The committee, she said, “sees this issue as important and pressing and we hope to do all that we can as a peace church to protect people in our community … according to our religious convictions, our constitutional rights and Lancaster County’s history of supporting immigrants.”
.. On Monday, White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told reporters that part of the CBO report was “absurd,” and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said, “We disagree strenuously with the report that was put out.”.. Hall, a conservative economist, responded to the email, Hoagland said, writing that “he was doing the job he’s paid to do.”.. Its analysis, for example, of the White House’s proposed tax cut plan could find that large reductions in corporate or individual tax rates could lead to a big spike in the deficit. It could also issue a report about the economic impact of building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border... “They appointed this person,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said. “He was supposed to be a conservative person. Unfortunately for Republicans, he’s also an honest person.”.. “I’m concerned about it, but let’s face it, this is a tough baby to take care of and there will be some people who are left out,” said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). “There isn’t enough money in the world to cover everybody the way they’d like to be covered.”.. Hall was hand-picked for the CBO job in 2015 by congressional Republicans, including Price, who at the time was a GOP congressman from Georgia... The Obama administration routinely objected to CBO assessments, but it often challenged CBO’s methodology or forecast modeling and didn’t dismiss reports outright.
New Data Suggest U.K. Government Figures Are Getting Released Early
‘The more prerelease access you have, the more likely it is that these things are going to be leaked,’ says the executive director of the Royal Statistical Society
U.K. government-bond futures often move sharply in the 24 hours before sensitive economic reports are released, an analysis of trading data shows, a phenomenon that suggests some investors may be trading with knowledge of official statistics before they are made public.
.. Over a hundred people, from Prime Minister Theresa May to dozens of policy advisers and press officers, can get to see some of the figures a day before they come out.
.. Some officials believe, for instance, that there was a persistent leak of British gross domestic product data in 2009 and 2010
.. This episode ended immediately after the May 2010 general election, when many of the individuals with prerelease access changed.
.. Officials say the wide and early briefing is so lawmakers can prepare how to present the data to the media and public.
.. In the 60 minutes before data was published, bond-futures prices moved, on average, by 0.029%—in the direction they would end up going after publication. That is more than a third of total movement in the two hours surrounding the release.
.. So a gain of 0.029% would add about £68 million in value.
.. In five of the seven cases where strong evidence of “price drift” was found in the U.S. by Prof. Kurov and his co-authors, the data were released by private organizations where security arrangements aren’t required to be as strict
.. Strong evidence of prices moving in the direction they would end up going after publication, or drift, was found in only two of 14 data releases published by U.S. government agencies, according to Prof. Kurov’s analysis.
The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Statistical and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge; statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the “logic of science”; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can’t be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically—but… let’s not be suckers. The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let’s face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system).
.. After 1998, when a “Nobel-crowned” collection of people (and the crème de la crème of the financial economics establishment) blew up Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund, because the “scientific” methods they used misestimated the role of the rare event, such methodologies and such claims on understanding risks of rare events should have been discredited.
.. While most human thought (particularly since the enlightenment) has focused us on how to turn knowledge into decisions, my new mission is to build methods to turn lack of information, lack of understanding, and lack of “knowledge” into decisions—how, as we will see, not to be a “turkey”.
.. certain class of relationships that “look good” in research papers almost never replicate in real life (in spite of the papers making some claims with a “p” close to infallible)
.. For instance you do not “need evidence” that the water is poisonous to not drink from it. You do not need “evidence” that a gun is loaded to avoid playing Russian roulette, or evidence that a thief a on the lookout to lock your door. You need evidence of safety—not evidence of lack of safety— a central asymmetry that affects us with rare events. This asymmetry in skepticism makes it easy to draw a map of danger spots.
.. My classical metaphor: A Turkey is fed for a 1000 days—every days confirms to its statistical department that the human race cares about its welfare “with increased statistical significance”. On the 1001st day, the turkey has a surprise.
.. And one Professor Ben Bernanke pronounced right before the blowup that we live in an era of stability and “great moderation”
.. I have nothing against economists: you should let them entertain each others with their theories and elegant mathematics, and help keep college students inside buildings. But beware: they can be plain wrong, yet frame things in a way to make you feel stupid arguing with them. So make sure you do not give any of them risk-management responsibilities.)
.. In Mediocristan, exceptions occur but don’t carry large consequences. Add the heaviest person on the planet to a sample of 1000. The total weight would barely change. In Extremistan, exceptions can be everything (they will eventually, in time, represent everything). Add Bill Gates to your sample: the wealth will jump by a factor of >100,000. So, in Mediocristan, large deviations occur but they are not consequential—unlike Extremistan.
.. Fourth Quadrant: Complex decisions in Extremistan: Welcome to the Black Swan domain. Here is where your limits are. Do not base your decisions on statistically based claims. Or, alternatively, try to move your exposure type to make it third-quadrant style (“clipping tails”).
How statistics lost their power – and why we should fear what comes next
The ability of statistics to accurately represent the world is declining. In its wake, a new age of big data controlled by private companies is taking over – and putting democracy in peril
In theory, statistics should help settle arguments. They ought to provide stable reference points that everyone – no matter what their politics – can agree on. Yet in recent years, divergent levels of trust in statistics has become one of the key schisms that have opened up in western liberal democracies. Shortly before the November presidential election, a study in the US discovered that 68% of Trump supporters distrusted the economic datapublished by the federal government.
