andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1388 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
Source: html
Introduction: Frank Newport of Gallup reports ( link from Jay Livingston): Americans become progressively less positive about economic conditions the farther away from home they look. Forty-nine percent rate economic conditions in their local area as excellent or good, but that drops to 25% when rating the U.S. economy, and to 13% when assessing the world as a whole. This is really wack: I can see how it might make sense for Americans to think conditions are worse in other countries, but it’s hard to see a rational reason for the Lake-Wobegon-like pattern of people thinking things are ok locally but not nationally. Gallup highlights the partisan breakdown, which I graphed here: Unsurprisingly (given that their party controls the presidency and one house of Congress), Democrats are more optimistic than Republicans. This is just the flip side of University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan claiming in October 2008 that the economy is not that bad because “the current unem
sentIndex sentText sentNum sentScore
1 Frank Newport of Gallup reports ( link from Jay Livingston): Americans become progressively less positive about economic conditions the farther away from home they look. [sent-1, score-0.287]
2 Forty-nine percent rate economic conditions in their local area as excellent or good, but that drops to 25% when rating the U. [sent-2, score-0.838]
3 This is really wack: I can see how it might make sense for Americans to think conditions are worse in other countries, but it’s hard to see a rational reason for the Lake-Wobegon-like pattern of people thinking things are ok locally but not nationally. [sent-5, score-0.232]
4 Gallup highlights the partisan breakdown, which I graphed here: Unsurprisingly (given that their party controls the presidency and one house of Congress), Democrats are more optimistic than Republicans. [sent-6, score-0.293]
5 This is just the flip side of University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan claiming in October 2008 that the economy is not that bad because “the current unemployment rate of 6. [sent-7, score-0.435]
6 ” Something happened in November of that year that dramatically changed Mulligan’s perspective on the economy! [sent-9, score-0.126]
7 Two things that surprised me about the partisan comparisons were, first, that the differences in views of the local and state economies were so small, and, second, that Independents were basically identical to Democrats. [sent-10, score-0.56]
8 It is the Republicans who stand out, both in their gloomy views of the national economy and also internationally. [sent-11, score-0.549]
9 This is consistent with David Brooks’s recent claim that Republicans believe that we are “on the cusp of the fiscal and institutional collapse of our welfare state, which threatens not only the future of government finances but also the future of American capitalism. [sent-12, score-0.418]
10 It would be easy to criticize this as just partisanship, but a more charitable view would be that this pessimism is warranted. [sent-15, score-0.263]
11 If what it takes to have such a view is to lose a couple of elections, so be it. [sent-16, score-0.078]
12 In any case, the differences between the parties are only a matter of degree. [sent-17, score-0.077]
13 Just about all the numbers in the above graph are below 50%, and an overwhelming majority of Democrats and Independents also rate the U. [sent-18, score-0.192]
14 ” Frank Newport concludes: This local positivity bias is not uncommon in surveys, but in this context suggests that the average American is not in as dire straits economically as would be thought based on national economic confidence ratings alone. [sent-21, score-0.807]
15 These data are in line with previous research showing that Americans rate their personal financial situations more positively than they rate the national economic situation. [sent-22, score-0.644]
16 It’s never clear how much these confusions are a product of misinterpreting the local situation and how much arises from faulty generalization to the rest of the country. [sent-24, score-0.452]
wordName wordTfidf (topN-words)
[('economy', 0.243), ('newport', 0.194), ('rate', 0.192), ('local', 0.185), ('overestimating', 0.183), ('americans', 0.173), ('independents', 0.16), ('mulligan', 0.153), ('republicans', 0.149), ('conditions', 0.144), ('economic', 0.143), ('gallup', 0.131), ('aid', 0.13), ('dramatically', 0.126), ('foreign', 0.124), ('partisan', 0.121), ('national', 0.117), ('frank', 0.117), ('congress', 0.111), ('democrats', 0.098), ('misinterpreting', 0.097), ('pessimism', 0.097), ('positivity', 0.097), ('straits', 0.097), ('views', 0.097), ('graphed', 0.092), ('gloomy', 0.092), ('congressmember', 0.092), ('finances', 0.092), ('hating', 0.092), ('country', 0.089), ('percent', 0.089), ('charitable', 0.088), ('confusions', 0.088), ('threatens', 0.088), ('dire', 0.088), ('locally', 0.088), ('drops', 0.085), ('liking', 0.085), ('faulty', 0.082), ('breakdown', 0.082), ('future', 0.08), ('presidency', 0.08), ('unsurprisingly', 0.08), ('uncommon', 0.08), ('economies', 0.08), ('casey', 0.078), ('fiscal', 0.078), ('view', 0.078), ('differences', 0.077)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 1.0000005 1388 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-22-Americans think economy isn’t so bad in their city but is crappy nationally and globally
