Posts Tagged failing to figure

On the Daily Telegraph’s blog, Richard Preston writes about Civitas’ latest publication, Failing to Figure by Mervyn Stone, emeritus professor of statistics at UCL.  Half-way through, Preston makes the wry observation:

‘His biggest case study is the immensely complicated, deceitful and deluded means by which the formula was arrived at that determines how much of the NHS budget goes to each of the 152 primary care trusts in England. It’s almost proof of his case that you need to be a professional statistician to follow his argument: the chances of politicians understanding the formula, and therefore assessing whether it was fair, were virtually nil.’

True, it’s complicated.  But here’s something of an idiots’ guide (something also that Nigel Hawkes has written about in a typically eloquent way in the British Medical Journal):
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