Adventures in Social Policy

Home of an undergraduate interested in economic and social policy. Links, reflections on lectures and reading recommendations. (Unpretentious, I promise.)

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Mistakes, we’ve drawn a few

Learning from our errors in data visualisation

More bad charts! This time with good explanations of why, and how to fix them, from a data journalist at The Economist.

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From people asking whether she went to Oxford or Cambridge, to men assuming she is the ‘coffee girl’, Tara O’Reilly says Parliament can often be an unwelcoming environment for young, working-class women. But the Labour staffer – who last week won the Young Women’s Trust’s ‘Trailblazer’ Award – believes the culture can change. She talks to Marie Le Conte

An excellent interview with a trailblazing staffer.

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Adam Smith, Misanthrope - John Kay

Adam Smith would, as is widely recognised, have been sceptical about the current vogue for ‘industrial strategy’: ‘The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not …

A pleasing list of times Adam Smith disapproved of people, from economics writer John Kay.

(Given how often Smith’s ideas are misrepresented this is also a seriously useful reminder.)

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The Book

"SMART & STREET SMART" Ha-Joon Chang Professor, Cambridge University "WILL DO A WORLD OF GOOD" Bill McKibben Founder, 350...

Recommendation: the book on finance if you don’t really care about finance.

If you’re approaching financial systems from the ‘burn it down’, ‘evil capitalist’, or ‘disinvestment campaign’ angles this is the book for you. If you want to be a trader you should read it too. How it works, how to experiment, and how to change it.

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Wetherspoons' Brexit-Themed Mail-Out Dodges Regulators

The company’s effort exposed a loophole in how political communications are regulated outside of an election period.

This is interesting! There’s a growing push for better regulation of political advertising, especially targeted ads on social media etc. (See the Electoral Reform Society’s new report on campaign laws). This example, of political material sent out by a company outside of an election or similar shows a gap in the regulations.

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How the BBC Visual and Data Journalism team works with graphics in R

Over the past year, we‘ve fundamentally changed how we produce graphics.

A great blog from the BBC Visual and Data Journalism team on greating graphics in R, with links to their style package and ‘cookbook’ of tips for working with ggplot2.

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Why we should fear technophobia - UnHerd

Do you turn your phone off an hour before bed? Do you feel like you ought to? Have you heard that the blue light affects your brain in some way? Throws off your circadian rhythms? You’re not alone.

This is good! Not just on technophobia, but on the important distinction between a paper finding a difference is statistically significant (i.e. probably not a fluke), and the effect size (i.e. does it actually make much difference?).

“Small links are blown out of all proportion, and extrapolated from mildly interesting scientific finding to major lifestyle or societal intervention.

The key thing to note here is that when scientists say some finding is “statistically significant”, they don’t mean that it’s important.”

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Brexit: The draft withdrawal agreement

How to make sense of it? Try starting here:

Commons Library: 7 documents you should bookmark  links to the original sources, and some factsheet explainers from the EU

Institute for Government explainer articles, especially on what’s changed since March and the Northern Ireland protocol (both in handy table form)

Open Europe’s analysis

And what’s next?

IFG’s useful infographic (plus more nuanced report)

Possibly a Conservative party leadership challenge

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The pastoral role of the party whips

Andrew Defty, University of Lincoln, discusses the pastoral support offered by party whips in Westminster .

Whips are often portrayed as enforcers (see the original House of Cards), but in their pursuit of making sure enough MPs vote on the party line they also have a role in holding MPs together.

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My list of five of the best introductions to economics wasn’t exactly the usual suspects, but I wanted to stray a little further off the obvious territory and recommend six books you might wa…

Sidle sideways into economics with Tim Harford! (I wholeheartedly recommend Ben Goldacre as well.)

I can’t remember now if this was a good introduction, but Asimov’s Foundation Series certainly planted a seed in my brain.

More recently, Becky Chamber’s society in Record of a Spaceborn Few impressed me.

And of course my economics textbook recommended Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle. 

What books would you recommend for a sideways route into economics?

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Map of the incredible decline in child mortality from 1800 to 1950 to 2015.

Keep reading

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I like the inclusion of the first map even though it’s a very broad estimate and there probably was in fact significant variation between regions, to drive home that just 200 years ago nobody was doing well on this.

Nowadays even in Somalia the rate is less than half what it was in 1950, wow.

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Child mortality here is the percent of children who died under the age of 5 (which I guess is the standard measure but I had to look it up, so here you go).

And it is a huge improvement, but that’s still 1 in 200 or so children in America, and it makes me a little sad.

But the 1950 numbers are crazy. That’s my parent’s generation, roughly! Everyone my grandparent’s age presumably knew a bunch of dead babies.

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How come 1% Russia is in blue but 1% China is in green?

[jumpingjacktrash]

probably due to decimal places they didn’t put on the map due to space.

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This blog post sums it up: “The world is much better. The world is awful. The world can be much better. All three statements are true.”

 https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better

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Women MPs of the World conference

“More great images from the #WomenMPsoftheWorld conference taken by the @HouseofCommons's @Jess__Taylor__”

Photos from the first Women MPs of the World conference held in the House of Commons today.

https://twitter.com/hashtag/WomenMPsoftheWorld?src=hash Women’s place is in the House.

©UKParliament/Jessica Taylor

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Exclusive: Tories Accused Of 'Rigging' Parliament To Avoid Defeat Over Gambling Reform Delays

Labour and Tory rebels are furious at the government's tactics.

Parliamentary procedure matters!

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R. Silberzahn et al. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science. 2018

I love this paper. One data set, one question, 29 teams of researchers,  21 unique combinations of covariates, and, of course, significant differences in the findings.

The authors have also written about how more crowd-sourcing and collaboration in research could improve the robust of results.

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How WhatsApp stops the Tory plotters plotting | The Spectator

How to explain Theresa May’s resilience? As Prime Minister, she has survived mishaps and calamities that would have finished off her predecessors. She has no shortage of rebels keen to succeed or…

Fed up with your WhatsApp groups? So are MPs, apparently. 

This is an interesting discussion of how politics really gets done (or fails to, in this case).

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Sanjay Srivastava

We can talk about bias from experimental effects without impugning someone’s character, so can we try to discuss bias from data analysis choices in the same way? I.e. less getting side-tracked by how the honest researcher wouldn’t ever p-hack, more systematic consideration of safeguards.

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Madestam, A., D. Shoag, S. Veuger, and D. Yanagizawa-Drott. 2013

Can protests make a difference? This paper uses the natural experiment of different weather on the day of the first big tea party protests to show that the movement did affect policy making.