Introduction: Frank Newport of Gallup reports ( link from Jay Livingston): Americans become progressively less positive about economic conditions the farther away from home they look. Forty-nine percent rate economic conditions in their local area as excellent or good, but that drops to 25% when rating the U.S. economy, and to 13% when assessing the world as a whole. This is really wack: I can see how it might make sense for Americans to think conditions are worse in other countries, but it’s hard to see a rational reason for the Lake-Wobegon-like pattern of people thinking things are ok locally but not nationally. Gallup highlights the partisan breakdown, which I graphed here: Unsurprisingly (given that their party controls the presidency and one house of Congress), Democrats are more optimistic than Republicans. This is just the flip side of University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan claiming in October 2008 that the economy is not that bad because “the current unem
2 0.21793698 394 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-05-2010: What happened?
Introduction: A lot of people are asking, How could the voters have swung so much in two years? And, why didn’t Obama give Americans a better sense of his long-term economic plan in 2009, back when he still had a political mandate? As an academic statistician and political scientist, I have no insight into the administration’s internal deliberations, but I have some thoughts based on my interpretation of political science research. The baseline As Doug Hibbs and others have pointed out, given the Democrats’ existing large majority in both houses of Congress and the continuing economic depression, we’d expect a big Republican swing in the vote. And this has been echoed for a long time in the polls–as early as September, 2009–over a year before the election–political scientists were forecasting that the Democrats were going to lose big in the midterms. (The polls have made it clear that most voters do not believe the Republican Party has the answer either. But, as I’ve emphasized before
3 0.21625142 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
4 0.18767475 286 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-20-Are the Democrats avoiding a national campaign?
Introduction: Bob Erikson, one of my colleagues at Columbia who knows much more about American politics than I do, sent in the following screed. I’ll post Bob’s note, followed by my comments. Bob writes: Monday morning many of us were startled by the following headline: White House strenuously denies NYT report that it is considering getting aggressive about winning the midterm elections. At first I [Bob] thought I was reading the Onion, but no, it was a sarcastic comment on the blog Talking Points Memo. But the gist of the headline appears to be correct. Indeed, the New York Times reported that White House advisers denied that a national ad campaign was being planned. ‘There’s been no discussion of such a thing at the White House’ What do we make of this? Is there some hidden downside to actually running a national campaign? Of course, money spent nationally is not spent on targeted local campaigns. But that is always the case. What explains the Democrats’ trepidation abou
Introduction: A few years ago Larry Bartels presented this graph, a version of which latter appeared in his book Unequal Democracy: Larry looked at the data in a number of ways, and the evidence seemed convincing that, at least in the short term, the Democrats were better than Republicans for the economy. This is consistent with Democrats’ general policies of lowering unemployment, as compared to Republicans lowering inflation, and, by comparing first-term to second-term presidents, he found that the result couldn’t simply be explained as a rebound or alternation pattern. The question then arose, why have the Republicans won so many elections? Why aren’t the Democrats consistently dominating? Non-economic issues are part of the story, of course, but lots of evidence shows the economy to be a key concern for voters, so it’s still hard to see how, with a pattern such as shown above, the Republicans could keep winning. Larry had some explanations, largely having to do with timing: under De
6 0.15006053 1079 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-23-Surveys show Americans are populist class warriors, except when they aren’t
7 0.14909911 384 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-31-Two stories about the election that I don’t believe
9 0.133517 323 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-06-Sociotropic Voting and the Media
10 0.12808464 666 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-18-American Beliefs about Economic Opportunity and Income Inequality
12 0.12441754 1577 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-14-Richer people continue to vote Republican
13 0.12225515 369 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-25-Misunderstanding of divided government
14 0.11962374 84 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-14-Is it 1930?
