Category: Statistics

It’s a Self Licking Ice Cream Cone

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Terrorism has increased by 4500% since we overthrew Iraq and Libya and tried to overthrow Syria:

An analysis of terror attacks since 2002 suggests U.S. efforts to combat terrorism — i.e., the “war on terror” — have led to a dramatic increase in death and suffering from terrorism.

Published this year on Sept. 11, Paul Gottinger, a staff reporter for Reader Supported News, analyzed incidents of terrorism from George Bush declaring the war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11 through the present, and found a staggering 6,500 percent increase in terrorism. Gottinger, who used data provided by the State Department in his analysis, found that casualties have increased by 4,500 percent.

Countries occupied by or being bombed the U.S. military seem to fare worst of all:

“[F]rom 2007 to 2011 almost half of all the world’s terror took place in Iraq or Afghanistan – two countries being occupied by the US at the time.

Countries experiencing US military interventions continue to be subjected to high numbers of terror attacks, according to the data. In 2014, 74 percent of all terror-related casualties occurred in Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Syria. Of these five, only Nigeria did not experience either US air strikes or a military occupation in that year.”

Further illustrating the devastating impact of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Gottinger’s report showed that terror attacks in that country jumped from 208 in 2002 to 11,000 by 2005.

In a Dec. 10 appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz suggested the Middle East was more stable before the war on terror began.

The thesis that the US is a force for good in the world is simply not supported by the facts.

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Another Myth Busted

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It turns out that rich people do not relocate when a state raises taxes:

When it comes to taxes, millionaires have short fuses. Ratchet up their rates and they’ll blow you off and move to a low-tax, or no-tax, state.

 Or so goes one argument against taxing the rich: States that levy a “millionaires tax” risk chasing those millionaires away to Florida, Texas, and other places with no income tax. Hedge fund manager David Tepper’s recent decision to move from New Jersey to Florida, possibly creating a billionaire-size hole in Jersey’s budget, raised alarms. Golf great Phil Mickelson, shortly after his infamous Dean Foods stock trade, complained about his high tax rate in California and threatened to move to Florida.

Now, a study based on 13 years of tax data finds that most millionaires don’t move cross-country just to avoid a tax bill. It turns out that the rich, while perhaps different from us, aren’t all that mobile. When they do move, it’s often for reasons that have nothing to do with taxes. For one thing, they appear to like the beach.

The study, published in the June issue of the American Sociological Review, suggests that states—and countries—may have some leeway to raise taxes on the wealthy without scaring away their tax base. It has obvious political implications, possibly serving as ammunition for those who favor taxing the rich. It could help advance the arguments of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, for example, who have both proposed higher taxes on upper-income Americans.

And if they did leave, good riddance.

If they leave, they lose political influence where they formerly lived, and the less influence that the self-obsessed pampered assholes have, the better.

We Are Unbelievably Screwed

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Have you heard the latest update on anthropogenic climate chane?

It turns out that the month of February was completely off the charts:

Earth got so hot last month that federal scientists struggled to find words, describing temperatures as “astronomical,” ”staggering” and “strange.” They warned that the climate may have moved into a new and hotter neighborhood.

This was not just another of the drumbeat of 10 straight broken monthly global heat records, triggered by a super El Nino and man-made global warming. February 2016 obliterated old marks by such a margin that it was the most above-normal month since meteorologists started keeping track in 1880, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

NOAA said Earth averaged 56.08 degrees Fahrenheit (13.38 degrees Celsius) in February, 2.18 degrees (1.21 degrees Celsius) above average, beating the old record for February set in 2015 by nearly six-tenths of a degree (one-third of a degree Celsius).

The old record was set just last December and the last three months have been the most above-normal months on record, said NOAA climate scientist Jessica Blunden. And it’s not just NOAA. NASA, which uses different statistical techniques, as well as a University of Alabama Huntsville team and the private Remote Sensing System team, which measure using satellites, also said February 2016 had the biggest departure from normal on record.

These were figures that had federal scientists grasping for superlatives.

“The departures are what we would consider astronomical,” Blunden said. “It’s on land. It’s in the oceans. It’s in the upper atmosphere. It’s in the lower atmosphere. The Arctic had record low sea ice.”

“Everything everywhere is a record this month, except Antarctica,” Blunden said. “It’s insane.”

In the Arctic, where sea ice reached a record low for February, land temperatures averaged 8 degrees above normal (4.5 degrees Celsius), Blunden said. That’s after January, when Arctic land temperatures were 10.4 degrees above normal (5.8 degrees Celsius).

It was also the warmest winter—December through February—on record, beating the previous year’s record by more than half a degree (0.29 degrees Celsius).These were figures that had federal scientists grasping for superlatives.

“The departures are what we would consider astronomical,” Blunden said. “It’s on land. It’s in the oceans. It’s in the upper atmosphere. It’s in the lower atmosphere. The Arctic had record low sea ice.”

