Category: Statistics

So, Now I’m Thanking Richard Nixon and Pierre Elliot Trudeau ……… Odd History

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It turns out that the surge, and subsequent drop, in crime in Canada also appears to be an artifact of lead exposure:

I’m happy to see lead at least get a shout out. Unless I’ve missed something, this might actually be the first time the New York Times has ever mentioned childhood lead exposure as a possible explanation for the decline in violent crime. Progress!

But while Eckholm is right to say that none of the other factors he mentions can explain a decline in violent crime that happened all over the world, he’s wrong to include lead in that list. It’s the one explanation that does have the potential to explain a worldwide drop in crime levels. In particular, the chart on the right shows the use of gasoline lead in Canada, which peaked in the mid-70s and then began dropping as catalytic converters became more common. Leaded gasoline was banned for good in 1990, and is now virtually gone with a few minor exceptions for specialized vehicles.

So what happened? As Zimring says, Canada saw a substantial decrease in violent crime that started about 20 years after lead emissions began to drop, which is exactly what you’d expect. I calculated the numbers for Canada’s biggest cities back when I was researching my lead-crime piece, and crime was down from its peak values everywhere: 31 percent in Montreal, 36 percent in Edmonton, 40 percent in Toronto and Vancouver, and 53 percent in Ottawa. CompStat and broken windows and American drug laws can’t explain that.

It is almost certain that lead exposure is a significant factor the rise and fall of crime world wide, and given the wide variations in techniques used by law enforcement, it is likely the most significant factor in the rise and fall of crime worldwide.

Given the clearly racist assumptions of broken windows policing, and the even more clearly racist subtext of America’s fascination with incarceration, it’s not surprising that the law enforcement establishment has studiously avoided looking at lead’s effects on crime.

Racially biased law enforcement philosophies, particularly when it generates more money for law enforcement and incarceration is a feature of, and not a bug in, our society.

The Latest Unemployment Numbers are not Good

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While most of the coverage has been about a fall in the unemployment rate, specifically a fall in the U-3 rate, from 5.8% to 5.6%, but this misses a lot.

Specifically, workforce participation fell again, so the number is primarily as a result of people giving up, “Long-term unemployment remains highly elevated, and the work force participation rate, already at historically low levels, slipped in December.”

Additionally, wages fell in December, indicating that the ordinary worker is still being screwed by the job market:

The big disappointment was on wages. In the November numbers, one of the brightest signs was an 0.4 percent rise in average hourly earnings, which was a hint that maybe, just maybe, a tighter job market was leading employers to raise wages after years of resisting.

It turned out to be a false signal. In Friday’s revisions, November wages rose only 0.2 percent. And even worse, in December they fell 0.2 percent.

………

Over the last year, the average hourly wage in America has risen 40 cents, from $24.17 to $24.57 an hour. That is a mere 1.65 percent, in the same ballpark as many inflation readings and not a meaningful rise in real wages.

We need to see an improvement in the takehome pay for the median worker before we see anything like a strong job market.

Call me a Curmudgeon, But………

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The most recent news on employment, which shows good employment growth, is good news, but I would not start singing Hosannas yet.

There are a number of temporary externalities, most notably a 40% drop in the price of oil in the past 6 months and renewed froth in the housing market, that account for much of this, and neither of them are sustainable.

Also, it increasingly looks like the big casino on Wall Street is back, and they can f%$# up anything.

Your Statistical Graphic of the Day

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Yesterdat, I mentione the relative rarity of Federal Grand Juries no-billing to provide context in the Ferguson ruling.

Today, I show you the infographic:

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That data is from a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and covers October 1, 2009, to September 30, 2010. Over that time period, over 193,000 federal offenses were investigated, about 16 percent of which were declined for prosecution. That leaves just over 162,300 offenses that the government tried to prosecute. And the grand jury decided against doing so 11 times, finding no true bill or a lack of evidence to do so.

Nope. Nothing suspicious here.

Move along.

Reasonably decent Jobless Numbers

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Pretty good, with the 4 week moving average hitting an 8½ year low:

Initial jobless claims held steady at 287,000 last week.

