For example, both sides might agree that rocket launchers are a step too far.

Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic strip, has always been an idiosyncratic, creative thinker. He has upped his output this election cycle. He is not always right but he is virtually always interesting. One of his gifts is looking at a tired issue from just a slightly different angle and coming up with a startling new perspective. Here is an example based on the gun control issue.

From Why Gun Control Can’t Be Solved in the USA by Scott Adams.

On average, Democrats (that’s my team*) use guns for shooting the innocent. We call that crime.

On average, Republicans use guns for sporting purposes and self-defense.

If you don’t believe me, you can check the statistics on the Internet that don’t exist. At least I couldn’t find any that looked credible.

But we do know that race and poverty are correlated. And we know that poverty and crime are correlated. And we know that race and political affiliation are correlated. Therefore, my team (Clinton) is more likely to use guns to shoot innocent people, whereas the other team (Trump) is more likely to use guns for sporting and defense.

That’s a gross generalization. Obviously. Your town might be totally different.

So it seems to me that gun control can’t be solved because Democrats are using guns to kill each other – and want it to stop – whereas Republicans are using guns to defend against Democrats. Psychologically, those are different risk profiles. And you can’t reconcile those interests, except on the margins. For example, both sides might agree that rocket launchers are a step too far. But Democrats are unlikely to talk Republicans out of gun ownership because it comes off as “Put down your gun so I can shoot you.”

Let’s all take a deep breath and shake off the mental discomfort I just induced in half of my readers. You can quibble with my unsupported assumptions about gun use, but keep in mind that my point is about psychology and about big group averages. If Republicans think they need guns to protect against Democrats, that’s their reality. And if Democrats believe guns make the world more dangerous for themselves, that is their reality. And they can both be right. Your risk profile is different from mine.

So let’s stop acting as if there is something like “common sense” gun control to be had if we all act reasonably. That’s not an option in this case because we all have different risk profiles when it comes to guns. My gun probably makes me safer, but perhaps yours makes you less safe. You can’t reconcile those interests.

Our situation in the United States is that people with different risk profiles are voting for their self-interests as they see it. There is no compromise to be had in this situation unless you brainwash one side or the other to see their self-interest differently. And I don’t see anyone with persuasion skills trying to do that on either side.

Fear always beats reason. So as long as Democrats are mostly using guns to shoot innocent people (intentionally or accidentally) and Republicans are mostly using guns for sport or self-defense, no compromise can be had.

If we had a real government – the kind that works – we would acknowledge that gun violence is not one big problem with one big solution. It is millions of people with different risk profiles voting their self-interest as they see it.

So stop acting like one side is stupid. Both sides of the gun issue are scared, and both have legitimate reasons to be that way. Neither side is “right.”

Markets distill the biases, opinions, & convictions of elites

An interesting observation.

Markets distill the biases, opinions, & convictions of elites. Structurally less able to predict populist movements. https://t.co/AONTtmxwLW

— TED (@EpicureanDeal) June 24, 2016

Mysteries of data display

Hmmm.

Stomach cancer kills fewer American men and women. https://t.co/i4yNRpkJbZ #health #progress pic.twitter.com/DvYEgdVyaI

— HumanProgress.org (@humanprogress) June 10, 2016

Great health achievement.

But as always I am fascinated by how we communicate things, particularly in numbers.

One of the standing rules of thumb is to watch the axis. Things get hidden by monkeying around by truncating ranges and other such tricks. Also pay attention to legends.

This is a great example. I would have sped right by without those two heuristics. And I don't think there is anything maliciously misleading going on. But the way the data is presented ends up being misleading even though it is a remarkable and positive story.

The first thing that caught my attention was that the two, nearly identical lines are not labelled. Going to the source data, the solid line is for men and the dotted line is for women. A glancing look makes you think that the cancer rates for women and men have plunged in tandem. And, in a fashion, they have.

But having sorted out the line labelling, you then notice that there are two Y axes with different ranges. The one on the left ranges from 1 to 9 odd and the one on the right ranges from 2 to 17. It takes a second to grasp what is going on.

