India’s Deep North
In my post Pakistan ~10 years on I alluded to the fact that despite India’s robust economic growth of the past ~15 years or so in the aggregate there is a wide range of state-by-state variation. It is conventional in the media to point out the massive caste/class divisions in India, but because of the […]
Pakistan ~10 years on
Long time readers of this weblog will recognize Zachary Latif. Zachary and I have been having exchanges on various topics on and off since 2002 on the blogs. His early opinionated musings on cultural and historical topics were a definite prod for me to venture out more vigorously into this domain. As a Pakistani […]
Republicans, the middle class party
In my post below I refuted the contention that the Democrats are the party of the rich. As I noted there is some evidence that the super-rich may tilt Democrat. There are some economic and social sectors which lean Democratic because of their social liberalism, but there is no preponderance that I have seen in […]
Daily Data Dump – Thursday
Why Do Foreigners Like Fanta So Much? I arrived in the USA as a pre-schooler, but the disappearance of Fanta from my life is actually something I wondered about back then. I had no idea that it was a Nazi-origin drink.
Chew on This: Six Dental Myths Debunked. You probably know some of these. But did […]
The girls are all right, they accept human evolution
One of the trends that makes me less pessimistic about the inevitability of an idiocratic end-point to technological civilization is that it seems young Americans are more likely to accept evolution than earlier age cohorts. The EVOLVED variable asks whether one believes that “Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of […]
Do liberals and conservatives know what they are?
Matthew Yglesias says:
I only wish the same level of scrutiny were applied to assertions about whether the public is “liberal” or “conservative” where I believe there’s strong circumstantial evidence that many people just don’t understand these terms in the way political and media professionals understand them. For example, when you break these things out by […]
India’s life expectancy gap
Poking around some data sets, I randomly stumbled onto to this factoid:
According to World Bank estimates India’s life expectancy is now below that of Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal’s! Now, I am aware that these data and analyses are somewhat an art, and that there’s a lot of subterfuge (hello Greece!). Additionally, it does seem strange […]
Using the General Social Survey
I’ve mentioned this before, but I thought it would be useful to repeat again. Many of my social science related posts use Berkeley’s web interface with the General Social Survey. Regularly people ask me in the comments details as to the variables, or a more explicit elaboration of the methods. First, this is a weblog, […]
Liberal Creationists Are Not Very Intelligent
A comment below about intelligent people who believe in dumb ideas made me want to revisit the Creationism demographics in the GSS. More on point I wanted to look at the relationship between IQ and Creationism crossed with demographic variables. I used the WORDSUM variable as a proxy for IQ (the correlation is ~0.70). WORDSUM […]
More children please: men or women?
In the post below on Bryan Caplan’s arguments for why one should have more children there was an “interesting” comment:
As if we’re harmless little creatures at one with our environment and put no toll on the balance of nature around us. Funny how we humans act like mindless rabbits and lemmings and put the sole […]
Why educated women are having children
Matt Yglesias has posted some charts showing that
1) Childlessness among women is becoming more common
2) The variation of this state by education is disappearing
Here’s the chart which illustrates the second phenomenon:
I think the reason this may be occurring is a dilution of the sample bias of women who have higher education in relation to the […]
The future of fertility; more kids please
After my post yesterday on Bryan Caplan’s argument for having more children, I was curious as to what the public perceptions of the ideal number of children was in the General Social Survey. There’s a variable with large N’s which is already in there: CHLDIDEL. It asks:
What do you think is the ideal number of […]