Lone Gunman

The more unequal a society’s income dis­tri­b­u­tion, the more health and social prob­lems ail both the rich and the poor.

With this the­ory brought to his atten­tion through the “quite fas­ci­nat­ing book” The Spirit Level, Nico­las Bau­mard dis­plays the evi­dence to sup­port the the­ory that eco­nomic inequal­ity is bad for all inhab­i­tants of a coun­try before con­sid­er­ing some pos­si­ble expla­na­tions, and look­ing at what this means in terms of poverty and cli­mate change.

It is com­mon knowl­edge that in rich soci­eties the poor have shorter lives and suf­fer more from almost every social prob­lem. In [The Spirit Level], [the authors] demon­strate that more unequal soci­eties are bad for almost every­one — the well-off as well as the poor […]. The remark­able data the book lays out and the mea­sures it uses are like a ‘spirit level’ which we can hold up to com­pare the con­di­tions of dif­fer­ent soci­eties. The dif­fer­ences revealed, even between rich mar­ket democ­ra­cies, are strik­ing. Almost every mod­ern social and envi­ron­men­tal prob­lem — ill-health, lack of com­mu­nity life, vio­lence, drugs, obe­sity, men­tal ill­ness, long work­ing hours, big prison pop­u­la­tions — is more likely to occur in a less equal society.

Base­ball fan? Bau­mard also points out that “the more equal the salaries in a base-ball team are, the bet­ter its performance”.

“Safety is never allowed to trump all other con­cerns”, says Julian Bag­gini, and with­out say­ing as much gov­ern­ments must con­sis­tently put a price on lives and deter­mine how much risk to expose the pub­lic to.

In an arti­cle for the BBC, Bag­gini takes a com­pre­hen­sive look at how gov­ern­ments make risk assess­ments and in the process dis­cusses a topic of con­stant intrigue for me: how much a human life is val­ued by dif­fer­ent gov­ern­ments and their departments.

The ethics of risk is not as straight­for­ward as the rhetoric of “para­mount impor­tance” sug­gests. Peo­ple talk of the “pre­cau­tion­ary prin­ci­ple” or “erring on the side of cau­tion” but gov­ern­ments are always trad­ing safety for con­ve­nience or other gains. […]

Gov­ern­ments have to choose on our behalf which risks we should be exposed to.

That poses a dif­fi­cult eth­i­cal dilemma: should gov­ern­ment deci­sions about risk reflect the often irra­tional foibles of the pop­u­lace or the ratio­nal cal­cu­la­tions of sober risk assess­ment? Should our politi­cians opt for informed pater­nal­ism or respect for irra­tional preferences? […]

In prac­tice, gov­ern­ments do not make fully ratio­nal risk assess­ments. Their cal­cu­la­tions are based partly on cost-benefit analy­ses, and partly on what the pub­lic will tolerate.

via Schneier on Security

Sci­en­tists need­ing to per­suade soci­ety at large shouldn’t be rely­ing on their data alone to per­suade but instead should employ PR tac­tics, sug­gests Wired’s Erin Biba (and a num­ber of PR com­pany employ­ees, natch).

I don’t totally agree with the idea (sci­en­tific integrity and all that jazz) but some of the thoughts/suggestions are entirely valid and sci­en­tists could go far by lis­ten­ing to some of the advice and criticism.

For instance, this sug­ges­tion to remove science’s holier-than-thou atti­tude, replac­ing it with per­sonal sto­ries of those at its core (the sci­en­tists them­selves):

It didn’t even occur to the [Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion for the Advance­ment of Sci­ence] pan­elists [at a recent cli­mate change sym­po­sium] that some­one might find that here’s-the-data-we’re-right atti­tude patronizing—and wor­thy of skep­ti­cism. “Until sci­en­tists real­ize they need us, we can’t help them,” [Kelly Bush, founder and CEO of PR firm ID] says. “They have to wake up and say: ‘I rec­og­nize it’s not work­ing, and I’m will­ing to lis­ten to you.’ It’s got to start there.” Sci­ence increas­ingly must make its most impor­tant cases to nonscientists—not just about cli­mate but also evo­lu­tion, health care, and vac­cine safety. And in all of those fields, the sci­ence has proven to be inca­pable of speak­ing for itself. It’s time for those with true pas­sion to get over the stigma, stand up, and start telling their stories.

A study com­par­ing the effects of var­i­ous leisure activ­i­ties on the recog­ni­tion and iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of faces has con­cluded that eye­wit­nesses should not be per­mit­ted to do cryp­tic cross­word puz­zles prior to an iden­tity parade.

The study, con­ducted by Cardiff University’s Michael Lewis, com­pared logic puz­zles (sudoku), cross­word puz­zles (both cryp­tic and stan­dard) and mys­tery nov­els (Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code) and found that per­form­ing cryp­tic cross­words reduced the reli­a­bil­ity of recog­nis­ing and iden­ti­fy­ing faces.

“The iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of an offender by a wit­ness to a crime often forms an impor­tant ele­ment of a prosecution’s case. While con­sid­er­able impor­tance is placed by jurors on the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the offender by a wit­ness (such as a sus­pect being picked out from an iden­tity parade), research tells us that these iden­ti­fi­ca­tions can often be wrong and some­times lead to wrong­ful convictions.”

“It would be unde­sir­able,” he writes, “to have wit­nesses doing some­thing before an iden­tity parade that would make them worse at pick­ing out the offender … Con­sider what wit­nesses may do before an iden­tity parade. It is pos­si­ble that they might be doing some­thing to pass the time (eg read or do a puz­zle). It is pos­si­ble that some of these poten­tial activ­i­ties may lead to a detri­ment in face processing.”

via @noahWG

Cities with large immi­grant pop­u­la­tions are some of the safest places to live, sug­gest the data and stud­ies, espe­cially those where the police “know how to work with [immi­grants], not against them”.

The stud­ies in question–including one exten­sive study by the FBI–go on to sug­gest rea­sons why immi­grants reduce a city’s crime:

This is not just a mat­ter of ran­dom cor­re­la­tion being mis­taken for cau­sa­tion. A new study by soci­ol­o­gist Tim Wadsworth […] care­fully eval­u­ates the var­i­ous fac­tors behind the sta­tis­tics that show a mas­sive drop in crime dur­ing the 1990s at a time when immi­gra­tion rose dra­mat­i­cally. In a peer-reviewed paper appear­ing in the June 2010 issue of Social Sci­ence Quar­terly, Wadsworth argues not only that “cities with the largest increases in immi­gra­tion between 1990 and 2000 expe­ri­enced the largest decreases in homi­cide and rob­bery,” which we knew, but that after con­sid­er­ing all the other expla­na­tions, ris­ing immi­gra­tion “was par­tially responsible.” […]

So, yes, there are pretty com­pelling data to sup­port the argu­ment that immi­grants as such—even pre­sum­ably “ille­gal” immigrants—do not make cities more dan­ger­ous to live in. But what mech­a­nism about such immi­gra­tion makes cities safer? Robert J. Samp­son, head of the soci­ol­ogy depart­ment at Har­vard, has sug­gested that, among other things, immi­grants move into neigh­bor­hoods aban­doned by locals and help pre­vent them from turn­ing into urban waste­lands. They often have tighter fam­ily struc­tures and mutual sup­port net­works, all of which actu­ally serve to sta­bi­lize urban envi­ron­ments. As Samp­son told me back in 2007, “If you want to be safe, move to an immi­grant city.”