Steve Kass

From “A Glut of One-Bedroom Apartments” in today’s New York Times:

Brokers say that many people who bought their apartments at or near the top of the market and now must sell are often simply trying to avoid losing money on the deal.

In May 2007, John and Wendy Penn bought a one-bedroom on West 72nd Street for $650,000. The couple, whose main residence is on Long Island, wanted an office and a pied-à-terre in Manhattan to expand their insurance business.

They bought the apartment as a long-term investment and quickly completed about $30,000 in renovations, including the restoration of the apartment’s prewar details. But when Mr. Penn became an independent insurance agent, he no longer needed space in Manhattan.

So in February, the couple put the apartment up for sale, pricing it at $769,000. Three price cuts later, the apartment is listed at $725,000 and still has not sold.

It doesn’t sound like the Penns are “simply trying to avoid losing money.” They tried to sell their apartment nine months after they bought it for $119,000 more than they paid. Now they’re only asking $75,000 more, which should cover their renovations, the sales agent’s commission, and the property taxes they paid. Does the Times think a pied-à-terre in Manhattan (or any housing anywhere) is supposed to be free?

Under the headline “Rise in TB Is Linked to Loans From I.M.F.”, Nicholas Bakalar writes for the New York Times today that “The rapid rise in tuberculosis cases in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is strongly associated with the receipt of loans from the International Monetary Fund, a new study has found.”

The study, led by Cambridge University researcher David Stuckler, was published in PLoS Medicine and is online at (URL may wrap):

http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0050143&ct=1.

Cambridge, Schmambridge. First clue: the Times quotes Stuckler: “When you have one correlation, you raise an eyebrow,” Mr. Stuckler said. “But when you have more than 20 correlations pointing in the same direction, you start building a strong case for causality.”

In twenty post-communist countries, the variable “participated in an IMF loan program in year Y” was significantly negatively associated with “TB rate per 100000 people,” whether using rate of cases, of deaths, or of new cases.

After reading the paper and looking at much of the source data, I agree with William Murray, an IMF spokesman also quoted in the article: “This is just phony science.”

Why do I agree with Murray?

Take the supporting table below, for example. It shows all the TB mortality data from “did not participate in an IMF loan program” years: year-to-year percentage changes in TB mortality rates (based on Logs) [sic]. Among the 45 values are 31 0.00s and nothing else close to zero. Almost half the nonzero values are from Poland and Hungary, but—oddly—the change is nonzero in odd-numbered years and zero in even-numbered years. There are four -22.31s, two -18.23s, a 15.42 and a -15.42, a 13.35 and a -13.35, and four stray values, one of which is -69.31. Now I know -0.6931 from calculus (the natural log of ½), and I googled 0.2231: it’s the natural log of 0.8. (There were about four times as many “did participate” country-years, for a total of 200+ data points.)

If you haven’t guessed, the data here, which mostly express stable or declining TB mortality, and which found the entire study, and which the authors attribute significantly to non-participation in IMF loan programs, are 4-significant-digit percentage changes between logs of adjacent very small positive integers. The small integers are from the Global Tuberculosis Database, queryable here: http://www.who.int/globalatlas/dataQuery/default.asp. This WHO data is rounded to whole numbers and for the countries and years studied, ranged between 1 and 20.

While this data is crude, I don’t doubt the study’s main finding: among post-communist countries, “participated in an IMF loan program in year Y” was significantly negatively associated with “TB rate per 100000 people.” What I doubt is that the relationship has anything to do with the IMF loan program.

The timeframe studied was 1989 to 2003, and a quick look at the data reveals a pattern to which are the “in an IMF loan program” years for the countries studied. Most countries began participating in 1991, 1992, or 1993, and most countries continued their participation through 2003, the end of the study timeframe. During this time, TB was on the rise, and there’s no question the mid nineties were not a typical period.

While the authors mention many correction strategies and tests to avoid one or another kind of bias, they didn’t mention the way in which “in program” years were distributed as one potential confounder. I can’t see how they ruled it out. There data isn’t there. From 1994 to 1997, there are only 10 “not participating” data points, mostly from Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Poland, which countries were anomolous in having shown no increase in TB during their IMF years. Some countries, Bosnia for example, seem to have been omitted from this part of the analysis, despite having participated in an IMF loan program and data being available from WHO.

The countries studied included Russia, with 140,000,000 people, as well as Estonia, Latvia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Albania, Armenia, Bosnia, Lithuania, counted together having less than 20% of Russia’s population. The authors acknowledge the possibility of ecological fallacy with little investigation. Summary statistics, such as the mean and standard deviation of TB rate among the countries, are unweighted by population, and fail to reflect the real situation. Over one time period quoted, the number resulting from taking the average of each countries TB rate, unweighted for population, went up 30%, but the TB rate among the population under study in fact doubled. Whether this changes any interpretation, I can’t say, but it does make a difference.

