andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2011 andrew_gelman_stats-2011-647 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen links to this article by Matt Ridley that manages to push all my buttons. Ridley writes: Drawing a direct analogy with the effect of vouchers in the education system, Messrs. Seeman and Luciani suggest “healthy-living vouchers” that could be redeemed from different (certified) places–gyms, diet classes, vegetable sellers and more. Education vouchers, they point out, are generally disliked by rich whites as being bad for poor blacks–and generally liked by poor blacks. Three things here. First, I’m sick and tired of all the rich-white bashing. I mean, what’s the deal? Matt Ridley is a rich white, I’m a rich white, so are lots and lots of the readers of the Wall Street Journal. If you got a problem with rich whites, maybe you should start writing for a publication associated with a different income stratum and a different ethnic group. Second, the rich-white thing seems so selective. Does Ridley bash rich whites who want to lower taxes? Rich whites who w
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1 Ridley writes: Drawing a direct analogy with the effect of vouchers in the education system, Messrs. [sent-2, score-0.439]
2 Education vouchers, they point out, are generally disliked by rich whites as being bad for poor blacks–and generally liked by poor blacks. [sent-4, score-1.301]
3 Matt Ridley is a rich white, I’m a rich white, so are lots and lots of the readers of the Wall Street Journal. [sent-8, score-0.548]
4 If you got a problem with rich whites, maybe you should start writing for a publication associated with a different income stratum and a different ethnic group. [sent-9, score-0.444]
5 Does Ridley bash rich whites who want to lower taxes? [sent-11, score-0.691]
6 Rich whites who want safe neighborhoods, clean streets, fast wifi, winning sports teams, bomb-free commercial aircraft, juicy steaks, cold beer, and all the rest? [sent-12, score-0.462]
7 It’s only when rich whites happen to disagree with him that he decides to play this populist game. [sent-14, score-0.648]
8 Third, it’s not true that rich whites oppose school vouchers. [sent-15, score-0.872]
9 Here are our estimates from the 2000 and 2004 Annenberg surveys: Fourth, who says that opponents of school vouchers oppose them “as being bad for poor blacks”? [sent-17, score-0.905]
10 , we rich whites spend a lot more time thinking about ourselves than we do about poor blacks. [sent-24, score-0.845]
11 The rewrite So let’s rephrase Ridley’s sentence, given what we’ve learned above: Education vouchers are generally disliked by poor whites and are liked by rich whites (if they happen to be Catholic or evangelical Protestant), poor Hispanics, and poor blacks in the Northeast. [sent-25, score-2.279]
12 Two Canadian academics, Neil Seeman and Patrick Luciani, state, with zero evidence, that opponents of school vouchers oppose them “as being bad for poor blacks. [sent-26, score-0.905]
13 And, hey, maybe opinions on school vouchers have changed since 2004. [sent-34, score-0.495]
14 But the very fact that their idea defies conventional wisdom suggests that it is a good one. [sent-47, score-0.722]
15 I agree that conventional wisdom isn’t always right. [sent-49, score-0.448]
16 But does he really believe that the very fact that an idea defies conventional wisdom suggests it’s a good idea? [sent-50, score-0.722]
17 And maybe he’d like to wash down his next KFC meal with a delightful C&C; Cola, which conventional wisdom suggests is high quality. [sent-53, score-0.628]
18 So maybe it would be better to defy conventional wisdom and just invent numbers. [sent-57, score-0.532]
19 It’s so much easier than conducting a survey, and the very fact that it defies conventional wisdom suggests it’s a good idea! [sent-58, score-0.722]
20 I only noticed the education vouchers part because I’ve done research in that area. [sent-71, score-0.478]
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same-blog 1 1.0000001 647 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-04-Irritating pseudo-populism, backed up by false statistics and implausible speculations
Introduction: Tyler Cowen links to this article by Matt Ridley that manages to push all my buttons. Ridley writes: Drawing a direct analogy with the effect of vouchers in the education system, Messrs. Seeman and Luciani suggest “healthy-living vouchers” that could be redeemed from different (certified) places–gyms, diet classes, vegetable sellers and more. Education vouchers, they point out, are generally disliked by rich whites as being bad for poor blacks–and generally liked by poor blacks. Three things here. First, I’m sick and tired of all the rich-white bashing. I mean, what’s the deal? Matt Ridley is a rich white, I’m a rich white, so are lots and lots of the readers of the Wall Street Journal. If you got a problem with rich whites, maybe you should start writing for a publication associated with a different income stratum and a different ethnic group. Second, the rich-white thing seems so selective. Does Ridley bash rich whites who want to lower taxes? Rich whites who w
