“So why doesn’t the Telegraph hire some? ”

Since they’ve just hired Andrew Gilligan, I assume they actively want to avoid people who can put 2 and 2 together reliably in case they find out that the dirty hippies were right all along. Can’t have that, can we?

Why are lefties so stupid they don’t know a median is a type of average?

Why are lefties sp stupid they’re so keen to react to an article they don’t even bother to read it before slagging it off?

Why are lefties so stupid that they don’t know what productivity is, how it’s measured, or why it has decline precipitously on their watch?

Why are lefties so stupid, that in accusing somebody of failing to understand basic concepts, they completely misunderstand them themselves?

Why are lefties so stupid, that all they have are insults and smear rather than argument and engagement?

Why are lefties so stupid that they fail at basic comprehension, grasp of elementary statistics, and can’t even mock and fisk properly?

Why are lefties so stupid, they’re an average of 13 points behind in the polls?

Why are lefties so stupid they’re heading for electoral oblivion?

Why are lefties so stupid?

Why?

“Why are lefties so stupid they don’t know a median is a type of average?”

? Perhaps cos I bin went to skool under Thatcher?

Seriously, buddy, you for real here? You do know the difference between median and mean, I mean?

Martin, are you going to tell Tim Worstall he’s a stupid leftie, or shall I?

A median is a type of average, yes. So is a mean. So 60% of the uk average household income implies either.

This apparently is not clear to the author.

Also unclear to the author is the meaning of an inverse correlation. There is a marked correlation between expenditure on education and productivity. What the author has confused is correlation and causation.

Generally that’s a simpleton’s mistake, normally reserved for the most inept of Daily Mail science coverage.

@4:

You can tell Tim Worstall what you like. I’m just going to sit here and laugh at Chris Dillow for making an idiot of himself.

Well, Tim Worstall is a leftie after all….progressive, radical, liberal, what’s not leftie about all of that?

Stupid, well, we all have our moments of course….

“A median is a type of average, yes. So is a mean. So 60% of the uk average household income implies either.”

just wonderful … now there’s a man who is too stupid to ever to recognize how stupid he is …

A median is a type of average, yes. So is a mean. So 60% of the uk average household income implies either.

Yes, so which one did the Telegraph writer mean? If he meant ‘mean’, why didn’t he say so? Simply saying ‘average’ leaves the reader in the dark and suggests that the writer either doesn’t understand the difference or didn’t bother to point it out.

Also unclear to the author is the meaning of an inverse correlation. There is a marked correlation between expenditure on education and productivity. What the author has confused is correlation and causation.

What? Janet Daley said that there was an inverse correlation between spending levels and academic success – spend more money, get worse results. I can draw you some graphs if you would like.

What the stats actually show is that if you spend 43% more money, you get less than 43% improvement in results – hence the decline in productivity. Results actually went up, whereas Janet Daley is telling us that they went down. If productivity fell by 7.5% then we can assume that results went up by around 39%, give or take a bit.

“Average” can mean either “median” or “mean”, surely?

Poor Martin. He just perpetuates the stereotype of stupid Tories.

– hopefully that’s closed the evil italic menace.

…and so I don’t understand Chris or Luis’s vitriol. It’s not the best phrasing, but it’s not wrong either.

Hell, even ‘central tendency’ becomes politicised on LC
http://www.scienceclarified.com/Sp-Th/Statistics.html

Perhaps you should all stop being mean

Why resort to insult? Why not explain your disagreement and say why you disagree? Why the need to accuse others of being ‘stupid’?

This isn’t politics or argument, its the politics of the playground … FGS grow up!

Hi Martin,

You write, “Why are lefties so stupid, that all they have are insults and smear rather than argument and engagement?

Why are lefties so stupid that they fail at basic comprehension, grasp of elementary statistics, and can’t even mock and fisk properly?”

*

Today on Liberal Conspiracy, we’ve reported on news from Mongolia to Skelmersdale, as well as accurately rebutting arguments from a range of the most popular right-wing blogs and newspapers.

You have accused Stonewall of breaking the law without providing any evidence, and shown that you don’t know what ‘inverse correlation’ means.

