Sunday, February 17, 2013

Is it in the public interest to know Bulgarian/Romanian migration estimates?

Perhaps in a few years just another 'bigoted woman' will be asking where are they are all flocking from... again... and the answer, that time, may be Romania and Bulgaria. 

There is mounting media speculation and interest in the accession of Eastern European states which took place in 2004 - which lead to a large influx of Polish and other migrants to the UK - being repeated in 2014. The influx was of course famous and famously resented because the UK, under Tony Blair, did not impose restrictions on the numbers of migrants permitted to enter the UK per year, nor on their ability to seek UK employment, unlike many other states. It is now estimated around 500,000 Polish migrants settled in the UK between 2001 and 2011.

At the time the accession treaty was being considered, when ministers were weighing up what controls would be right for the UK, estimates provided by Home Office civil servants speculated that around 13,000 migrants would come to the UK each year. It ended up being more like 270,000, so they were wrong by a factor of over 2,000%. Whoops (to be fair, if you read the linked report, you'll see they were fairly cautious about providing an estimate as they didn't believe they had good enough data to carry out the analysis... but still....).

This time around, with the impending lifting of migration controls on Bulgaria and Romania as a result of the 2005 Treaty of Accession, there are probably a few once-bitten-twice-shy civil servants who recall those past events of Polish migration - it goes without saying that the Tories will not want to take the same political flak over this as Labour have. 

So, whilst we have heard a lot of people getting hot and bothered about the possibility of this repeat, nobody this time in Government is willing to put a number on how many will arrive on the UK's shores. 

In fact, we know that the Home Office has looked at the impact of the expansion. When first asked to release the reporrt, the Home Office said there 'are no numbers in it', and that 'no report with numbers has ever existed and we won't be commissioning one' (imagine a carrot cake but without carrots...).

But now the situation has changed, and it is being claimed that it won't be helpful to release the information. Both SoS for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles, and immigration minister Mark Harper are taking this line. Indeed, when subject to an FoI by the New Statesman, the response said that they (Home Office ministers presumably...although strictly speaking officers should be judging this...) needed time to assess whether it was in the public interest to release the information. This ability of the Government to withhold information for which there is clearly massive public interest is fascinating. 

If a newspaper managed to get hold of this information via leaking, and then published it, presumably the Government would - in keeping with its defence of the actions of the press following the Leveson inquiry - be quite comfortable with the press publishing it, so long as it sold papers (the sole assessment editors feel is justified when considering public interest). 

It is strange, that the Government has in law a public interest test which it applies to its own work, and yet feels ready to defend an utterly different method of assessing the public interest when it is in the hands of another body. 

Which brings us to the question, just what is the public interest? is there a common definition, and who has the right to apply it? Because if the Government is so gung-ho as it claims to be about press freedom, then so long as an editor wants information which he/she believes should be published, then it would have to grant access to that information, to be in keeping with it's assertion that the press is the best assessor of public interest in the context of information release. 

If that is not the case, then we have surely come to some kind of Platonic impasse, where principle is abandoned in favour of circumstance. The circumstance that prevents the application of the principle in this case is that the Government holds the control of the information, so in this instance is able to abandon the pretence of their principle that the press can and should freely be able to assess public interest. It seems perfectly clear, if the press obtained this information, and released it, the Government would not go after the press for wrongly obtaining the information, but would rather go into debate about the meaning of the information and its accuracy.

This is a bizarre situation, and shows how the law can be a confusing beast, more so when ministers are ideologically wedded to concepts except when it doesn't suit them.   




Sunday, February 10, 2013

Big Data - ally or enemy?

There's a huge buzz around Big Data at the moment in circles of academia, technology and politics. People are excited by the prospects for analytical breakthroughs which may answer some challenging unresolved questions. 

