing less provocative, so really girls are asking for it.
• Counter: If you're out in public and I see you're not wearing protective headgear, does that give me the right to smash in your skull with a hammer? I mean you're asking for it because you're not wearing something to protect your head. source  via
• Moral: Your rights end where my nose begins.
• Puz
• Steven J. Dubner of Freakonomics fame [prev] throws light on the quirkiness of life when you look at things a bit sideways: "When to Rob a Bank". 
• More side-thinkers have a crack at Cicada 3301
•  Another [olde] puzzle - Rennes-le-Château
• Art
• "A painter can't expect to make a living but can make a life . . . with a certain calm". Wayne Theibaud looks back on his life.