Chris Green writes: >Again, Allen overwhelms with far more bulk than (I feel) >it is appropriate to respond to in a forum such as this.
So who decides what is appropriate as a response to another TIPSters contentions? I could have quoted just a couple of the academic critics of Wilkinson & Pickett’s thesis, but that would have left open the possibility that these were maverick opinions. I could have simple cited the articles, but three of them were lengthy critiques, and which TIPSters have the time to plough through them unless they have a good reason for doing so? That is why I extracted their conclusions, and showed that a wide range of relevant academics found W&P’s thesis wanting. And why Chris, who told us previously that he was “enjoying” reading *The Spirit Level*, a book heavy with figures, statistics and diagrams that need thoughtful examination, should find a total of some 700 words in criticism of the book a chore is a puzzle to me. >I will say, in response to Kay's critique, that one should look at >the whole book. It is written for a popular audience, and so does >not include correlations coefficients in the main text, but they are >included in appendix. A fair point, though it doesn’t deal with W&P’s over-confident contentions based on very-scattered scatter diagrams the lines through which are heavily dependent on a few outliers. Nor does it deal with the fact that the reviewers I cited are all working (or have worked) in the fields of economics and/or sociology, so their criticisms are not simply based on the book itself (as is made clear in the lengthier reviews). >The burden of proof is on the critic to provide an >equally compelling case for some other variable. I note that, keeping in mind Mill’s dictum that “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that”, Chris did not answer my request for critical responses to the book that he has sought out. In fact some of the academics I cited do reference articles (some authored or co-authored by themselves) that make a case for different factors. For instance Goldthorpe cites such articles in his references, and Leigh cites two articles he has co-authored that run counter to one aspect of W&P’s contentions. (The same is true for other scholarly critiques that I did not cite.) >an equally compelling case What is evident from the reviews I cited is that W&P’s thesis is far from compelling for quite a few academics who have considerable knowledge of the relevant subject matter. Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London allenester...@compuserve.com http://www.esterson.org ------------------------------------------ From: Christopher Green <chri...@yorku.ca> Subject: Re: The joy of stats Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2010 08:23:56 -0500 Again, Allen overwhelms with far more bulk than (I feel) it is appropriate to respond to in a forum such as this. I will say, in response to Kay's critique, that one should look at the whole book. It is written for a popular audience, and so does not include correlations coefficients in the main text, but they are included in appendix. As for it seeming a bit utopian, yes it is, in the sense that there is essentially zero chance the the populations of the US and UK, especially, will ever accept these recommendations. Inequality has (sadly) become an entrenched part of their national ideologies - the "pain" that signals to them they are getting maximum "gain" from their economies. That people refuse to do what is good for them doesn't mean, however, that it wouldn't sill be good for them. For myself, I find the evidence provided in the book quite compelling. As with all correlational research, it is possible that there is something else, correlated with equality, going on. The authors are aware of this issue and address it extensively. The burden of proof is on the critic to provide an equally compelling case for some other variable. Chris --- Christopher D Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M6C 1G4 Canada ----------------------------------------- From: Allen Esterson <allenester...@compuserve.com> Subject: Re: The joy of stats Date: Thu, 16 Dec 2010 06:51:06 -0500 (EST) On 15 December Chris Green cited evidence he thinks is supportive of >the conclusions of the book I was "pushing" a few weeks >ago: _The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone_. As I wrote in a post under the thread on “objectivity” recently, while one can never completely remove one’s own biases and preconceptions in assessing a thesis, one of the basic principles is that one should seek out writings critical of the thesis before drawing any firm conclusions. (John Stuart Mill puts the same notion rather more strongly in his essay “On Liberty”: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”) This is the third time in recently weeks that Chris has “pushed” *The Spirit Level*. So I ask of Chris, which of the several informed critiques of the “Spirit Level” that have been published, some of which are easily found on the internet, have you read? There are plenty of informed critical responses out there, not by any means all from the political Right. For instance, Andrew Leigh (former professor of economics at the Australian National University and currently a Labor member of the Australian House of Representatives who regards himself as “about as anti-inequality an economist as you’ll find”) writes: “John Kay’s view in the FT http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/77b1bd26-14db-11de-8cd1-0000779fd2ac.html#axzz17MJEMHNx comes closest to my own: " ‘a larger source of irritation is the authors’ apparent belief that the application of regression methods to economic and social statistics is as novel to social science as it apparently is to medicine. The evidence presented in the book is mostly a series of scatter diagrams, with a regression line drawn through them. No data is provided on the estimated equations, or on relevant statistical tests. If you remove the bold lines from the diagram, the pattern of points mostly looks random, and the data dominated by a few outliers.’ " http://previousleigh.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/look-at-the-changes-not-at-the-levels/ Here is David Runciman (Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at Trinity College Cambridge), in the well-left-of-centre London Review of Books: “Why then, given all this – the concise argument, the weight of the evidence, the unmistakable practical purpose of the authors – does the book still feel oddly utopian? Part of the problem, I think, is that the argument is not as straightforward as its authors would like. Despite their obvious sense of conviction, and maybe even because of it, they fudge the central issue at crucial moments, whereas at others, perhaps in order to compensate, they overstate their case, which only makes things worse.” http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n20/david-runciman/how-messy-it-all-is And from Christian Bjørnskov (Associate Professor of Economics, University of Aarhus, Sweden): “To ordinary readers without firm statistical training, this approach appears to represent careful and 'painstakingly marshaled' evidence, as The Economist put it. However, to readers with a background in economics or political science, the evidence in the book is wanting. When seeing strong conclusions drawn from scatter plots and other simple figures, for example, one has to ask three questions: 1) are the relations driven by outlier observations; 2) are the findings robust to controlling for other relevant factors; and 3) are the relations likely to be causal? Surprisingly often, Wilkinson and Pickett’s claims fail to address one or more of these questions. “The bottom line is that this is a well-written, stimulating polemic. It nevertheless suffers from the same problems as one-trick ponies: if the one trick does not impress you, the show is a failure. Wilkinson and Pickett’s trick simply does not hold up to empirical scrutiny.” http://nonicoclolasos.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/pdr-bjornskov-review-file.pdf Finally, John Goldthorpe, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Nuffield College, Oxford, in "European Social Review", 2009: “Questions might be raised about every link in this proposed causal chain originating in income inequality…[…] Wilkinson and Pickett have no time for nicely balanced judgements. They believe that the evidence they present shows beyond doubt that more equal societies ‘do better’, and they are also confident that they have the right explanation for why this is so... Their case is by no means so securely established as they try to make out... it has been called into question by other leading figures in the field – a fact that WP might have more fully acknowledged... WP’s inadequate, one-dimensional understanding of social stratification leads to major problems in their account of how the contextual effect is produced." http://esr.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2009/10/22/esr.jcp046.abstract Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London allenester...@compuserve.com http://www.esterson.org --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=7268 or send a blank email to leave-7268-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
