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Both Anthony and Francis argued, in reference to my comments on Tory `bed blockers' and claims made about them that, rather than analysing the data in terms of the age of the individual MPs, I should have used the length of their service in Parliament. In fact, this was what I was originally intending to do, but I couldn't find a good reference which collated the lengths of service of the various MPs; I assumed that their age would be a reasonable proxy. Since I wrote that, Anthony has very kindly complied with my suggestion and provided me with a table of the relevant data, for which gift many thanks are due.
It turns out that (as you'd expect), age and length of service of Tory MPs are pretty well-correlated: (this and later plots ignore various special cases -- speakers, ill MPs and outliers)
but treating the data in terms of length of service does change the results slightly. While there are no significant correlations between MP ages and their performance on the indicators for which I have data, there are with length of service. In particular, both the number of written questions asked and attendance at divisions are inversely correlated with length of service -- that is, MPs who've been in the Commons longer ask fewer questions and vote less often:
(Slightly surprisingly, although the plot -- not shown -- looks convincing, it turns out that there's no significant variation of Fax Your MP response rate with length of service.)
There's not a whole lot to say about this, really. It makes the Torygraph's story a little more plausible, though I'd be cautious about broad-brush use of these indicators. Anthony suggested in email that I see whether it makes any difference whether an MP has served several disconnected stretches or one continuous term; from what I've looked at, it doesn't. If you want a causal theory to inform these vague statistical stumblings, it would be as well to start with the theory (expounded, I think, in Yes, Minister, though I can't find the quote at the moment) that a typical government consists of three-hundred-and-fifty-odd MPs. About a hundred will be too old to be Ministers; about a hundred will be too young; this leaves about a hundred and fifty to fill about a hundred Ministerial posts.
Some of these will be too useless for the job, leaving the government with rather little choice in matters. As MPs age, they risk passing from `eligible' to `elderly', or fucking up badly enough that they become `useless'. (In Matthew Parris's autobiography, he recalls being called to one side by a whip and told that, had he not forgotten to vote in an important division, he would probably have achieved office of some sort; as it was, he was left to languish on the back benches....) As MPs carry on through their Parliamentary careers, with the prospect of high office receding, the incentives to attend divisions, speak and hope to be noticed, and ask endless written questions with the hope of uncovering hidden Governmental scandal must recede with it.
Which is a plausible enough theory if you like that sort of thing. I'm sure if the correlation had come out the other way -- it's hardly striking, after all -- I could have come up with something equally plausible-sounding about the loyalty and work ethic of the long-serving, or some other such nonsense.
Comments (10 so far)
Much fuss in the Conservative Party's internal newsletter over the (lack of) activities of so-called `bed-blocking' older Tory MPs. Apparently, the Conservative Chief Whip is,
having ``a quiet whisky'' with members whom he believes are not pulling their weight
in order to clear out 30 safe seats for a new generation of Young Conservatives. The Torygraph's story is backed up with high-quality statistics such as these:
Michael Mates, a member of Lord Butler's committee, voted in only 30 per cent of divisions, the worst record of any Tory MP. Stephen Dorrell, the member for Charnwood and once secretary of state for health, asked no oral questions and voted in only 33 per cent of divisions.
To be honest, this story sounded like bollocks when I read it and a little work demonstrates that I was right. They Work For You collects `performance' data for individual MPs: the number of speeches they make and written questions they ask, the number of divisions (votes) they attend, and what fraction of messages sent them through Fax Your MP are answered within a fortnight. The Tories' own site has biographies of the individual MPs, which usually mention their dates of birth. (I couldn't find the dates of birth of 16 of 169 Tory MPs; this won't significantly affect the results.)
Firstly, the age distribution of Tory MPs:
The ages of Conservative Parliamentarians are (slightly surprisingly) approximately normally distributed with mean 52.6 years and standard deviation 8.5 years. This tells us that `young' is a relative term here; picking an arbitrary cut-off, I've assumed that `young' Tory MPs are those aged 50 or less.
Basically there is no correlation between age and `performance' in Conservative MPs:
With outliers -- like John Bercow MP, who asks hundreds of written questions per year -- excluded, there are no statistically significant performance differences between `old' (>50 years) and `young' (<50 years) Tory MPs.