Not sure you’re really in that good a position to make the ‘lefties only know about smears and fail at basic comprehension’ argument.

The Janet Daly error is serious, she seems to think the report says that spending the money made things worse (and presumably might believe the spending less will make things better), when as you point out, it says no such thing.

But I can’t agree on the median/mean thing. From wot I lurned in Fatchers brittan, median, mean, and even mode are all kinds of averages. Most people mean mean when they say average. And yes, there are obvious distinctions (especially because the median, when it comes to wages, will be lower cos it won’t be distorted by super rich “outliers”), but the piece you pick up is not as such wrong, it might be just trying to make a sentence shorter.

Last time I checked the difference between the mean and median was about 3k, so it’s not insignificant when talking about poverty.

Can’t see what the problem is with the mean/median distinction.

Surely a good thing if Conservatives believe in a poverty line defined as 60% of the mean, rather than 60% of the median?

I’d let it pass.

The second point re productivity is spot on – with the addition that so much is missing from productivity stats they’re next to useless (e.g. productivity in Education would double overnight before if half of teachers were sacked and class sizes double)

“Most people mean mean when they say average” – exactly, therefore if the ‘average’ you are writing about is actually a median, then you should say so. Surely Torygraph readers would be capable of understanding “A low income household is one that lives on less than 60 per cent of the median UK household income”?

19 – Even so, taking an article by Janet Daly and using it to accuse all Tory writers of being stupid is like taking a James Macintyre article and using it to accuse all Labour writers of being stupid fantasists.

How about the mode income, which I’d guess is probably around £64.30 a week, as that applies to about 2.5 million people on JSA.

That’s an “Average,” can we use that?

s like taking a James Macintyre article and using it to accuse all Labour writers of being stupid fantasists.

Still smarting about the Michal Kaminski scoops he got eh? Awww…

John,

Sure they’re both averages, and I think you’re right, the fault is maybe mine for mis-reading Martin and then being so rude, because he just means that by using the word average the journalist could have meant either median or mean … I took him writing “So 60% of the uk average household income implies either” to mean that either would have the same implications, that it doesn’t matter which is which in the context of an article about relative poverty. Which of course it does. [as Chris writes elsewhere, using the median means the numbers living in relative poverty cannot be increased just by the rich getting richer]

Vitriol perhaps also explained by “Why are lefties so stupid they don’t know a median is a type of average?” but two wrongs don’t make a right. Sorry Martin.

I was thinking more:

“But blogs are nothing if not controversial, so I am going to stick my neck out and say that — contrary to conventional wisdom — Tony Blair will emerge as the unexpected winner of the race to become EU president tonight.”

“Average” can mean either “median” or “mean”, surely?

Yes… and no.

Generally speaking, the vast majority of people will take ‘average’ to mean ‘mean’, but the mean figure for household income is not one that statisticians and economists use because its too easily skewed by outliers. If Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Roman Abramovich and the Sultan of Brunei all became domiciled in the UK at the same time, the mean figure of net household wealth would rise, just because four very wealthy individuals moved to the UK, but their presence would have no impact on the median figure.

So in Chris and Tim’s terms, the use of ‘average’ is wrong, and all the more so because the error was made in the Telegraph, an upmarket title that, back in Bill Deedes day, would have been very likely very unlikely to make such a basic error. (Thanks, Tim)

“an upmarket title that, back in Bill Deedes day, would have been very likely to make such a basic error.”

??

There are three versions of ‘Average’ – Mean, Median and Mode. None of them equate perfectly to the other – all three are seperate and distinct ways of attempting to grasp what is esentially a concept rather than an absolute – what the thing in the middle is.

If a paper is wrongly quoting an average – which it’s clear they have here it’s either down to poor understanding or deliverate misinterpreation. Neither good for our national press.

As already stated above, all three of these will have differences of several £k – and wrongly using one ‘average’ over the other can twist an argument in any direction you choose.

Why do righties always try to hide behind their false statements when found out?

I don’t understand how it is an “appalling” error to use the word average instead of median, when median is a type of average measurement.