 Expectations were for claims to rise slightly to 295,000, up from last week’s 287,000.

 Last week’s report was revised up slightly to 288,000.

The 4-week moving average of claims fell to 287,750, down 7,250 from last week, the lowest 4-week moving average since February 4, 2006.

Bravo, Occupy the SEC

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Occupy the SEC now has a simple rating of your Congress critter.

It’s a pretty simple system:

Methodology

Our methodology was rather straightforward. We created a simple formula that allowed us to produce a score between 0 and 100 for each member of the House . A score of 100 means that a member voted in a manner that was consistent with our positions on every bill. Conversely, a score of 0 means that the member took the opposite view of OSEC on all considered bills.

Additionally, we gave some weight to the sponsorship and cosponsorship of bills. If a bill was “good” then we viewed sponsoring (or introducing) the bill as good and therefore rewarded that individual with what amounts to additional good votes. If the individual introduced a “bad” bill then we subtracted from the member’s score by counting the sponsorship as if it constituted additional bad votes. Co-sponsorship of bills was treated in a similar fashion but the weight we applied was smaller. Lastly, we added a multiplier to each bill that reflected the importance of the bill and its potential impact. For instance, if the bill was just a minor “technical fix” then it received a small multiplier, but if the bill was aimed at, say rehauling an entire agency (as HR 3193 aims to do by changing the makeup of the CFPB), then we viewed votes on that bill as being more significant, and consequently applied a larger multiplier to it.

Rather unsurprisingly, the Dems score better than the Republicans, but I would note that any Dem under 50 should be considered for a primary challenge.

H/t naked capitalism.

More Feet of Clay from the American “Educational Reform” Establishment

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What a surprise, the favorite project of corporate schooling advocate, and Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, is an abject failure:

The Obama administration’s signature $4 billion Race to the Top initiative, designed to spur far-reaching education reforms across the country and raise student achievement, is largely a failure, an analysis released Thursday concludes.

Most winning states made what the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education labeled “unrealistic and impossible” promises to boost student achievement in exchange for prizes that were ultimately paltry in comparison with their pledges.

But three years in, Race to the Top hasn’t spurred states to address what really is behind students’ poor academic performance: poverty and the associated lack of opportunities that accompany it, said Elaine Weiss, national coordinator of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. Her group advocates for a more targeted focus on poverty over the current slate of education reforms involving testing and accountability.

The Department of Education rejected the report’s conclusions, saying it’s seeing promising signs of improvement in student achievement in Race to the Top states and warning that it’s too early to draw sweeping conclusions. Some state officials also said they are finding the competition useful.

Of course, this assumes that the real goal of the corporate driven education reform is actually to improve education, and not simply an excuse to allow Wall Street to asset strip yet another segment of our society.

I do not share the optimism of  Broader, Bolder Approach to Education.  I have concluded that it is about private profits, and not an honest desire to improve American education.

The Jobs Numbers Suck.

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Nonfarm payrolls rose by 142,000 in August. Generally improvement in the employment situation starts at about 200,000:

American employers hired fewer workers than forecast in August and the jobless rate dropped because people left the workforce, bolstering those on the Federal Reserve who want to be more deliberate in removing monetary stimulus.

The 142,000 advance in payrolls was the smallest this year and followed a revised 212,000 gain in July, figures from the Labor Department showed today in Washington. The reading was lower than the most pessimistic estimate in a Bloomberg survey of economists. The unemployment rate fell to 6.1 percent last month from 6.2 percent, reflecting a drop in joblessness among teenagers as well as the decline in labor participation.

………

The median projection in the Bloomberg survey of 91 economists called for a 230,000 increase in August payrolls. Estimates ranged from increases of 190,000 to 310,000 after a previously reported 209,000 July gain. Revisions to prior reports subtracted a total of 28,000 jobs from overall payrolls in the previous two months.

The participation rate, which indicates the share of working-age people in the labor force, decreased 0.1 percentage point to 62.8 percent, matching the lowest since 1978.

Basically, this just sucks.

Thank You Richard Nixon (Not a Joke)

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One of the things that Richard Nixon did that he doesn’t get credit for is getting lead out of paint and gasoline.