15 0.11753692 2167 andrew gelman stats-2014-01-10-Do you believe that “humans and other living things have evolved over time”?
16 0.11721728 1636 andrew gelman stats-2012-12-23-Peter Bartlett on model complexity and sample size
17 0.11601213 100 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-19-Unsurprisingly, people are more worried about the economy and jobs than about deficits
18 0.1121399 478 andrew gelman stats-2010-12-20-More on why “all politics is local” is an outdated slogan
19 0.11120284 270 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-12-Comparison of forecasts for the 2010 congressional elections
20 0.10595677 1437 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-31-Paying survey respondents
topicId topicWeight
[(0, 0.162), (1, -0.119), (2, 0.183), (3, 0.089), (4, -0.092), (5, -0.011), (6, -0.044), (7, 0.0), (8, -0.018), (9, 0.021), (10, -0.048), (11, -0.002), (12, -0.045), (13, 0.025), (14, -0.005), (15, 0.007), (16, 0.014), (17, 0.02), (18, -0.027), (19, 0.027), (20, -0.002), (21, 0.05), (22, 0.022), (23, 0.02), (24, -0.007), (25, -0.032), (26, 0.008), (27, -0.036), (28, 0.047), (29, 0.08), (30, 0.011), (31, 0.031), (32, -0.017), (33, 0.001), (34, -0.066), (35, 0.019), (36, -0.06), (37, 0.041), (38, 0.077), (39, 0.044), (40, 0.002), (41, 0.044), (42, 0.006), (43, 0.007), (44, 0.054), (45, 0.007), (46, 0.021), (47, -0.02), (48, 0.034), (49, -0.022)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
same-blog 1 0.97031224 1388 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-22-Americans think economy isn’t so bad in their city but is crappy nationally and globally
Introduction: Frank Newport of Gallup reports ( link from Jay Livingston): Americans become progressively less positive about economic conditions the farther away from home they look. Forty-nine percent rate economic conditions in their local area as excellent or good, but that drops to 25% when rating the U.S. economy, and to 13% when assessing the world as a whole. This is really wack: I can see how it might make sense for Americans to think conditions are worse in other countries, but it’s hard to see a rational reason for the Lake-Wobegon-like pattern of people thinking things are ok locally but not nationally. Gallup highlights the partisan breakdown, which I graphed here: Unsurprisingly (given that their party controls the presidency and one house of Congress), Democrats are more optimistic than Republicans. This is just the flip side of University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan claiming in October 2008 that the economy is not that bad because “the current unem
Introduction: A few years ago Larry Bartels presented this graph, a version of which latter appeared in his book Unequal Democracy: Larry looked at the data in a number of ways, and the evidence seemed convincing that, at least in the short term, the Democrats were better than Republicans for the economy. This is consistent with Democrats’ general policies of lowering unemployment, as compared to Republicans lowering inflation, and, by comparing first-term to second-term presidents, he found that the result couldn’t simply be explained as a rebound or alternation pattern. The question then arose, why have the Republicans won so many elections? Why aren’t the Democrats consistently dominating? Non-economic issues are part of the story, of course, but lots of evidence shows the economy to be a key concern for voters, so it’s still hard to see how, with a pattern such as shown above, the Republicans could keep winning. Larry had some explanations, largely having to do with timing: under De
3 0.82870352 384 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-31-Two stories about the election that I don’t believe
Introduction: I don’t exactly disagree with the two arguments that I reproduce below, but I think they miss the point. Is “the battle over elitism” really central to this election? First, the easy one. Peter Baker in the New York Times, under the heading, “Elitism: The Charge That Obama Can’t Shake”: For all the discussion of health care and spending and jobs, at the core of the nation’s debate this fall has been the battle of elitism. . . . Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist, said Mr. Obama had not connected with popular discontent. “A lot of people have never been to Washington or New York, and they feel people there are so out of touch,” he said. . . . Rather than entertaining the possibility that the program they have pursued is genuinely and even legitimately unpopular, the White House and its allies have concluded that their political troubles amount to mainly a message and image problem. I think this is misleading for the usual reason that these message-oriented critiques are
4 0.82351989 394 andrew gelman stats-2010-11-05-2010: What happened?
