Two Common Statistical Mistakes About Marriage and Sex

In the previous post I said that every survey on the subject found that men had more sexual partners than women. I also implied that everyone bought this. It is, of course, impossible unless you think that men have a lot of sex outside the country, and women don't, or, of course, that a lot of men have homosexual affairs. Because it takes two to tango - so for every man having sex, there has to be a woman. So women have as much sex as men - over a large enough population. So if British women aren't having as much as British men, somewhere there's a country where women must be reporting more sexual partners than men. Except there isn't. The standard comment is that women might under-report and men over-report, but consider the effect of doing that for these options: (1-2, 3-5, 6-9, 10-15, 15+). The effect would be very obvious. You would also assume that the clever statisticians who analyse these things would have corrected for that. My favourite explanation is that there are a small number of women who pass through an intensely promiscuous period - but they are under-represented in the sample, which also don't capture just how many partners they had. You may live in a more prosaic world.

The other one is the divorce rate. There's a figure of 1 in 3 that's been going round forever, which comes from the fact that for a long time there were about 100,000 divorces and 300,000 marriages a year, which looks like 1 in 3. Except that divorces come from the pool of married people, and marriages come from the pool of single people. So you can't just divide one by the the other. National Statistics report that in 2008 the divorce rate was 11.2 per 1000 married people, with the highest cohort rate for 22-29, where 26 per 1000 married women got divorced. The marriage rate (for 2007, 2008 not available at time of writing) was about 20 per 1000 single people. In case you're wondering, in order for everyone to be married at thirty-five, given they can start at sixteen, the marriage rate would have to be a bell-ringing 71 per 1000. In 2006, half the men in the country were single.

I think marriage stats are fascinating. Start here for a comprehensive pdf and here for some directions from National Statistics.

Britain On The Couch

Oliver James is a celebrity psychiatrist with a private practice amongst the upper echelons of London's professional classes. I've no doubt his work in prisons, hospitals or wherever brings him into contact with people we would rather see dead than want to make better. He's well-read and knows his pop culture. I've no doubt he's a good man and convivial company. This much is obvious from his book Britain on the Couch.

His thesis is that between the 1950's and to the present, Britain has become a more uncertain, anxious, depressed and rancourous place. His reason is that we have weaker roles, especially around the family and marriage, and we make and are forced to make by television and magazines, far more comparisons with other people - which usually doesn't make us feel good about ourselves. Britain is a low-seratonin society, serotonin being a chemical that makes the body work better and is generated by being in higher-status roles, the lack of which makes you depressed and injections of which do wonders for previously glum vervet monkeys. Being low-income doesn't help much either, and he notes that especially since the 1980's the low-income got less and the better-off got more. Low income depresses, and depression lowers serotonin.

I'm not disputing the figures and I'll assume the anecdotes are real. What I'm disputing is the significance of those figures and anecdotes, and the idea that it was better in the 1950's. Or 1850's. Or classical Athens. Many of the anecdotes turn out to be about people who are suffering from alcoholism, drugs or psychiatric problems - either their own or someone else's. Once booze, drugs or mental illness creeps into the gene pool, you have to assume those are the primary causes of any odd behaviour, rather than anything more literary or cultural. Many of the studies are based on observation and self-reporting via questionnaires. The reliability of these can be judged by the fact that they invariably show - when used to ask - that men have more sexual partners than women. Everyone buys this one, along with the one about one in three marriages ending in divorce (because there are about 100,000 divorces a year, and 300,000 marriages). Anyone who buys either of these for more than five minutes - as James does - should stay out of the policy analysis business. The increase in divorce since the 1970's does not argue that people are more picky about marriage. It argues that they always were bad judges of good partners, married too young and changed too quickly and, of course, just plain got tired of each others' acts - only after the Divorce Reform Act 1969, they could escape their bad judgement and misery more easily.

James cites a number of studies suggesting that people who have suffered a serious misfortune make themselves feel better by comparisons with people even worse off: they amy have AIDS, but at least they don't live in Chad. But that's not why people say these things. When two people with the same misfortune meet and talk, how they talk, what they say, the emotions they can share, are totally different from what they can say - and want to say - to the ignorant who haven't been there and don't know. The "at least I'm not in Chad" comment is a stock response - like saying you're happy when that nice man with the clipboard asks you. It's also a brush-off, a way for the knowing to avoid having to deal with the ignorance of the unknowing, and for the unknowing to signal that they aren't handing out any sympathy. More speech than you think is to close off unwanted conversations, and more conversations than you might think are unwanted. There is no point talking to people who haven't been there and don't get it - you may as well be talking Uzbek in Marseille.

Citing pop culture is always tricky, because more and more, pop culture is about itself. There is a lot of gender rancour in pop culture - especially women being rude about men - but that doesn't mean women are actually being ruder about men, it means editors like it and comedians can make money from it. Throughout history a greater number of women than we think have disliked men and held them in contempt - it's just that now they can get a newspaper column out of it. What's changed isn't the reality, it's the Daily Mail.

There's something about the Fifties, if you were born in them, which both James and I were. The decade is preserved in black-and-white photographs, a time when working men wore suits on a Saturday, trains were drawn by steam engines, the roads were often empty, the lorries were small, the shops local and women in long coats went walking with toddlers in duffel coats. There's an innocence in those photographs - not a moral, social, sexual or personal innocence, but an economic one. Most people worked for the big nationalised industries or long-established family firms. Outside inexcusable practices around the docks and farms, most jobs for the lower-middle classes and above were going to last as long as they wanted. And if they got fed up with the boss, they could get another one. And of course the money was good and there was less to spend it on. That's the innocence of the 1950's. If it was so wonderful, the Sixties would not have happened. But it wasn't, and they did.

