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I have read both The Spirit Level and Snowdon's book. While one of Snowdon's criticism has some merit, The Spirit Level is guilty of 'going beyond the data' fairly often and drawing conclusions not really warranted by the data shown, the rest of Snowdon's critique is little more than a polemic. The one statement he makes about Correlation Coefficients is wrong. He uses, in his graphic presentations, the square of the correlation coefficient (I suspect because it shows a smaller value) and then misinterprets it. So he obviously does not even have a basic understanding of statistical methods (or else deliberately misconstrues them). He also is given to adding points and dropping points from scatterplots and then re-interpreting them. Again, the relationsip either stands as shown or it doesn't. One cannot add and take away points helter skelter. And he seems inclined to drop what he calls outliers in violation of most accepted methods for doing so. Merely dropping a point because it's highest (or lowest) won't do, as there will always be a highest or lowest point. Also if a point is well outside the range of other points, that does not, by itself, warrant its exclusion. He clearly wishes to drop these points because they don't agree with his view, not out of any statistical justification. Snowdon takes the Spirit Level bibliography to task because it includes references to the authors previous works. Has Snowdon any familiarity with academic research at all? Authors very frequently list previous work they've done in their references; happens all the time. Snowdon's review also contains serious allegations and numerous Ad Hominem attacks. He accuses the authors of The Spirit Level of "cherry picking" their data on more than one occasion in his review. That is a serious charge in academia. But it becomes ludicrous when Snowdon himself goes on this long effort to find data points that either make his particular point or discredit The Spirit Level. That is clearly 'cherry picking'. In my view, then, Snowdon's review, commissioned apparently by a right-wing think tank, is just a hatchet job. It has very little to commend as a serious critique of The Spirit Level.