“Everything everywhere is a record this month, except Antarctica,” Blunden said. “It’s insane.”

In the Arctic, where sea ice reached a record low for February, land temperatures averaged 8 degrees above normal (4.5 degrees Celsius), Blunden said. That’s after January, when Arctic land temperatures were 10.4 degrees above normal (5.8 degrees Celsius).

It was also the warmest winter—December through February—on record, beating the previous year’s record by more than half a degree (0.29 degrees Celsius

Clearly man made global warming is a hoax.

Every major model for climate change as proven to be too conservative.

The reality has been worse, and it is likely to get worse.

).

Told Ya So

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Yesterday, I suggested that we wait a couple of days to see what the final vote tally in Iowa.

Today, we hear that votes are still trickling in:

Votes from one precinct in Iowa were still missing Tuesday morning, and Democrats from that neighborhood scrambled to find party officials so that they could report their tally: Bernie Sanders won by 2 delegates over Hillary Clinton.

With Des Moines precinct No. 42’s results, Clinton’s excruciatingly close lead narrowed further, making the final tally for delegate equivalents in the Democratic Iowa caucuses:

Clinton: 699.57

Sanders: 697.77.

It quickly raised questions about whether Sanders had won the popular vote in Iowa. Sanders backers called for Iowa Democratic Party officials to release the raw vote totals.

This is what happens in very close elections, and it won’t be fully resolved until well after New Hampshire votes.

Their Goal Is to Punish Women. Mission Accomplished

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One of the not so tightly kept secrets of the abortion criminalization movement is that they want to ban birth control as well.

The reason for this is because they want to punish women for their sexuality, and now a study shows that when they get what they want, they succeed in punishing women:

In the US, there are many laws limiting when and how women can receive abortions. But there is almost no research on what happens to women who seek out abortions and are denied them. Now a team of health researchers at the University of California, San Francisco has completed a longitudinal study of a group they call “Turnaways,” women who tried and failed to get abortions due to local laws. The researchers found that women who received abortions were over six times as likely to have and achieve positive life plans than Turnaways.

The Turnaway study

To gather their unusual Turnaway data set, the researchers spent two years interviewing 956 women who sought abortions at 30 different abortion clinics around the US. 182 of them were turned away. All the women were interviewed a week after being turned away or receiving an abortion and then again a year later to assess the longer-term outcomes of their experiences. The team has also just completed interviews with the women that will reveal where they are five years after being turned away or not.

In its first analysis of turnaway data published two years ago, the team found that women seek out abortions for complicated reasons, with the most common being a feeling of financial unpreparedness. This earlier analysis also showed that 86 percent of turnaways chose to keep their children, and 67 percent of them would up below the poverty line a year later. By comparison, 56 percent of women granted abortions in the study were below the poverty line a year later. This finding lent credibility to many turnaways’ concerns that being financially unprepared would cause problems down the line.

………

Only 53 percent of the goals were aspirational among turnaways. Women who received abortions had roughly 85 percent aspirational plans. Women who had children but did not parent them had 80 percent aspirational plans. The upshot was that turnaways who kept their children had far fewer positive goals for the future than their counterparts who received abortions.

Of all the goals measured, 47 percent were achieved. There was little difference between turnaways and women who had abortions when it came to achieving their goals. However, as the researchers write in their paper, women who received abortions “were significantly more likely to have both an aspirational plan and to have achieved it” than turnaways who kept their children. Upadhyay was quick to point out that overall, most of the women’s goals were aspirational. “They all had high hopes,” she said. But Turnaways “were much more likely to have negative goals.”

What this latest phase in the Turnaway study reveals is that not having access to abortion can negatively impact women’s lives. As Upadhyay and her colleagues put it in their paper, “Whether or not a person has aspirational plans is indicative of her hope for the future. Without such plans or hopes, she misses out on opportunities to achieve milestones in life.”

Put bluntly, the Turnaways had fewer hopes, so they had fewer reasons to push themselves toward what they defined as better lives.

Destroying these women’s lives is one of the goals of the anti-abortion movement.

You won’t ever hear them say it, but it is clear from what they do.

I Finally Have a Word for It, “Stochastic Terrorism”

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“Stochastic” is a word for an event that seemingly occurs randomly, but actually follows statistical patterns, which means that one can look there is some sort of cause and effect relationship involved.

Elisabeth Parker uses the term Stochastic Terrorism to describe the right wing’s use of language and mass communications to inspire the occasional “Lone Wolf” mass shooter:

I recently argued for treating all mass shooters and bombers as terroristic threats. Now I’ll explain how the GOP ratchets up the threat level through a process called stochastic terrorism.

As we mourn the victims of the latest mass shooting, we can also clearly see a pattern: The shooters (or sometimes bombers) nearly always turn out to be white males with right-wing political leanings, and the media nearly always describes them as “insane” or as “disturbed loners.” Philly Mayor Michael Nutter and others view these attacks as looming terroristic threats, but — because the killers often lack formal ties with extremist groups — we often don’t want to call them “terrorists” because we’re still struggling to describe what has grown more and more obvious.