The moral of the story? Not sure, but perhaps one or more of these will do:
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... then you don't need any advice. In this vein, the Government is about to send out 25 million copies of this leaflet to every home in Britain. The booklet hovers for twenty-two pages between the banale and the criminally stupid, offering up such nuggets of information as the suggestion that, when a terrorist attack occurs, you should, (emphasis mine)
- Go inside a safe building
- Stay inside until you are advised to do otherwise
- Tune in to local radio or TV for more information
Of course, there are always going to be particular occasions when you should not ``go in'' to a building, for example if there is a fire.
(... or, for another example, when some maniac has crashed an aeroplane into the identical building next-door to you.)
Elsewhere we are told that, should a bomb go off,
If you saw the explosion, stay in the area in a safe place and tell the police what you saw.
-- because, after all, terrorists have never been known to plant secondary devices in places to which survivors of a blast might flee. Quite apart from the fact that we're repeatedly being told that al Qaeda might use a bomb to distribute radioactive or poisonous materials, in which case staying in the area is unlikely to be wise. (This particular piece of advice is a little upsetting, since it could actually kill people.)
About the only piece of advice in the leaflet which isn't obvious is the suggestion that, to secure one's business premises, one should look at a website run by MI5. This even contains -- would you believe -- a section on protecting your business from KGB moles. Errm, I'm sorry, I meant `terrorists', obviously.
The new booklet, Preparing for Emergencies, makes for an interesting comparison with Protect and Survive and other `how to survive a nuclear war' advice from the same era. Back then, we were expected to show initiative and DIY skills, for instance by propping a door up against a wall and hiding underneath it for two weeks, occasionally emerging to shit in a bucket and try to tune into the BBC. When it was published, Protect and Survive was ridiculed for the uselessness of advice such as,
Even the safest room in your home is not safe enough, however.
If you live in a caravan or other similar accommodation which provides very little protection against fall-out your local authority will be able to advise you on what to do.
Your local authority? Really? I wouldn't trust my local authority to advise its way out of a wet paper bag, but we may just be unlucky in this bit of the country. I am reminded of the (perhaps apocryphal) leaflet distributed by the Iranian government during the war with Iraq in the 1980s. The leaflet was entitled (roughly) `What to do if you are attacked with modern chemical weapons' and ran, in summary, like this:
Close all the windows and doors. Turn on the shower. Get everyone into the shower with their clothes on and stay under the water until you are certain that it is safe to come out.
In fact, the 1980s nuclear leaflets, like Preparing for Emergencies, never really got to grips with the fact that, in a nuclear war, lots of people will die. Even the leaflet on the work of the UK Warning and Monitoring Organisation can't quite bring itself to mention this simple fact, instead stepping to the brink and then swiftly retreating:
Life goes on.... Through the existence, readiness and prompt response of UKWMO, ten million lives may have been saved -- to see the dawn of another day.
There was, however, a chilling TV and radio broadcast on the subject:
If however you have had a body in the house for more than five days, and if it is safe to go outside, then you should bury the body for the time being in a trench, or cover it with earth, and mark the spot of the burial.
For another interesting contrast, it is worth reading the 1940 leaflet, If the Invader Comes. Unlike the later leaflets, this extraordinary document supposed that, in the event of a dire national crisis, the people of the country will not lose all ability to think rationally and automatically rush about like headless chickens. There are various helpful suggestions (in CAPITAL LETTERS, no less):
DO NOT GIVE ANY GERMAN ANYTHING. DO NOT TELL HIM ANYTHING. HIDE YOUR FOOD AND YOUR BICYCLES. HIDE YOUR MAPS. SEE THAT THE ENEMY GETS NO PETROL. IF YOU HAVE A CAR OR MOTOR BICYCLE, PUT IT OUT OF ACTION WHEN NOT IN USE. IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO REMOVE THE IGNITION KEY; YOU MUST MAKE IT USELESS TO ANYONE EXCEPT YOURSELF.
(Sound advice, if you've ever been on a beach holiday in the Mediterranean... sorry.)
