Author Archives: Diane Coyle

Statistical literacy for schools

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At a governors’ meeting this morning, at the primary school where I’m the chair of governors, we discussed the school’s results in the Key Stage 2 SATs (for those who don’t know, it’s the national test children are required to take at the end of their primary school career in England, aged 10-11). The results were excellent. Our philosophy is that we aim for ever-greater attainment so we look for year-on-year improvement, every year.

However, at this time of year I always reflect on the inability of the entire educational, policy and political establishment to understand that the variability observed in a sample will always be larger, the smaller the sample. Ours is currently a small school with under 30 pupils in the final year, and as few as 24 or 25 might be entered for a test subject depending on their circumstances. Each child is worth several percentage points in the results table. Stuff happens, and one child might do better or worse on test day. There is no real meaning to be read into quite large year-on-year changes in the scores for a small school – and more meaning to be read into them the bigger the school. So I’m delighted by the big increases in our results this year (and one would never want to use small sample size as an excuse for a decline without really careful probing); but I take more comfort from the upward trend over three years, and even more from the other data that we look at as governors, and from observing lessons and looking at children’s work in school.

The bigger the sample, the more likely it is that extremes at one and and the other will cancel each other out when you calculate the average. This inverse relationship between variability in the sample and sample size is well-explained in Chapter 1 of Howard Wainer’s excellent book, [amazon_link id=”0691152675″ target=”_blank” ]Picturing the Uncertain World: How to Understand, Communicate and Control Uncertainty through Graphical Display[/amazon_link]. He gives brilliant examples of people drawing incorrect or at least unproven conclusions from their failure to take account of this relationship. They include the movement in the US supporting smaller schools (as he puts it, billions of dollars are being spent on increasing variance), interpretations of cancer “clusters”, supposed differences in intelligence or attainment between the sexes – there are countless examples.

I don’t think basic statistical literacy is included in the new curriculum for English primary schools – a shame when there’s evidence everywhere of its absence.

[amazon_image id=”0691152675″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Picturing the Uncertain World: How to Understand, Communicate, and Control Uncertainty through Graphical Display[/amazon_image]

Lessons from the past

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My Tube reading lately has been chapters from an excellent new book edited by Nick Crafts and Peter Fearon, [amazon_link id=”0199663181″ target=”_blank” ]The Great Depression of the 1930s: Lessons for Today[/amazon_link]. The comparison between the present day and the 30s has made frequent appearances in post-crisis commentary, so work by economic historians investigating the similarities and differences in forensic empirical detail is most welcome. The cast list of contributors for this book is impressive too, including Charles Calomiris, Timothy Hatton, Barry Eichengreen and other econ history stars.

[amazon_image id=”0199663181″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Great Depression of the 1930s: Lessons for Today[/amazon_image]

In the first two chapters, the editors first give an overview of international experience in the 1930s, and then what lessons that might hold for the present day. They would serve as a stand-alone overview of the issues. The big headline is that among all the causes of the Depression in the 30s, the constraint imposed by the gold standard combined with US and French accumulation of gold stands out for its causal role. The collapse in trade is presented here as a consequence, albeit one that quickly fed into the vicious downward spiral.

For today, that means the monetary response emerges the most important policy difference, a lesson truly learned and applied by the likes of Ben Bernanke and other central bankers. And for all that some groups in some countries are currently experiencing dreadful rates of unemployment, the cost in loss of jobs and human misery has been nothing like as great now as it was then. It is really encouraging to read that policymakers have not in fact been condemned to repeat the same mistakes as their forbears.

This raises the question about the Eurozone, however, the subject of the book’s final chapter by Barry Eichengreen and Peter Temin. Its conclusions are far more depressing. The authors see little room for optimism about any possible route out of the crisis – leaving the Euro is difficult and will cause turmoil, staying in is difficult and will cause political and economic instability. The only possible hope is for European governments to deliver on policies that might stimulate growth. The preceding chapter by Kris James Mitchener and Joseph Mason is somewhat sobering too, as it asks, having avoided earlier policy mistakes, how do countries now exit from their expansionary policies without disrupting the economy too much? They suggest that exit from the policies responding to the Great Depression did not occur until the 1950s; the implication is that we should be thinking on a similar timescale now.

There is much fascinating material in between these early and late chapters – this is a super collection.

I’d like to have read more about France in the 30s, as I hadn’t before realised that its gold hoarding had been larger in scale than America’s – most accounts focus on US policy. The section on the Nazis’ economic appeal is rather sobering, emphasising their ability to prioritise reducing unemployment, introduce large-scale public works, and at the same time keep wage pressure down by abolishing unions and collective bargaining.

The other country that brought unemployment down relatively quickly and realtively far in the 1930s was Britain, via a housebuilding programme – housebuilders then were able to respond quickly to low interest rates, unhampered by mad planning laws, in contrast to today. Another key difference between countries lay in the banking system, with the UK’s then in a much healthier state than the US’s. That balance has reversed now, and it is Britain’s banks that are failing to lend for new investment.

All in all, and continuing one of the themes of yesterday’s post on global governance, this book is an excellent advertisement for the relevance of economic history.

The unfinished business of global governance

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Yesterday I finished Mark Mazower’s [amazon_link id=”0141011939″ target=”_blank” ]Governing the World: The History of an Idea[/amazon_link]. It’s an excellent overview of global governance, ideal for students new to the subject as well as readers with a general interest. The book starts with the Concert of Europe and ends with the implications of the financial crisis for the EU. It has a western perspective, but then, as it argues, global governance has been a western and specifically American construct.