For a fairly simple explanation of what Big Data is (and you do need to know), pop along here

A recent article on the BBC website gave an interesting bit of insight into the kind of fervour that's stirring up. The article came with the headline "Will Big Data herald a new ere in medicine?", the sort of typical headline that accompanies some of the more bold claims about what Big Data may, or may not, deliver.

For people interested in politics like you (how else did you get here?!?) and I, there are prospects about Big Data that intrigue. For example, we have long known that history will lead to the inexorable rise of the left - that is to say, of the workers (ahem - just for the sake of argument...) - so perhaps Big Data can shine a light on the behaviour of voters worldwide over the past fifty years, looking at age ranges, gender, then looking too at whether this has lead to more leftwing parties gaining power, or more leftwing policies being implemented. 

Just shove in the 'right' metrics (nations, turnout, vote system, vote result, gender/age/ethnicity breakdown etc etc) and.... voila!!! out pops the answer... Except it doesn't work like that. 

As one of the big daddys of statistics, Naseem El Taleb, author of Black Swan (no, not THAT Black Swan, THIS Black Swan - one of a series of best selling statistical books) has recently written in Wired, Big Data is fundamentally limited. 

The reason for the Big Data limitation is fairly straightforward. 

Answers to complex, challenging questions, are hard to find. Having more powerful analysis, i.e. more educated, nuanced, well-developed approaches to examining issues can provide answers. Having more information - i.e. Big Data - simply means that the haystack which contains the needle is much bigger. 

In the field of politics, this has interesting implications. Taleb proposes that the availability of Big Data means that it is easier to manipulate/select that wealth of information to prove a hypothesis that has been developed; i.e. forgone conclusions to academic's - or other's - areas of research. 

At the moment, in the field of politics there is one area of huge debate - is austerity worsening the depression? or is it fixing the mess? This is classic Keynes V Friedman territory (though I must stress - capital and infrastructure are the key spending initiatives Keynes would favour, not just spending more money on everything, such as welfare, for instance). 

And this huge area of debate is being hotly contested using the tried tools of the trade - selective evidence to support hypothesis. Take a trundle over to Telegraph blogs, and you'll see what I mean. 

Of late, for instance, many of the bloggers on the right of the spectrum are enjoying the recovery of Latvia, because it went on something of an austerity drive and has recovered strongly in recent quarters. This is amazing 'selectivitis'. One small nation, which few know much about, is having a recovery for reasons even fewer known about. It is very easy to use this tiny sample out of the vast amount of data on other nations, to justify austerity, and that is precisely what is happening. 


What we are beginning to see if how easy it is for those on the wrong side of the argument to defend and obfuscate themselves with a minute amount of data on their side. The Latvian example is debatable, but even if it wasn't, is it's sample comparable, or sizable enough, to warrant drawing conclusions about the wider use of macroeconomics elsewhere, in larger regions such as the whole of Europe? I am far from convinced. 

So for me, Taleb's warning about the misuse of information to demonstrate hypothesis is timely, and we should watch for these hypothesis-proving examples on both sides of the spectrum, and argue for honest cynicism about the usability of small samples in either case. 

Big Data is going to be a huge area of focus over the coming years, especially with the growth of the internet of things, but we should remain mindful of the possibilities, as well as being cautious and healthily skeptical of the users of such data, and their methods of reasoning. 




Sunday, February 03, 2013

The emergence of Depression Denial & questions over tax transparency

In response to the woeful GDP figures for the last quarter of 2012, which showed the UK's economy had contracted by 0.3%, it caught my attention that a few political commentators had started voicing an interesting new angle on economic matters. 

Historically, we've become accustomed to many various excuses for the coalition's inability to get the economy moving. We've had Royal weddings, jubilees, snow and more snow... in fact, pretty much if anything 'stuff like' happens, then you can be pretty damned sure it was to blame for a precipitous fall in output and derailing all those credible plans for growth the coalition had so carefully crafted. One wonders if the coalition maintains a record of slightly unexpected/unusual events with which to refer come the bleak date of the next GDP figure release; 'Feb 2nd - Newcastle United beat Chelsea 3-2... plausible link to North East manufacturing and construction drop', 'Feb 1st - a wetter than usual Friday, causing decrease in night-time economy'. 

