Stumbling and Mumbling

Are day-night games fair?

Last week, the MCC announced plans to spend £200m upgrading Lords', with some of the money used for floodlights. However, a new paper suggests the latter might not be money well spent.
This is because day-night games are a poor competition. The authors looked at the 649 one-day day-night internationals played between 1979 and 2005, and found that the toss is massively important in such games.
They estimate that in a match between two sides of equal ability, the team winning the toss and batting first has a 57% chance of winning the match, a probability that rises to 69% if it also has home advantage.
By contrast, other research suggests that in day-only games, batting first is a disadvantage.
This suggests that batting in deteriorating light, even under floodlights, is a serious handicap.
And it means day-night games are unsatisfactory as their outcome is (partly) known before a ball is bowled.
One solution to this might be to have split innings, with teams batting for 25 overs alternately.

The toss, the Lucas critique and stability

Sometimes, important matters can shed light upon less important ones. Here’s an example. This letter in the Times from Michael Stafford reminds me why the UK economy has been so stable in recent years:

I have long felt that in any Test series it would be fairer if the two captains tossed only once, before the first Test. Whoever won the toss would then decide whether to bat or bowl first in that Test.
From then on, the choice would go to the captain who had not made the decision in the previous match.

There‘s a problem with this. Imagine the home side in a series were one-up and due to choose whether to bat or bowl in the following test. The groundsman would then prepare a featherbed pitch which might crumble on the last day, knowing his side would choose to bat first and so have a good chance of running up an unassailable total.
If he didn‘t know who would choose to bat, he couldn‘t prepare a pitch so favourable to his own team. The current system is therefore fairer.
What Mr Stafford fails to see is that if we change the rules, we change people’s behaviour - in this case groundsmen. This what the Lucas critique says.
What’s this got to do with economic stability?
Simple. This too might be due to the fact that changes in rules change behaviour.
In this case, the rule change was giving the Bank of England independence back in 1997. This led to a change in behaviour - people believed inflation would remain more stable. So the Bank hasn’t needed to raise interest rates so much as it did before in response to a pick-up in inflation. This in turn means we haven’t needed recessions to kill off inflation, as we did in the 1980s; Bill Martin and Bob Rowthorn tell the story here. 
Alternatively, the stability might be just luck (pdf).

Names matter

Why is West Indian cricket so bad? Here's a theory - only a partial, tentative explanation. But it's an overlooked possibility.
It's because the players' names are unusual.
Take the current side: Chris, Daren, Devon, Runiko, Shivnarine, Dwayne, Danesh, Darren, Jerome, Corey, Fidel. Five of these names are pretty rare, and only two are older, common ones: Darren and Chris.
Compare the side that blackwashed England in 1984: Gordon, Des, Larry, Viv, Clive, Jeff, Malcolm, Eldine, Roger, Michael and Joel. Only one name is really unusual, and most are old, common names.
This matters for a simple reason. If a boy has a common name, he'll think: "I'm nothing special. I'm going to have to work to make a name for myself." So Michaels, Malcolms and Roys practice harder. But if a boy has an unusual name, he'll think: "I'm special, unique. I can be me." He'll not practice so hard, thinking that talent and self-expression are sufficient.
The upshot is that people with common names will be more likely - at the margin and with exceptions - to put in the hard work necessary to succeed.
This is just a hunch based upon one data set. But there's more evidence. This paper (pdf) says:

More popular names are associated with better lifetime outcomes: that is, more education, occupational prestige and income, and a reduced likelihood of having a child before 25.

And teachers apparently think kids with unusual names are less likely to do well at school than ones with commoner names - an expectation that might be self-fulfilling.
So, maybe names matter.

Warne - not as good as Higgs

Shane Warne, who retires from test cricket tomorrow, has rightly received much acclaim. However, it's my patriotic duty to remind you that in one respect he is considerably inferior to Ken Higgs. Warne's test career bowling average, of 25.35, is much worse than Higgs' 20.74; many of Higgs' wickets were top batsmen. Of course, Higgs' career was shorter, but that was partly because of the selectors' southern bias.
This raises a question. Why do we pay so little attention to bowling averages? Everyone knows Don Bradman's batting average to the second decimal place, and could have a fair stab at naming the other players with the highest career batting averages. But I guess very few could name the men with the best bowling averages*, even excluding the earliest players who played in games where scores were generally lower.
Is there a good reason for this?
* Strictly speaking, the best test career bowling average of all time was Monkey Hornby's, the man immortalized in Francis Thompson's poem.