Luckily for us, someone has already coined the term we’re looking for: “stochastic terrorism.” G2Geek came up with it on Daily Kos back in 2011 in response to the Tucson shooting that left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) with a severe brain injury that cut her term short.

Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.


To further clarify, G2Geek later updated his post to explain that the stochastic terrorists aren’t the ones who pose the actual terroristic threats. No, they’re the ones who use their access to the media to broadcast extreme views that inspire “disturbed loners” like Dylann Roof and Robert Lewis Dear to attack. In his post, G2Geek specifically calls out hate-mongering people on Fox “News” like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. Now, GOP officials, lawmakers and 2016 presidential candidates have likewise come under fire for their over-the-top, insane and hateful rantings about immigrants, gays, Planned Parenthood, blacks, and Muslims.

The person who actually plants the bomb or assassinates the public official is not the stochastic terrorist, they are the “missile” set in motion by the stochastic terrorist. The stochastic terrorist is the person who uses mass media as their means of setting those “missiles” in motion.

Ms. Parker asserts, and I agree that this is a part of a deliberate strategy, and I agree.

In, fact, I would argue that this strategy is already bearing fruit, as the fear of another Oklahoma City bombing, a classic example of Stochastic Terrorism, is keeping law enforcement officials from enforcing the law at the Malheur reserve in Oregon.

The question is how to stop it.

H/t Pieter Lugt‎

Some History Perspective on Bank Failures

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FDIC Data


Data from 1921

The good folks at Calculated Risk have put together some very interesting on bank failure going back almost 100 years.

It should be noted that the current bank failures are dwarfed by the failures during the S&L crisis, (Also known as the bailout of the Texas banking industry) but that we routinely saw more failures than that before the creation of the FDIC.

The next time that someone complains about how excessive regulation constrains the dynamism of the US economy, show them these graphs.  (click for slide show)

Jimmy McMillan Was Right

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The divergance becomes


A convergence when rent is removed

Over at the Wall Steet Journal, they note that reason for the divergence between the CPI and PCE when juxtaposed wit the PPI is that the PPI does not include rent:

Prices in the U.S. are either rising or falling, depending on how you measure them.

The best-known measure of consumer inflation, the Labor Department’s consumer-price index, rose 0.5% from a year earlier in November. The Federal Reserve prefers to use the Commerce Department’s personal-consumption expenditures price index, which rose 0.4% on the year in November.

So why did another Labor Department inflation yardstick, the producer-price index, decline 1.1% on the year in November? The answer may be simple: Housing costs are rising faster than pretty much anything else, and they’re not part of the PPI.

A little background first. The PPI tracks price changes at the business level, and it was overhauled two years ago to cover a broader base of goods and services. In some cases, it can reveal inflationary pressures in the pipeline before they show up in consumer prices.

It also happens to be first broad inflation gauge released each month, earning it extra attention from economists and investors. The December PPI report will be released Friday morning, while the CPI won’t be out until next Wednesday and the PCE price index won’t be available until Feb. 1.

The PPI has generally moved in tandem with the two consumer-facing price gauges, but it has diverged from both measures over the past year. All three inflation gauges fell toward zero after oil prices began to tumble in mid-2014. The PPI kept going, dropping into negative annual territory and staying there, while the CPI and PCE measures have stabilized at low levels.

The likely culprit: rising rents. The cost of shelter, as measured by the CPI, rose 3.2% in November from a year earlier for the third consecutive month—the fastest growth in eight years. But while rent (and its equivalent for homeowners) makes up nearly a third of the CPI basket and a smaller but still substantial share of the PCE index, it’s absent from the PPI. That may explain why the path for PPI looks a lot like the path of CPI if you exclude shelter costs from the latter index.

There are a number of take aways here.

First, and most obvious is (of course) that the rent is too damn high.

The second is that an increasing proportion of our economy is going to rents of various forms rather than productive activities, which does nto indicate an economy that is progressing.

The third, and most important take away is that we are actually in a deflationary economy, like the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The reason that our economic recovery doesn’t feel like an economic recovery is because it really isn’t one.

We are in a deflationary spiral.

And Yet More Bullsh%$ in the Criminal Justice Arena

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It appears that, notwithstanding claims of the “Ferguson Effect”, and the reality of police slowdowns in places like New York City, there is no statistically significant increase in the murder rate:

As I’ve mentioned in a number of posts over the years, I believe the Late 20th Century Crime Wave was one of the two or three most politically and culturally consequential events in the US in the second half of the twenty century. It is hard to overstate the impact of this very real rise in the rates of all violent crimes but most especially murder. And one of the greatest mysteries about it is that that for all the studies, theories and attempts to control it, we simply do not have a clear understanding of why it began in the early 1960s or why it ended over the course of the 1990s. I’ve noted that, somewhat against my better judgment, I’ve become increasingly open to the seemingly crude and monocausal theory that lead poisoning played a key role in driving the crime wave. Still, I think we still basically do not know. Yet, over the last year or so we’ve seen a rising chorus of commentary and political posturing which claims that increasing civil rights activism (i.e. Black Lives Matter or the so-called “Ferguson Effect”) and more permissive or cowed policing is at least starting to push crime rates back up toward where they were in the bad old days.

