Posts filed under Just look it up (283)

Keith Ng drew my attention on Twitter to an ad from Labour saying “Under National, the number of young people not earning or learning has increased by 41%”.

When you see this sort of claim, you should usually expect two things: first, that the claim will be true in the sense that there will be two numbers that differ by 41%; second, that it will not be the most informative summary of the data in question.

If you look on Infoshare, in the Household Labour Force Survey, you can find data on NEET (not in education, employment, or training).  The number was 64100 in the fourth quarter of 2008, when Labour lost the election.  It’s now (Q1, 2017) 90800, which is, indeed, 41% higher.  Let’s represent the ad by a graph:

We can fill in the data points in between:

Now, the straight line doesn’t look as convincing.

Also, why are we looking at the number, when population has changed over this time period. We really should care about the rate (percentage)

Measuring in terms of rates the increase is smaller — 27%.  More importantly, though, the rate was even higher at the end of the first quarter of National’s administration than it is now.

The next thing to notice is the spikes every four quarters or so: NEET is higher in the summer and lower in the winter because of the school  year.  You might wonder if StatsNZ had produced a seasonally adjusted version, and whether it was also conveniently on Infoshare…

The increase is now 17%

But for long-term comparisons of policy, you’d probably want a smoothed version that incorporates more than one quarter of data. It turns out that StatsNZ have done this, too, and it’s on Infoshare.

The increase is, again 17%. Taking out the seasonal variation, short-term variation, and sampling noise makes the underlying pattern clearer.  NEET increased dramatically in 2009, decreased, and has recently spiked. The early spike may well have been the recession, which can’t reasonably be blamed on any NZ party.  The recent increase is worrying, but thinking of it as trend over 9 years isn’t all that helpful.

Given the discussions of immigration in the past weeks, I decided to look for some historical data.  Stats NZ has a report “A Century of Censuses”, with a page on ‘proportion of population born overseas.” Here’s the graph

The proportion of immigrants has never been very low, but it fell from about 1 in 2 in the late 19th century to about 1 in 6 in the middle of the 2oth century, and has risen to about 1 in 4 now. The increase has been going on for the entire lifetime of any NZ member of Parliament; the oldest was born roughly at Peak Kiwi in the mid-1940s.

Seeing that immigrants have been a large minority of New Zealand for over a century doesn’t necessarily imply anything about modern immigration policy — Hume’s Guillotine, “no ought deducible from is,” cuts that off.  But I still think some people would find it surprising.

In New Zealand, the Government Statistician reports to the Minister of Statistics, currently Mark Mitchell.  For about a decade, the UK has had a different system, where the National Statistician reports to the UK Statistics Authority, which is responsible directly to Parliament. The system is intended to make official statistics more clearly independent of the government of the day.

An additional role of the UK Statistics Authority is as a sort of statistics ombudsman when official statistics are misused.  There’s a new letter from the Chair to the UK political parties

The UK Statistics Authority has the statutory objective to promote and safeguard the production and publication of official statistics that serve the public good.

My predecessors Sir Michael Scholar and Sir Andrew Dilnot have in the past been obliged to write publicly about the misuse of official statistics in other pre-election periods and during the EU referendum campaign. Misuse at any time damages the integrity of statistics, causes confusion and undermines trust.

I write now to ask for your support and leadership to ensure that official statistics are used throughout this General Election period and beyond, in the public interest and in accordance with the principles of the Code of Practice for Official Statistics. In particular, the statistical sources should be clear and accessible to all; any caveats or limitations in the statistics should be respected; and campaigns should not pick out single numbers that differ from the picture painted by the statistics as a whole.

I am sending identical letters to the leaders of the main political parties, with a copy to Sir Jeremy Heywood, Cabinet Secretary.

We don’t have anyone whose job it is to write that sort of letter here, but it would be nice if the political parties (and their partisans) still followed this advice.

The graph is from a Google Trends search for  “International Men’s Day“.

There are two peaks. In the majority of years, the larger peak is on International Women’s Day, and the smaller peak is on the day itself.

The World Economic Forum (the people who run the Davos meetings) are circulating this graph:

According to the graph, New Zealand is at the bottom of the OECD, with 0% waste composted or recycled.  We’ve seen this graph before, with a different colour scheme. The figure for NZ is, of course, utterly bogus.

The only figure the OECD report had on New Zealand was for landfill waste, so obviously landfill waste was 100% of that figure, and other sources were 0%.   If that’s the data you have available, NZ should just be left out of the graph — and one might have hoped the World Economic Forum had enough basic cluefulness to do so.

A more interesting question is what the denominator should be. The definition the OECD was going for was all waste sent for disposal from homes and from small businesses that used the same disposal systems as homes. That’s a reasonable compromise, but it’s not ideal. For example, it excludes composting at home. It also counts reuse and reduced use of recyclable or compostable materials as bad rather than good.

But if we’re trying to approximate the OECD definition, roughly where should NZ be?  I can’t find figures for the whole country, but there’s some relevant –if outdated — information in Chapter 3 of the Waste Assessement for the Auckland Council Waste Management Plan. If you count just kerbside recycling pickup as a fraction of kerbside recycling+waste pickup, the diversion figure is 35%. That doesn’t count composting, and it’s from 2007-8, so it’s an underestimate. Based on this, NZ is probably between USA and Australia on the graph.