Members of the public are expected to display initiative, apparently at their own expense:
IF YOU ARE A GARAGE PROPRIETOR, YOU MUST WORK OUT A PLAN TO PROTECT YOUR STOCK OF PETROL AND YOUR CUSTOMERS CARS. REMEMBER THAT TRANSPORT AND PETROL WILL BE THE INVADER'S MAIN DIFFICULTIES. MAKE SURE THAT NO INVADER WILL BE ABLE TO GET HOLD OF YOUR CARS, PETROL, MAPS OR BICYCLES.
and without a helpful leaflet in pastel colours to explain how to do so. All in all, If the Invader Comes is quite an inspiring document. Perhaps this just results from our romantic notions about the Britain of the 1940s, but certainly it's better written than its modern cousins and its unspoken assumptions are uplifting rather than depressing. I wonder if, in analogous circumstances today, we could expect people to behave as suggested in rule five: (emphasis mine)
You may be asked by Army and Air Force officers to help in many ways. For instance, the time may come when you will receive orders to block roads or streets in order to prevent the enemy from advancing. Never block a road unless you are told which one you must block. Then you can help by felling trees, wiring them together or blocking the roads with cars. Here, therefore, is the fifth rule:-
(5) BE READY TO HELP THE MILITARY IN ANY WAY. BUT DO NOT BLOCK ROADS UNTIL ORDERED TO DO SO BY THE MILITARY OR L.D.V. AUTHORITIES.
(This concludes today's test of the emergency broadcast network.)
Update: had I seen it in time, I would certainly have linked to this splendid spoof of the new Government leaflet. Its contents are probably just as useful as those of the real document....
Comments (9 so far)
Just a brief comment on the crime figures. I'm willing to bet that, as long as both reported crime numbers from the police and data from the British Crime Survey have both been published (since 1982, I think) the government have pointed to the lower of the two and the opposition to the higher. This may be sound politics but it is intellectually dishonest. That not all crime is reported to the police is a fairly obvious point which opposition politicians presumably do understand (and will themselves point out if they ever form a government...). To claim, as David Davis does, that,
The most reliable measure of crime is that which is reported to the police.
Crime is falling but the number of crimes reported to the police is rising. This combination isn't even necessarily surprising: people are more likely to report crime if they think that doing so will achieve something useful so you'd expect the fraction of crimes reported to the police to rise as crime falls.
Elsewhere it has been pointed out that crime has been falling just as unemployment has been falling. This has been true since the early 1990s, certainly: (NB that crime figures in this plot excludes Scotland and Northern Ireland, while unemployment figures are for the whole UK, so it should be taken as a general indication of the trend only)
but not really before then. This doesn't tell us anything about causation, but the implicit theory -- that people who can't find jobs go a-burgling instead -- seems fairly plausible. New Labour may have created 661 new offences and all sorts of new schemes for stopping crime since coming to office, but chances are the fall in crime is just the result of an improving economy.
Elsewhere in the BCS it is reported that two thirds of the population believe that crime is rising; half of them believe that it's risen `a lot' in the past year. Probably they always say that, but fewer do so this year than last, when the figures were 78% and 38% in the previous survey. Since 1992, fear of crime (rather than perception of its incidence) has actually been falling as crime falls, but in MORI's polls of the most important issues facing Britain today, the numbers expressing concern about crime, law and order, violence and vandalism are only poorly correlated with the actual crime rate:
(I've plotted fear of burglary specifically, as this has been reported by the BCS for longer than fear of other crimes.) Of course, the people expressing concern in MORI's survey are expressing concern about all crime and violence (and other sorts of antisocial behaviour too); even so, the figures for fear of car crime and violent crime in the BCS have also fallen during the few years they've been recorded, and don't reflect the recent peak in concern from MORI's polls. I'm (cynically) convinced that people's view of `the most important issues' facing the country is completely dominated by media coverage of those issues. As a little bit of evidence tangential to the point, try to guess which issue is which in this plot, also from the MORI data:
(Those who've seen that plot before: let the others have a go. The issues I've plotted concern about are,
The answer is here, but trying to guess is probably more fun.)
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No doubt each of my half-dozen readers sees the Guardian every day and there is little need to draw their attention to yesterday's front-page headline, titled, 90% of whites have few or no black friends. The story relates to a recent poll conducted by YouGov for the Commission for Racial Equality, for a report to be released later this week. Besides the headline number we learn,
(The poll asked respondents to consider `their closest 10 to 20 friends'.)
Data on the ethnicity of the UK population were collected by the 2001 census, and are presented in an appallingly non-accessible table on the National Statistics website. Reformatting this properly and crudely amalgamating categories, the proportions of the whole UK population in 2001 were,
| Ethnicity | % |
|---|---|
| White | 92.1 |
| mixed | 1.2 |
| Asian (various) | 4.0 |
| black | 2.0 |
| Chinese | 0.4 |
| all minority | 7.9 |
(Note that I've followed the Guardian Style Guide in capitalising `Asian' and not `black'. I'm not sure I'm happy with that, but then I am quoting from their article....)