Introduction: A lot of people are asking, How could the voters have swung so much in two years? And, why didn’t Obama give Americans a better sense of his long-term economic plan in 2009, back when he still had a political mandate? As an academic statistician and political scientist, I have no insight into the administration’s internal deliberations, but I have some thoughts based on my interpretation of political science research. The baseline As Doug Hibbs and others have pointed out, given the Democrats’ existing large majority in both houses of Congress and the continuing economic depression, we’d expect a big Republican swing in the vote. And this has been echoed for a long time in the polls–as early as September, 2009–over a year before the election–political scientists were forecasting that the Democrats were going to lose big in the midterms. (The polls have made it clear that most voters do not believe the Republican Party has the answer either. But, as I’ve emphasized before
5 0.81440961 286 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-20-Are the Democrats avoiding a national campaign?
Introduction: Bob Erikson, one of my colleagues at Columbia who knows much more about American politics than I do, sent in the following screed. I’ll post Bob’s note, followed by my comments. Bob writes: Monday morning many of us were startled by the following headline: White House strenuously denies NYT report that it is considering getting aggressive about winning the midterm elections. At first I [Bob] thought I was reading the Onion, but no, it was a sarcastic comment on the blog Talking Points Memo. But the gist of the headline appears to be correct. Indeed, the New York Times reported that White House advisers denied that a national ad campaign was being planned. ‘There’s been no discussion of such a thing at the White House’ What do we make of this? Is there some hidden downside to actually running a national campaign? Of course, money spent nationally is not spent on targeted local campaigns. But that is always the case. What explains the Democrats’ trepidation abou
6 0.80032629 84 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-14-Is it 1930?
7 0.79570472 1020 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-20-No no no no no
9 0.78187972 1079 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-23-Surveys show Americans are populist class warriors, except when they aren’t
10 0.76135945 1577 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-14-Richer people continue to vote Republican
11 0.76126671 149 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-16-Demographics: what variable best predicts a financial crisis?
12 0.76022357 551 andrew gelman stats-2011-02-02-Obama and Reagan, sitting in a tree, etc.
13 0.75311434 323 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-06-Sociotropic Voting and the Media
14 0.72331053 1936 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-13-Economic policy does not occur in a political vacuum
15 0.71798378 828 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-28-Thoughts on Groseclose book on media bias
16 0.71444899 312 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-02-“Regression to the mean” is fine. But what’s the “mean”?
17 0.70578289 814 andrew gelman stats-2011-07-21-The powerful consumer?
18 0.70506424 130 andrew gelman stats-2010-07-07-A False Consensus about Public Opinion on Torture
19 0.69479364 521 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-17-“the Tea Party’s ire, directed at Democrats and Republicans alike”
20 0.69026577 649 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-05-Internal and external forecasting
topicId topicWeight
[(2, 0.028), (4, 0.017), (9, 0.011), (14, 0.01), (15, 0.038), (16, 0.095), (24, 0.126), (53, 0.018), (56, 0.15), (76, 0.013), (82, 0.011), (83, 0.013), (86, 0.042), (89, 0.017), (93, 0.031), (98, 0.011), (99, 0.264)]
simIndex simValue blogId blogTitle
1 0.95700073 14 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-01-Imputing count data
Introduction: Guy asks: I am analyzing an original survey of farmers in Uganda. I am hoping to use a battery of welfare proxy variables to create a single welfare index using PCA. I have quick question which I hope you can find time to address: How do you recommend treating count data? (for example # of rooms, # of chickens, # of cows, # of radios)? In my dataset these variables are highly skewed with many responses at zero (which makes taking the natural log problematic). In the case of # of cows or chickens several obs have values in the hundreds. My response: Here’s what we do in our mi package in R. We split a variable into two parts: an indicator for whether it is positive, and the positive part. That is, y = u*v. Then u is binary and can be modeled using logisitc regression, and v can be modeled on the log scale. At the end you can round to the nearest integer if you want to avoid fractional values.