Kevin Drum has written a lot about how falling crime rates 20 years after environmental lead was removed from paint and gasoline crime fell, and now we see lead exposure correlates to teen pregnancy as well:

Jessica Wolpaw Reyes has a new paper out that investigates the link between childhood lead exposure—mostly via tailpipe emissions of leaded gasoline—and violent crime. Unsurprisingly, since her previous research has shown a strong link, she finds a strong link again. But she also finds something else: a strong link between lead and teen pregnancy.

This is not a brand new finding. Rick Nevin’s very first paper about lead and crime was actually about both crime and teen pregnancy, and he found strong correlations for both at the national level. Reyes, however, goes a step further. It turns out that different states adopted unleaded gasoline at different rates, which allows Reyes to conduct a natural experiment. If lead exposure really does cause higher rates of teen pregnancy, then you’d expect states with the lowest levels of leaded gasoline to also have the lowest levels of teen pregnancy 15 years later. And guess what? They do. The chart on the right shows the correlation between gasoline lead exposure and later rates of teen pregnancy, and it’s very strong. Stronger even than the correlation with violent crime.

It’s not surprising.

One of the effects of lead on the developing brain is reduced impulse control, and it seems obvious to me that lack of impulse control would increase the likelihood of high risk sexual behaviors.

GDP Up in 2nd Quarter

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GDP grew at a 4% annual rate in the 2nd quarter:

The United States economy rebounded strongly in the second quarter of the year, shaking off the negative effects of an unusually harsh winter and stirring hopes that it might finally be establishing a solid enough footing to put the lingering effects of the recession squarely in the past.

The Commerce Department, in its initial estimate for April, May and June, reported on Wednesday that the economy grew at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4 percent, surpassing expectations.

During the first quarter, output shrank at a rate of 2.1 percent, less than had been reported. The department had earlier said that first-quarter output fell 2.9 percent.

A lot of the growth is increases in inventory, and averaging the two, we are still looking at about an anemic 2% annual growth rate.

Meh.

Today’s Episode of Not Surprised at All: CEO Pay Edition

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It turns out that there is No relationship whatsoever between a CEO pay and performance:

With all the public chatter about exorbitant executive compensation and income inequality, it’s useful to look at the relationship between chief executive officer pay and corporate performance. Typically, when the subject of their big pay packages arises, CEOs—usually through their spokespeople—say they are paid for performance. Does data back that up?

An analysis of compensation data publicly released by Equilar shows little correlation between CEO pay and company performance. Equilar ranked the salaries of 200 highly paid CEOs. When compared to metrics such as revenue, profitability, and stock return, the scattering of data looks pretty random, as though performance doesn’t matter. The comparison makes it look as if there is zero relationship between pay and performance.

Actually, it’s on the order of 1%, and certainly not worth it. (Click on the image for a better view of the trend line)

The cult of the overpaid CEO has no basis in reality.

It’s  all a game where one hand washes the other.

Hoocoodanode?

WE Just Got Fracked

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A new analysis of what was previously considered the largest shale oil formation in the United States has just shrunk by 96%:

Federal energy authorities have slashed by 96% the estimated amount of recoverable oil buried in California’s vast Monterey Shale deposits, deflating its potential as a national “black gold mine” of petroleum.

Just 600 million barrels of oil can be extracted with existing technology, far below the 13.7 billion barrels once thought recoverable from the jumbled layers of subterranean rock spread across much of Central California, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said.

The new estimate, expected to be released publicly next month, is a blow to the nation’s oil future and to projections that an oil boom would bring as many as 2.8 million new jobs to California and boost tax revenue by $24.6 billion annually.

The Monterey Shale formation contains about two-thirds of the nation’s shale oil reserves. It had been seen as an enormous bonanza, reducing the nation’s need for foreign oil imports through the use of the latest in extraction techniques, including acid treatments, horizontal drilling and fracking.

The energy agency said the earlier estimate of recoverable oil, issued in 2011 by an independent firm under contract with the government, broadly assumed that deposits in the Monterey Shale formation were as easily recoverable as those found in shale formations elsewhere.