On the religion side, the fractions are,
| Religion | % |
|---|---|
| Muslim | 2.7 |
| Hindu | 1.0 |
| Sikh | 0.6 |
but note that the numbers of practising members of those religions will be lower.
Suppose that the population were homogeneously mixed. How would we expect those headline numbers to turn out? We need one more assumption, which is the number of friends each respondent has. God know how you'd find that out, so let's plump for 15, in the middle of YouGov's suggested 10 -- 20 range. `Most' of this group is, let's say, three quarters: 12 or more. (More detail: the argument here is that if people make friends in a homogeneously mixed population, then the probability of each friend being from a particular ethnic group simply reflects the fractions of the population belonging to those groups; it is then simple to compute the fraction of people we would expect to report a particular number of their friends being of certain ethnicities.)
On this basis we would expect that:
So, does that mean we should pat ourselves on the back and think happy thoughts about how integrated Britain is becoming? Sadly, no.
That exception in (2) is that members of the ethnic minorities tend to have more friends from the ethnic minorities than we would expect in a homogeneously mixed population. This is a measure of the extent to which Britain's population is not integrated: if we imagine a simplistic model with a white majority and a single non-white minority, which is split into an integrated population and an isolated non-white minority, where a `mixing fraction' of the minority's members have joined the integrated population, we find something like this:
Note that this model doesn't really work (it always predicts values too high for the fraction of white people having mostly white friends). But it does illustrate that the extent of population mixing has a huge effect on the number of non-white people reporting mostly non-white friends, and very little effect on the number of white people reporting mostly white friends.
The Guardian goes on to quote Trevor Phillips (chair of the CRE):
When it comes to race and religion this clearly demonstrates we are dealing with a difference of which most people in this country have no first-hand experience, and therefore it is not surprising that they can be misled about blacks, Gypsies and Muslims, and it's not surprising that for no apparent reason they can become hostile and racist.
This is superficially plausible. Certainly I remember when I first encountered that idiot Peter Cuthbertson I put his prejudices down to the fact that he grew up in 98.5% white Darlington. But from the above it's clear that, at least on the measures in YouGov's survey, the extent to which -- in aggregate, at least -- white people have ethnic minority friends is currently not that far off the extent to which they would do in an homogeneously mixed population. If there is a solution to white racism, I suspect that further integration alone isn't it (though obviously these results will differ from place to place).
Phillips proposes summer camps for 16-year-olds, to be used (basically) for social engineering. This idea makes me pretty uneasy, but clearly something has to be done to fix one horrifying problem mentioned in the Guardian's article:
In January, a MORI poll found that 41% of white people and 26% of ethnic minority people surveyed wanted the races to live separately.
(I can't find the MORI report but note that in a -- say -- 1,000-person survey, we'd expect about 79 ethnic minority respondents. One hopes that, like the YouGov survey here, the MORI one asked a separate ethnic minority sample; otherwise, the margin of error on that 26% would be huge.)
Congratulations to Francis and Julian on winning a New Statesman New Media Award with Public Whip. Since he's also published this photo of the Downing Street Says team from a separate event, I suppose I can too without looking too much of a self-publicist:
Elsewhere we discover that David Blunkett is organising a five-year plan (I wonder why nobody has thought of doing that before) and that fascists get just as lousy service from the banks as everyone else. The latter, I suppose, is heartening, in a way. And don't forget to send in your consultation responses to the Home Office by half-past-five today. It won't make a bit of difference, but it's the thought that counts.
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One very brief comment on yesterday's BBC story about racism in the labour market. As usual, the BBC did not elaborate in their story on exactly how the data were obtained, and the verbal description of their results is unsatisfying:
CVs from six fictitious candidates -- who were given traditionally white, black African or Muslim names -- were sent to 50 firms by Radio Five Live.
Many of the firms were well known and the jobs covered a range of fields, Radio Five Live said.
All the applicants were given the same standard of qualifications and experience, but their CVs were presented differently.
Almost a quarter of applications by two candidates given traditionally ``white'' names - Jenny Hughes and John Andrews - resulted in interview offers.
