andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2010 andrew_gelman_stats-2010-456 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: As we said in Red State, Blue State, it’s not the Prius vs. the pickup truck, it’s the Prius vs. the Hummer. Here’s the graph: Or, as Ross Douthat put it in an op-ed yesterday: This means that a culture war that’s often seen as a clash between liberal elites and a conservative middle America looks more and more like a conflict within the educated class — pitting Wheaton and Baylor against Brown and Bard, Redeemer Presbyterian Church against the 92nd Street Y, C. S. Lewis devotees against the Philip Pullman fan club. Our main motivation for doing this work was to change how the news media think about America’s political divisions, and so it’s good to see our ideas getting mainstreamed and moving toward conventional wisdom. P.S. Here’s the time series of graphs showing how the pattern that we and Douthat noticed, of a battle between coastal states and middle America that is occurring among upper-income Americans, is relatively recent, having arisen in the Clinton ye
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same-blog 1 1.0 456 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-07-The red-state, blue-state war is happening in the upper half of the income distribution
Introduction: As we said in Red State, Blue State, it’s not the Prius vs. the pickup truck, it’s the Prius vs. the Hummer. Here’s the graph: Or, as Ross Douthat put it in an op-ed yesterday: This means that a culture war that’s often seen as a clash between liberal elites and a conservative middle America looks more and more like a conflict within the educated class — pitting Wheaton and Baylor against Brown and Bard, Redeemer Presbyterian Church against the 92nd Street Y, C. S. Lewis devotees against the Philip Pullman fan club. Our main motivation for doing this work was to change how the news media think about America’s political divisions, and so it’s good to see our ideas getting mainstreamed and moving toward conventional wisdom. P.S. Here’s the time series of graphs showing how the pattern that we and Douthat noticed, of a battle between coastal states and middle America that is occurring among upper-income Americans, is relatively recent, having arisen in the Clinton ye
Introduction: Charles Murray wrote a much-discussed new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” David Frum quotes Murray as writing, in an echo of now-forgotten TV personality Tucker Carlson , that the top 5% of incomes “tends to be liberal—right? There’s no getting around it. Every way of answering this question produces a yes.” [I’ve interjected a “perhaps” into the title of this blog post to indicate that I don’t have the exact Murray quote here so I’m relying on David Frum’s interpretation.] Frum does me the favor of citing Red State Blue State as evidence, and I’d like to back this up with some graphs. Frum writes: Say “top 5%” to Murray, and his imagination conjures up everything he dislikes: coastal liberals listening to NPR in their Lexus hybrid SUVs. He sees that image so intensely that no mere number can force him to remember that the top 5% also includes the evangelical Christian assistant coach of a state university football team. . . . To put it i
3 0.15133396 2141 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-20-Don’t douthat, man! Please give this fallacy a name.
Introduction: Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m always on the lookout for new items for the lexicon . It’s been a good month on that front. In addition to the Garden of Forking Paths, I’ve encountered two entirely new (to me) fallacies. The first of the two new fallacies has a name that’s quite a mouthful; I’ll hold off on telling you about it right now, as Eric Loken and I are currently finishing a paper on it. Once the paper’s done, I’ll post it in the usual place (or here , once it is scheduled to be published) and I’ll add it to the lexicon as well. What I want to talk about today is a fallacy I noticed a couple days ago. I can’t think of a good name for it. And that’s where you, the readers, come in. Please give this fallacy a name! Here’s the story. The other day on the sister blog I reported on a pair of studies involving children and political orientation: Andrew Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee found that, in Great Britain, parents of girls were more likely
4 0.13769192 2255 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-19-How Americans vote
Introduction: An interview with me from 2012 : You’re a statistician and wrote a book, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State , looking at why Americans vote the way they do. In an election year I think it would be a good time to revisit that question, not just for people in the US, but anyone around the world who wants to understand the realities – rather than the stereotypes – of how Americans vote. I regret the title I gave my book. I was too greedy. I wanted it to be an airport bestseller because I figured there were millions of people who are interested in politics and some subset of them are always looking at the statistics. It’s got a very grabby title and as a result people underestimated the content. They thought it was a popularisation of my work, or, at best, an expansion of an article we’d written. But it had tons of original material. If I’d given it a more serious, political science-y title, then all sorts of people would have wanted to read it, because they would
Introduction: Psychology is a universal science of human nature, whereas political science is centered on the study of particular historical events and trends. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that when a psychologist looks at politics, he presents ideas that are thought-provoking but are too general to quite work. This is fine; political scientists can then take such ideas and try to adapt them more closely to particular circumstances. The psychologist I’m thinking about here is Steven Pinker, who, in writes the following on the question, “Why Are States So Red and Blue?”: But why do ideology and geography cluster so predictably? Why, if you know a person’s position on gay marriage, can you predict that he or she will want to increase the military budget and decrease the tax rate . . . there may also be coherent mindsets beneath the diverse opinions that hang together in right-wing and left-wing belief systems. Political philosophers have long known that the ideologies are rooted in diffe