We are not going to frack our way into energy independence.

The problems that California is not like Texas, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, etc.  It is highly seismically active, and  this action has chopped the shale layer into isolated little pieces.

Big Ag Will Kill Us Now

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The good folks at I F%$#ing Love Science point us to a study that strongly indicates that neonicotinoid pesticides cause colony collapse disorder in bees:

A new study claims to have pegged neonicotinoids as the definitive cause of Colony Collapse Disorder. But does the data really justify the conclusions?

European honey bees are incredibly important pollinators. Unfortunately, they’re disappearing at a rapid rate due to a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). What actually causes CCD isn’t completely understood. CCD has confused scientists since it was first described, or had its name changed, in 2006. It is likely caused by a number of different factors, working together – however, there has been a large focus on a certain group of insecticides known as neonicotinoids. In December of 2013, in an attempt to mitigate their involvement, the EU implemented a two-year memorandum on three commonly used insecticides in the neonicotinoid family. Many, including their own government, criticized the science behind the moratorium.

There is a desperate need for new studies to accurately test the different variables involved in CCD. New research from Dr. Alex Lu attempts to peg neonicotinoid insecticides as the underlying cause of CCD. The study set up 18 hives to test the effects of two neonicotinoids, clothianidin and imidacloprid, from 2012-2013. Six colonies were selected from three different sites in central Massachusetts, and sublethal doses of each insecticide were given orally to treatment hives via a syrup solution. Six of twelve treated colonies abandoned their hives while only one of the six control hives abandoned theirs. Neonicotinoids obviously do not help bees, but whether this study has found them to be the ‘smoking gun’ isn’t exactly as clear as many are making it out to be. Only 18 hives were used in this study which is too small of a sample size to control for other variables and definitely too small to form a definitive conclusion as to the affects of neonicotinoids. The way he tests for CCD-like symptoms is not a definitive indication that is occurring. Hive abandonment is not automatically CCD. Honey bees may abandon their hives for any number of different reasons, and this study doesn’t control for any of them.

This is why things like pesticides should be proved safe before use, and not allowed until proved they are unsafe, as is the USDA’s policy in the United States.

This is a small study, and as such, it should not be the sole basis of regulatory policy, but I do think that this is a good justification to throwing a few million dollars at a larger study, before we lose our almond, avocado, apples, peaches, pears, etc.

Remember the that Miracle Hepatitis B Cure?

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You knwo, the one that costs $1,000.00 a pill, Solvaldi?

Well, it turns out that, in addition to being priced at larcenous expensive, the evidence of its efficacy is simply not there:

The German agency performed this assessment based on a dossier submitted by the drug manufacturer (presumably Gilead).  The assessment found some reason to think the drug beneficial, but that the evidence was sparse, left many questions unanswered, and was inadequate to assess the drug for some important patient populations.  At this point, only a summary is available in English.  It includes links to further information in German.

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Thus the assessment concluded that the drug company dossier included at best irrelevant data that it tried to pass off as important, and inexplicably left out other data that might have been relevant.

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Summary

It is even bloodier money if the assumption that the drug is a “well-tolerated and effective cure,” which  Dr Huyler held, proves not to be true.  It is clear that most of the money that Gilead is now scooping up in the US is not to pay retrospectively for research and development or drug production. Instead, it seems likely to be supporting marketing, public relations, some investors’ profits, and huge executive compensation.  When the public realizes that the money may not be buying miracles, the outrage should increase.  


 The Sovaldi case is a signal example of how our health care system is awash in marketing hype and public relations buzz that has swamped rational skeptical thinking about logic and evidence.  That marketing and PR is ever enriching managers while it will send the rest of us, health care professionals included, to the poor house.  And all the money we spend will not buy us the promised miracles and triumphs.

 True health care reform would revisit the pact society once made with drug, biotechnology and device companies meant to promote reasonably priced innovation, but now promoting oligarchy; support transparency and honesty in clinical research; and challenge how health care managers can make millions or billions from unproven, and sometimes worthless or dangerous products.

It also turns out that the study was not double blind.

So the wonder drug may not be any more effective than existing drugs, and it costs a lot more.