Kids these days

/ bs king / 1 Comment

There’s a certain brand of newspaper headline that used to really annoy me when I was a teenager.  At the time I dubbed them “kids these days” headlines….essentially headlines that play to older people’s love of fretting over how bad things are in the younger generation.  Prime examples are pretty much on repeat: they’re lazy, they’re not getting the education the older generation got, they’re irresponsible, they’re selfish, they like bad music.

I’m over a decade removed from teenagerhood, but my gosh do I still hate those headlines.   I am pretty much of the opinion that every generation has their own pluses and minuses, and we all need to chill out.  Headlines that say “hey, this new generation really figured out a bunch of stuff our target demographic totally screwed up” are just not going to sell.  
ANYWAY, I saw a good example of this in USA Today (via Instapundit)  with the headline “Younger people expect inheritance that won’t exist”.  
Oh those darn kids!  Always expecting their parents to support them.  Entitled whipersnappers!

First off, this was based on a study done by TD Ameritrade.  For all the issues I have with academic studies, studies done by companies trying to sell you something are even worse.  Also, they almost never release their source data.  
You don’t have to look far to see where this one got ridiculous:

Nearly 40% of Generation Z, those ages 13 to 22, expect to receive an inheritance, according to a recent TD Ameritrade study. As a result, they don’t believe that they will need to save for retirement.

Seriously? They asked 13 to 22 year olds about their retirement saving ideas and then report that their expectations are unrealistic?  I would be more weirded out if the study had shown that 40% of them had a comprehensive plan in place.  Most 13 to 22 year olds haven’t entered the full time workforce yet.

I mean, my retirement accounts are doing fairly well thank you very much, but I opened the first one when I was exactly 22….you know, after I got my first post college full time job.  Coincidentally, that was also the first time I gave any serious thought to the entire concept of retirement.

They don’t provide any information about the age distribution of the respondents, but if it was even, 40% of kids in a group of that age range would be 13 to 16.  I’ve never parented a teenager, but it strikes me that most parents of kids in that age range probably aren’t having in depth discussions with them about their financial situation, and certainly not about their retirement savings.  Even those who are teaching financial lessons to their kids probably limit their disclosure about specific numbers.  Asking kids in that age range to have an educated opinion about this is ridiculous.

One more thing….I don’t know what kids they polled for this study.  However, the chances that an investment firm polled children of it’s own clients is pretty high.  Parents who have investment firm accounts are probably more likely to actually be leaving their kids an inheritance, correct?  It’s suspicious to me that they go from their own specific study to a “in general parents aren’t leaving their kids money”.  How about the kids of these parents?

Alright, that’s all I can say without seeing how this study was actually done.  Now get off my lawn.

Brief update

/ bs king / 2 Comments
Leave it to xkcd to post a comic that perfectly describes my life right now.
Still trying to figure out when to blog, but his lordship seems to be sleeping in progressively longer bouts, so I may get some time back soon.
I’m feeling very motivated to post regularly again, as my brother let me know this morning that I have in fact made a difference in the world.  He’s currently an executive producer on a new film about poverty in America, and apparently felt one of the stats the filmmaker used was a bit fishy.  He looked up the source and felt it was a deceptive stat, and asked her not to use it.  Then he called me and told me about it.  I feel I’ve accomplished something here.
If your curious, the movie is here: http://www.thelinemovie.com/

Never go with facts when a pre-existing narrative will do….

/ bs king / 3 Comments

Well, the Republican National Convention has come and gone, and I have been too busy with house guests and the new little darling to even watch the much talked about Clint Eastwood speech.  So I can’t say I had been too on top of things, though I was a bit surprised to see the headline that the reality show (which I have also not seen) “Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo” had beat the RNC in the ratings.

This morning, in a quiet moment, I was perusing the internets, and found an interesting note in a Gawker article about that headline:

The Hollywood Reporter story titled “Honey Boo Boo Ratings Top the Republican National Convention” that perpetuated this myth went on to state that this victory was in the demographic of adults 18-49, and this results from coverage of the convention being spread over multiple channels. “Aggregate coverage of the RNC across networks obviously eclipsed Honey Boo Boo considerably,” Michael O’Connell wrote. Obviously. Considerably.

The media LOVES stories of increasing American ignorance and the decline of civilization.  So much so that they’ll rearrange their own numbers to prove how bad things are getting.

It’s quite the racket really….create a reality show, report on how this brings media to a new low, then hype it up so people watch it, then start writing stories about how people are watching it.  

Genius.

5 Easy Pieces

/ bs king

Simply Statistics put up this link to an interview with David Spiegelhalter on 5 good books to help understand statistics and risk.  I haven’t read any of them, but they looked excellent.  Also, this quote is excellent:

There is a nice quote from Joel Best that “all statistics are social products, the results of people’s efforts”. He says you should always ask, “Why was this statistic created?” Certainly statistics are constructed from things that people have chosen to measure and define, and the numbers that come out of those studies often take on a life of their own.