The Ashes, inequality and explanation

Why did England lose the Ashes? There's a parallel between this question and the question: why are some people richer than others? This is because both are subject to three levels of explanation.
1. Micro, or proximate. In the case of the Ashes, this level focuses on the precise, individual factors that caused England to lose: the Aussies were good, England were only lucky in 2005; Simon Jones and Michael Vaughan were injured; the selectors wrongly omitted Read and Panesar; the team were under-prepared for the first test, and so on.
In the case of inequality, this level focuses on differences in human capital, or in the compensating advantages or market failures that cause some jobs to be better paid than others.
2. Meso, or middling-level explanations. With the Ashes, this set asks questions about the structure of English cricket.  Should the side be selected by the coach, or  by a committee of experts in the county game? Are central contracts the best way of creating a team, or should England players play more county cricket?
With inequality, this level asks why there should be differences in human capital. Much of New Labour's (stated) policy has been addressed to this question - Blair's emphasis upon Sure Start, for example, or the aim of raising educational standards and increasing university graduates.
3. Macro explanations. In the case of cricket, these ask: what features of English society cause us to produce so few good cricketers? Is it the sale of playing fields, the under-payment and demotivation of teachers, the decline of social capital that means youngsters don't join cricket clubs, a bias against competitive sport, or what?
In the case of inequality, this level looks at the underlying power relations that generate inequality - the ability of firms to exploit workers; the inbuilt opportunities for rent-seeking at the top of hierarchies; the ideologies that underpin hierarchical employment structures and create a big demand for "talented" managers, and so on.
People who are relaxed about inequality seem to prefer to stick to micro level explanations, whilst radicals prefer level 3-type explanations.
Which raises my question. Does this "left" vs "right" preference between levels of explanations for economic inequality map into a similar preference for explanations of England's cricketing failure? If not, why not? And if so, what causes the difference in preferences?
And what counts as a proper explanation anyway?

Monty Panesar and market failure

It looks as if Monty Panesar will not play in the first test. Chris suggests this might be because his superior bowling skills will be wasted as Geraint Jones can't catch a spinning ball.
This raises an important economic problem - of indivisibilities in the production function. Imagine an extreme case in which spinners only take wickets through stumpings or caught behinds. If the wicket-keeper were useless, the spinner's skills, however great, would  be wasted. In this case, the production of Australian wickets is indivisible; it requires two inputs (a keeper and spinner) each of whom is little use without the other.
Such indivisibilities have important implications:
1. They can cause increasing returns to scale. If Monty did play, the marginal product of a an extra, good, keeper would be very high. Of course, England can't field more than 11 players. But ordinary companies, faced with similar indivisibilities, can. If one worker becomes very productive only if he works with an expensive machine, the firm should buy the machine.
This, of course, means that larger firms can be much more efficient than smaller ones, who can't overcome such indivisibilites. And this, in turn, means that competition between firms might not exist. As Herbert Scarf  showed here (pdf):

In the presence of increasing returns to scale in production the competitive equilibrium will typically fail to exist.

2. They help explain the existence of firms. If two assets only work well together, each has an incentive to threaten to pull out in order to bargain for a bigger share of the output. This is the hold-up problem. One natural solution to this is for the assets to be owned and managed together. If the threat of workers walking out is greater than that of capital moving, this implies that the assets should be owned by workers. This is why there's a case for worker ownership of public transport.
3. Indivisibilities can reduce incentives to acquire skills. There's little point spending years training to be an engineer, if there'll be no manufacturing industry when you qualify. This can lead economies into a "low skill equilibrium." People don't learn skills because they fear firms won't have the technology that requires skilled workers, and firms don't invest in technology, because they fear there'll not be the skilled workers to use it.
4. There's an ethical issue. Where there are indivisibilities, a worker's marginal product depends upon more than his own skills; when England have a  useless wicket-keeper, Monty's marginal product is low. But if they had a good one, it would be high.
This in turn suggests that it's too simple to say that it's "fair" to pay someone their marginal product. Is it really fair that a man's pay can vary widely through factors beyond his control?
Monty's likely exclusion from the England team isn't just bad news for all good Englishmen, then. It's also troubling for the more simple-minded free-marketeers.

