andrew_gelman_stats andrew_gelman_stats-2012 andrew_gelman_stats-2012-1503 knowledge-graph by maker-knowledge-mining
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Introduction: Jeff points me to this news article and asks, Can this be right? Hmmm . . . the article defines “wealthier smokers” as “those earning 60,000 or more.” So suppose a “low-income smoker” makes $20K, then 25% is $5000, which is $100 a week, or $14/day, which according to the article is roughly the cost of a pack of cigarettes. So I guess it’s possible. It just depends where you put the cutoff for “low-income” and where you put the cutoff for “smoker.” I also wonder whether the numerator and denominator are comparable. It might be that if you add up all of these people’s expenses and divide by their income, you’ll get a ratio of more than 100%.
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1 Jeff points me to this news article and asks, Can this be right? [sent-1, score-0.327]
2 the article defines “wealthier smokers” as “those earning 60,000 or more. [sent-5, score-0.573]
3 ” So suppose a “low-income smoker” makes $20K, then 25% is $5000, which is $100 a week, or $14/day, which according to the article is roughly the cost of a pack of cigarettes. [sent-6, score-0.92]
4 It just depends where you put the cutoff for “low-income” and where you put the cutoff for “smoker. [sent-8, score-1.31]
5 ” I also wonder whether the numerator and denominator are comparable. [sent-9, score-0.629]
6 It might be that if you add up all of these people’s expenses and divide by their income, you’ll get a ratio of more than 100%. [sent-10, score-0.767]
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same-blog 1 1.0 1503 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-19-“Poor Smokers in New York State Spend 25% of Income on Cigarettes, Study Finds”
Introduction: Jeff points me to this news article and asks, Can this be right? Hmmm . . . the article defines “wealthier smokers” as “those earning 60,000 or more.” So suppose a “low-income smoker” makes $20K, then 25% is $5000, which is $100 a week, or $14/day, which according to the article is roughly the cost of a pack of cigarettes. So I guess it’s possible. It just depends where you put the cutoff for “low-income” and where you put the cutoff for “smoker.” I also wonder whether the numerator and denominator are comparable. It might be that if you add up all of these people’s expenses and divide by their income, you’ll get a ratio of more than 100%.
Introduction: Ratio estimates are common in statistics. In survey sampling, the ratio estimate is when you use y/x to estimate Y/X (using the notation in which x,y are totals of sample measurements and X,Y are population totals). In textbook sampling examples, the denominator X will be an all-positive variable, something that is easy to measure and is, ideally, close to proportional to Y. For example, X is last year’s sales and Y is this year’s sales, or X is the number of people in a cluster and Y is some count. Ratio estimation doesn’t work so well if X can be either positive or negative. More generally we can consider any estimate of a ratio, with no need for a survey sampling context. The problem with estimating Y/X is that the very interpretation of Y/X can change completely if the sign of X changes. Everything is ok for a point estimate: you get X.hat and Y.hat, you can take the ratio Y.hat/X.hat, no problem. But the inference falls apart if you have enough uncertainty in X.hat th
Introduction: Well put.
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Introduction: Reihan Salam discusses a theory of Tyler Cowen regarding “threshold earners,” a sort of upscale version of a slacker. Here’s Cowen : A threshold earner is someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more. If wages go up, that person will respond by seeking less work or by working less hard or less often. That person simply wants to “get by” in terms of absolute earning power in order to experience other gains in the form of leisure. Salam continues: This clearly reflects the pattern of wage dispersion among my friends, particularly those who attended elite secondary schools and colleges and universities. I [Salam] know many “threshold earners,” including both high and low earners who could earn much more if they chose to make the necessary sacrifices. But they are satisficers. OK, fine so far. But then the claim is made that “threshold earning” behavior increases income inequality. In Cowen’s words: The funny thing is this: For years, many cultural c
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Introduction: A NY Times Environment blog entry summarizes an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looks into whether there really is a “scientific consensus” that humans are substantially changing the climate. There is. That’s pretty much “dog bites man” as far as news is concerned. But although the results of the study don’t seem noteworthy, I was struck by this paragraph in the blog writeup, which is pretty much a quote of the PNAS article: For example, of the top 50 climate researchers identified by the study (as ranked by the number of papers they had published), only 2 percent fell into the camp of climate dissenters. Of the top 200 researchers, only 2.5 percent fell into the dissenter camp. That is consistent with past work, including opinion polls, suggesting that 97 to 98 percent of working climate scientists accept the evidence for human-induced climate change. Two percent of the top 50, that’s one person. And 2.5 percent of the top 200, that’s five
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same-blog 1 0.96341151 1503 andrew gelman stats-2012-09-19-“Poor Smokers in New York State Spend 25% of Income on Cigarettes, Study Finds”
Introduction: Jeff points me to this news article and asks, Can this be right? Hmmm . . . the article defines “wealthier smokers” as “those earning 60,000 or more.” So suppose a “low-income smoker” makes $20K, then 25% is $5000, which is $100 a week, or $14/day, which according to the article is roughly the cost of a pack of cigarettes. So I guess it’s possible. It just depends where you put the cutoff for “low-income” and where you put the cutoff for “smoker.” I also wonder whether the numerator and denominator are comparable. It might be that if you add up all of these people’s expenses and divide by their income, you’ll get a ratio of more than 100%.