But only 9% of the ``Muslim'' applications, by the fictitious Fatima Khan and Nasser Hanif, prompted a similar response.
Letters from the ``black'' candidates, Abu Olasemi and Yinka Olatunde, had a 13% success rate.
(Having read that, you might -- for instance -- be wondering how, out of 50 cases, they can have obtained a particular result in an odd-numbered percentage of trials; or, more generally, whether these results really tell us anything.)
(I mentioned some of this in comments on Matthew's web log; the discussion there is mostly unenlightening, but it's worth reading Tom's contribution, since he actually knows something this area, which the other participants mostly, I think, do not.)
In fact, the BBC have presented the raw data from the study along with examples of the CVs they sent to the various employers. The aggregate results were:
| implied race of applicant | number of applications resulting in invitation for interview | not invited for interview | no reply received | application `lost' |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| white | 23 | 22 | 55 | 0 |
| asian | 8 | 20 | 66 | 6 |
| black | 13 | 22 | 65 | 0 |
At the simplest level of analysis, these results provide strong evidence (chiČ = 21.2731, p = 0.0011) for the hypothesis that the result of a job application is influenced by the apparent race of the candidate. Race doesn't significantly influence whether a rejected candidate is told to piss off (`not invited') or simply never contacted again, but it is significant (p = 0.01681) in determining whether their application is `lost'.
It is of course true that a test of statistical significance does not of itself show that the conclusions of the study are accurate: the design of the study must also be sensible. But there's nothing obviously wrong with the methodology here, and as Tom points out the conclusions of this study are similar to those of various previous studies (sadly those he refers to -- Half a Chance, Still? published by the Nottingham and District Racial Equality Council in 1994; We Regret to Inform You... published by the CRE in 1996; and Racial discrimination against doctors from ethnic minorities, BMJ 306:691-2, 1993 -- are not available on-line).
Anyway, it turns out that, British employers are racist (at least where it comes to black african and Asian job applicants). This sucks pretty badly, and I'd say the fact that there exist purportedly intelligent apologists (they know who they are) for this state of affairs sucks almost as much.
(On a tangentially related note, this story in yesterday's Guardian describes how hard it is to get a booking in a restaurant if your surname is `bin Ladin', and also tells us that the enemies of civilisation are terrible at interior decor:
[Carmen bin Ladin, estranged wife of Osama's brother, Yeslam bin Laden] cattily remarks in the book that the Bin Ladens have no taste in interior decor, all gold taps and terrible paintings....
In other news, don't take up photography if you're a US citizen with dark skin. Elsewhere, John Band elaborates on one of my darker fears, illustrating it with a short visit to the edge of reason, personified by crank right-wing web loggers. Actually I disagree with John on one point; he writes,
But we also need to ensure that in the horrible event that the intelligence fails [and there is a further serious terrorist attack], we don't let the macho headcases dig our graves for us.
-- my fear is not that we will have our graves dug for us, but that if the West overreacts and embarks on a war of genocide, it will be brutally effective in prosecuting it.)
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(This may as well be filed under `pointless graph update', in fact.) First the good news: the amount of spam I'm getting (by an extraordinary leap let's assume that this is true of the amount of spam other people get, so that this is of any possible interest to other people) seems to be increasing only linearly (and not, for instance, exponentially).
And now the bad news: it's increasing at a rate a bit more than 1.1 (spams/day)/day, so that a year from now I should expect to be receiving 400 spams/day more than I am now:
Related news: Microsoft Windows viruses are still a minor pain in the arse, but nothing compared to fucking idiots who send `virus-warning' error messages to forged addresses:
(Another slightly surprising observation from the above is that there does not appear to be any significant `seasonal' component to the rate at which spam arrives in my inbox. That is, the average number of spams I get on a Monday is pretty close to the number I get on a Tuesday, Wednesday or indeed any other day of the week. This suggests that spammers, in aggregate, don't take any days off. Serves the fuckers right, quite frankly.)
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Many people will have seen the big publicity campaign for `chip and PIN' authorisation for credit and debit card transactions. This is advertised through a website for the whole scheme, numerous lesser websites from individual banks, adverts in the windows of shops which have installed the new equipment, and occasional breathless articles in the press about how `chip and PIN' will stop fraud using the POWER OF TECHNOLOGY!
(John Band has already covered some of this stuff.)