The Kentish bias

England have dropped Geraint Jones. This is a surprise, because it flies in the face of a longstanding bias amongst the Test selectors in favour of players from the home counties in general, and Kent in particular.
This chart shows what I mean. It plots the number of Test caps won by players from each of the old counties (I'm excluding Durham) since 1946 against the number predicted by a simple two-variable model. The two variables are:
1. A home county dummy. This equals 1 for Essex, Kent, Middlesex and Surrey, and 0 for the others.
2. The number of county championship titles multiplied by a dummy if a county contains a Test ground. Logic tells us that stronger counties - as measured by the number of championships they've won - should produce more Test players. Oddly, though, this is true only of counties with a Test ground.
These two facts alone explain three-quarters of the variation in counties' test caps.
What's even more amazing  is the size of the home county effect. The home counties have, on average, 206 more Test caps than other counties. As the average county has only 345 caps, this is a lot.
However, Kent have produced even more caps than this effect would predict - 611, against a predicted 423.
This, I guess confirms what fans outside London have always suspected - there's a bias towards (spit) southern players.
Another thing: did I mention that I don't have a girlfriend?

Islam, cricket and rationality: a dialogue

From the Sunday Times:

Before converting from Christianity to Islam last year [Mohammed Yousuf] averaged 48 in Test cricket; since he converted (and changed his name from Yousuf Youhana) he has scored more than 1,000 runs at 93.

Yousuf: This is proof of Allah's existence and greatness. He's made me a better cricketer.
Rationalist: Pish. If Allah cares so much about Pakistani cricket, why hasn't he taught your team-mates how to catch a ball?
Yousuf: You miss the point. Allah doesn't care especially about cricket. He cares about rewarding converts. And just look at the figures - he's rewarded this convert.
Rationalist: Come off it. Everyone knows a good batsman can average 93 over a short interval. It's just luck and form. Nothing to do with Allah.
Yousuf: You misdescribe the position. Sure, there's a good chance that a batsman with a career average of 48 will average 93 over short periods. But the chance of him doing so immediately after converting to Islam is much lower. So low that it's unlikely to be coincidence.
Rationalist: But coincidences happen sometimes. It's not as if your Allah has a magic wand to convert good players into great ones.
Yousuf: There's no magic involved. It's basic common sense. Since finding Allah, I've become more disciplined and contented in my life. And a disciplined and contented man makes a better sportsman. If you doubt me, just look at Zinedine Zidane. That's what happens when a man loses the religion of his forefathers.
Rationalist: Have you never read David Hume? He said:

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish.

Surely, it's more likely that you're just going through a run of good form than that Allah exists. So we shouldn't infer from your batting that Islam is the correct religion.
Yousuf: The ignorance here is not mine, but Hume's. He was unaware of his contemporary, Thomas Bayes. In a Bayesian framework, my belief in Islam is strengthened by my good form. This corroborates my Bayesian prior that Allah is benign and great.
Rationalist: Maybe. But it doesn't shake my prior that Islam is just gibberish.
Yousuf: That tells us about your prior, not about the evidence. By all means, continue in your infidel ways. Just don't pretend that rationality and evidence is all on your side.