………

When I started looking at this I was curious to find out myself because I have heard a lot of reports of the murder rate specifically going up. That’s obviously bad news in itself. But it also confounds my assumption that the rise and fall of the murder rate over the second half of the 20th century had far less to do with policy interventions of any sort than we’d like to think. So if a mild ramping back of aggressive policing can shift the scales in the other direction, that changes the whole story significantly. If crime is on the way back up, I’d still be suspicious that it is tied to differences in policing. My assumption would be that the underlying trends, about which we understand little, have shifted. In any case, what I found was quite different from what I’ve been hearing and reading.

From the beginning of 2015 there has been what can only be called a relentless desire to find a spike in the crime and murder rates. So for instance, back on March 3rd, The New York Daily News ran “Murders up 20% in 2015 in year-to-year comparison, NYPD says“. Needless to say, when you’re only going on 2 out of 12 months the statistics can be very volatile. Then there was a less hyperbolic story that ran in The New York Times, “Murder Rates Rising Sharply in Many U.S. Cities, which noted a 9% increase in the murder rate for New York City. Then on September 21st, USA Today published ‘Bloody weekend in NYC puts rising murder rate in spotlight‘ which noted that “A bloody weekend in New York that saw eight shooting deaths could signal that out-of-control gun violence may return to the city” and then went on to say …

The number of homicides is up slightly over last year, and if the trend continues New York City may see its first uptick in the homicide rate after 25 years of decline.

Now, this last claim is worth zeroing in on. I’ve gone back and recompiled the number of homicides in New York City going back to the peak year of 1990. And whatever gloss, interpretation or prediction about the future one may make from these numbers, this point about a “first uptick” is simply false. Since 1990, even as the murder rate has gone down consistently, the number has actually gone up on a year over year basis 6 times: 1999 (6%), 2000 (.3%), 2003 (1.7%), 2006 (10.6%), 2008 (5.9%) and 2010 (13.8%).

As late as one week ago, Newsday predicted that the city murder rate would end up at just over 5%, with 350 homicides for the year. But as of Christmas Day, the number stood at 339 homicides for 2015, which would amount to an increase over 1.8% over 2014.
………

The Times itself touched on this point yesterday with a very different article “Anxiety Aside, New York Sees Drop in Crime,” which notes that while New Yorkers seemed to feel less safe, over all crime actually fell by 2%. 

………

The simple reality is that we won’t really know the story until the 2015 FBI statistics are released. And even then we will only know about a single year, which means very little. For the moment, what seems clear is that there is a public mood of panic, menace and fear. And at least in New York City, that seems to be the case even though it’s totally belied by the actual crime statistics.

What a surprise.  The reports of skyrocketing crime appear to be at best statistical noise, and more likely a juxtaposition of bias in reporting, and efforts by law enforcement to push the meme.

This is Not a Surprise

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There now appear to be some strong statistical indications of ballot manipulation in the latest Turkish elections:

A statistical study of the voting patterns in Turkey’s November 1 general election found strong evidence that is “consistent with widespread voting manipulation”.

That was the conclusion of a paper released by assistant professor Erik Meyersson at Stockholm School of Economics entitled “Digit Tests and the Peculiar Election Dynamics of Turkey’s November Elections”, and released on November 4.

The result of the elections came as a shock as the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s defied the almost universal polling consensus and won some 9 percentage points more than expected – just enough to rule alone, but not quite a constitutional majority.

Some have speculated that faced with external and internal instability Turks have turned to a strong leader to see them through uncertain times in what might be called a “Sultan complex”. However, drilling down into the voting statistics Meyersson concludes that Sunday’s result was not so much an AKP victory as a defeat for the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Action Party (MHP).

“As in last elections, much of the change in voting seems to have occurred among nationalist as well as Kurdish voters, with this election seeing a difference of priority among them. Whereas June’s election was HDP’s to win, this one appears to have been to a large extent the nationalist MHP’s to lose,” Meyersson said in his paper.

Meyersson concentrated on the differences between June’s election and this one, where that time AKP was the recipient of the shock and had its majority grip on power broken after HDP entered parliament for the first time.

“Plotting the difference in vote share between November and June, the AKP’s gain appears to come predominantly at the expense of MHP. In some other cases, the vote swing seems to be driven by voters in Kurdish provinces leaving the other main opposition party pro-Kurdish and left-leaning Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) for AKP,” says Meyersson.

