Docsity
Docsity

Prepare for your exams
Prepare for your exams

Study with the several resources on Docsity


Earn points to download
Earn points to download

Earn points by helping other students or get them with a premium plan


Guidelines and tips
Guidelines and tips

World of Happiness-Lecture Slides (Statistical Shenanigans)-Literature, Slides of Psychology of Happiness

These are the lecture slides by Dr. Danny Dorling who is a well known lecturer in the field of Happiness Studies. These Slides are from his lectures delivered in 2010. The following are the main points; Statistical Shenanigans, Sweet Peas, Nobel Prizes, Nobel Peace Prizes, Politically Innumerate, Education Statistics, Science, OECD, Geographical Distribution, Inequalities, Female Nobel Laureates.

Typology: Slides

2011/2012

Uploaded on 01/25/2012

lilwayne
lilwayne 🇬🇧

4.1

(7)

243 documents

1 / 23

Toggle sidebar

This page cannot be seen from the preview

Don't miss anything!

bg1
Statistical Shenanigans:
From Sweet Peas to Nobel Prizes,
how much
that we take for granted
ain't necessarily so
Danny Dorling
Royal Statistical Society
Annual Conference, Brighton 17th
September 2010
12:15pm - 1:35pm
Plenary 6 - Significance
Auditorium 2 - Hewison Hall
pf3
pf4
pf5
pf8
pf9
pfa
pfd
pfe
pff
pf12
pf13
pf14
pf15
pf16
pf17

Partial preview of the text

Download World of Happiness-Lecture Slides (Statistical Shenanigans)-Literature and more Slides Psychology of Happiness in PDF only on Docsity!

Statistical Shenanigans:

From Sweet Peas to Nobel Prizes,

how much

that we take for granted

ain't necessarily so

Danny Dorling

Royal Statistical Society

Annual Conference, Brighton 17th

September 2010

12:15pm - 1:35pm Plenary 6 - Significance Auditorium 2 - Hewison Hall

Objectives

“This talk presents a short and

somewhat irreverent tour through

social statistics, asking how

unbiased our great statisticians

really are, examining the 19th

century pioneers of social

statistics and giving a few

examples from their work

(including on sweat peas and

paupers)”

Results and Conclusions

“Underlying all these stories is the question

of how best we can "collect, arrange,

digest and publish facts, illustrating the

condition and prospect of society in its

material, social, and moral relations." - as

read the original aims of the Royal

Statistical Society. How impartial are the

statistics of each age?”

Politically

innumerate?

  • There is no such thing as a

neutral social statistic

  • But don‟t be afraid of social

statistics

  • Consider two numbers:
    • £70,000,000,000 – structural

deficit 2010

  • £77,000,000,000 – rise in

wealth of the richest 1000

people in the UK 2009-2010.

(Sources – both the Sunday

Times Newspaper)

Are they comparable?

Figure 1: Children by student proficiency

in science in the Netherlands, according

to the OECD, 2006 (%)

2%advanced

11%

developed

26%

27% effective

simple

21%

barely 11% limited

2% none

Is this how children in the Netherlands really are?

Figure 2: Distribution of children by

proficiency in science, according to the

OECD, 2006 (%) Children

….maybe this is all b- b- b- baloney (mustn‟t use a rude word now, not if we are well-educated). Look at the shape of those curves ……. They are all very similar aren‟t they?

What could be different?

• If there was not such a need to get the

qualifications quickly to get above others

in the labour market students could begin

to learn and think rather than increasingly

cram and drink.

And how does what we still do now appear so often to replicate mistakes that we made in the past?

Figure 4: Geographical distribution of

paupers, England and Wales, 1891

Source: Figure redrawn from the original. Pearson, K (1895) „Contributions to

the mathematical theory of evolution – II. Skew variation in homogeneous

material‟, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series

A, Mathematical, vol 186, pp 343-414, Figure 17, plate 13)

0

20

40

60

80

100

120

-200-

0 100200300400500600700800900 1000

normal(N) binomial(B) data(D)

Too good to be true?

Don‟t the little dots form a pleasing pattern? - maybe a little too pleasing. I just point this out to suggest someone checks.

Galtons‟ 1877 graph: Source: Magnello, E. and B. V. Loon (2009).

Introducing Statistics. London, Icon Books. (Page 123)

Floating a boat

If someone finds that Galton‟s

famous sweet pea graph was a

little too good to be true this does

not mean that sweet peas did not

behave in this way. It is just an

example of what was then normal

and what, in a slightly tempered

form, is still normal amongst many

statisticians: to get a little carried

away with underlying theories that

everything is normally distributed

and, if that is not found to be the

case then fit the data to such a

curve to make it „normal‟.

Figure 6: Distribution of income showing

inequality (US$), worldwide, 2000

Source: Figures (in purchase power parity, US$) derived from estimates by Angus Maddison, from a version produced in spreadsheets given in ww.worldmapper.org, based in turn on UNDP income inequality estimates for each country. See Dorling, D., 2010, Injustice:

(..$$$$.....annually………….....)

40c a day70c a day1.4$ a day

3$ a day6$ a day

Europe

Americas Asia Africa

How we got today‟s inequalities

1977

1973

1968

1969

Africa

Asia

Americas

Europe

Figure 7: Real growth per decade in GDP (%), per person, by continent, 1955–

2001. The log normal distribution we see today was due to 1980s divergence

Source: as Figure 6

And how unusual are our times?

0%

2%

4%

6%

8%

10%

12%

14%

16%

18%

20%

1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000

Figure 9: Share of all income received by the richest 1% in Britain, 1918– 2005

Note: Lower line is post-tax share. Source: Atkinson, A.B. (2003) „Top incomes in the United Kingdom over the twentieth century‟, Nuffield College Working Papers, Oxford (http://ideas.repec.org/p/nuf/esohwp/_043.html), figures 2 and 3; from 1922 to 1935 the 0.1% rate was used to estimate the 1% when the 1% rate was missing, and for 2005 the data source was Brewer, M., Sibieta, L. and Wren-Lewis, L. (2008) Racing away? Income inequality and the evolution of high incomes, London: Institute for Fiscal Studies, p 11; the final post-tax rate of 12.9% is derived from 8.6%+4.3%, the pre-tax rate scaled from 2001.

And is recession really over?

Figure 10: The crash: US mortgage debt, 1977–2009 (% change and US$ billion)

Source: US Federal Reserve: Debt growth, borrowing and debt outstanding tables

(www.federalreserve.gov/releases/Z1/Current/) Right-hand axis, net US$ billion

additional borrowed - Left-hand axis: percentage change in that amount.