But when I read Jeremy Warner of the Telegraph ask "does anyone believe in the GDP figures anymore?", it struck me that there might be a new chord being struck here. 

Jeremy's question begs the response - if we can't trust GDP figures anymore, why not, and at what point did they become discredited (strange coincidence this seems to coincide with ? Perhaps it's all a public sector conspiracy and the staff at the ONS are trying to manipulate the figures downwards? Or, stranger and more conspiratorial still, perhaps the figures are right.... and everyone involved in creating growth is being persuaded by their public sector friends to work less hard for a bit. 

Jeremy poses the question as to how GDP can still be so poor, given that private sector jobs are being created at a rate of knots. He then answers his own question, in a way which suggests he's not too sure of the GDP being so wrong after all.... 

Either the GDP numbers are quite significantly wrong, or labour productivity has gone into precipitous decline, with growing numbers of people prepared to accept poorly paid, "grunt" jobs.

My own view is that it is a combination of the two. The situation is probably not as bad as the headline number suggests, but by the same token, these are by and large not great jobs that are being created – scraping by on part time work and self employment. A whole new army of white van man is being created. Some work is better than no work, but this is not a healthy development.

We know that whilst jobs are being created, they are not being created nearly fast enough, nor are they at decent levels of pay, nor for permanent or full-time positions. Positions are low paid, short hours/part-time, temporary. We know also that the figures are being massaged on job creation. If, on top of this, a large number of positions are apprenticeships....  then how much growth do we expect in productivity? An apprenticeship is no bad thing, but it is not a position which will add greatly to productivity on a macro scale. 

Fascinatingly, Warner's analysis and headline point to the likelihood that the right will begin to castigate the longstanding international measure of a nation's wealth and growth - GDP- purely because it doesn't suit their purposes. Standard sophistry some might say, but this kind of propaganda should not go unnoticed. (same sophistry is brewing now on child poverty - being redefined by IDS)

The right has made a lot of 'deficit denial' since 2010, let us not allow their 'depression denial' be unseen. 

A further thing which comes to mind when we speak of the deficit and the depression - both of which do exist, but are deliberately obfuscated - to what extent was the UK's parlous financial position in 2010 down to corporate tax avoidance measures? 

The right commonly points the figure of blame at Brown and Blair for spending at the wrong point in the economic cycle (which they use as an excuse, to permit themselves to not spend at the right point in the cycle....'couldn't make it up' springs to mind). However, given that we now know that most large multinational corporations operative in the UK have been avoiding paying minimal taxes for years, what effect is that likely to have had on the UK's balance? Although the transparency of these tax affairs is now in the public eye, is it not likely that SMEs which were UK based and paid full taxes, have consistently been driven out of business for a period of decades by those which pay minimal taxes? 

Not knowing the scale of the tax avoidance means it is hard to say what the impact has been, but certainly we know that the UK account would be looking somewhat less unhealthy if these companies had been paying corporation tax at the full rate. 

So, whilst the right busy themselves denying the depression, we can but hope that corporations will be forced into paying UK taxes to start to reverse that depression and keep more funds in the UK... Apple, Google, Amazon, Play, these tech-giants must be brought to heel, and we can't rely on the Government to do that job - they will lay the blame at the door of international laws and globalized trade. Which means that ethical consumerism is the only realistic route. 

ps. I fully expect GDP figures to change - perhaps be revised up, but that always happens, and just means that over time more analysis can be carried out to make the analysis more accurate. To imply that GDP is simply 'wrong' is different, as it points to something fundamentally inaccurate in the way that it is measured, and is being devised as a plot to water down the potency of the GDP figures and their impact on the polls - which is the biggest threat to the Conservatives, simple as that.