Statistics Statistics

Last week Lee Hsien Loong finally came out clean with the government's concern about social stratification in Singapore. He noted that 'the children of successful people are doing better, the children of less successful people are doing less well....It's a big gap. It exists in Singapore, sharper than before.'

This seems to undermine Ng Eng Hen's statements just before the GE that Singapore's meritocracy education system ensures social mobility. To pove that meritocracy is alive and well, he had then flashed out statistics that amongst students in the bottom third socio-economic bracket, about half score within the top two-thirds of their Primary 6 cohort. One can only laugh and wonder how many iterations these statistcs were juggled and tossed to present a certain point. I can even imagine the irate minister dismissing sets of not good enough figures.

I have personally learnt from the experiences in my previous job to be discerning in reading historical figures. This happened when the company invited banks to submit proposals for jobs like managing a bond issue or a M&A project. Unbelievably every bank would present itself as the top in a league table. Were their statistics fraudulent? No not at all, it was just a question of being top in which geographical zone, which historical period (last 1,3,5,7 or 10 years), which criteria (aggregate of projects in terms of $ value; absolute number of projects; or number/aggregate value of projects exceeding $100m $200m etc). There was no shortage of creative criteria used to present each bank as top in the league table. In fact I was told that there is a software to help sort statistics for league tables such that the desired presentation is achieved.

It is no surprise therefore that the government and affiliates with its huge resource of think tank and software can easily produce sets of authentic figures that meet the presenter's requirement. So when LHL defended Temasek and GIC's investments in Citigroup and UBS in 2008 by citing that despite the huge write down in those investments, GIC's annual returns in the past 20 years still averaged 7.8 percent in U.S. dollar terms; a discerning reader has to ask for figures over the last 10 or 5 or 3 years as well to get a more holistic picture.

Back to Ng Eng Hen. Ooh... I feel bad for him (He preformed a minor surgery for me when he was a surgeon. Nice guy, very approachable). Just because the government's stance has changed, the statistics he presented earlier in the year may now seem irrelevant or even misleading! Well if you have asked why bottom ONE THIRD ah?, why 50%? amongst top TWO THIRD ah? you would have scratched your head and dismissed it as "Aiya I was never good at statistics in school anyway, that's why I can never understand".