Mormons are average
Clark of Mormon Metaphysics says below:
My impression is that atheists, Mormons and Jews did best simply because all three groups tend to be well educated. (Someone mentioned stats adjusted for education but I couldn’t see where that was noted although maybe I just missed the obvious)
This is not an unfounded assertion, as it is “common […]
Religious illiteracy is the norm
By now you probably know that:
Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons are among the highest-scoring groups on a new survey of religious knowledge, outperforming evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions.
On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions […]
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 […]
The socioeconomic status of white ethnics
In the post below on the prolific nature of the Kennedy clan some commenters were curious as to the general socioeconomic slant of Irish Catholics. The GSS has a variable ETHNIC which asks which nation an individual’s ancestors came from. Combine that with RELIG, and you can figure out how Irish Catholics stack up nationally. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Daily Data Dump – Friday
23andMe research article finally published. Dr. Dan MacArthur offers his take on a new PLoS Genetics paper which was published using 23andMe’s user base. Of course there’s already information coming out of 23andMe’s user community not getting into the academic literature, see this comment below.
Group Solidarity and Survival. For what it’s worth, I think group […]
The rise of the irreligious Left, the reemergence of Republican religious neutrality (?)
Over at ScienceBlogs I have a post up where I explore the differences by state between the American Religious Identification Survey in 1990 and 2008. I then compare these data to the national election results in 1988 and 2008.
Here is a chart which shows the relationship between % “No Religion” and proportion of votes for […]
Open thread on Scott Brown, etc.
In case people want to discuss his victory tonight. I don’t have any unique insights that you can’t find elsewhere, but a quick question. Looking at the pollster.com Coakley vs. Brown polls on the front page right now I get average of 51 for Brown and 44 for Coakley. The final looks like to be […]
Estimating black-white racial tension from 1850 to present
As a New Year’s gift, here is a free copy of an entry I put up on my data blog (details on that here). It’s a quantitative look at the history of race and culture in America, together with qualitative examples that illustrate the story that the numbers…
One year after the financial collapse, Gotham in a downward spiral
Actually, not really. New York on Track for Fewest Homicides on Record. I assume that those who project long term fiscal problems due to a contraction in the financial sector in New York City are probably correct (assuming that the financial sector act…
Crime way down. Who exactly knows stuff?
Despite recession, crime keeps falling:In times of recession, property crimes, in particular, are expected to rise.They haven’t.Overall, property crimes fell by 6.1 percent, and violent crimes by 4.4 percent, according to the six-month data collected b…
Social science data sets
At the Inter-University Consortium for Political & Social Research. Registration is free.
Food stamps & unemployment go together (duh)
Derek Thompson at The Atlantic has a post Are America’s Fattest States Also the Most Jobless?. The county-level data on unemployment only goes back to 2008 (at least that I can find online). But I do have data on obesity at the county-level too. What’s…
Food stamps & unemployment go together (duh)
Derek Thompson at The Atlantic has a post Are America’s Fattest States Also the Most Jobless?. The county-level data on unemployment only goes back to 2008 (at least that I can find online). But I do have data on obesity at the county-level too. What’s…
Are over-leveraged counties seeing an increase in food stamp usage?
Since The New York Times put up the csv file which they used to generate their maps of food stamp usage, I thought I’d look at the data a little closer. In particular, look at this graphic of change in food stamp usage by county (dark equals more usage…
The white vote for Obama, by county & correlates
A friend of mine who was looking at the distributions on obesity and diabetes wondered about their political correlations. To do that and add anything new it seems that it would be best to estimate the white vote for Barack Obama in 2008 by county. Thi…
Where the fat folks live
Since it’s after Thanksgiving and I’m feeling bloated, I figure a follow up to the post on obesity and diabetes might be apropos. I want to focus on obesity. I have the raw county-by-county data, but obviously it isn’t broken down by race. But, I do ha…
Data and social networks
Does anyone know of a free source of county level presidential results going back to the 19th century? I want to compare correlations in voting across time. I did find some data from Pennsylvania, and noted that the Great Flip seems not to be evident i…
Variation in belief 1988-2008, the rise of skepticism
Below in the comments David Heddle says:
Of course there is no way, that I can see, of estimating how many of those leaving the church were self-identified Christians but who were actually in-the-closet unbelievers. Perhaps (who knows?) this is a sizable group, one that is beginning to come out of the closet as the stigma […]