andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1444 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Nadia Hassan writes: In your review of the Jacobs and Page book, you argued that while there was an open question of whether government could give voters what they wanted in light of the tax increases they might accept, Jacobs and Page were pretty persuasive about targeted tax hikes and specific programs especially against the freeloader view. Recent discussions, and some focus groups bear out these points exactly. The link is from a report by Stan Greenberg, James Carville, and Erica Seifert. I suppose if you ask Doug Schoen to make up some data, you’ll get a different story.
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1 Recent discussions, and some focus groups bear out these points exactly. [sent-2, score-0.474]
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3 I suppose if you ask Doug Schoen to make up some data, you’ll get a different story. [sent-4, score-0.329]
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same-blog 1 1.0 1444 andrew gelman stats-2012-08-05-Those darn conservative egalitarians
Introduction: Nadia Hassan writes: In your review of the Jacobs and Page book, you argued that while there was an open question of whether government could give voters what they wanted in light of the tax increases they might accept, Jacobs and Page were pretty persuasive about targeted tax hikes and specific programs especially against the freeloader view. Recent discussions, and some focus groups bear out these points exactly. The link is from a report by Stan Greenberg, James Carville, and Erica Seifert. I suppose if you ask Doug Schoen to make up some data, you’ll get a different story.
2 0.1874544 985 andrew gelman stats-2011-11-01-Doug Schoen has 2 poll reports
Introduction: According to Chris Wilson , there are two versions of the report of the Occupy Wall Street poll from so-called hack pollster Doug Schoen. Here’s the report that Azi Paybarah says that Schoen sent to him, and here’s the final question from the poll: And here’s what’s on Schoen’s own website: Very similar, except for that last phrase, “no matter what the cost.” I have no idea which was actually asked to the survey participants, but it’s a reminder of the difficulties of public opinion research—sometimes you don’t even know what question was asked! I’m not implying anything sinister on Schoen’s part, it’s just interesting to see these two documents floating around. P.S. More here from Kaiser Fung on fundamental flaws with Schoen’s poll.
3 0.18600313 113 andrew gelman stats-2010-06-28-Advocacy in the form of a “deliberative forum”
Introduction: John Sides reports on a paper by Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs about so-called deliberative forums, in particular a set of meetings called America Speaks that have been organized and conducted by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, an organization formed by the former advertising executive, Secretary of Commerce, and investment banker to focus attention on the national debt. Sides, Page, and Jacobs discuss three key points: 1. Any poll or focus group is only as good as its sample, and there is no evidence that the participants in the America Speaks forums were selected in a way to be representative of the nation. Page and Jacobs write: Deliberative forums often fail to get a representative sample of Americans to participate, even when they try hard to do so. Worse, some deliberative forums make little or no serious effort to achieve representativeness. They throw open the doors to self-selected political activists with extreme opinions, or they compile a secret list
Introduction: Everybody knows how you can lie with statistics by manipulating numbers, making inappropriate comparisons, misleading graphs, etc. But, as I like to remind students, the simplest way to lie with statistics is to just lie! You see this all the time, advocates who make up numbers or present numbers with such little justification that they might as well be made up (as in this purported survey of the “super-rich”). Here I’m not talking about the innumeracy of a Samantha Power or a David Runciman, or Michael Barone-style confusion or Gregg Easterbrook-style cluelessness or even Tucker Carlson-style asininity . No, I’m talking about flat-out lying by a professional who has the numbers and deliberately chooses to misrepresent them. The culprit is pollster Doug Schoen, and the catch was made by Jay Livingston. Schoen wrote the following based on a survey he took of Occupy Wall Street participants: On Oct. 10 and 11, Arielle Alter Confino, a senior researcher at my polli
Introduction: See page 179 here for Gowa’s review from 1986. And here’s my version (from 2008).
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Introduction: Nadia Hassan writes: In your review of the Jacobs and Page book, you argued that while there was an open question of whether government could give voters what they wanted in light of the tax increases they might accept, Jacobs and Page were pretty persuasive about targeted tax hikes and specific programs especially against the freeloader view. Recent discussions, and some focus groups bear out these points exactly. The link is from a report by Stan Greenberg, James Carville, and Erica Seifert. I suppose if you ask Doug Schoen to make up some data, you’ll get a different story.
2 0.60011411 859 andrew gelman stats-2011-08-18-Misunderstanding analysis of covariance
Introduction: Jeremy Miles writes: Are you familiar with Miller and Chapman’s (2001) article : Misunderstanding Analysis of Covariance saying that ANCOVA (and therefore, I suppose regression) should not be used when groups differ on a covariate. It has caused a moderate splash in psychology circles. I wondered if you had any thoughts on it. I had not heard of the article so I followed the link . . . ugh! Already on the very first column of the very first page they confuse nonadditivity with nonlinearity. I could probably continue with, “and it gets worse,” but since nobody’s paying me to read this one, I’ll stop reading right there on the first page! I prefer when people point me to good papers to read. . . .
3 0.58732522 1080 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-24-Latest in blog advertising
Introduction: I received the following message from “Patricia Lopez” of “Premium Link Ads”: Hello, I am interested in placing a text link on your page: http://andrewgelman.com/2011/07/super_sam_fuld/. The link would point to a page on a website that is relevant to your page and may be useful to your site visitors. We would be happy to compensate you for your time if it is something we are able to work out. The best way to reach me is through a direct response to this email. This will help me get back to you about the right link request. Please let me know if you are interested, and if not thanks for your time. Thanks. Usually I just ignore these, but after our recent discussion I decided to reply. I wrote: How much do you pay? But no answer. I wonder what’s going on? I mean, why bother sending the email in the first place if you’re not going to follow up?
