June 7, 2023
Briefly
- Michael Neilson and Chris Knox at the NZ$ Herald have an excellent look at crime statistics and what you can’t straightforwardly conclude from them
- Outsourcing: there was a story about garlic to stop Covid. Here are responses from a blog at the University of Waikato, and from misinformation.wiki
- Many French labour regulations start to apply when you have 50 employees, says the Economist, showing the graph on the right that has a big drop in the number of businesses reporting 50 or more employees
The graph on the left shows the same self-reporting from a different source. The graph in the middle shows actual numbers of employees estimated using payroll data, with nothing happening at 50 — an interesting difference (from)
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
The French data is a very typical feature when one examines business data. Much of business structures relate to legal, tax, labour and admin efficiencies, so what you may think as the business may not be the actuality. Certainly don’t expect smooth distributions. Also be very wary of business data combined from different sources. Here at StatsNZ we do a lot of entity resolution.
2 years ago
Yes — what’s most interesting is the difference between the self-reported and officially-estimated figures rather than either one separately
2 years ago
That report by Neilson and Knox is excellent. It doesn’t let the Herald off the hook for grossly inflating our crime woes, but it helps. But you have to ask yourself where the academic criminologists are. I have been used to the equivalent breed in public health, and they routinely draw up statistics and inform and correct public and media perspectives. I have seen almost nothing like that in the crime area. Jarrod Gilbert does something like that, but it is not quantitative and, while insightful, can be idiosyncratic.
2 years ago