………
The main statistical test the paper explores is the use of the so-called Benford’s Law that is a widespread statistical technique for spotting cheating in polls and has a big body of academic literature behind it.

The way it works is simple: in a fair vote the last number of the final tally for each polling station should be randomly distributed. As humans are very bad at generating random numbers if the vote count has been tampered with then this randomness is destroyed and a discernable pattern emerges.
………
Meyersson’s study finds a very similar thing seems to have happened last weekend. The analysis was complicated by the fact that some ballots only produced 300-350 ballot papers, which is too small a number to be a good statistical sample. To get round this problem Meyersson decided to use the June vote as the basis of the comparison for the randomness of the last number – but that also assumes the summer’s vote was free and fair.

Those caveats aside, the results are striking. As the chart below of the frequency of each of the appearance of the numbers from 0-9 in the last place of the final tally clearly show there are too few zeros in the AKP party vote counts and too many for MHP.  The same is true for HDP, but the number of zeros at the end of the tally for Republican People’s Party (CHP) were the same in both elections and conforms to the Benford distribution above.
………
Meyersson’s study finds a very similar thing seems to have happened last weekend. The analysis was complicated by the fact that some ballots only produced 300-350 ballot papers, which is too small a number to be a good statistical sample. To get round this problem Meyersson decided to use the June vote as the basis of the comparison for the randomness of the last number – but that also assumes the summer’s vote was free and fair.

Those caveats aside, the results are striking. As the chart below of the frequency of each of the appearance of the numbers from 0-9 in the last place of the final tally clearly show there are too few zeros in the AKP party vote counts and too many for MHP.  The same is true for HDP, but the number of zeros at the end of the tally for Republican People’s Party (CHP) were the same in both elections and conforms to the Benford distribution above.

This explains a lot.

It also means that Erdogan is likely to use even more extreme measures to remain in power the next time around.

I rather expect that we won’t see him leave office absent some sort of coup activity.

Not a pleasant thought for a NATO ally.

I Care Not Much for a Man’s Religion Whose Dog and Cat Are Not the Better for It

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Abraham Lincoln said that, and a recent research implies that generosity and religiously are antithetical:

An argument often advanced for the encouragement of religion is that, to paraphrase St Matthew’s report of Jesus’s words, it leads people to love their neighbours as themselves. That would be a powerful point were it true. But is it? This was the question Jean Decety, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Chicago, asked in a study just published in Current Biology.

Dr Decety is not the first to wonder, in a scientific way, about the connection between religion and altruism. He is, though, one of the first to do it without recourse to that standard but peculiar laboratory animal beloved of psychologists, the undergraduate student. Instead, he collaborated with researchers in Canada, China, Jordan, South Africa and Turkey, as well as with fellow Americans, to look at children aged between five and 12 and their families.

Altogether, Dr Decety and his colleagues recruited 1,170 families for their project, and focused on one child per family. Five hundred and ten of their volunteer families described themselves as Muslim, 280 as Christian, 29 as Jewish, 18 as Buddhist and 5 as Hindu. A further 323 said they were non-religious, 3 were agnostic and 2 ticked the box marked “other”.

………

The upshot was that the children of non-believers were significantly more generous than those of believers. They gave away an average of 4.1 stickers. Children from a religious background gave away 3.3. And a further analysis of the two largest religious groups (Jews, Buddhists and Hindus were excluded because of their small numbers in the sample), showed no statistical difference between them. Muslim children gave away 3.2 stickers on average, while Christian children gave away 3.3. Moreover, a regression analysis on these groups of children showed that their generosity was inversely correlated with their households’ religiosity. This effect remained regardless of a family’s wealth and status (rich children were more generous than poor ones), a child’s age (older children were more generous than younger ones) or the nationality of the participant. These findings are, however, in marked contrast to parents’ assessments of their own children’s sensitivity to injustice. When asked, religious parents reported their children to be more sensitive than non-believing parents did. 

 It appears that no one’s dog cat is better for their owner’s religion.

If You Treat Your Employees Like Crap, It Flows to the Customer

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It turns out that the Wal-Mart grocery business is lagging, because they suck at running supermarkets:

Wal-Mart’s grocery business is getting crushed by competitors, according to analysts.

The retailer is plagued by negative customer feedback “due to lack of convenience in shopping Supercenter formats, below-average customer service, and below-average quality, freshness, and breadth of produce,” Wayne Hood, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets, wrote in a recent research note.

As a result, Wal-Mart is losing grocery market share to rivals like Kroger and Publix, which have higher customer satisfaction ratings than Wal-Mart, according to Hood.

That’s a troubling sign for Wal-Mart, which gets more than half of its revenue from groceries, and has been consistently offering lower prices than its rivals, Hood writes.

Grocery prices at Wal-Mart are approximately 10% to 15% lower at Wal-Mart compared to Kroger, according to Hood.

But the lower prices have failed to spur growth in Wal-Mart’s grocery business, as illustrated in the graph below.