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same-blog 1 0.96753883 456 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-07-The red-state, blue-state war is happening in the upper half of the income distribution
Introduction: As we said in Red State, Blue State, it’s not the Prius vs. the pickup truck, it’s the Prius vs. the Hummer. Here’s the graph: Or, as Ross Douthat put it in an op-ed yesterday: This means that a culture war that’s often seen as a clash between liberal elites and a conservative middle America looks more and more like a conflict within the educated class — pitting Wheaton and Baylor against Brown and Bard, Redeemer Presbyterian Church against the 92nd Street Y, C. S. Lewis devotees against the Philip Pullman fan club. Our main motivation for doing this work was to change how the news media think about America’s political divisions, and so it’s good to see our ideas getting mainstreamed and moving toward conventional wisdom. P.S. Here’s the time series of graphs showing how the pattern that we and Douthat noticed, of a battle between coastal states and middle America that is occurring among upper-income Americans, is relatively recent, having arisen in the Clinton ye
Introduction: Charles Murray wrote a much-discussed new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” David Frum quotes Murray as writing, in an echo of now-forgotten TV personality Tucker Carlson , that the top 5% of incomes “tends to be liberal—right? There’s no getting around it. Every way of answering this question produces a yes.” [I’ve interjected a “perhaps” into the title of this blog post to indicate that I don’t have the exact Murray quote here so I’m relying on David Frum’s interpretation.] Frum does me the favor of citing Red State Blue State as evidence, and I’d like to back this up with some graphs. Frum writes: Say “top 5%” to Murray, and his imagination conjures up everything he dislikes: coastal liberals listening to NPR in their Lexus hybrid SUVs. He sees that image so intensely that no mere number can force him to remember that the top 5% also includes the evangelical Christian assistant coach of a state university football team. . . . To put it i
Introduction: Psychology is a universal science of human nature, whereas political science is centered on the study of particular historical events and trends. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that when a psychologist looks at politics, he presents ideas that are thought-provoking but are too general to quite work. This is fine; political scientists can then take such ideas and try to adapt them more closely to particular circumstances. The psychologist I’m thinking about here is Steven Pinker, who, in writes the following on the question, “Why Are States So Red and Blue?”: But why do ideology and geography cluster so predictably? Why, if you know a person’s position on gay marriage, can you predict that he or she will want to increase the military budget and decrease the tax rate . . . there may also be coherent mindsets beneath the diverse opinions that hang together in right-wing and left-wing belief systems. Political philosophers have long known that the ideologies are rooted in diffe
4 0.76574379 1169 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-15-Charles Murray on the new upper class
Introduction: The other day I posted some comments on the voting patterns of rich and poor in the context of Charles Murray’s recent book, “Coming Apart.” My graphs on income and voting are just fine, but I mischaracterized Murray’s statements. So I want to fix that right away. After that I have some thoughts on the book itself. In brief: 1. I was unfair to call him a Tucker Carlson. 2. Murray talks a lot about upper-class liberals. That’s fine but I think his discussion would be improved by also considering upper-class conservatives, given that I see the big culture war occurring within the upper class. 3. Using the case of Joe Paterno as an example, I discuss why Murray’s “preach what you practice” advice could be difficult to carry out in practice. Murray on the top 5% David Frum quoted Murray as writing that the top 5% “tends to be liberal—right? There’s no getting around it. Every way of answering this question produces a yes.” In response, Frum and I both pointed out t
5 0.75990427 1635 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-22-More Pinker Pinker Pinker
Introduction: After I posted this recent comment on a blog of Steven Pinker (see also here ), we had the following exchange. I’m reposting it here (with Pinker’s agreement) not because we achieved any deep insights but because I thought it useful to reveal to people that so-called experts such as us are not so clear on these issues either. AG: I noticed your article on red and blue states and had some thoughts. . . . The short summary is that I think that your idea is interesting but that, as stated, it explains too much, in that your story is based on centuries-long history but it only fits electoral patterns since the 1980s. SP: Though the exact alignment between red and blue states, political parties, and particular issues surely shift, I’d be surprised if the basic alignments between geography and the right-left divide, and the issues that cluster on each side of the divide, have radically changed over the past century. (Obviously if you define “red” and “blue” by the Republican
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Introduction: As we said in Red State, Blue State, it’s not the Prius vs. the pickup truck, it’s the Prius vs. the Hummer. Here’s the graph: Or, as Ross Douthat put it in an op-ed yesterday: This means that a culture war that’s often seen as a clash between liberal elites and a conservative middle America looks more and more like a conflict within the educated class — pitting Wheaton and Baylor against Brown and Bard, Redeemer Presbyterian Church against the 92nd Street Y, C. S. Lewis devotees against the Philip Pullman fan club. Our main motivation for doing this work was to change how the news media think about America’s political divisions, and so it’s good to see our ideas getting mainstreamed and moving toward conventional wisdom. P.S. Here’s the time series of graphs showing how the pattern that we and Douthat noticed, of a battle between coastal states and middle America that is occurring among upper-income Americans, is relatively recent, having arisen in the Clinton ye
2 0.86208099 718 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-18-Should kids be able to bring their own lunches to school?