Re-reading Marx on cricket

No Marxist exegesis, however brilliant, has ever gone undisputed. Someone, then, must challenge Norm's contention that, in his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx was "attempting to signal to us, across the intervening years he knew would intervene, his choices for a Test XI."
Now, Norm's insight that Marx was anticipating a cricket team is a brilliant one. Why else would Marx have eleven theses? And in accusing Feuerbach of "not grasp[ing] the significance of revolutionary...activity", he's clearly complaining about Feuerbach's failure to pick a spinner.
But Norm makes the same mistake Marx accuses Feuerbach of making in thesis VII: he fails to see that "the abstract individual whom he analyses belongs in reality to a particular form of society." Norm's XI is precisely a series of abstract individuals, isolated from their particular form of society.
No. What Marx had in mind was a particular team, an "ensemble of social relations." That team was the Leicestershire side of the late 70s.
The first sign that this is the case is the famous 11th thesis, where he selects his tail-ender: "the point, however, is to change it."
The key word here is "point". A point has no dimensions. What particle has no dimensions - so much so that it has not yet been discovered? A Higgs boson.
It is obvious, therefore, that Marx's number 11 was Ken Higgs.
Turn to thesis VI. Norm is right to say the reference to social relations  means brothers. But he gets the wrong ones. Put the thesis in context. It's about materialism. What was the material on which  industrial capitalism was founded? Steel(e).
He  clearly means John Steele, brother of David.
Consider too his talk, in the same thesis, of the "abstract - isolated  - human individual." What's the most isolated position on the field - in the sense of most specialized (remember - alienation arises from the division of labour)? Wicket-keeper. Which wicket-keeper had a cricketing brother? Roger Tolchard.
Thesis 4 gives us another player. Here, Marx talks of the "self-cleavage and self-contradictoriness" of the world, and the removal of the contradiction "revolutionized in practice." The greatest cleavage in the world is that between cricket and football. Who removed this contradiction?
Chris Balderstone, the last man to play both test cricket and first division football. And he bowled left arm spin - that's a revolutionized practice.
Thesis 3 also talks of revolutionizing practice - spinners again. Marx says here that "the educator himself needs educating." Obviously, this is a reference to men who were coaches as well as players. And his talk that "changed men are products of other circumstances" is a reference to players who changed counties.
He means Jack Birkenshaw and Ray Illingworth.
In thesis 5, Marx writes of "human- sensuous activity." We can take this as meaning David Gower's batting.
Thesis 2 talks of a "purely scholastic  question" - a reference to Nigel Briers, who made his Leicestershire debut as a schoolboy.
You might wonder why Marx was so keen to discuss the Leicestershire side of the late 70s. The reason's simple. Think about how Marx would have been atracted to cricket in the first place - by the most famous cricketing achievement on German soil.
This was the occasion when Alan Ward, the Leicestershire fast bowler took three wickets in three balls against a German club side - an achievement for which he earned the name Gerry hat-trick Ward.

Anorak's corner

The dead trees all report batting averages for the Ashes series. Averages, though, are only part of the story. One question you should ask about any statistic is: what sample is that taken from?
We should therefore also look at the standard deviation around the averages. Here they are, with averages in brackets.
Australia
Langer        30.8 (43.8)
Hayden       38.4  (35.3)
Ponting      46.1 (39.9)
Martyn       18.0  (19.8)
Clarke         23.7 (37.2)
Katich         22.6 (27.6)
Gilchrist     14.3 (22.6)
Warne         27.9 (27.7)
England
Trescothick  23.4 (43.1)
Strauss          42.3 (39.3)
Vaughan      48.2 (32.6)
Bell                 23.2 (17.1)
Pietersen       43.1 (52.6)
Flintoff          35.0 (40.2)
Jones             24.7  (25.4)
What does this mean? A low standard deviation is a sign of consistency. Whether this is a good thing or not is, however, doubtful. Gilchrist and Bell have been consistent - consistently disappointing. And Trescothick's low standard deviation reflects a tendency for him to get out when well set - which is not good. Surprisingly (I think), Freddie Flintoff has been quite a consistent scorer.
Interpretation is also clouded by the small sample - Vaughan and Ponting look inconsistent because they both had one big innings - and by the fact that scores are not distributed as a bell curve; not even an Australian can score less than zero.
But the fact is that - especially over longer periods - a standard deviation can be a useful measure. If a batsman average 40, we might want to know whether this means he scores a string of decent innings, or a century alongside a few low scores.
Standard deviation is not the only statistic that should accompany averages. Another useful one would be a batsman's covariance with his team. A batsman who makes a big score when his side does well - a high covariance - is a flat track bully. But one who does well when his team does badly - a low covariance with the side - is good in a scrap. I suspect the careers of Atherton and Hussain would look good on this measure.
The fact is, there's more in the numbers than mere averages report. I could add skewness and kurtosis...
I'll get me anorak.
Another thing: Whilst I'm in credibility-lowering mode, I'll follow Norm in picking up the Geek's meme.
Person I fancy but wish I didn't: Kerry Katona.
Person other people fancy but I can't see why: Angelina Jolie.