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
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Introduction: After our discussions of psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s opinions about working-class voters (see here and here ), a question arose on how to reconcile the analyses of Alan Abramowitz and Tom Edsall (showing an increase in Republican voting among low-education working white southerners), with Larry Bartels’s finding that “there has been no discernible trend in presidential voting behavior among the ‘working white working class.’” Here is my resolution: All the statistics that have been posted seem reasonable to me. Also relevant to the discussion, I believe, are Figures 3.1, 4.2b, 10.1, and 10.2 of Red State Blue State. In short: Republicans continue to do about 20 percentage points better among upper-income voters compared to lower-income, but the compositions of these coalitions have changed over time. As has been noted, low-education white workers have moved toward the Republican party over the past few decades, and at the same time there have been compositional changes
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Introduction: The fun part of this entry comes near the end. Amanda Marcotte has some nice things to say about Red State, Blue State and connects our findings with some current political conflicts. She picks up on our theme of perception and reality, that national journalists live in a different world and can have difficulty grasping national voting patterns: The book definitively answers the perplexing question of our time, which is, “Why do poor people in red states vote against their economic interests?” The answer is, quite simply, they don’t. There is no paradox. To quote Gelman: “If poor people were a state, they would be ‘bluer’ even than Massachusetts; if rich people were a state, they would be as ‘red’ as Alabama, Kansas, the Dakotas, or Texas.” Of course, I don’t think the stereotype of tea baggers have ever been that they’re poor. But I do think there’s a supposition that they’re lower or middle middle class, and not well-educated. That’s based on the illiterate signage, t
Introduction: Matthew Yglesias noticed something interesting in a political story today that reminds me of one of our arguments in Red State, Blue State. I have the feeling that most readers of this blog are less fascinated than I am by U.S. politics, so I’ll put the rest below the fold. Yglesias quotes a Washington Post article on Blanche Lincoln returning to the U.S. Senate after surviving a primary challenge from a candidate supported by organized labor: Lincoln was embraced by her colleagues . . . Sen. Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) held up two fists and said of her primary campaign: “Fighting Wall Street with one hand, unions with the other.” Yglesias points out a fundamental asymmetry here: Schumer, who’s become something of a national leader among Senate Democrats, celebrates this ideal [of governing in a manner that's equidistant from rival interest groups], but there’s not a single member of the Republican Party–much less a leader–who’d say anything remotely similar. Schumer is basi
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen links to this article by Matt Ridley that manages to push all my buttons. Ridley writes: Drawing a direct analogy with the effect of vouchers in the education system, Messrs. Seeman and Luciani suggest “healthy-living vouchers” that could be redeemed from different (certified) places–gyms, diet classes, vegetable sellers and more. Education vouchers, they point out, are generally disliked by rich whites as being bad for poor blacks–and generally liked by poor blacks. Three things here. First, I’m sick and tired of all the rich-white bashing. I mean, what’s the deal? Matt Ridley is a rich white, I’m a rich white, so are lots and lots of the readers of the Wall Street Journal. If you got a problem with rich whites, maybe you should start writing for a publication associated with a different income stratum and a different ethnic group. Second, the rich-white thing seems so selective. Does Ridley bash rich whites who want to lower taxes? Rich whites who w
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
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Introduction: So asks James Ledbetter in Slate. And the answer is . . . No! Here’s what happened in 2008: OK, that’s how people vote. How bout party identification and ideology? Check these out : (Click on image to see larger version.) And here it is, sliced a different way : Of, if you want to see it in map form, check out this article (with Daniel and Yair). P.S. A skeptic might comment that the above graphs, which are based on national poll data, only break down incomes to the top 5% or so. What about the truly rich. Here are my thoughts on the political attitudes of the super-rich. P.P.S. Ledbetter actually makes some good points in his article, which is about the campaign contributions of rich Americans. The article relies on a recent book by David Callahan, which seems to echo the work of Tom Ferguson (cited in the above-linked blog entry), who’s tracked campaign contributions by industry over many years. I think that Ferguson (and Callahan) a