Basically, Wal-Mart sucks, but they are cheap.

Of course, dollar stores are cheaper and they are not suckier, and Target is a bit more expensive and much less sucky, and now it turns out that even the lowly supermarket chain produces stores that people are wiling to pay extra to go to.

Couldn’t happen to a more repulsive company.

Why the Germans Shouldn’t Run the EU

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It turns out that the economy of North Korea grew faster than the EU’s economy last year:

North Korea’s economy expanded by 1.0% to $29.85 billion (£19 billion) in 2014, according to Reuters citing analysis from South Korea’s central bank.

That’s just better than the 0.9% growth recorded in the Eurozone last year.

The Bank of Korea (BoK) report that “the increase in economic activity was attributed mainly to growth in services and building while farming, mining and manufacturing saw slower growth.”

Growth in services, making up around 31.3% of total economic output, accelerated to 1.3%, up from 0.3% in 2013, with retail sales, food, and accommodation, logistics and communications all expanding from a year earlier.

………

North Korea does not release official economic data, hence the reliance on the BoK analysis to estimate economic output.

EU growth is pathetic.

What’s more the EU’s hegemon and chief predatory exporter, Germany, experienced a GDP growth roughly double that of the EU as a whole.

German policies with regard to the EU, and particularly with regard to the Euro zone, are about benefiting the nation at the expense of its neighbors.

German domination was a bad idea in 1935, and it’s a bad idea in 2015.

There are Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Official Chinese Government Statistics

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Is there anyone with two braincells to rub together who believes that China actually hit a 7% growth rate in the last quarter? I don’t,

Not only are the Chinese stats suspect at the top levels, but every regional and local government is feeding them data that is driven by what they think their higher-ups want to hear:

China’s economy grew an annual 7 percent in the second quarter, steady with the previous quarter and slightly better than analysts’ forecasts, though further stimulus is still expected after the quarter ended with a stock market crash.

It has been a difficult year for the world’s second-largest economy. Slowing growth in trade, investment and domestic demand has been compounded by a cooling property sector, deflationary pressure, and most recently a stock market crash, so the recent sequence of data releases showing signs of improvement may help buttress faltering confidence in the effectiveness of prior policy support measures.

Analysts polled by Reuters had forecast gross domestic product (GDP) in the world’s second-largest economy would grow 6.9 percent in April-June from a year earlier, compared with 7.0 percent in the March quarter.

On a quarterly basis, the economy grew 1.7 percent compared with 1.4 percent in the March quarter, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Wednesday.

Monthly activity data, released alongside the GDP report, also beat expectations across the board to show signs of a rebound, with factory output hitting a five-month high.

Yeah, right.  And the Chinese stock market is not melting down right now.

In the Realm of the Blatantly Obvious………

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A study of bankers had determined that when bankers are given unrealistically tough performance standards, they cheat:

Bankers are more likely to behave unethically when under pressure to reach tough performance targets, according to a survey of British financial-services employees.

Managers in banking, insurance and wealth management were more anxious and inclined to misbehave when “negative consequences or punishment for poor performance were highlighted,” PricewaterhouseCoopers and the London Business School said in a report on Monday.

“When it made them feel anxious, they tended to say money was one of their key motivators,” Duncan Wardley, a behavioral science specialist at PwC, said in the statement. “They also tended to take more risks and make unethical choices.”

I am so no surprised.

Of course, this could lead to techniques that might enhance banker honesty, but I see that as unlikely.

Decent, but Not Great Unemployment News

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In April, non-farm payroll increased by 223,000and the (U-3) unemployment rate fel by 0.1% to 5.4%:

The American job market rebounded in April, the government said on Friday, helping to ease worries that the economy was on the brink of another extended slowdown after a bleak winter in which the overall economy stalled. But the growth in jobs failed to translate, once again, into any significant improvement in pay.

Employers added 223,000 positions last month, the Labor Department reported, and the unemployment rate decreased to 5.4 percent, a turnaround from the disappointing performance in March, initially reported as a modest 126,000 gain and then revised down on Friday to 85,000.

“We expected a rebound following the numbers in March and we got it, but not much more,” said Guy Berger, United States economist at RBS. “Wage growth is still the missing piece.”

Indeed, before Friday’s report, some economists were estimating that average hourly earnings might rise 0.2 percent or more in April, signaling an upswing from the slow pace of wage gains since the end of the recession.


But average hourly earnings rose only 0.1 percent in April, producing a 2.2 percent annual gain. That modest showing suggests that any meaningful wage gains for most workers are still delayed, despite the steadily falling unemployment rate.

 This really ain’t much.

First, population increase requires about 200,000 new jobs each month to run in place, so 223,000 is not much, and second the drop in unemployment is largely an artifact of rounding:

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In April, 8.549 million Americans were unemployed. The civilian labor force, which includes the employed and everyone looking for jobs, stood at 157.072 million. Based on those numbers, the unemployment rate was 5.443%.