The Y axis on the left is for women and on the right is for men. Let's follow this through. in 1950, women suffered roughly 9 stomach cancers per 100,000 women whereas men suffered stomach cancers at nearly twice that rate at 17 for 100,000 men.

By using different ranges, the chart hides an important fact. Yes, stomach cancers have decline at the same rate but they started from dramatically different points. Men suffer stomach cancer at nearly twice the rate as women.

And what about today? Looking at the chart, you'd think that men and women have converged to the same cancer rate. But they haven't. Men still suffer stomach cancer at nearly twice the rate as women, but both suffer at a far lower level than in the past. Women 1.45 per 100,000 and Men at 2.68 per 100,000. The ration of male suffers to female suffers has barely budged in 50 years.

This is virtually entirely a good news story, the decline in stomach cancer rates. But there is also a communications story in here.

Why use different Y axes ranges? By doing so you hide that men suffer stomach cancer at twice the rate of women and that hasn't changed in fifty years? By charting the data as they have elected to do, they hide a pretty interesting question. Why do men suffer stomach cancer at twice the rate? Is it simply a gender difference? Do men have sufficiently different diets (eat more red meat, drink more beer?) that that might cause the differential. Is the fact that women live longer than men in some way responsible for the differential? Are there other common organ cancers where there is such a strong variance between the sexes and do others penalize women over men, and if so, which and why?

The only reason I can think of to display the data in the fashion it has been displayed is if one were advocating for the distribution of research money. In other words, men would favor larger investments in stomach cancer research than women simply because of the differential.

But the originating site, HumanProgress, doesn't, at a cursory view, appear to me to be an advocacy group.

So a mystery and a good example of the importance of clear thinking about information display. Properly displayed, the data prompts some interesting and unresolved questions. Displayed as it is, the data suggests that the problem is all but solved.

Productivity has increased dramatically and in a short time frame

More than 700 years of income inequality in the UK measured via income share of the top 5% and Gini, 1980-2010 by Max Roser.

Click to enlarge

Excellent charting of what is a difficult to measure concept.

What is missing is the productivity dimension. Yes, income inequality is blessedly dramatically lower today than it was a hundred years ago. But that just measures the relative difference at the whole society level.

A hundred years ago, if you were in the bottom quintile, maybe the bottom two quintiles, you were border line starvation and even the middle income quintile was financially perilous. When everyone was working at such lower income, absolute income was a greater issue than relative income. It is only since we have become so prosperous so quickly that we have focused (mistakenly) on income inequality rather than what has always been the real root issue, productivity.

I think what these charts bring to the fore is that a hundred years ago poverty and income inequality were tantamount to starvation whereas today, definitional poverty and income inequality are really measures of relative discomfort.

And it is the rapidity of the spread of prosperity which is perhaps most remarkable of all. From top of mind, the bottom income quintile in the US in 2016 have a capital and durable goods consumption profile equivalent of that of the middle income quintile in 1970. There are a lot of people who are alive today with happy childhood memories of being middle income quintile in 1970.

Looking internationally, Mexico today has an average per capita GDP about where the US was in 1950 (from memory). Again, most of us today know someone who can remember the 1950s.

The only point here is that the income in individual and national productivity has increased dramatically and in a short time frame. It is disorienting and easy to lose perspective. Yes there are still poor countries and poor people within countries but what those terms actually mean in real life circumstances are far different from what they meant fifty and a hundred years ago.

History of hours worked per week

Interesting.

Data and interpretation

Hmmm.

After Orlando, who in Congress offered "thoughts & prayers"? Who demanded gun control https://t.co/jhNI2njIlX pic.twitter.com/nV5Eeirh6r

— Info=Beautiful (@infobeautiful) June 22, 2016

Very interesting example of the complexity of communication. It would be even more useful to see context and concatenations. For example, how many people who extended their thoughts and prayers also spoke up for civil rights?

Look at all nine examples. While any one person might more or less strongly agree with any particular sentiment, none of them are inherently "wrong." You can certainly read a greater inclination for making political points out of a tragedy among some than others.