For those who haven't encountered this spectacular innovation yet, the idea is that, rather than signing a slip when you make a transaction, you type in the same four-digit code you use to withdraw money from a cash machine. (You might imagine this change being motivated by the observation that even trained staff get comparisons of signatures wrong in about 40% of cases, and anyway staff at shops usually don't bother to check the signature on a credit card counterfoil.)
The `chip' part refers to the fact that the scheme can only be used with new `smart' credit cards, which have both a magnetic strip bearing your account number and various other details, and a silicon chip with the same data and some other stuff. The `other stuff' includes the ability to check whether a PIN entered by a user is correct, and to shut down the card if an incorrect PIN is entered three times. It is supposed to be impossible to copy the data off the card's chip, and anyway it is protected by the magic of cryptography. Of course, none of this matters a bit, because the magnetic strip is easy to copy and is the only thing read by a cash machine. So if you want to embark on a lucrative career in cash-card fraud, all you need to do is to get a job in a shop, install a little bit of electronics to record the PINs which customers enter into the `chip and PIN' terminal, and surreptitiously swipe their cards through a magnetic stripe reader. Copy the cards, find a cash machine, and plunder their accounts. (Note how this is much more efficient than traditional credit card fraud which requires the crook to buy goods or services; with `chip and PIN' the dishonest shop assistant can nick actual cash.) Now, criminals are already doing this with auto-tellers, but it'll be even easier with `chip and PIN', since, (as the `chip and PIN' people helpfully point out)
Point-of-sale PIN terminals will be of various shapes and sizes like tills are now.
and so there'll be no way to tell whether the contraption into which you're asked to enter a PIN is a real `chip and PIN' terminal or something cobbled together by a criminal.
Oddly enough, the consumer-oriented propaganda from the `chip and PIN' people doesn't mention any of this. Instead it claims that,
Chip and PIN is the new, more secure way to pay with credit or debit cards in the UK.
Instead of using your signature to verify payments, you will be asked to enter a four-digit Personal Identification Number (PIN) known only to you.
You might be wondering how this scheme will make you `more secure', as the above quotation suggests. If so, you need to read it more closely. It's not claiming that `chip and PIN' will make you more secure, as that's not the point of the system. The intention is to reduce losses from banks and merchants resulting from fraud. (It is frequently said that the implementation of `chip and PIN' in France reduced losses resulting from card fraud by 80%.) There are two ways that losses to fraud can be reduced:
I haven't seen any discussion of the French figures in this light (and, of course, the second sort of reduction is pretty hard to measure).
From the point of view of a cardholder, the reason that it's safe to pay for things using credit or debit cards is nothing to do with PINs or chips or cryptography; the reason is that you're insured by your bank against losses. `Chip and PIN' ostensibly doesn't change this; if a criminal obtains your PIN and card number and robs you via an ATM (or obtains your PIN and nicks your card, then uses it to pay for items in a credit card transaction), then you should be insured against the loss. On this theory, `chip and PIN' is a nuisance, but not a financial risk.
Unfortunately, this theory is wrong, not for any technical reason but because banks in the UK have historically been very effective at pretending that their computer systems are secure when they aren't. There are several examples mentioned in Ross Anderson's paper, Why Cryptosystems Fail, (and numerous others in his book, which is well worth reading); sometimes victims are refunded, but often the pattern followed looks like this:
(There's a list of some of these cases on Mike Bond's web pages about `Phantom Withdrawals', including references to the shocking Munden case and various other miscarriages of justice. It's worth noting that in Bond's list, a case is marked as `resolved' if the courts have reached a decision either way, so `resolved' cases include ones where banks have screwed over customers for thousands of pounds lost because of crap security, and the courts have stood by and done nothing about it.)
In one case Anderson mentions, the bank's defence rested in part on the laughable claim that their computer system could not suffer from bugs because its software ``was all written in assembly language''. With friends like these, who needs enemies? The only mystery is how they've kept card fraud down to only Ł400 million per year.
And, despite twenty years of ATM fraud, banks are still trying to pull off the `PINs can't be forged' stunt to avoid (a) compensating customers for fraud, and (b) being exposed as completely hopeless. (This doesn't work in the United States, where the courts decided that banks were liable for such losses unless there was actual evidence that the complaining customer was trying to defraud them; see this paper for more on the situation there and here.)