In March, there were 8.575 million unemployed and 156.906 million in the labor force, which meant the unemployment rate back then was closer to 5.465%.

That’s a 0.022% point decline in the unemployment rate. That’s definitely less of a drop than the 0.1% drop rounding will get you.

On the brighter side, the Black unemployment rate fell tyo below 10% for the first time in 7 years.

Someone Finally Found a Way to Beat the Lottery

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Las Vegas makes billions in its casinos with the house have a house edge of 3% to 5%.

State lotteries typically have a house edge of 40% to 50%, so it is a sucker bet, and, as I have told Sharon*, only a fool plays the lottery.†

Well my hats off to Eddie Ray Tipton, who has devised a winning strategy for the lottery:


Prosecutors say they have evidence indicating the former head of computer security for a state lottery association tampered with lottery computers prior to him buying a ticket that won a $14.3 million jackpot, according to a media report.

Eddie Raymond Tipton, 51, may have inserted a thumbdrive into a highly locked-down computer that’s supposed to generate the random numbers used to determine lottery winners, The Des Moines Register reported, citing court documents filed by prosecutors. At the time, Tipton was the information security director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, and he was later videotaped purchasing a Hot Lotto ticket that went on to fetch the winning $14.3 million payout.

In court documents filed last week, prosecutors said there is evidence to support the theory Tipton used his privileged position inside the lottery association to enter a locked room that housed the random number generating computers and infect them with software that allowed him to control the winning numbers. The room was enclosed in glass, could only be entered by two people at a time, and was monitored by a video camera. To prevent outside attacks, the computers aren’t connected to the Internet. Prosecutors said Tipton entered the so-called draw room on November 20, 2010, ostensibly to change the time on the computers. The cameras on that date recorded only one second per minute rather than running continuously like normal.

“Four of the five individuals who have access to control the camera’s settings will testify they did not change the cameras’ recording instructions,” prosecutors wrote. “The fifth person is defendant. It is a reasonable deduction to infer that defendant tampered with the camera equipment to have an opportunity to insert a thumbdrive into the RNG tower without detection.”

Tipton has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and his attorney has said the theory about computer tampering isn’t “factually viable.”

On December 23, a little more than a month after Tipton allegedly tampered with the computers, a man at a convenience store was video taped buying a Hot Lotto ticket that later won the $14.3 million payout. Authorities identified the man as Tipton, but as an employee of the association that administered the lottery, he was barred by law from buying lotto tickets or claiming lottery prizes. The winning ticket went unclaimed for almost a year. Hours before it was scheduled to expire, a company incorporated in Belize tried to claim the prize through a New York attorney. In January, Tipton was charged with two counts of fraud. The allegations that he used his insider access to tamper with the RNG were first made in the court documents filed last week.

Seriously, absent a TARDIS, this is about the only way to beat the lottery.

Like I said, it is a sucker bet.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
†To paraphrase Bret Maverick, I do not approve of gambling, I prefer poker.

It’s the Record Distributors who are Impoverishing Musicians, not the Internet

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With all the complaints from various rock and rollers about there over Spotify and similar services, but the numbers show that it is still the record companies that are hoovering up most of the revenue in the music business:

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In the 1960s, Motown Records had a reputation for depriving artists of well-earned royalties, most egregiously in the case of Barrett Strong whose name was removed as a songwriter of the 1960 hit “Money (That’s What I Want)” because of a so-called “clerical error.” Chamberlin’s point was, despite the groundswell of criticism from artists against Pandora and Spotify, it’s labels, not technology platforms, that are most responsible for low royalty checks. The reason artists feel the pain so acutely in today’s digital era is that there are more performers than ever before with access to wide distribution platforms like YouTube and far less money to go around: Music industry revenue has been cut in half since 2000.

Referring to the heyday of the overpriced CD in the 90s, [former Smashing Pumpkins drummer Jimmy] Chamberlin said, “I just think when money’s swollen like that there’s this ‘high tide rises all boats’ type of mentality.” But the truth is, labels have always withheld massive shares of royalties, with or without Spotify.

The problem is, these contracts between artists and labels — and labels and Spotify — are proprietary and opaque, so it’s been difficult to identify precisely how much artists are getting screwed on a macro level, beyond looking at the sad earnings statements musicians occasionally publish on their blogs.

Until now.

A new report from audit firm Ernst & Young and the French record label trade group SNEP reveals better estimates than we’ve ever seen on the payout distribution of music streaming services.

And who do you suppose takes the biggest cut? You guessed it, labels.

According to the report, labels net 45.6 percent of the streaming revenue created by Spotify and Deezer, the two platforms included in the study. The streaming platforms themselves — most of which have yet to achieve profitability despite fielding frequent attacks for their supposed greed — take home 20.8 percent. An additional 16.7 percent is paid in taxes before songwriters and performing artists finally see their shares — which amount to 10 percent and 6.8 percent, respectively.

