From Danny Dorling\’s new book, \”Injustice, why social inequality persists\”, from the intro, this gem:
Within rich countries, the portrayal of children\’s abilities as lying along bell curves (as if these are natural things) is unjust.
What?
Bell curves are unnatural? Children? Abilities?
Lordy be, height, weight, dick length, tit size and lifespan length lie upon bell curves. The thought that the smarts to deal with the world similarly lies along such a statistical representation of so much of the rest of the human experience is hardly revolutionary. And to describe it as \”unjust\” is simply to prove oneself as a mimping whiffler.
One other joy:
In the US to not have a car these days is not to live as a \”normal\” human being. But in Britain almost half the children of lone parents have no access to a car.
1) I\’m quite happy that kiddies aren\’t driving down to the offie myself.
2) To compare the social standards of one country to those of another does not, in fact, work. Many in India are vegetarian for religious reasons. This does not mean that many in England who eat meat are breaching English religious standards. Many in China eat rice as their preferred source of carbohydrates. This does not mean that those in England who eat potatoes are therefore rice deprived. And, of course, that England as a more urban country than the US, one with more communal, socialistic even, methods of transport like the Tube (and I most certainly, while not being either the child of a single mother or having sired children on a mother I am not married to, did not desire or have a car when I last lived in London) and thus a car is less of a requirement….I thought that was supposed to be a good thing?
3) Absolutely everyone has access to a car. It\’s called, for those who wish to rent it for a short time only (in the sense that \”prostitute\” is a synonym for \”very short term conjugal rights\” or \”short term wife\”) \” a taxi\”.
Mimp. Whiffle.
I might try to do a longer critique of this book as if that\’s what we get in the intro the rest of it should be fun.
If you can’t accept that random variation produces a normal distribution, you will never be able to understand causes of phenomena, nor develop and apply solutions to problems. Sadly this knowledge is not widely held, hence the rampant bollocks spouted by most pols of any hue and by the majority of management gurus. They place political prejudice before evidence.
Gauss discovered the normal distribution in 1805, Deming built his System of Profound Knowledge in 1950. Our business and society continues to fail, despite knowledge being available.
Ah, but the only reason taxis are affordable for poor people is because the taxi firms exploit poor immigrants who barely speak English who’re prepared to work all the hours under the sun for the small amounts of money we’re prepared to pay.
Oh, wait, I get a cheap ride home, they get to put food on the table, everyone wins.
Except the idiots and racists, obviously.
Car’s on the market, anyone want to buy a ten year old purple Ka? One careful owner (that wasn’t me). It’s in good working order, except the brakes…
The fact is they do lie along a bell curve. There might be arguments about why they are so distributed.
Heh! Reality sucks.
The man’s an idjit.
But I can’t help wondering what his alternative to the normal distribution of natural features is. Are we expected to believe that all children are exactly the same? Or does he think it his duty to try to force them all to be exactly the same? If so, I dread to think what he is planning to do to the tall kids….
We already know that the lefty mantra of educating all children to achieve their fullest potential was a lie, we saw how the funding for gifted children was stealthily withdrawn.
And his criteria are rather questionable. In the raising of children, access to two parents who live at your house, is a whole lot more advantageous than access to a car. But we are expected to overlook thumping great disadvantages that are the direct result of “lifestyle choices”, because that would be “judgemental”.
what sort of distribution does he think children’s ability lie along? It hadn’t occured to me that a uniform, chi-squared, gamma etc. might be any more “just” than the normal
There is only one “just” distribution Luis. One in which there are no variations, and all the children are exactly the same.