[amazon_image id=”0141011939″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Governing the World: The History of an Idea[/amazon_image]

Given its scope, the sections covering the parts I know best, namely the post-1990 globalisation debate and role of the IMF, World Bank, WTO etc, feels quite concise. Reassuringly, though, it also gets to the essence of the issues.There are also some interesting perspectives – for instance, on the problematic status of NGOs, many of which started specifically as instruments of the Cold War. “The broad term ‘NGO’ hids as much as it reveals'” writes Mazower. He introduced me to the acronym GONGO, government-organised non-governmental organisation.

Another very interesting section covers the momentousness of the UK requesting IMF assistance to deal with its balance of payments crisis in 1976. The book focuses on the internal Labour Party debate between the Atlanticists, among them Prime Minister Jim Callaghan and Chancellor Denis Healey, and the left-wingers who favoured a radical turn towards nationalisation, capital controls etc. When the former prevailed, Mazower writes, “It was much more than a defeat for the British Left, the unions and the working class. It was the first step in the capitalist reconstruction of the West.” He argues that the moment marked the turn away from post-war social corporatism and enabled the construction of the financialized ‘free market’ economy of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The book goes on to finger the role of economists in this process, and specifically its turn away from history and institutions into the realms of abstraction. “Most of the economists in the IMF had little interest in history, nor in the other social sciences. Its staffers were mostly male, and almost entirely economists trained in American and English universities. Entering the IMF and the World Bank in the 1980s, they were rational-expectations revolutionaries who based their prescriptions on in-house templates couched in the language of highly formalized mathematical models…. they existed in a state of more or less total ignorance of the cultures, languages, or institutions of the countries they had been told to cure, having been trained, as many economists still are, to believe that this ignorance did not matter.” Anybody who quibbles about this should read Kevin O’Rourke’s marvellous post on why history matters in economics.

Mazower’s book ends with some thoughts or questions about where a  system of global governance shaped fundamentally by America goes next, in a world of European crisis and Chinese power. There seems little doubt it will be different – think only of the contrasting Western and Chinese attitudes to conditionality for loans to Africa these days. (Deborah Brautigam’s book [amazon_link id=”0199606293″ target=”_blank” ]The Dragon’s Gift[/amazon_link] is fascinating on the Chinese perspective.)

Mazower is a skeptic about the current emphasis on human rights as a justification for intervention in internal conflicts: “A world in which violations of human rights trump the sanctity of borders may turn out to produce more wars, more massacres and more instability.” Reading a history of the past two centuries of debate makes it clear that the dilemmas are constant, however. There are always powerful and less powerful countries. Governance is built around rights and responsibilities, but whose rights – the nation, the minority group or the individual? The balance changes as events move on. Technology progresses and social complexity increases, so there is a constant dilemma between technocracy and participation or politics. It is impossible to embed the good judgement these dilemmas require into a perpetual institutional framework; global governance will always be unfinished business.

 

Technocracy vs democracy

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Ever since I read Daniel Bell’s [amazon_link id=”0465097138″ target=”_blank” ]The Coming of Post-Industrial Society[/amazon_link], I’ve been struck by how prescient it was about the tension between technocracy and democracy. Bell argued that as societies become more complex and require technical expertise in areas ranging from healthcare and engineering to economics, there will be increasing conflict with the populism engendered by democracy. What would he make of Twitter-based political dynamics?! The technocratic government in Italy, post-crisis, was a vivid illustration of Bell’s dilemma in action.I spoke recently about the trade-off again in my recent Pro Bono Economics lecture, the likely conflicts between the “what works” agenda in public policy and political populism. Crises or slow growth make the trade-off worse because they encourage populism and because there is no additional output to compensate losers – it’s zero sum.

[amazon_image id=”0465097138″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Coming Of Post-industrial Society (Harper Colophon Books)[/amazon_image]

In the fascinating Mark Mazower book I’ve now almost finished, [amazon_link id=”0141011939″ target=”_blank” ]Governing the World: The History of an Idea[/amazon_link], he cites Hans Morgenthau’s 1946 [amazon_link id=”B0007DKTKQ” target=”_blank” ]Scientific Man versus Power Politics[/amazon_link], which from the title touches on the same theme. Mazower says the book attacks the naivety of technocrats and the Saint Simonian tradition of belief in rational universalism. So it seems like this is a constant theme, played out in every era.

As a footnote, the Mazower book has given me another technocratic hero, the Australian Robert Jackson who ran the logistics for the Allies in the Middle East during World War II, having first helped organise the defence of Malta while in his 20s, then helped run UNRRA after the war. There is a biography by James Gibson, [amazon_link id=”0955396808″ target=”_blank” ]Jacko, Where Are You Now?[/amazon_link]

Weightlessness

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Reading a review of Mark Miodownik‘s new book, [amazon_link id=”0670920541″ target=”_blank” ]Stuff Matters[/amazon_link], brought to mind my own first (1996) book [amazon_link id=”1900961113″ target=”_blank” ]The Weightless World[/amazon_link] (or as a free pdf). It looked at the way technology was changing the structure of the economy and society, and used the idea of dematerialisation as a link – the economy becoming increasingly intangible, manufactures becoming smaller and lighter, value inhering in the design and service etc, rather than the stuff.

[amazon_image id=”1900961113″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Weightless World: Thriving in the Age of Insecurity[/amazon_image]

So I was very struck by the aerogels, graphene and other innovations highlighted in the book. Is even stuff becoming weightless now?

[amazon_image id=”0670920541″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man-made World[/amazon_image]