Saturday 28 June 2014

Break!

Just to break the mono-thematic nature of the recent posts, I thought I'd just linked to this article which has appeared in the Significance website.

That's an interesting analysis conducted by researchers at the LSE, demystifying the myth that migrants in the UK have unfair advantages in accessing social housing.

I believe these kinds of findings should be made as widely accessible as possible, because of the incredible way in which these myths are used to build up conspiracy theories or political arguments that are passed for based on "facts", but are, in fact, just a partial (if not biased at all) view of a phenomenon.

Our paper on the Eurovision song contest (ESC) (here, here and here) is of course far less important to society than housing; but it struck me that a few of the (nasty) comments we got in some of the media that reported the press release of our findings were effectively along the lines: I think Europe hate Britain and the fact that we don't win the ESC is evidence to that; you say otherwise based on numbers; that doesn't move my position by an inch


At the time, I felt a bit petty because this bothered me a bit. But, a couple of days later, I came across a couple of articles (here and here) on one politician who used the same kind of reasoning to make their point (eg Britain should get out of the EU $-$ the ESC is evidence that they hate us). Which bothered me even more...

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