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Introduction: Americans (including me) don’t know much about other countries. Jeff Lax sent me to this blog post by Myrddin pointing out that Belgium has a higher murder rate than the rest of Western Europe. I have no particular take on this, but it’s a good reminder that other countries differ from each other. Here in the U.S., we tend to think all western European countries are the same, all eastern European countries are the same, etc. In reality, Sweden is not Finland . P.S. According to the Wiki , Greenland is one tough town. I guess there’s nothing much to do out there but watch satellite TV, chew the blubber, and kill people.
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Introduction: Mark Palko links to a blog by Megan McArdle which reproduces a list entitled, “What You Paid For: 2009 tax receipt for a taxpayer earning $34,140 and paying $5,400 in federal income tax and FICA (selected items).” McArdle writes, “isn’t it possible that the widespread support for programs like Social Security and Medicare rests on the fact that most people don’t realize just how big a portion of your paycheck those programs consume?” But, as Palko points out, the FICA and Medicare withholdings are actually already right there on your W-2 form. So the real problem is not a lack of information but that people aren’t reading their W-2 forms more carefully. (Also, I don’t know if people are so upset about their withholdings for Social Security and Medicare, given that they’ll be getting that money back when they retire.) I’m more concerned about the list itself, though. I think a lot of cognitive-perceptual effects are involved in what gets a separate line item, and what doesn
4 0.6769954 1145 andrew gelman stats-2012-01-30-A tax on inequality, or a tax to keep inequality at the current level?
Introduction: My sometime coauthor Aaron Edlin cowrote (with Ian Ayres) an op-ed recommending a clever approach to taxing the rich. In their article they employ a charming bit of economics jargon, using the word “earn” to mean “how much money you make.” They “propose an automatic extra tax on the income of the top 1 percent of earners.” I assume their tax would apply to unearned income as well, but they (or their editor at the Times) are just so used to describing income as “earnings” that they just threw that in. Funny. Also, there’s a part of the article that doesn’t make sense to me. Ayres and Edlin first describe the level of inequality: In 1980 the average 1-percenter made 12.5 times the median income, but in 2006 (the latest year for which data is available) the average income of our richest 1 percent was a whopping 36 times greater than that of the median household. Then they lay out their solution: Enough is enough. . . . we propose an automatic extra tax on the income
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Introduction: Reihan Salam discusses a theory of Tyler Cowen regarding “threshold earners,” a sort of upscale version of a slacker. Here’s Cowen : A threshold earner is someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more. If wages go up, that person will respond by seeking less work or by working less hard or less often. That person simply wants to “get by” in terms of absolute earning power in order to experience other gains in the form of leisure. Salam continues: This clearly reflects the pattern of wage dispersion among my friends, particularly those who attended elite secondary schools and colleges and universities. I [Salam] know many “threshold earners,” including both high and low earners who could earn much more if they chose to make the necessary sacrifices. But they are satisficers. OK, fine so far. But then the claim is made that “threshold earning” behavior increases income inequality. In Cowen’s words: The funny thing is this: For years, many cultural c
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Introduction: Jeff points me to this news article and asks, Can this be right? Hmmm . . . the article defines “wealthier smokers” as “those earning 60,000 or more.” So suppose a “low-income smoker” makes $20K, then 25% is $5000, which is $100 a week, or $14/day, which according to the article is roughly the cost of a pack of cigarettes. So I guess it’s possible. It just depends where you put the cutoff for “low-income” and where you put the cutoff for “smoker.” I also wonder whether the numerator and denominator are comparable. It might be that if you add up all of these people’s expenses and divide by their income, you’ll get a ratio of more than 100%.
2 0.81401634 1397 andrew gelman stats-2012-06-27-Stand Your Ground laws and homicides
Introduction: Jeff points me to a paper by Chandler McClellan and Erdal Tekin which begins as follows: The controversies surrounding Stand Your Ground laws have recently captured the nation’s attention. Since 2005, eighteen states have passed laws extending the right to self-defense with no duty to retreat to any place a person has a legal right to be, and several additional states are debating the adoption of similar legislation. Despite the implications that these laws may have for public safety, there has been little empirical investigation of their impact on crime and victimization. In this paper, we use monthly data from the U.S. Vital Statistics to examine how Stand Your Ground laws affect homicides. We identify the impact of these laws by exploiting variation in the effective date of these laws across states. Our results indicate that Stand Your Ground laws are associated with a significant increase in the number of homicides among whites, especially white males. According to our estimat
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Introduction: Barack Obama’s win has a potentially huge effect on policy. The current budget negotiations will affect the level and direction of government spending and on the mix of taxes paid by different groups of Americans. We can guess that a President Romney would have fought hard against upper-income tax increases. Other areas of long-term impact include the government’s stance on global warming, foreign policy, and the likelihood that Obama will nominate new Supreme Court justices who will uphold the right to abortion announced in Roe v. Wade. When it comes to public opinion, the story is different. The Democrats may well benefit in 2014 and 2016 from the anticipated slow but steady recovery of the economy over the next few years—but, as of November 6, 2012, the parties are essentially tied, with Barack Obama receiving 51% of the two-party vote, compared to Mitt Romney’s 49%, a split comparable to Al Gore’s narrow victory in 2000, Richard Nixon’s in 1968, and John Kennedy’s in 1960.
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