Why the Wimbledon draw is a warning to policy makers

 Seeding matters in tennis.  Get the seedings – the assessment of who is most likely to win the tournament - wrong, and the public are denied the best final they might see – as happened at the French Open two weeks ago.  The tournament organisers at Wimbledon have just committed that error and produced an unbalanced draw – though less a bad one than there might have been.

Most of the world’s top tennis tournaments apply a simple rule.  They seed players according to their current place in the world rankings – which are calculated on a player’s performance over the past year.

Wimbledon doesn’t do that.  It has always said that, since the grass court season is so short, and thus plays so little part in determining the rankings, they reserve their right to adjust to recognise grass court performance.  For the men’s tournament they have an algorithm to do that.  For the women’s they exercise judgement – and that has led them in the past to bump the formidable Williams sisters up the seeding chart.

But even with these get-out clauses, the sports pages are full of condemnation of the decision to seed former champion, Rafael Nadal at No.5.

Data driven

The reason for Nadal’s seeding is quite simple.  Despite winning the French Open, Nadal is currently at No.5 in the world.  That is what the data says and data does not lie.

Context matters

But there is a reason for Nadal’s lowly ranking – he spent 7 months of the last season at home in Mallorca unable to play.  So the people ahead of him in the rankings have six months more points than him.  The fact that he is fifth in the rankings despite being absent for half the year is pretty amazing.

Formulaic adjustment

So why is Nadal not benefiting from the adjustment formula?  Because that too is very rules bound.  It takes account of performance on grass.  At first sight Nadal – twice a winner at Wimbledon (remember 2008 and his gloomy vanquishing of the seemingly undefeatable Federer), and four times a beaten finalist looks to have a pretty good claim to be bumped up.  If he were a woman he would be.  But the men’s formula looks at “recent” performance on grass – and last year Nadal’s knees were beginning to go – and he made shock early exits in the two grass tournaments he played and gave the Olympics a miss.  His earlier performances count for nothing.

Applying judgement

No tennis pundit thinks Nadal is the fifth most likely person to win the tournament.  Pre-draw betting markets had him ranked second alongside homegrown favourite Andy Murray, and ahead of both Federer and his compatriot, who has never won a Grand Slam (Rafa has 12) David Ferrer.   The smart move would be to seed him third or fourth which would have made sure there was no risk of him playing the top two in the quarter finals – and also avoiding what has happened – a quarter final versus Federer.

Off the courts

There has been much discussion on the benefits of more data driven decision making – in sport and in policy.   And in general, basing policy on data is much better than relying on prejudice alone.

But the case of the Nadal seeding adds a caution.  Data alone only tell you so much.  You also need to look behind the data and apply judgement to get the most sensible result.  This is the point US forecaster Nate Silver makes in his book “The Signal and the Noise” – you need to start with a hypothesis you refine as more data becomes available.   

This view also lines up with the points Jeremy Hardie and Nancy Cartwright made at Institute for Government on Monday about the way to use evidence in practice.  If you don’t understand the key elements that drive a result, successful replication will be impossible.  What looks like the “same” policy will turn out to have very different results if you misunderstood what bits of sameness mattered.  They called for the new What Works centres to develop guidance on how to make what works somewhere work somewhere else. And you need to find different ways of looking at the same problem to sense check your results.

If Wimbledon had looked at an alternative measure of performance – the rankings of performance in 2013 - they would have found that Nadal isn’t the fifth ranked player in the world.  By a considerable margin, he is the best.

Politics is POINTLESS

In the aftermath of the Eastleigh by-election, PASC chair Bernard Jenkin reflected on the disconnect between the Westminster village on the Today programme on Saturday morning.   If politicians watched the teatime quiz show Pointless, they would realise just how little the public knows (or cares?) about them.

I love the quiz show Pointless (I am not alone – when he did his back in, BBC Business Editor, Robert Peston, tweeted that the one good part was that he would be able to watch the show).  For those who have not watched, it the format is quite simple.  Pairs of people (an interesting demographic – a mix of small business people, students, public sector workers and the retired) have to find answers that the fewest people got when “100 people were given a 100 seconds” to answer a question.  The choice of subjects is quite eclectic – from mountain ranges, to famous blondes, to Scottish football,  to Latin phrases translated into English.   Whichever pair wins through the first 3 rounds gets to play for a jackpot when they are given five categories to choose from – and then are given 3 chances to find “the all important pointless answer”.

It’s a good format  and makes for a fun forty-five minutes – but it’s also a fascinating window into what a sample of people know and don’t know.  And over a concerted period of Pointless watching (it’s been on for years but I only discovered it in the autumn), some very distinct patterns appear. 

