All our Lies

One consequence of moving is that three weeks of mail, and counting, has vanished into a postal black hole. The system for redirection in the US is free, and very simple to order online, but it seems to fail in its most basic function, a timely redirection. So every day I trot to the mailbox hoping to see a pile of Economists and Guardian Weeklies and Times, and every day so far I’ve come back empty handed. A week ago I got around to changing address with all the publications, so probably new ones will start arriving before the old ones. And of course we have no idea what other important correspondence is languishing in the same black hole.

The lack of periodicals has enabled me to catch up on reading some real books. Staying with my non-fiction preference, I’ve completed “Evicted” by Matthew Desmond and “Everybody Lies” by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.

I enjoyed them both. Both authors are young and pioneering in how and what they research, and come up with compelling narratives. I think I would rather spend time with Desmond, and Stephens-Davidowitz seems rather less mature. But I applaud both of them. These are probably examples of books that would never have been published, leave alone become best sellers, in the days when publishers stayed close to established writers and subjects. So both represent another victory for technology.

If you are minded to read Desmond’s book, then be aware that it is heavy. The subject matter is depressing and the stories of human degradation are relentless through the book. I found my mood darkening every time I spent any time reading it, and it took a couple of days after I had finished for me to be able to stop thinking about it and becoming rather miserable.

The book looks in depth at one of the curses in modern US society; that of housing challenges for the poor. There has been little new public housing built in recent years, and some existing public stock has reverted to the private sector. The financial crisis increased demand for rentals because some people faced foreclosure. There are few landlords willing to work at the bottom of the market, despite its profit potential. And regulation favours landlords. Meanwhile incomes for the poorest have been static – without any inflation – because the poor don’t vote or garner much sympathy and budgets are cut as taxes are reduced.

The consequence of all this is that poor people live in ever more desperate accommodation yet must to pay ever-greater shares of their income on rent. Many fall short, so are evicted, and that leads to a cycle of one-off costs and stigmatisation from which there is no real escape.

What is most brilliant about the book is how Desmond did his research. He chose one typical city, Milwaukee, and actually observed the lives of his subjects first hand, first by living in a trailer park and then renting in the inner city while shadowing some of its residents. He tells real stories of real people, and then draws general conclusions to create a bigger picture. It is a wonderful piece of work. We can feel how the people become trapped. Desmond shows great balance, avoiding sentimentality and not glossing over the failings of the people he got to know, and even showing some empathy for the landlords, who it would be easy (but lazy) to characterise as uncaring villains.

This way the reader really feels the desperation of the victims of the system, as well as understanding the trade offs of the other players like landlords and police.

It must have been a feat of endurance for Desmond to complete his research in this way. I hope many people read the book, including people in positions of influence. But somehow I doubt it. It is such a tough read and such a difficult subject to address with policy. Desmond advocates universal housing vouchers, so that housing becomes a right in the same way as health care – or at least health care in civilised countries and even in the US before the current administration guts Obamacare. Good luck building support for that in the current climate.

The second book was a much easier read and cheered me up. Stephens-Davidowitz is a data scientist with some interest in anthropology. A few years ago he would have ended in market research or some statistical branch of policy research. But now we have the internet, and he has specialised in using that new toy.

His brilliance is to find new ways to use the big data from things like Google searches and Facebook posts. But his approach is grounded in science. He is careful about statistical validity of conclusions and risks of bias, and he complements his new data sources with established ones to add weight to his findings. He points a clear path forward for his new approach. Though he is not modest in highlighting its potential, his argument remains quite compelling.

The examples he used to demonstrate his new art were decidedly tabloid material, though even some of those could help influence public policy. There was much discussion about how much sex we really get compared with what we claim, and some analysis of homosexuality and racism. Usefully, there is strong evidence that curbing abortion leads to failed abortions and deaths of foetuses – just what anti-abortionists are claiming to try to reduce. The analysis of closet racism is linked to Trump’s success as a backlash to Obama, based on regional patterns. I would have liked to see an attempt to see how much closet sexism did for Hillary, but that was absent.

While such content fuelled my interest, I also enjoyed the discussion of the theory, having been a poor statistician at college and then having developed some ideas about big data in retail in its early days, when we started loyalty programmes and suddenly had a surfeit of information about customers but little idea how to garner value from it.

Here, Stephens-Davidowitz makes some useful points. Big data is often only confusing, if you don’t know what to look for. It can bring out false positives just from its scale. But it does allow you to test ideas much more quickly. Key seemed to me to have a workable hypothesis to test. The other key was to divide real intention from claim. Most Facebook posts are more fantasy than reality. And I liked the revelation that when people put a series of quality movies on their “must watch soon” list, they are much more likely to seek out more banal comedies and action movies when the time comes to next choose what to really watch.  

I was never short of hypotheses. I mused about putting coffee odours in shops and having kids visibly eat ice creams on forecourts on hot days, thinking both might drive sales. We had many thoughts about variable pricing by station and by time of day, though here we always missed the longer-term effects of playing games with customer tolerance. I would have enjoyed the opportunity in business to try out many more live tests of this sort of thing. It remains true that winning retailers will not just be the ones with more data, but the ones with more skills at how to use it.

We already see the beginning of the dangers of the power generated from this new science. We can be manipulated in our opinions without any realisation or regulation. Data can be a tool, for example with insurance companies, to profile consumers in ways that are smart but could be discriminatory. Stephens-Davidowitz has some incomplete ideas about such things.

Overall, I can be a bit grateful as well as a bit annoyed with the US postal service for giving me the extra time to do a bit of book reading. Lo and behold, this afternoon has seen the arrival of two Economists, hopefully the start of the flood. But the interlude was enlightening. I should read more. Really, I should – not just claim that I should or have some vague intent to.