Oxford’s Stringency Index is Falling Apart
Joakim BookJoakim Book
– December 24, 2020

AIER >> Daily Economy >> Science >> Crisis


Since the pandemic started, the chattering classes ‒ and particularly those of us who have been somewhat skeptical of the policy interventions ‒ have used a chart tool from Our World in Data. This site, run by Oxford researcher Max Roser with a great team of scholars and communicators, is a fantastic tool for visualizing and condensing the world’s scientific data. I use it almost every day.

For every country, the chart in question gives a daily value for what’s known as “Government Response Stringency.” Commentators, policy-makers, researchers, and journalists have used it to gauge differences in countries’ response to the pandemic. This is exactly the kind of useful research we want academia to produce: third-party, unbiased ranking, by political scientists and data scientists, such that the rest of us can get a quick understanding of what’s going on.

Even though all the data used (and its methods) are publicly available, nobody really cared to look under the hood. These are well-established researchers at one of the world’s best universities (no bias on my part!), with a strong commitment to accuracy and excellence ‒ they couldn’t possibly have gotten anything seriously wrong, could they?

Think again.

The Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford, from which the ranking stems, employs hundreds of people for this effort, sifting through news and public communication to distil the pandemic responses by governments in 184 countries and territories (minus a handful where data isn’t reported or credible).

First of all, several different indices exist, not the single one that Our World in Data reports. Secondly, the Our World in Data team has confused the issue by mislabeling the chart they construct from the Blavatnik team’s data: they report a “Government Response Stringency Index” whereas the Blavatnik team lists both a “Government Response Index” and a “Stringency Index.” The source tab, titled “Stringency Index,” describes the variables that go into a third index ‒ “Containment and Health Index” ‒ while the actual data reported comes from the “Stringency Index,” i.e. not the one titling their graph. -- excerpt, rest at link above --

I find this kind of thing deeply disturbing. The coordination, group-think, mind-meld kinda stuff in order to subvert truth and objectivity is very concerning.