What you missed was finishing off the full quote, which reads: “A low income household is one that lives on less than 60 per cent of the average UK household income in the year in question – after housing costs and council tax. For a family of four it is £14,560 a year.”

As long as the £14,560 figure is correct, does it really matter that the type of average was not specified?

Pretty much a non-article from Mr Dillow.

‘Generally speaking, the vast majority of people will take ‘average’ to mean ‘mean’

Well, that’s what the average person means anyway..,

We’re making the rather heroic assumption here that they actually *want* to understand the stats, rather than just use any scary-sounding numbers that come to hand as rhetorical flim-flam.

It’s because educational outputs haven’t risen as fast as inputs

Oh, so that’s ok then. Someone correct me if I’ve misunderstood, but doesn’t a fall in productivity of 7.5% mean that we are achieving now with ~£45bn a year what we ought to be able to achieve with ~£42bn?

I don’t understand how it is an “appalling” error to use the word average instead of median, when median is a type of average measurement.

It’s appalling because a person who is paid to enlighten the public about important news through the national press should be able to express that news with clarity. Instead the article leads to a series of assumptions and misinterpretations that are political in nature. In short the political picture becomes skewed and partial.

“Maybe it’s a good job that newspapers don’t matter”

Who says they don’t matter?

Because they are wrong…… Particularly if they have a good circulation ,and a wide cross section of the electorate. Which is why both parties will do almost anything to attract the Murdoch papers on side.

And Why Blair ended up in the shit like he did. And now Call me Dave is about to make the same mistake. The only advantage that this country might have got from a Tory govt was that it would not be afraid of the Murdoch press.

Call me Dave has just pissed that away with his sweet heart deal.

@32 not necessarily. Beyond a certain point, the more effort you put into something, the harder it is to produce outputs – 80/20 rule and all that. We could just be running into that point.

The use of the word average is not wrong, just sloppy. It’s akin to reviewing a car with the statement that it does 60 mpg on long journeys without defining whether the fuel is petrol, diesel or LPG.

The sloppiness is important because the concept of average (ie median) wealth and income is so misunderstood in the UK. We’ve had loads of threads on LC about how people fail to recognise how poor or rich they are relative to others. Blurring the significance of mean and median makes it more difficult when explaining that the Daily Mail’s concept of “average household”, for example, excludes the vast majority.

Chris Dillow footnote: “It could be that the error here is the subs’, rather than the writers.”

Perhaps the error was introduced by an editor, but that isn’t a sufficient excuse. The writer should have checked the final copy; it may have been too late to fix for the printed editions, but not for the web version.

“but that isn’t a sufficient excuse. The writer should have checked the final copy”

As someone who writes occasionally for the press….that ain’t the way it happens. Not at CiF, not at The Times, not on the Telegraph.

There is no opportunity for the writer to check the final version.

Perhaps there ought to be……but that’s another matter from blaming the writer when there isn’t.

Tim, comments acknowledged, but that is not an excuse for leaving the web version uncorrected. Some popular North American newspapers on the web have a little aside at the bottom of stories that tracks and explains changes.

Why are Tory writers so stupid?

Hmmm, evolution? Dunno – but they definitely deserve a wedgie for this.

And what should you get for not knowing the difference between stupidity and ignorance?

“The use of the word average is not wrong, just sloppy. It’s akin to reviewing a car with the statement that it does 60 mpg on long journeys without defining whether the fuel is petrol, diesel or LPG.”

And guess what, as a non-driver that seems like a secondary detail to me. “Average” might be less precise but it is the natural word to use in a news piece.

There seems to be a lack of understanding of what a newspaper is for. It’s not an academic treatise.

Janet Daley is half-right: productivity in schools has declined but she presents no evidence in that quote of an inverse correlation between spending and OUTPUT as she implies.

Considering that Toynbeeb and such ilk make this sort of error all the time painting it as right-wing stupidity is just pathetic.

I’m not sure Sunny’s in a position to call Martin Coxall stupid. What with Martin having attended one of the world’s best universities.

Because they just are. Nothing more, nothing less.