This reminds me of word clouds (software that digests a body of text and then represents words in size based on their frequency of use. It is fascinating to read a passage and then see a word cloud representation of that passage. But usually it is hard to intuit a particular interpretation solely of frequency of word usage.

Same with this diagram. You think there must be something there, and there probably is, but it is hard to describe exactly what the represented data is telling you.

Over regulation of business and under regulation of government

Interesting observation.

One of the hallmarks of blue governance is over-regulation of private business & under-regulation of government: https://t.co/AQbdgWozbP

— Walter Russell Mead (@wrmead) June 22, 2016

I would pick at this a bit. Management (adaptive) is better than regulation (fixed) and regulation should be fit for purpose. I.e. more or less as required by circumstances.

File Under: Female Privilege

From Chivalry Is Not Dead When It Comes to Morality from New York University.

We’re More Likely to Protect Women Than We Are Men

We’re more likely to sacrifice a man than a woman when it comes to both saving the lives of others and in pursuing our self-interests, a team of psychology researchers has found.

“Our study indicates that we think women’s welfare should be preserved over men’s,” observes Oriel FeldmanHall, a post-doctoral researcher at New York University and the study’s lead author.

The research, conducted at Cambridge University’s Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and Columbia University, appears in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

In one experiment, study subjects read one of three versions of a “Trolley Dilemma”—a commonly used technique in psychology studies and akin to the “Lifeboat Question” (i.e., if you could save only three of five passengers in a lifeboat, whom would you choose?). In the trolley scenario, subjects read one of three versions of the dilemma, where each vignette described a man, woman, or gender-neutral bystander on the bridge. The participants were then asked how willing they were to “push the [man/woman/person] onto the path of the oncoming trolley” in order to save five others farther down the track.

The results showed that both female and male subjects were much more likely to push the male bystander or one of unspecified gender than they were the female bystander.

Dudes, don't stand on a bridge over a trolley.

Precision, nuance and efficiency

From the always rewarding Language Log, Economy of Expression by Victor Mair.

Mair is pointing out one half of a phenomenon which amounts to a paradox. Mair draws attention to the capacity of English for high density communication, also known as terseness. Much communicated with little. He offers these examples.

Flying back from Vienna on Austrian Airlines yesterday, I saw the following notices printed on the back of the seat in front of me:

Gurte während des sitzens geschlossen halten*

Fasten seat belt while seated

—

*some airlines begin this sentence with a "bitte", which would make the German even longer

Die schwimmweste befindet sich unter ihrem sitz

Life vest under your seat

As so many times before, I was struck by the terseness of English.

He links to a couple of other posts he has done making the same point but comparing English to Japanese, Russian, Chinese and French.

The paradox is that while English is able to communicate with great density (much meaning, few words), it is also the largest language in the world. See my post The English language hasn't got where it is by being pure. English has between 450,000 and 650,000 words depending on which dictionary you choose to use as your base. In contrast, German, according to traditional estimates, has a vocabulary of about 185,000, Russian 130,000, and French fewer than 100,000.

To reinforce Mair's point above about the efficiency of the English language, here is another way of looking at it. Despite having so many more words, fewer words and syllables are required to transmit the critical information. The number of syllables required to translate the Gospel of Mark into each language.

English 29,000
Teutonic languages (average) 32,650
French 36,500
Slavic languages (average) 36,500
Romance languages (average) 40,200
Indo-Iranian languages (average) 43,100

The upshot is that with a much larger vocabulary but also a much more efficient communication structure, English is both highly efficient but also has the capacity for great precision and nuance.

That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world.

Love of country is expressed in many ways. From Bill Murray's character in the movie Stripes.

We’re not Watusi, we’re not Spartans, we’re Americans. With a capital ‘A.’ And you know what that means? Do you? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We’re the underdog. We’re mutts. But there’s no animal that’s more faithful, that’s more loyal, more lovable than the mutt. Who saw ‘Old Yeller’? I cried my eyes out.