Inequality and Web Search Trends(nytimes.com) |
Inequality and Web Search Trends(nytimes.com) |
This would be a fascinating appendix for Charles Murray's book Coming Apart. If you liked this article, you might enjoy his quiz about which of these two Americas you are likely to live in: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/white-educated-and-wealt... (Edit: I scored 46 and the description is completely accurate: "A first-generation upper-middle-class person with middle-class parents")
I'm not overly impressed.
I scored 27 but I'm a Brit living in the states and a lot of the blue-collar culture stuff doesn't translate (NASCAR).
I'm perfectly fine not being involved with the more pop culture stuff. I've only watched House of the shows they listed.
Is this a worrying new trend though? I'm pretty sure the world has always had its haves and have-nots.
I'm not surprised you found the results unimpressive, since Britain has a far different history with class and mobility than the United States. I was impressed with how the questions ascertained that I'd grown up in a rural area then moved to a wealthy suburb in adolescence. Things like going to parades, eating at Applebee's, or going fishing were strongly present in the first half of my life and completely absent in the second half. I crossed a major divide in American culture without even realizing it.
What I find especially intriguing are some of the explanations Leonhardt posits, which presume a causal link and attempt to suggest what that cause is. That's part of the reason why I enjoy running Correlated.org -- it's fun to try to guess what the connection might be between two seemingly unrelated things.
But let's remember: Not all correlations entail a causal link. (I prefer that way of putting it over "Correlation does not imply causation," because correlation does imply causation ... it's just that it often wrongly implies it.)
I'm not sure you can consider obesity as part of 'a hard place to live'. thats an action an individual chooses regardless of geography. You could argue that poor people have no choice, they are obese because they are poor for example, but that would be like double counting income if they are highly correlated.
income is also tricky since taxes and costs of living has a huge effect. this could possibly explain why the places to live shown are largely opposite to most 'happiness' indicators that I have seen. at least looking at its map: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/upshot/where-are-the-harde...
There is evidence of the nation’s cultural divide in the results,
with “Zoolander” (a 2001 movie starring Ben Stiller) and Vengaboys
(a Dutch dance-pop band) popular in the easiest places and Kenneth
Nixon, of the rock band Framing Hanley, popular in the hardest
places."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Zbi0XmGtMw
Are the easiest places to live in the TV advertising markets of Six Flags, by any chance?
Is that entire county committing disability fraud? What's going on there?
If this is the #3 search term, the data must be thin. Anyone familiar with this dataset want to chime in? I have a similar camera that is used pretty often and I couldnot even recognize the name without a google search. Did I just get lucky by buying 2x nb-6l ? maybe the nb-4l is really a pain point? Maybe some users of the elph series have real issues with this thing?
I can see why one might think that, but it's actually not necessarily the case.
I'm not sure how they're defining 'highest correlation to our index' (there are a few different ways to interpret that statement), but for example, with a latent Dirichlet allocation[0][1], a word or phrase that is rare but is almost exclusively limited to a given subgroup might still end up being one of the top associations for that group.
Another example using a similar technique: For "The Real Stuff White People Like"[2] we analyzed millions of fairly lengthy profiles, and still the results yield some phrases that you might think are relatively uncommon (though not rare), but are very highly associated with certain groups. We did the same thing for sexual orientation[3], and you can see similar effects there.
One other thing to keep in mind is that search terms are usually a few words, which is much shorter than the typical OkCupid profile.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_dirichlet_allocation
[1] An LDA is only one possible way of analyzing data of this sort, but it's a reasonably common one so it's easy to find other examples for comparison
[2] http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-real-stuff-white-peopl...
[3] http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/gay-sex-vs-straight-sex/
In Hale County, Alabama, nearly 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability.[2] On the day government checks come in every month, banks stay open late, Main Street fills up with cars, and anybody looking to unload an old TV or armchair has a yard sale.
Sonny Ryan, a retired judge in town, didn't hear disability cases in his courtroom. But the subject came up often. He described one exchange he had with a man who was on disability but looked healthy.
"Just out of curiosity, what is your disability?" the judge asked from the bench.
"I have high blood pressure," the man said.
"So do I," the judge said. "What else?"
"I have diabetes."
"So do I."
This is another good argument for Basic Income: SSD keeps people from earning some money through whatever skills they have (cleaning houses, selling food, making clothes, day labor, etc.) because of the strict income restrictions on how much you can earn while on SSD. If everyone knows it's a program for the unemployable, why keep up this charade that it's actually for the disabled? Just write them a $1000 check every month and allow them to earn extra income however they choose.
I'm 24, can run three miles and work 50 hours/week.
High blood pressure is not a disability.
It's squishy whether it's fraud or not. The unemployability is real, the medical conditions are a matter of semantics, and it's in nobody's interest to dig at it too deeply.
You seem to have some beliefs about US history which I don't share. I don't believe in the myth of upward mobility in the US, while there are certainly examples of this, the story is oversold. I don't believe the society is as meritocratic as it is made out to be. The biggest predictor of a person's success is their parent's wealth.
I'd also argue the fact that you apparently crossed this major divide in American culture without even realizing it suggests that maybe you didn't cross a major divide of anything at all.
This is without even going into the immigrant/religious/racial divides that exist. We aren't going to have a homogenous group of 300m people - this isn't a bad thing, and it isn't a new thing.
> High blood pressure is not a disability.
Your high blood pressure, as it currently is, is clearly not a disability for you in the work that you do. That does not mean that high blood pressure is not a disability.
[1] The exception is that each state agency also has a "List of Impairments", a catalog of specific conditions and combinations of conditions that are considered unconditionally disabling; if you have a condition on that list, or one judged as severe as one on that list, you are considered disabled without analysis of the specifics of your previous work.