April 10, 2017
Briefly
- Good piece at Stuff about what a 500-year flood is. The concept isn’t quite as shaky as it sounds — there’s some independent information from comparing different river systems — but it’s inevitably uncertain.
- 23andme is back providing genetic risk information, but in a much more restricted way after FDA review. A lot of the risk information you can get this way isn’t useful for treatment, but it’s the sort of thing some people like to know. So, sometimes, do their insurance companies
- The concept of ‘net tax’ — tax paid minus cash benefits and transfers (but not non-cash ones such as Pharmac subsidies) can be a useful concept. However, I don’t think it’s as useful when ‘tax’ leaves out GST, as in this story at Stuff. Admittedly, it’s not trivial to calculate how much GST people pay, but I’m sure the Treasury had looked at it.
- Scientists and journalists need to get better at communicating uncertainty, and people need to accept it’s there. (Ed Yong, in the Atlantic)
- Analysis at Pro Publica on minorities paying more for car insurance (in the US) even after adjusting for risk.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
The “net tax” is even sillier because
1) it doesn’t take into account the stages people are at e.g. a 5 year old, compared to a 25 year old, 35 year olds with two kids, compared to 50 years olds with kids who’ve flown the nest, compared to over 65 year olds,
(pretty much everyone comes into the world a net taker because of tax free medical care)
or
2) the unseen benefits people receive because other people are well educated, healthy, safe and housed. (Rich people get greater service from the police and legal system then poor people even when they are never in contact with them)
or
3) the unseen benefits people receive because other people do untaxed work like parent helpers in school, work done in the home, running social or sporting organisations.
or
4) the benefits which go straight through poor people’s pockets in to rich people’s pockets so you have to ask who is the real benficiary.
The accomodation benefit gets given to a beneficiary but ends up in the landlord’s pocket. WFF gets given to the beneficiary but the real beneficiary is the employer who gets to hold down wages and take the difference in profit. If these benefits were tossed, rents would have to come down and wages go up.
or
5)
rich people who can escape paying tax. Sam Morgan has talked about this
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/3613852/Sam-Morgan-defends-tax-comments
The thing is that society is set up so that most people take more than they earn over their life time and that’s a feature not a bug. Inflation means they pay less when young adults than they receive when retired.
7 years ago
Yes, there’s a bunch of reasons why net tax is deficient as a measure of who pays whom.
I’d still say it’s not completely useless as a cross-sectional quantity.
However, if you’re going to leave out a lot of tax, I do think it pretty much becomes completely useless.
7 years ago
Referring to the 1 in 500 year flood. I saw some numbers for a river, where the river volume for a 1 in 200 yr was estimated to be 13% higher than the 100 yr, and based on the river contour the flood height was 0.3m greater.
Even if they are estimated they can still be in a narrow band of water levels.
7 years ago
It can be; whether it is depends on a lot of details about the flood basin.
If you’ve got a small, steep catchment area, the peak floods depend mostly on local rain rates over short intervals. In the opposite direction, if you’re looking at the Waikato River, it could be that rains over a wide area of the North Island over quite a long a period of time could all contribute to the same flood peak.
7 years ago