.. In the UK, a research project by Cambridge University and YouGov looking at conspiracy theories discovered that 55% of the population believes that the government “is hiding the truth about the number of immigrants living here”.
.. One of its main findings is that people often respond warmly to qualitative evidence, such as the stories of individual migrants and photographs of diverse communities. But statistics – especially regarding alleged benefits of migration to Britain’s economy – elicit quite the opposite reaction. People assume that the numbers are manipulated and dislike the elitism of resorting to quantitative evidence.
.. The problem is that the government is now engaged in self-censorship, for fear of provoking people further.
.. The declining authority of statistics – and the experts who analyse them – is at the heart of the crisis that has become known as “post-truth” politics. And in this uncertain new world, attitudes towards quantitative expertise have become increasingly divided. From one perspective, grounding politics in statistics is elitist, undemocratic and oblivious to people’s emotional investments in their community and nation. It is just one more way that privileged people in London, Washington DC or Brussels seek to impose their worldview on everybody else. From the opposite perspective, statistics are quite the opposite of elitist. They enable journalists, citizens and politicians to discuss society as a whole, not on the basis of anecdote, sentiment or prejudice, but in ways that can be validated. The alternative to quantitative expertise is less likely to be democracy than an unleashing of tabloid editors and demagogues to provide their own “truth” of what is going on across society.
.. This raises the alarming question of how – if at all – we will continue to have common ideas of society and collective progress, should statistics fall by the wayside.
.. ince the high-point of the Enlightenment in the late 18th century, liberals and republicans have invested great hope that national measurement frameworks could produce a more rational politics, organised around demonstrable improvements in social and economic life.
.. But for the most part it is thanks to statistics, and not to democratic institutions as such, that we can know what the public thinks about specific issues. We underestimate how much of our sense of “the public interest” is rooted in expert calculation, as opposed to democratic institutions.
.. the contemporary populist attack on “experts” is born out of the same resentment as the attack on elected representatives. In talking of society as a whole, in seeking to govern the economy as a whole, both politicians and technocrats are believed to have “lost touch” with how it feels to be a single citizen in particular.
.. Speaking scientifically about the nation – for instance in terms of macroeconomics – is an insult to those who would prefer to rely on memory and narrative for their sense of nationhood, and are sick of being told that their “imagined community” does not exist.
.. Yet in recent decades, the world has changed dramatically, thanks to the cultural politics that emerged in the 1960s and the reshaping of the global economy that began soon after. It is not clear that the statisticians have always kept pace with these changes. Traditional forms of statistical classification and definition are coming under strain from more fluid identities, attitudes and economic pathways.
.. the location of economic activity far more important, exacerbating the inequality between successful locations (such as London or San Francisco) and less successful locations (such as north-east England or the US rust belt). The key geographic units involved are no longer nation states. Rather, it is cities, regions or individual urban neighbourhoods that are rising and falling.
.. Headline-grabbing national indicators, such as GDP and inflation, conceal all sorts of localised gains and losses that are less commonly discussed by national politicians.
.. when politicians use national indicators to make their case, they implicitly assume some spirit of patriotic mutual sacrifice on the part of voters: you might be the loser on this occasion, but next time you might be the beneficiary. But what if the tables are never turned? What if the same city or region wins over and over again, while others always lose?
.. What if many of the defining questions of our age are not answerable in terms of the extent of people encompassed, but the intensity with which people are affected?
.. the focus on “unemployment” masked the rise of underemployment, that is, people not getting a sufficient amount of work or being employed at a level below that which they are qualified for.
.. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if these same people became suspicious of policy experts and the use of statistics in political debate, given the mismatch between what politicians say about the labour market and the lived reality.
.. it is not enough simply to know which box someone would prefer to put an “X” in. One also needs to know whether they feel strongly enough about doing so to bother. And when it comes to capturing such fluctuations in emotional intensity, polling is a clumsy tool.
.. Figures close to Donald Trump, such as his chief strategist Steve Bannon and the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, are closely acquainted with cutting-edge data analytics techniques, via companies such as Cambridge Analytica, on whose board Bannon sits. During the presidential election campaign, Cambridge Analytica drew on various data sources to develop psychological profiles of millions of Americans, which it then used to help Trump target voters with tailored messaging.
.. The new apparatus of number-crunching is well suited to detecting trends, sensing the mood and spotting things as they bubble up. It serves campaign managers and marketers very well. It is less well suited to making the kinds of unambiguous, objective, potentially consensus-forming claims about society that statisticians and economists are paid for.
.. A post-statistical society is a potentially frightening proposition, not because it would lack any forms of truth or expertise altogether, but because it would drastically privatise them. Statistics are one of many pillars of liberalism, indeed of Enlightenment.
.. But the battle that will need to be waged in the long term is not between an elite-led politics of facts versus a populist politics of feeling. It is between those still committed to public knowledge and public argument and those who profit from the ongoing disintegration of those things.