Of course, nobody would try to claim that forging someone's signature is impossible, and if the bank tried to use that as an argument against compensating you for losses from fraud, they'd be laughed out of court. So one consequence of `chip and PIN' is that it will be easier for banks to avoid paying out for losses from fraud, thereby cutting their losses. (I was astonished to hear from a friend that their signature was frequently questioned when they paid for items with a card. Often cashiers draw attention to the fact that my signature written in the large space available on a credit card slip looks completely different to my signature written in the tiny little box on the back of a credit card, but none of them have ever suggested that I'm forging someone else's scribble....)
You'd expect that retailers wouldn't be very happy with a system designed to let banks screw over their customers (who are, as you will recall, `always right'), so the banks have decided to shift liability for fraud onto retailers, in cases where `PIN [sic.] could have prevented fraud' to encourage them to sign up to the new scheme. Since most businesses have lots of customers but only one bank, it's probably rational for them to let a few of their customers get shafted by the banks just to avoid making any trouble.
There is a solution to this problem, in fact: you can ask to be issued a `PIN-suppressed' or `chip and signature' card by your bank; when you use the card in a `chip and PIN' terminal, the terminal will prompt you to sign the slip as usual rather than entering a PIN. When I rang my bank to ask about this, they explained that it was only available to disabled people. While it's nice to see a company offering, in one small way, better service to disadvantaged members of society than to others, this is scant reassurance for those of us who want a good chance of recovering our losses when we become victims of fraud. (Current figures suggest that about one in four bank customers will be victims of ATM fraud at some point in their lives.) So, I've written to my bank (Barclays) to ask for a `PIN-suppressed' card. I'll report on the response, but so far I am not hopeful.
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Alex Tabarrok on `Marginal Utility' (rapidly descending from list of links to vaguely entertaining economics stuff into advert for foaming-at-the-mouth Randism) writes,
A sign on the highway on the road to Toronto speaks volumes.
Remember, driving is a privilege not a right.Despite the fact that I am Canadian, everytime I see this sign my stomach churns with anger and I must suppress a desire to turn back to the U.S. The sign is a reprimand from the rulers to the ruled reminding them of their place. I want to tear it from the ground but my fellow Canadians think my reaction odd. More Americans, I think, would understand and that I suppose is why I call America home.
Now, ignoring the fact that he was a day late posting this -- were I an americanophobe I would obviously make a comparison with the second world war (or even the `war on terror[ism]') here -- let's look more closely at this. Tabarrok is apparently claiming that the United States is superior to Canada on the basis that the latter's government believes that,
driving is a privilege not a right.
Which must mean that, in Tabarrok's imagination at least, it is that case that,
driving is a right, not a privilege
in the United States. Now, I haven't spent enough time in the United States to make an objective assessment of the driving skills of residents of that country, though I will say that they have an annoying tendency to sound their horns before, during and after performing the simplest of maneouvres. But what about Tabarrok's claim? For whom is driving a right? He doesn't qualify the sentiment, so we must assume that it's a right for everyone: people who are drunk, or unqualified, or medically unfit to drive a car, or who don't own a car, or whatever. (Happily for the residents of the United States, that nation of course does not follow his recommendation.)
I want to tear [the sign carrying the slogan] from the ground but my fellow Canadians think my reaction odd.
We are, apparently, supposed to interpret this as evidence that citizens of the United States are in some way an improvement on Canadians.
That said, I know plenty of lovely people from the United States, while Tabarrok is a Canadian. However, all the other people I know from Canada are quite normal.
(In a previous episode of Tedious Libertoonian Twaddle Update -- not published under that name -- John Band pointed out that it's always worth checking that alleged internet libertoonians aren't taking the piss. In this case I don't think he is -- taking the piss is, apparently, a collectivist thing to do -- but I'm prepared to consider evidence to the contrary.)
Comments (6 so far)
So, I went to deepest darkest Essex for the day. In fact it was most pleasant, if a bit muddy. Anyway, on an entirely trivial note, I saw a rubbish bin on the side of which the word
LITTER
was written in enormous letters. Below, in much smaller print, the notice continued,
Another Great Product From Granby Ltd.
Obviously it meant the bin, not the rubbish; but I was confused for a moment.
(I'm not sure whether this, err, observation is splendid or nonsense -- it would be silly for it to be rubbish -- but I'm sure my half-dozen readers will enlighten me.)
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Copyright (c) Chris Lightfoot; available under a Creative Commons License. Comments, if any, copyright (c) contributors and available under the same license.