The headlines at both the Herald and Stuff say they’re about Lotto winners, but the vastly more numerous losers have to have basically the same demographics. That means any statistics drawn from a group of 12 winners are going to be very unreliable.

There some more reliable sources.  There’s (limited) information released by NZ Lotteries under the Official Information Act.  There’s also more detailed survey data from the 2012 Health and Lifestyles Survey (PDF)

Of the 12 people in today’s stories, 11 were men, even though men and women play Lotto at about the same rate. There’s a lot less variation by household income than I would have guessed. There is some variation by ethnicity, with Asians being less likely to play Lotto. People under 25 are a bit less likely to play. It’s all pretty boring.

I’ve complained a few times that clicky bogus polls have an error rate as bad as a random sample of about ten people, and are useless.  Here we have a random sample of about ten people, and it’s pretty useless.

Except as advertising.

The Chief Coroner has released provisional suicide statistics for the year to June 2016.  As I wrote last year, the rate of suicide in New Zealand is basically not changing.  The Herald’s story, by Martin Johnston, quotes the Chief Coroner on this point

“Judge Marshall interpreted the suicide death rate as having remained consistent and said it showed New Zealand still had a long way to go in turning around the unacceptably high toll of suicide.”

The headline and graphs don’t make this clear

Here’s the graph from the Herald

If you want a bar graph, it should go down to zero, and it would then show how little is changing

I’d prefer a line graph showing expected variation if there wasn’t any underlying change: the shading is one and two standard deviations around the average of the nine years’ rates

As Judge Marshall says, the suicide death rate has remained consistent. That’s our problem.  Focusing on the year to year variation misses the key point.

Auckland Transport released new patronage data, and FigureNZ tidied it up to make it easily computer-readable, so I thought I’d look at some of it.  What I’m going to show is a decomposition of the data into overall trends, seasonal variation, and random stuff just happening. As usual, click to embiggen the pictures.

First, the trends: rides are up.

It’s hard to see the trend in ferry use, so here’s a version on a log scale — meaning that the same proportional trend would look the same for all three modes of transport

Train use is increasing (relatively) faster than bus or ferry use.  There’s also an interesting bump in the middle that we’ll get back to.

Now, the seasonal patterns. Again, these are on a logarithmic scale, so they show relative variation

The clearest signal is that ferry use peaks in summer, when the other modes are at their minimum. Also, the Christmas minimum is a bit lower for trains: to see this, we can combine the two graphs:

It’s not surprising that train use falls by more: they turn the trains off for a lot of the holiday period.

Finally, what’s left when you subtract the seasonal and trend components:

The highest extra variation in both train and ferry rides was in September and October 2011: the Rugby World Cup.

There has been some controversy about changes to how unemployment is computed in the Household Labour Force Survey. As StatsNZ had explained, the changes would be back-dated to March 2007, to allow for comparisons.  However, from Stuff earlier this week:

In a media release Robertson, Labour’s finance spokesman, said National was “actively massaging official unemployment statistics” by changing the measure for joblessness to exclude those using websites, such as Seek or TradeMe.

Robertson was referring to the Household Labour Force Survey, due to be released on Wednesday, which he says would “almost certainly show a decrease in unemployment” as a result of the Government “manipulating official data to suit its own needs”.

Mr Robertson has since withdrawn this claim, and is now saying

“I accept the Chief Statistician’s assurances on the reason for the change in criteria but New Zealanders need to be aware that National Ministers have a track record of misusing and misrepresenting statistics.”

That’s a reasonable position — and some of the examples have appeared on StatsChat — but I don’t think the stories in the media have made it clear how serious the original accusation was (even if perhaps unintentionally).

Official statistics such as the unemployment estimates are politically sensitive, and it’s obvious why governments would want to change them. Argentina, famously, did this to their inflation estimates. As a result, no-one believed Argentinian economic data, which gets expensive when you’re trying to borrow money. For that reason, sensible countries structure their official statistics agencies to minimise political influence, and maximise independence.  New Zealand does have a first-world official statistics system — unlike many countries with similar economic resources — and it’s a valuable asset that can’t be taken for granted.

The system is set up so the Government shouldn’t have the ability to “actively massage” official unemployment statistics for minor political gain. If they did, well, ok, it was hyperbole when I said on Twitter ‘we’d need to go through StatsNZ with fire and the sword’, but the Government Statistician wouldn’t be the only one who’d need replacing.

This appeared on Twitter

Now, I could just about believe NZ was near the bottom of the OECD, but to accept zero recycling and composting is a big ask.  Even if some of the recycling ends up in landfill, surely not all of it does.  And the garden waste people don’t charge enough to be putting all my wisteria clippings into landfill.

So, I looked up the source (updated link). It says to see the Annex Notes. Here’s the note for New Zealand

New Zealand: Data refer to amount going to landfill

The data point for New Zealand is zero by definition — they aren’t counting any of the recycling and composting.

When the most you can hope for is that the lies in the graph will be explained in the footnotes, you need to read the footnotes.