First, and perhaps as expected, a lot of people know about celebrities, films and other forms of popular culture and a bit of sport.   Geography and history are quite a lot weaker.   People had amazingly little recall of Olympic medallists (only 23 named Jessica Ennis as the winner of Heptathlon gold – what were they watching last summer?)

Second, those categories are the ones that the finalists almost invariably pick reflect the same themes – but because knowledge of categories such as “Steve Carrell” films is so widespread it’s really difficult to find a pointless answer. 

But third, from time to time, there is a politics category on offer.  It might be UK politics, or US or world politics.  In the final section, where contestants get a choice, they almost invariably immediately rule it out – on the basis that “they know nothing about politics” – no more shame in that than yet another woman admitting she knows “nothing about football”.  And they end up having to identify female Brit award winners since 1970.

It always seems a bad tactic.  Because to anyone who was listening to Bernard Jenkin on Saturday, its unbelievably easy to find a pointless answer in politics.  A few episodes ago the final pair did choose politics.  They had to identify current MPs whose surnames began with a vowel.  Their first answer was George Osborne – who scored a mighty 8.  Their other answers were Leo Abse (retired in 1987) and Gerry Adams (in the Irish Parliament now).   The jackpot went unwon. There were too many pointless answers to list at the end.  Douglas Alexander was pointless (Danny didn’t appear to be – the fruits of power).  In a much earlier programme when people were asked to name women MPs, Harriet Harman and Yvette Cooper were both pointless answers.

But perhaps the best illustration of the disconnect between the Westminster village and the people came in a question in an episode last week.  The category was Radio 4 programmes.  The question was “name the programme John Humphries has presented since XX”.   6/100 people (and none of the contestants) got the answer right.  Bernard: they are not listening.

Vote Abe -- or Birgitte

SPOILER ALERT – THIS ASSUMES YOU HAVE WATCHED THE END OF BORGEN SERIES 2 AND LINCOLN (OR AT LEAST KNOW YOUR HISTORY)

It’s been a great month for those of us who like our dramas political and have been wondering why we never saw Matt Santos’s first term in full technicolour.    But now Borgen has ended – until next year -  and there will be no Lincoln Part 2, it seems like a good time to reflect on what these two entertainments tell us about politics.

Intriguingly, for Coalition Britain, a central theme has been stitching together coalitions – with the noble Mr Lincoln resorting to bringing out the US version of the payroll vote – by offering federal jobs to lame duck Democrats to vote through the 13^th amendment – and PM Nyborg having to resort to smear tactics to get the Greens on board with her grand “Common Future” – and exiting a potential rival to Brussels (in the best titled episode of the series).   In both, we are asked to admire politicians who do the wrong thing to achieve a bigger objective.  But we also see the care and attention that is needed to assemble and keep coalitions going.

And a key theme of both is the problems politicians have in reconciling political office with home life.  The scenes between Abe and Mary Todd Lincoln make the Borgen domestics look restrained – at the very least until Birgitte’s last screaming match.  In both the spouses fail the Denis Thatcher test.   But most poignant in both is the impact on the children.  Interestingly the littler ones cope better – whether Tad or Magnus, while it is the older child who suffers.  And the compromise for both politicians is that they apply different rules to their children – Abe wanting Robert not to enlist because of what his being killed would do to the mother, Birgitte going private to jump the waiting list to get Laura into psychiatric treatment (do they really have 50 week waiting lists n Denmark?!). 

The biggest shock is just how different politics looks in the two.  One hundred and fifty years (and the Atlantic) separate Lincoln and Borgen.  While the House in Lincoln is split on abolition of slavery, it is vehement that it will not concede votes to “negroes” – but even clearer that votes for women would be absolutely beyond the pale.   The set up in the Danish Parliament looks very similar – big seats, in a semi-circle with a speaker in the middle.  But the composition of the two legislatures is very different.  In 1865, it is white men with beards. In 2012 (fictional) Denmark it is a rainbow parliament with prominent women and Muslims.   The House of Commons looks a bit too dangerously near the Lincoln end of the spectrum (except for the beards). 

But there is a heartening message from both.  Politics is a trade for honourable people.  They can manage to survive the chaotic home life (even if not an unfortunate theatre trip).  They can make change happen.   But one is fiction.  One is a story over a century old.  Neither is a story about British politics.   The most recent British political film showed our only woman prime minister struggling with Alzheimers, not wowing Parliament and trouncing the opposition, and left people none the wiser about what she actually did.  We still get the hopelessness of Yes Prime Minister and the venality of the Thick of It – and then wonder why people disengage from politics.

Which raises a question.  Can we only drop our cynicism about politics and politicians if we are looking at the “ government” of another country?