When you disregard taxes and the platforms’ share, labels keep a full 73.1 percent of the net revenue streaming services transferr to the music industry.

So how do the labels justify leaving such a slim piece of the pie to artists? “Well,” a record executive might argue, as he picks a piece of stale taco meat from his teeth, examines it, and decides to eat it, “Putting out an album is expensive.”

That may have been true fifteen years ago. But now that the world is digital, manufacturing costs are fast approaching zero. Recording software has gotten so good and so (comparatively) cheap that a kid with enough talent can make a record that sounds just as good as the new Taylor Swift album from her basement using ProTools, which costs $900 (or nothing, if one is willing to employ the five-finger Pirate Bay discount).

Furthermore, labels no longer need to launch an expensive world tour or bribe radio stations for an artist to receive international exposure. Sure, having a label marketing team behind your work certainly helps, but social media still possesses some vestige of its open, democratic roots — enough for savvy artists to build a following and attract attention to their work organically without a giant advertising budget.

My favorite example of an artist casting off major label overlords is hip-hop/R&B artist Ryan Leslie. He told me that his first album released on Motown in 2008 sold 180,000 copies. But the royalties Leslie received from those sales did not cover the $100,000 label advance he received to produce and market it. His new self-distributed album, however, has only sold 12,000 copies — less than one-tenth the sales of his Motown debut — and yet Leslie took home around $160,000 in revenue off album sales alone. When merchandise sales and concert tickets are included, Leslie has made over $400,000 since going independent, all of which he got to keep and distribute among his own small, lean team. (Of course it helped that Leslie already had a significant fan-base from his work on Motown).

Labels are withholding royalties as greedily as ever, and yet their value to artists has diminished greatly in the digital age. This demands a dramatic rethinking and restructuring of label-artist arrangements, a process that has barely begun to take shape.

If pop music artists have a problem with how they get revenue, they need to start with the record distributors, who are doing less and less for the musician, but still try to sit athwart the market and extract what are largely undeserved rents.

Streaming, Spotify and its ilk, much like iTunes and other digital music stores, are merely a channel.

Getting access to these services does not require the services of the record labels.

If you are getting boned by a contract with record labels, the problem is the contract with the record labels, not streaming.

My Thoughts on this Year’s Super Bowl

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Let me ask you, who are you gonna believe, Tom Brady, the greatest man in all of humanity, or a bunch of a**h**** on Twitter?

First, I do not have a dog in this hunt, though Sharon* does, being a die hard Pats fan since before Tom Brady.

I am watching for the ads.

Remember that article by Warren Sharp in Slate that said that the Patriots fumble numbers were mathematically impossible?

Yeah, not so much:

The data science community responded with a number of rebuttals (I put together a roundup of my favorite ones below). Collectively, these posts did a great job of breaking down the Statistics 101 problems with Sharp’s original analyses. But even if Sharp had been less sloppy, it would have been right to take issue with the larger implication of his work — that any major outlier, if shown to be statistically significant, should be seen as evidence of rule-breaking.

 Barry Bonds and Lance Armstrong were outliers. But so is Lionel Messi. And Phil Jackson. And the San Antonio Spurs. It would be irresponsible — and depressing — to assume every incredible performance equals cheating. Celebrating outliers is one of the best parts about being a sports fan.

 I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that, in cases such as these, our traditional methods of determining statistical significance can severely underestimate the odds of something happening due to chance. That’s because of the so-called Wyatt Earp Effect, named after the frontier lawman known for taking part in lots of gunfights without getting hurt. Earp’s feat seems improbable in hindsight, but given the sheer number of shootouts in the Old West, it was actually pretty likely that somebody would make it out alive.

 Likewise, it’s difficult to estimate the true odds against a team preventing fumbles to the extent Sharp originally suggested New England did. Knowing particulars about the Patriots after the fact can bias us into computing the odds that a specific team would have a specific fumble record over a specific period of years. But the real question regarding New England’s outlier-ness should surround the odds that any team would post any outlier statistic over any span of seasons. And the probability of that happening, as you may imagine, is a lot higher than the odds of a very specific set of circumstances.

 Here were some of the responses to Sharp’s posts:

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  • The harshest counterargument belonged to data scientist Drew Fustin. Fustin challenged Sharp’s choice to exclude dome teams (Sharp’s own post says outdoor teams barely fumble more often than those based in domes), instead looking at fumble rates across all teams in outdoor games only — whereupon the Patriots don’t even rank first in the NFL at fumble avoidance over the 2010-2014 period. He also questions whether Sharp’s decision to use that 2010-14 period was a case of cherry-picking the timeframe that would make the Patriots look most like an extreme outlier.

(emphasis mine)

Seriously, it’s a tempest in a teapot, and distracting all of us from the true meaning of the Super Bowl:  To sell us useless sh%$ that we really do not need and to pump up the profile of advertising firms.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.