Bizarre reasoning

Paul Seabright in the Times Literary Supplement on Alison Wolf's The XX Factor:

"The take-home message [apparent from various statistics] is clear: hold on to your virginity at least till after you leave school. In the twenty-first century, you may no longer owe it to your religion or your future husband to be sexually responsible, but you certainly owe it to your career."

But, he adds, "Nothing in the correlation justifies such a conclusion. ... A woman who concludes that being sexually choosier than she naturally wants to be will improve her chances of making the alpha track is making the same statistical error as a man who thinks that drinking more dry martinis will make him richer."

Hang on a minute. Having sex, by and large, increases your chances of having a baby. Having a baby before you leave school, by and large, hinders your pursuit of a successful career. No one is making a statistical errors by thinking along these lines.

Wonga not wronger

Robert Peston essentially says there is nothing wrong with Wonga, thereby maintaining his position as a sane voice within the BBC's business/economic reporting staff.

Anthony Hilton (consistently interesting) puts it like this: banks "lost touch with their customers, and had no real idea of what they wanted any more so they kept inventing things no one really needed and then had to go to extreme lengths to get them sold", while by contrast Wonga has "a clear unvarnished vision of who its customers [are], what they needed and how their demands could be met".

I was at a conference yesterday (more interesting than it sounds) which certainly bore out Hilton's comment about banks selling things no one needed - and going to great lengths to do so. On the other hand, something that people did want was clear pricing. This did not always help them: a free plain vanilla swap (in other words, fixing the rate on your loan) was often preferred, even if would have been better to have paid a premium in exchange for a better product (e.g. a cap).

Perhaps Hilton is being generous to say that banks didn't know what people wanted; perhaps they knew quite well that what customers wanted was to participate in their low-margin businesses, while banks wanted to move them to higher-margin areas.

But what seems to be right is that customers' desire for clear and transparent pricing allows businesses to charge lots of money, so long as it is clear how much will be charged and that it won't go up.

Lawyers often charge a lot of money, but their pricing is not that clear. I suspect that they could get away with charging even higher sums if they were fixed and predictable, rather than hourly-rate and obscure.

TV reporter defends using flood survivor as perch

That's the headline. The story and video are here.

Tricky question

I don't know the answer to this one.

Fill in the blank

"I met a 27-year-old man who had just managed to re-enter the world of work ... I wondered: did he think that the fact he [had been] unemployed was his fault?

His reply was [         ]. "Yeah," he said. "I do. I think I should have applied for more. I should have picked myself up in the morning, got out, come to a place like this [a sort of job centre] – tried more. When you're feeling down, you start blaming the world for your mistakes – you feel the world owes you. And it doesn't. You owe the world: you have to motivate yourself, and get out there, and try.""

How would you fill in the blank in the square brackets? 

Animals in the news

Great photos.

Things you only see in judgments

"Ms Canning had previously obtained degrees in political science and marketing from Haifa University and University of Westminster respectively before running a smoked salmon club for a smoked salmon company." Perhaps her marketing degree was a sandwich course.