If you're in the psychiatry business, it must be tempting to want to know why people fall apart and why so many of the people you see are so miserable and confused. A decent person would want to help them and a psychiatrist dealing with ordinary cases of neurotic unhappiness must believe that they can help. But it isn't quite like that. Everyone has cracks in their soul, either from birth or being brought up in Britain by British parents. You do. If you are lucky, nothing will happen to you that makes those cracks turn into a break. If it does, you will find yourself as a client of Oliver James - if you're lucky. If it doesn't happen to you, it will happen to someone else. James is always going to have clients. The number of unhappy, crazy and downright evil people (these are technical terms of folk psychology) may change, but it never becomes zero. Most people lead lives that vary between ordinary unhappiness and moderate joy, never quite reaching the heights or plumbing the depths. They never meet Oliver James and so they don't figure in his world-view.

How You Don't Want To See Your Car

So I went to see A Prophet at the Richmond Filmhouse Sunday lunchtime. On my way back to the car, I was greeted by this sight on the south bank...

.... which made me wonder what I was going to see on the north bank.

Ooops! My car way further down the road. Which there was no way of getting too right then (3:30pm) because the pavement is under water. By the time it had receded, about 4:00pm, and I got back, it looked like this...

 

And that's after the water has receded. I opened the door and found about three inches of water inside - the level must have come above the sill. The engine started and I drove home with water sloshing from side to side when I turned and from front to back whenever I accelerated or braked. That's not covered in the Driving Test. And no, the water doesn't fall out the bottom of the car once you reach dry land, because in modern cars the underpan is pretty much waterproof. So I spent a good hour scooping out water, pressing the carpet, scooping out more water and getting frozen hands. All of which I took in reasonable spirits - unlike the way I'm going to take the insurance company's handling of it. To judge from the clueless questions and comments I got, no-one has ever claimed on some minor flooding before. But that's for another day.

Why BAA Should Apologise For Making You Take Your Shoes Off

When you pass through those pointless security checks at the airport, do you think you're owed an apology when they find out that, no, in fact, you weren't carrying explosives? Probably not, but you are and here's why. Let's start with a less emotional example. Suppose your house is carpeted throughout in white. Naturally, when guests visit, you ask them to take their shoes off to save the carpet, and you've got a couple of little phrases to make a joke or a little ritual of it. What you don't do is say "Remove your shoes immediately, I know you have deliberately walked through smelly mud before you got here and intend to make my carpet filthy." That would be rude beyond belief. But that's exactly what British Airports Authority are saying to you. They are searching you because they think you are carrying a bomb - just as you are asking people to remove their shoes because, intentionally or not, outdoor shoes will make your carpet dirty. But whereas my outdoor shoes do have dirt and so you are making a reasonable request, neither you nor I are carrying a bomb and no reasonable person could suppose we were, so BAA are not making a reasonable request. You're itching to make excuses for them, aren't you? Like how they can't take a chance with safety (they aren't, you're not a bomber, remember?), or that they have to be seen to be doing something (for your benefit? not for mine), or that if they didn't there would be bombers going through for every flight. Well, let's take that last point first: the only two forms of transport on which people have been killed are the Tube and London Buses. Strangely, no-one asks you to remove your shoes before boarding a bus or entering the London Underground, and by some miracle there hasn't been another bombing on either since 2005. There are no excuses.  Either their checks are sincere and so they think we're all bombers, or they don't think we're all bombers and their checks are an empty gesture. What the checks are really about is liability protection - it's for BAA's financial benefit, not our safety. Uh-huh.  It's corporate arrogance of the highest order. They owe us an apology.

Two Views at the Side of the Thames

It's not that I don't have anything to say, it's just that I haven't had the time to settle down and say it. I'm still wading through Solomon's book on Hegel's Phenomenology and there's a whole mass of stuff I want to talk about round that. So here are two more shots from last summer, both taken on the South Bank of the Thames.

Lazing on a Summer Afternoon

Was it only in October I was here? It's January, it's cold. Let's daydream.

In Which My Manager Shows Faith In Me

There's a phrase I use: "I wound up learning more than I really wanted to know about ....". Recently I have had to write some code in VBA for Powerpoint. I regard all presentation programs as if not abominations then certainly not something a Real Man would use. Real Men speak clearly, from memory, without visual aids and for no more than three minutes. But here I was this week, searching the Internet for some code that would break links between a workbook and a presentation. My excuse is that I didn't have time to read about the Powerpoint object model and work it out for myself. I know I can record a macro, but macros have a habit of referring to "ActiveWhatever" and what you really need is the name of the object and it collection so you can loop through all the text boxes on all the slides - or whatever.

The real point isn't about Powerpoint, it's about the manager who told everyone I could automate a presentation with about fifty links to different graphs and tables in a workbook. So that someone else could just press a couple of buttons and what used to take two guys two weeks would now take one guy a couple of days (there's some unavoidable manual fiddling involved). I had a rough idea it could be done, but with Office you never know if you're going to be tripped up by some arcane detail in the object model, forcing you to a complete re-design. I didn't know it could be done. The manager believed that if it could be done, I could do it. When someone has that kind of faith in you, it's very motivating. And it's the first time that's happened at The Bank.