4 0.57508487 366 andrew gelman stats-2010-10-24-Mankiw tax update
Introduction: I was going through the blog and noticed this note on an article by Mankiw and Weinzierl who implied that the state only has a right to tax things that are “unjustly wrestled from someone else.” This didn’t make much sense to me–whether it’s the sales tax, the income tax, or whatever, I see taxes as a way to raise money, not as a form of punishment. At the time, I conjectured this was a general difference in attitude between political scientists and economists, but in retrospect I realize I’m dealing with n=1 in each case. See here for further discussion of taxing “justly acquired endowments.” The only reason I’m bringing this all up now is that I think it is relevant to our recent discussion here and here of Mankiw’s work incentives. Mankiw objected to paying a higher marginal tax rate, and I think part of this is that he sees taxes as a form of punishment, and since he came by his income honestly he doesn’t think it’s fair to have to pay taxes on it. My perspective i
Introduction: Given Grandma Mankiw’s hypothetical distaste for Sonia Sotomayor’s spending habits (recall that Grandma “would have been shocked and appalled” by the judge’s lack of savings), I expect she (the grandmother) would be even more irritated by the success of Sotomayor’s recent book: Now that Sotomayor has a ton of money coming in, in addition to a well-paying job and pension for life, that would almost seem to validate Sotomayor’s foolish, foolish decision to enjoy herself in middle age rather than sock hundreds of thousands of dollars into a retirement account she likely would never touch during her lifetime. One interesting thing about this example is that Mankiw apparently holds within himself a descriptive and normative view of economics. Descriptively, he models people as “spenders” or “savers.” But, normatively, he seems to attribute higher values to the “savers.” (He also seems to be confused about the relation between saving to intertemporal preference (see my long p
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Introduction: Tyler Cowen hypothesizes a “dogmatism portfolio” or a “quota of dogmatism”: in his words, If you’re very dogmatic in one area, you may be less dogmatic in others. OK, well “may be” is pretty vague. There’s not really anything to disagree with, yet. But then Cowen continues: There’s a lesson here. If you wish to be a more open-minded thinker, adhere to some extreme and perhaps unreasonable fandoms, the more firmly believed the better and the more obscure the area the better. This will help fulfill your dogmatism quota, yet without much skewing your more important beliefs. He seems to be making a testable prediction here, that levels of dogmatism on two randomly chosen issues should be negatively correlated. I guess I should call this “almost testable,” as it still requires an issue-by-issue measure of dogmatism. (Is it dogmatic to believe that there was this guy called Jesus who walked on water . . . or is it dogmatic to say that Jesus didn’t walk on water and
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Introduction: Nadia Hassan writes: In your review of the Jacobs and Page book, you argued that while there was an open question of whether government could give voters what they wanted in light of the tax increases they might accept, Jacobs and Page were pretty persuasive about targeted tax hikes and specific programs especially against the freeloader view. Recent discussions, and some focus groups bear out these points exactly. The link is from a report by Stan Greenberg, James Carville, and Erica Seifert. I suppose if you ask Doug Schoen to make up some data, you’ll get a different story.
3 0.91012591 646 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-04-Graphical insights into the safety of cycling.
Introduction: This article by Thomas Crag, at Copenhagenize, is marred by reliance on old data, but it’s so full of informative graphical displays — most of them not made by the author, I think — that it’s hard to pick just one. But here ya go. This figure shows fatalities (among cyclists) versus distance cycled, with a point for each year…unfortunately ending in way back in 1998, but still: This is a good alternative to the more common choice for this sort of plot, which would be overlaying curves of fatalities vs time and distance cycled vs time. The article also explicitly discusses the fact, previously discussed on this blog , that it’s misleading, to the point of being wrong in most contexts, to compare the safety of walking vs cycling vs driving by looking at the casualty or fatality rate per kilometer . Often, as in this article, the question of interest is something like, if more people switched from driving to cycling, how many more or fewer people would die? Obviously, if peo
4 0.90531492 1587 andrew gelman stats-2012-11-21-Red state blue state, or, states and counties are not persons
Introduction: Tyler Cowen points to this news article by Lauren Sandler: Stunningly, the postponement of marriage and parenting — the factors that shrink the birth rate — is the very best predictor of a person’s politics in the United States, over even income and education levels, a Belgian demographer named Ron Lesthaeghe [and coauthor Lisa Neidert] has discovered . Larger family size in America correlates to early marriage and childbirth, lower women’s employment, and opposition to gay rights — all social factors that lead voters to see red. All the analysis in the linked paper is at the state and county level. That’s fine but this is not going to tell you what is a “predictor of a person’s politics.” Cowen labels his post “Sentences to ponder,” and what I want to ponder is that people are so quick to jump from aggregate to individual patterns. And, yes, I know that aggregate patterns are related to individual patterns but they’re not the same. In particular, from the evidence we’
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Introduction: According to a New York Times article , cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have a new theory about rational argument: humans didn’t develop it in order to learn about the world, we developed it in order to win arguments with other people. “It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.” Based on the NYT article, it seems that Mercier and Sperber are basically flipping around the traditional argument, which is that humans learned to reason about the world, albeit imperfectly, and learned to use language to convey that reasoning to others. These guys would suggest that it’s the other way around: we learned to argue with others, and this has gradually led to the ability to actually make (and recognize) sound arguments, but only indirectly. The article says “”At least in some cultural contexts, this results in a kind of arms race towards greater sophistication in the production and evaluation o
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