same-blog 2 0.9550252 1388 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-22-Americans think economy isn’t so bad in their city but is crappy nationally and globally
Introduction: Frank Newport of Gallup reports ( link from Jay Livingston): Americans become progressively less positive about economic conditions the farther away from home they look. Forty-nine percent rate economic conditions in their local area as excellent or good, but that drops to 25% when rating the U.S. economy, and to 13% when assessing the world as a whole. This is really wack: I can see how it might make sense for Americans to think conditions are worse in other countries, but it’s hard to see a rational reason for the Lake-Wobegon-like pattern of people thinking things are ok locally but not nationally. Gallup highlights the partisan breakdown, which I graphed here: Unsurprisingly (given that their party controls the presidency and one house of Congress), Democrats are more optimistic than Republicans. This is just the flip side of University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan claiming in October 2008 that the economy is not that bad because “the current unem
3 0.95026648 933 andrew gelman stats-2011-09-30-More bad news: The (mis)reporting of statistical results in psychology journals
Introduction: Another entry in the growing literature on systematic flaws in the scientific research literature. This time the bad tidings come from Marjan Bakker and Jelte Wicherts, who write : Around 18% of statistical results in the psychological literature are incorrectly reported. Inconsistencies were more common in low-impact journals than in high-impact journals. Moreover, around 15% of the articles contained at least one statistical conclusion that proved, upon recalculation, to be incorrect; that is, recalculation rendered the previously significant result insignificant, or vice versa. These errors were often in line with researchers’ expectations. Their research also had a qualitative component: To obtain a better understanding of the origins of the errors made in the reporting of statistics, we contacted the authors of the articles with errors in the second study and asked them to send us the raw data. Regrettably, only 24% of the authors shared their data, despite our request
4 0.94645166 1045 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-07-Martyn Plummer’s Secret JAGS Blog
Introduction: Martyn Plummer , the creator of the open-source, C++, graphical-model compiler JAGS (aka “Just Another Gibbs Sampler”), runs a forum on the JAGS site that has a very similar feel to the mail-bag posts on this blog. Martyn answers general statistical computing questions (e.g., why slice sampling rather than Metropolis-Hastings?) and general modeling (e.g., why won’t my model converge with this prior?). Here’s the link to the top-level JAGS site, and to the forum: JAGS Forum JAGS Home Page The forum’s pretty active, with the stats page showing hundreds of views per day and very regular posts and answers. Martyn’s last post was today. Martyn also has a blog devoted to JAGS and other stats news: JAGS News Blog
5 0.94353241 1158 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-07-The more likely it is to be X, the more likely it is to be Not X?
Introduction: This post is by Phil Price. A paper by Wood, Douglas, and Sutton looks at “Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories.” Unfortunately the subjects were 140 undergraduate psychology students, so one wonders how general the results are. I found this sort of arresting: In Study 1 (n=137), the more participants believed that Princess Diana faked her own death, the more they believed she was murdered. In Study 2 (n=102), the more participants believed that Osama Bin Laden was already dead when U.S. Special Forces raided his compound in Pakistan, the more they believed he is still alive. As the article says, “conspiracy advocates’ distrust of official narratives may be so strong that many alternative theories are simultaneously endorsed in spite of any contradictions between them.” But I think the authors overstate things when they say “One would think that there ought to be a negative correlation between beliefs in contradictory accounts of events — the more one believes in
7 0.93605751 780 andrew gelman stats-2011-06-27-Bridges between deterministic and probabilistic models for binary data
8 0.93174517 1011 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-15-World record running times vs. distance
9 0.92237401 24 andrew gelman stats-2010-05-09-Special journal issue on statistical methods for the social sciences
10 0.92016053 267 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-09-This Friday afternoon: Applied Statistics Center mini-conference on risk perception
11 0.91953576 984 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-01-David MacKay sez . . . 12??
12 0.90997815 1929 andrew gelman stats-2013-07-07-Stereotype threat!
13 0.90641832 2248 andrew gelman stats-2014-03-15-Problematic interpretations of confidence intervals
14 0.90279132 1162 andrew gelman stats-2012-02-11-Adding an error model to a deterministic model
15 0.89870852 534 andrew gelman stats-2011-01-24-Bayes at the end
16 0.88119274 1435 andrew gelman stats-2012-07-30-Retracted articles and unethical behavior in economics journals?
17 0.88099158 1117 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-13-What are the important issues in ethics and statistics? I’m looking for your input!
18 0.88076669 2134 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-14-Oswald evidence
19 0.88051564 2137 andrew gelman stats-2013-12-17-Replication backlash
20 0.8796016 2065 andrew gelman stats-2013-10-17-Cool dynamic demographic maps provide beautiful illustration of Chris Rock effect