Introduction: I encountered this news article , “Chicago school bans some lunches brought from home”: At Little Village, most students must take the meals served in the cafeteria or go hungry or both. . . . students are not allowed to pack lunches from home. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria. . . . Such discussions over school lunches and healthy eating echo a larger national debate about the role government should play in individual food choices. “This is such a fundamental infringement on parental responsibility,” said J. Justin Wilson, a senior researcher at the Washington-based Center for Consumer Freedom, which is partially funded by the food industry. . . . For many CPS parents, the idea of forbidding home-packed lunches would be unthinkable. . . . If I had read this two years ago, I’d be at one with J. Justin Wilson and the outraged kids and parents. But last year we spent a sabbatical in Paris, where . . . kids aren’t allowed to bring
3 0.85584283 621 andrew gelman stats-2011-03-20-Maybe a great idea in theory, didn’t work so well in practice
Introduction: I followed the link of commenter “Epanechnikov” to his blog, where I found, among other things, an uncritical discussion of Richard von Mises’s book, “Probability, Statistics and Truth.” The bad news is that, based on the evidence of his book, Mises didn’t seem to understand basic ideas of statistical significance. See here, Or at the very least, he was grossly overconfident (which can perhaps be seen from the brash title of his book). This is not the fault of “Epanechnikov,” but I just thought that people should be careful about taking too seriously the statistical philosophy of someone who didn’t think to do a chi-squared test when it was called for. (This is not a Bayesian/non-Bayesian thing; it’s just basic statistics.)
4 0.84828812 698 andrew gelman stats-2011-05-05-Shocking but not surprising
Introduction: Much-honored playwright Tony Kushner was set to receive one more honor–a degree from John Jay College–but it was suddenly taken away from him on an 11-1 vote of the trustees of the City University of New York. This was the first rejection of an honorary degree nomination since 1961. The news article focuses on one trustee, Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, an investment adviser and onetime political aide, who opposed Kushner’s honorary degree, but to me the relevant point is that the committee as a whole voted 11-1 to ding him. Kusnher said, “I’m sickened,” he added, “that this is happening in New York City. Shocked, really.” I can see why he’s shocked, but perhaps it’s not so surprising that it’s happening in NYC. Recall the famous incident from 1940 in which Bertrand Russell was invited and then uninvited to teach at City College. The problem that time was Russell’s views on free love (as they called it back then). There seems to be a long tradition of city college officials being will
5 0.84308994 969 andrew gelman stats-2011-10-22-Researching the cost-effectiveness of political lobbying organisations
Introduction: Sally Murray from Giving What We Can writes: We are an organisation that assesses different charitable (/fundable) interventions, to estimate which are the most cost-effective (measured in terms of the improvement of life for people in developing countries gained for every dollar invested). Our research guides and encourages greater donations to the most cost-effective charities we thus identify, and our members have so far pledged a total of $14m to these causes, with many hundreds more relying on our advice in a less formal way. I am specifically researching the cost-effectiveness of political lobbying organisations. We are initially focusing on organisations that lobby for ‘big win’ outcomes such as increased funding of the most cost-effective NTD treatments/ vaccine research, changes to global trade rules (potentially) and more obscure lobbies such as “Keep Antibiotics Working”. We’ve a great deal of respect for your work and the superbly rational way you go about it, and
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