I’m pretty sure that about sums it up.

Skin cancer, sunscreen, and connecting the dots

/ bs king / 2 Comments

There is skin cancer in my family.  My grandfather has had it, and occasionally a doctor will try to tell me that I am genetically predisposed to it because of this.  While I try to practice good sun habits, I am dubious about the “genetic predisposition” argument.  You see, my grandfather spent several years in the early 40’s hanging out in the sun in the Phillipines while monitoring Japanese aircraft activity.  He thinks that’s more responsible for his skin cancer than genes.  I do too.

Regardless, you might say, it’s a good idea to wear sunscreen right?  Of course.  Except it may not help.

As it turns out, sunscreen formulas that prevent sunburn may not be equally good at preventing cancer.  And you may not be putting enough on.  And they may have chemicals in them that actually increase your cancer risk rather than decrease it.  Huh.

I’ve talked before about making sure you connect all the dots, not just proving disjointed ideas.  We know that sunscreen prevents sunburn, and people who get sunburns are more likely to get skin cancer.  The troubling part is that there is no proof that people who wear sunscreen get less skin cancer.  It’s tempting to jump from A to C, but you have to remember things can go wonky when you don’t remember the stop at B.

Regardless of the data, sunburns are painful, and I’m still very Irish, so I would recommend sunscreen in general…but lets not oversell the good it might be doing.

Religion and income

/ bs king / 2 Comments
Religion and income distribution.  Not sure I get exactly what data they used to get this, but still kind of interesting.  Incomes seem to skew upward the smaller the group, which makes a certain amount of sense.

 The Hindu numbers surprised me a bit.  I was guessing that has something to do with the high percentage of Indians in tech/healthcare professions, presumably making $100k+.  

Things to ponder on a Sunday

Retractions, while sometimes necessary, are never as good as the real thing

/ bs king / 2 Comments

Since starting this blog, I’ve become quite the fan of the website Retraction Watch.

One of the more interesting ongoing stories has been the number of retractions from Dipak Das, the UCONN researcher who faces massive misconduct charges for fabricating data in his research about the health benefits of red wine.

His current retraction count stands at 13 papers, with 145 counts of misconduct being investigated.

While the role of his work in the field is contested, one can’t debate that his results were widely reported and certainly helped with the public perception that red wine is good for you.  Thus, I found it interesting that Jezebel was running an article at the same time about the further proof that red wine is good for you.  In the background they mention some of the studies that Das did, that have since been retracted.  Not that this is necessarily their fault….recently it was found that only a quarter of retracted articles in online databases carry a retraction notice, and this drops to 5% if you look at downloadable PDFs.

People have complained about this with newspapers for years….large headlines, little tiny retractions…but with the ever increasing retraction rate and the centrality of the internet, this is liable to get worse before it gets better.

Economic Data, and why I don’t talk about it

/ bs king / 1 Comment

I find it really hard to even comment on economic data on this blog.  It’s based on so many assumptions and there are so many different numbers that can be included or excluded that critiquing it is a combination of trying to shoot fish in a barrel and trying to catch a greased pig.

Not my idea of a good time.

Anyway, BD Keller linked to an excellent post today that is way more articulate than I about why evidence based monetary policy is so hard to come by.

On economic experimental models:

Think of a good experimental design: randomised control variables, holding everything else constant, etc. Now think of the worst possible experimental design. Imagine something that engineers or psychologists might dream up over beers for a laugh, or to illustrate what not to do. That’s what economists face. It’s as if our lab assistants (the fiscal and monetary authorities) were deliberately trying to make our (economists’) lives as hard as possible. They do this, of course, not to spite us, but to try to make everyone else’s lives as easy as possible. To get a good experimental design for economists, both the fiscal and monetary authorities would need to be malevolent.

Makes sense, but given this, I do wish they’d stop saying their predictions with such authority.

Does egg = cigarette?

/ bs king / 2 Comments

Oh CNN, your headlines make me sad sometimes.

Is eating egg yolks as bad as smoking?

No.  No it is not.  The study you’re reporting on does in fact claim that eating egg yolks accelerate heart disease about 2/3rds as much as smoking does, but acceleration of heart disease is not actually the health problem smoking is most known for.  But you know that.  Sigh.

Not that I’m buying the study anyway.  They asked people, who already had heart disease, to report their egg yolk consumption over the course of their lives.  How accurately can you recall your average egg yolk consumption over the course of your life?  Additionally, people who have heart disease have most likely been told to cut down on consumption of saturated fat and cholesterol.  Those still eating more eggs have likely heard this advice, and disregarded it.  What are the chances that they’re disregarding other advice as well?  Lastly, it does not appear the study asked about the consumption of any other food, meaning egg consumption could actually just be co-occuring with the consumption of something else that was even worse.  Surveys that ask only about very specific foods tend to see what they want to see.

So basically, another correlation/causation issue here, combined with those terrible consumption recollection surveys, with a sprinkle obnoxious headline writing.   Yeehaw.