Not only am I not a statistician, I’m not an economist, and I have no idea whether the IMF did great things or not in mid-nineties eastern europe and former Soviet Union. But Stuckler and colleagues haven’t convinced me of anything.

Andrew Gelman dreams of the day when a journalist (like Ezra Klein) asks “Why?” the items on a list (like Rob Goodspeed’s) are in alphabetical order.

This drew my attention to the items on Barack Obama’s issues page, which as of today are not in alphabetical order (despite first appearance and various journalists’ reports that they are).

“Why?” is always a good question. So is “Why not?” If “Why not?” is the right question, something interesting might explain why [not]. Translation from another language, for example. A friend name Winternitz was listed as the first author of many joint papers, even after the citations were translated from Russian to English.

Why aren’t the items on Barack Obama’s issues page in alphabetical order? I don’t have an answer, but I wonder: Was the “Seniors & Social Security” issue once the “Social Security” issue?

This food-themed ad for an insurance company in the middle of an article about a fatal shark attack didn’t strike me as particularly tasteful.

A Reuters News Service article today reports [emphasis mine] “If both your parents have Alzheimer’s disease, you probably are more much likely than other people to get it, researchers said on Monday.” What if they both have dyslexia?

Headline: Nuclear Plant Shutdown Causes Massive Florida Power Outages

It’s the other way around, though, according to the article. A power outage caused the plant to automatically shut down, just like it’s supposed to. In the world of news, fear trumps truth.

A week ago, a small-town reporter named Steve Pokin wrote an emotional story for the St. Charles (Missouri) Journal. With headings like “SHADOWY CYBERSPACE”, “AX AND SLEDGEHAMMER”, and “THE AFTERMATH IS PAIN”, Pokin wove a modern tragedy about the October 2006 death of young Megan Meier. In Pokin’s tale, a neighbor fabricated a MySpace account through which the girl was tormented to commit suicide.

Whatever tragedy might have taken place in 2006, another tragedy is taking place now, in reaction to Pokin’s story. The AP picked it up yesterday, and it’s being republished widely, often under the headline “Mom: Web Hoax Led Girl to Kill Herself.”

Pokin’s story is taken at face value, people react with outrage and anger, and the supposed villain of the story has been identified and named by bloggers.

I’m not suggesting Pokin got the facts wrong, nor am I suggesting he got them right, either. I wasn’t there. I’m also not suggesting Pokin expected or intended the kind of reaction his story has produced. Pokin appears to have based his story mostly, if not entirely, on the word of one guilt-ridden, aggrieved mother (“I have this awful, horrible guilt and this I can never change,” she said. “Ever.”) and on the second-hand words of the story’s villain, summarized in a police report about an incident between the two families involved. From the reaction so far, that’s apparently all the information many people need to call for (or take) mob action.

A local television station quotes the St. Charles County Prosecutor, Jack Banas as saying, “Me personally, I’ve never seen anything on this case.”

Well it’s been much more than a few days. While I might recover what got lost in the change of hosting provider, there’s no point suspending the blog any longer. If I don’t keep posting, It’s laziness and procrastination from now on.

I’m changing web hosting providers, so things will probably be a mess for at least a few days.

The Federal tax filing deadline for regular 2006 tax returns is Tuesday, April 17, 2007, not Monday, April 16, 2007. Same for the state deadline here in New Jersey, and maybe your state, too. Why? Here’s the IRS’s answer:

Why are taxpayers getting extra time to file and pay?

Taxpayers will have extra time to file and pay because April 15 falls on a Sunday in 2007, and the following day, Monday, April 16, is Emancipation Day, a legal holiday in the District of Columbia.

By law, filing and payment deadlines that fall on a Saturday, Sunday or legal holiday are timely satisfied if met on the next business day. Under a federal statute enacted decades ago, holidays observed in the District of Columbia have an impact nationwide, not just in D.C. Under recently enacted city legislation, April 16 is a holiday in the District of Columbia. The IRS recently became aware of the intersection of the national filing day and the local observance of the new Emancipation Day holiday after most forms and publications for the current tax filing season went to print.

Individuals in the District of Columbia, as well as in six eastern states, already had an April 17 filing date prior to this announcement because they are served by an IRS processing facility in Massachusetts, where Patriots Day will be observed on April 16. These individuals are still required to file on April 17.

[link] IRS Q and A page about the April 17 deadline.