Introduction: Uberbloggers Andrew Sullivan and Matthew Yglesias were kind enough to link to my five-year-old post with graphs from Red State Blue State on time trends of average income by state. Here are the graphs : Yglesias’s take-home point: There isn’t that much change over time in states’ economic well-being. All things considered the best predictor of how rich a state was in 2000 was simply how rich it was in 1929…. Massachusetts and Connecticut have always been rich and Arkansas and Mississippi have always been poor. I’d like to point to a different feature of the graphs, which is that, although the rankings of the states haven’t changed much (as can be seen from the “2000 compared to 1929″ scale), the relative values of the incomes have converged quite a bit—at least, they converged from about 1930 to 1980 before hitting some level of stability. And the rankings have changed a bit. My impression (without checking the numbers) is that New York and Connecticut were
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Introduction: Catherine Rampell highlights this stunning Gallup Poll result: 6 percent of Americans in households earning over $250,000 a year think their taxes are “too low.” Of that same group, 26 percent said their taxes were “about right,” and a whopping 67 percent said their taxes were “too high.” OK, fine. Most people don’t like taxes. No surprise there. But get this next part: And yet when this same group of high earners was asked whether “upper-income people” paid their fair share in taxes, 30 percent said “upper-income people” paid too little, 30 percent said it was a “fair share,” and 38 percent said it was too much. 30 percent of these upper-income people say that upper-income people pay too little, but only 6 percent say that they personally pay too little. 38% say that upper-income people pay too much, but 67% say they personally pay too much. Rampell attributes this to people’s ignorance about population statistics–these 250K+ families just don’t realize t
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Introduction: Jim Hodges posted a note to the Bugs mailing list that I thought could be of more general interest: Is multi-modality a common experience? I [Hodges] think the answer is “nobody knows in any generality”. Here are some examples of bimodality that certainly do *not* involve the kind of labeling problems that arise in mixture models. The only systematic study of multimodality I know of is Liu J, Hodges JS (2003). Posterior bimodality in the balanced one-way random effects model. J.~Royal Stat.~Soc., Ser.~B, 65:247-255. The surprise of this paper is that in the simplest possible hierarchical model (analyzed using the standard inverse-gamma priors for the two variances), bimodality occurs quite readily, although it is much less common to have two modes that are big enough so that you’d actually get a noticeable fraction of MCMC draws from both of them. Because the restricted likelihood (= the marginal posterior for the two variances, if you’ve put flat priors on them) is
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Introduction: Commenter Tggp links to a criticism of science journalist Sharon Begley by science journalist Matthew Hutson. I learned of this dispute after reporting that Begley had received the American Statistical Association’s Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award, a completely undeserved honor, if Hutson is to believed. The two journalists have somewhat similar profiles: Begley was science editor at Newsweek (she’s now at Reuters) and author of “Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves,” and Hutson was news editor at Psychology Today and wrote the similarly self-helpy-titled, “The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane.” Hutson writes : Psychological Science recently published a fascinating new study on jealousy. I was interested to read Newsweek’s 1300-word article covering the research by their science editor, Sharon Begley. But part-way through the article, I
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen links to this article by Matt Ridley that manages to push all my buttons. Ridley writes: Drawing a direct analogy with the effect of vouchers in the education system, Messrs. Seeman and Luciani suggest “healthy-living vouchers” that could be redeemed from different (certified) places–gyms, diet classes, vegetable sellers and more. Education vouchers, they point out, are generally disliked by rich whites as being bad for poor blacks–and generally liked by poor blacks. Three things here. First, I’m sick and tired of all the rich-white bashing. I mean, what’s the deal? Matt Ridley is a rich white, I’m a rich white, so are lots and lots of the readers of the Wall Street Journal. If you got a problem with rich whites, maybe you should start writing for a publication associated with a different income stratum and a different ethnic group. Second, the rich-white thing seems so selective. Does Ridley bash rich whites who want to lower taxes? Rich whites who w
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