Eoin Clarke: Plankety-Plank
The graph above is classic Eoin Clarke: propaganda for credulous boneheads.
Take a statistic.
Find a way that simplifies and distorts reality with a big, shiny, wedge of colour.
Then display it to ‘show’ an apparent rising trend of misery under the Ministrations of the Tory Government. Here he’s talking about ‘bankruptcies’:
The graph above shows the accumulated total number of personal insolvencies in England & Wales from May 2010 until 31st March 2012. It shows that more than 230,000+ people have gone bankrupt under the Tories. If this rate of personal bankruptcies continues at this rate for the rest of this Tory government then close to 600,000 people will go bankrupt under this Tory government. There is some good news in today’s figures which show a 4.5% reduction in personal insolvencies but of course that is no succour to the 28,000+ people who went bankrupt in the first 13 weeks of this year.
Where to start?
The statistics are here on the Insolvency Service website, and you want the “Individual insolvencies in England and Wales, 1960 to present” spreadsheet.
Under Dr Eoin’s ’bankruptcy’ category he conflates:
- ‘Bankruptcy Orders‘, which are a traditional bankruptcy,
- ‘Individual Voluntary Arrangements‘, which are contracts with your creditors to pay reduced debts or at a reduced rate, and
- ‘Debt Relief Orders‘, which allow small (<£15000) debtors to apply online, stop paying debts, and walk away from them after 12 months.
- Deeds of Arrangements, which are more specialist and hardly ever used.
Debt Relief Orders were introduced by Gordon Brown in 2009, and in the last 2 years traditional “bankruptcies” have halved from 18,256 to 9,132.
Let’s explore the numbers.
Question one: Is the Evil Tory (never mind that it’s a coalition) government worse than the previous 2 years?
Er .. no.
- Cumulative Personal Insolvencies 2008-2009
A cumulative graph is the wrong one to display this data; the trend of interest is whether “bankruptcies” are increasing or not, and a cumulative graph conceals that information.
And as for selecting a segment from a basically section of graph, hoicking it out of context, and using it to pretend that this selected period is uniquely awful … the mind boggles.
Question 2: What does the longer term trend show in bankruptcies?
Here’s the graph that Eoin Clarke should have used if he wanted to make some intelligent commentary on trends in bankruptcy, showing the different types. This graph runs from 1990 to 2012:
- Personal Insolvencies 1990-2012
So what do we conclude?
a – The number of insolvencies has been gradually increasing for the last 15 years.
b – The number has reduced quite sharply under the current government, from a peak roughly when Mr Gordon was thrown out into the place of ghashign and grinding of teeth.
c – Dr Eoin’s presentation is both wrong and simply misleading. We cannot comment on whether that is down to dishonesty, ignorance, or sheer clueless stupidity.
It is far from axiomatic that a bankruptcy, or an increase in personal insolvencies, is a bad thing in itself. The objective is to resolve an impossible situation in an orderly way. But there a lot of complex points here, and reducing it to a simple misrepresented graph is to treat your audience with contempt.
I’d say. however, that the new system of Debt Relief Orders provides a significant perverse incentive for running up, or not addressing, debts while you do something else (eg finish a course), in the knowledge that you can walk away after a year.
Given the number of people beating Dr Eoin over the head with pig’s bladders in the hope that reality will seep in, it is incredible that more ‘journalists’ continue to use him as a source, whether or not he’s the Director of “Labour Left, The Home of Ethical Socialism”.
And the intellectual hollowing out of left commentary continues apace.
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1
May 9, 2012 at 07:32 -
“Given the number of people beating Dr Eoin over the head with pig’s bladders in the hope that reality will seep in, it is incredible that more ‘journalists’ continue to use him as a source…”
Replace ‘Dr Eoin’ with ‘Richard Murphy’, ‘Polly Toynbee’, ‘George Monbiot’…
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3
May 9, 2012 at 08:24 -
Is his doctorate in “Underwater Basket Weaving” or something less useful?
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May 9, 2012 at 09:19 -
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May 9, 2012 at 09:34 -
This seems to be the sort of stuff designed for ‘core voters’ – the ones that have been uneducated enough to swallow it.
Oddly, you see lots of similarly meaningless graphs and charts in the financial press (notably the FT). You wonder whether FT journalists are so daft that they either believe their own charts, or assume that their (presumably reasonably savvy) readers will.
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May 9, 2012 at 11:43 -
There is a picture in the MSN today regarding all the rain which we can still expect in this horrible drought; lashing down, and the bloke is holding a copy of the FT over his head. So…..clever enough to read the FT, too thick to carry a brolly during the wettest period since 1910.
Says it all really.
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9
May 9, 2012 at 11:37 -
Looks like he got Michael Mann to help him with that graph.
Speaking of which – it looks as though (DV) the shit might be about to hit the UAE fan at last. He has evidence that the Muir Russell enquiry was lied to by Keith Briffa, a colleague of that nice Prof. Phil Jones. The data needed to uncover this malfeasance took ten years to get out of UAE, using FOI.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/5/9/the-yamal-deception.html
http://climateaudit.org/2012/05/06/yamal-foi-sheds-new-light-on-flawed-data/
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10
May 9, 2012 at 12:32 -
I think you would like the following website by John Brignell.
And my favourite page I check is :-
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/number%20of%20the%20month.htm
I have spent many an hour reading its analysis for pure pleasure, which is strange considering I hated maths and statistics at school as I just “couldn’t get it.”
I guess that actually having to apply it during my work in IT allowed me to see maths in a practical way that the abstract methods of teaching didn’t.
It details many such examples of starting graphs in the wrong place, and/or shortening a scale while keeping its physical length the same to distort the graph.
Sadly it seems that ill health prevents him from posting very often recently, which is a great shame, but hopefully his site will remain a beacon for all that is wrong with statistics and data dredges for many years to come.
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May 9, 2012 at 16:49
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May 9, 2012 at 13:37 -
I read this book 50 years ago, I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to avoid being misled by poor stastical analysis.
The first thing I noticed about that graph was that it started at zero, and didn’t tell me what the previous rate of bankrupcies were. It’s one of the techniques described in the book.
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May 9, 2012 at 14:40 -
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May 10, 2012 at 00:24 -
The graph is not even obtained from the data which would show a steeper climb at the start and gradually shallower climb as time wears on and the rate of insolvencies declines.
Dr Clarke conflates not just IVAs and DROs with Bankruptcies, he also includes Sequestrations and Protected Trust Deeds.
His site has been reconfigured some months ago to block my comments on his factual errors-
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May 10, 2012 at 07:19
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May 10, 2012 at 01:35 -
Dr Clarke is union backed. That’s all you need to know.
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May 10, 2012 at 20:45 -
I would comment on this but I’m too busy trying to stop the bailiffs from taking over my shop!
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May 11, 2012 at 15:15 -
Eoin Clarke is a fucking idiot. Take a look at this:
http://liberalconspiracy.org/2012/01/10/ed-miliband-tried-to-persuade-against-iraq-in-2003/
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May 11, 2012 at 15:29 -
The man is absolutely innumerate. I toyed with the idea of pulling apart his ludicrous “Plan B” this week about how building 100,000 new council houses a year would rejuvenate the economy. Even leaving aside the obvious similarity the plan had with a perpetual motion machine his own figures so spectacularly failed to add up that any attempt to do a fair critique of the substance of the plan, such as it was, was doomed. Shame as he’s the single most used search term to end up on my blog despite only having written twice about him and I could have done with the traffic!
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20
May 11, 2012 at 17:11 -
Matt, has your blog and website been hacked?
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