category : Blog

Over the summer I built a microsimulation of Legal Aid for the Scottish Legal Aid Board (SLAB)- note on that to follow.

My SLAB contact asked a lot of good questions, especially about data.

One thing that came up is how different capital data is in the FRS and Wealth and Assets Survey.

I don’t really know why this is.

A quick write-up of a little microsimulation of Legal Aid that I’ve written for the Scottish Legal Aid Board (SLAB). It was fun, though I crashed a few deadlines and took some unexpected turns.

Just on the way back from the 9th World Congress of the International Microsimulation Association in Vienna. Northumbria allowed Howard Reed and me to go to present our NIHR work.

It was fun. Met some good people, heard some interesting papers, and our presentations went fine, I think.

Here’s a bunch of stuff I wrote (mostly co-wrote) when I was IFS. I’ll add a something on post-IFS work presently.

I gave a short talk on the model at Juliacon 2022.

This is just a reminder to me. There are so many steps to keeping a model like this up-to-date. And no real way of automating the process, sadly.

Dunno if this is quite right, but …

I’ve built two new interfaces for the model. One is a simple budget sim and the other a specialised Basic Income model.

It’s like painting the Forth Bridge, this. I’ve got to get back to the day-job stuff that pays the bills. Here’s a rough list of what I think currently needs to be done. It’s a lot. There are lots of TODOS and FIXMES dotted through the code - I count 256 of them. Often these are notes about duplicate code, bad naming practices, or things that I’ve hard-coded which should be parameterised. Often things that need checked again.

Here are the main things, I think:

I gave a short talk on the model at this years’ International Microsimulation Association Conference.

I’ve finally put some of this model out into the world - to almost zero response so far, but that’s OK.

This thing isn’t going to be of much general use if people can’t interact with it.

So I’ve started getting some output out of the model. I’ll do some posts on the full aggregate results presently (pretty encouraging so far), but one odd one stands out: my version of Scotland is a disturbingly equal society compared to what everyone else thinks.

The model now has a huge test suite, all of which passes, but I worry about test coverage still.

We’re in the middle of the move from the Legacy Benefit to Universal Credit transition. Modelling this is tricky.

A series of new Scottish disability benefits are moving towards implementation.

Kind of the point of this model is to capture changes like this.

Here’s a nice thing I discovered today - kind of rediscovered, as I’d asked about this a while back but it’s only just clicked.

Still plodding on with this. I did a fairly big refactor of how incomes where handled, and that’s simplified things bit. Need to do another one to cut down some of the huge enumerations used for employment and education status and the like, and simplify many of the crazily long names.

Now that I have merged in SHS data, with postcodes, I’ve been doing something with it.

Some notes as I try to add some Scottish Household Survey Data to my FRS based dataset.

.. 3 months later.

The Covid test I mentioned last time was negative. But 4 weeks ago I had another test, just on a vague feeling, and that one was positive. So it’s been a tricky few weeks. I’ll maybe write an entire entry on this.

On the model: I’ve been fitting it in amongst paid work, so progress is slower than I’d like.

I’m writing a Scottish Tax Benefit model, and I thought I would blog my progress. I’m writing this mainly just for me, as a kind of journal; I really would be rather disturbed if anyone read much of it (but, if you do, welcome..). As much as anything I’d like some practice writing a few hundred words every day.