Dig this.
The mean net worth of married-couple households ($187,102) was substantially higher than that of cohabitant households ($77,093), male-headed households ($92,045) and female-headed households ($48,726), which was the lowest of all family structures.All those dorks and Melvins who live their lives like it was the Donna Reed show have lots of money. Given our progressive tax code wherein the top 10% pay 65% of the taxes, it's a good bet that those squares are footing the bill for all of our public spending.
Even worse, it's the Christian, weekly church-goers that are probably paying the most. Check out chart of divorce rate vs. church attendance.
Since broken homes correlate strongly with social pathologies, those same creepy Christians are probably using a lower portion of the social services they're paying for.How hideous. Let's not tell anyone. I mean, what would happen if Rob Zombie or 50 Cent found out about this? It could set our popular culture back 50 years!
OK as far as it goes, and I'm not necessarily arguing with your conclusions, but it looks to me like what you *really* want to make your point is a graph showing "frequency of church attendance" versus "income". As it is, you have kind of a stretched-out causation chain (more church attendance, less divorce, more likely to be married, married people make more money, richer people pay more taxes). If you could find the direct graph (people who go to church weekly make more money and pay more taxes), then your point would be clear as a bell.
ReplyDeleteAs a side issue, one of the things that bothers me about divorce statistics is that it often isn't clear whether they mean "number of people who divorced at some time in their lives" versus "number of marriages that end in divorce". If we have a population where only one person in 10 ever gets divorced, but the onces who get divorced tend to marry and divorce, say, 5 times, we could get either 10% divorce rate or a slightly over 50% divorce rate, depending on which way we count them. In this particular graph, I'm wondering whether the non-church-goer numbers are being skewed by a small number of people like Elizabeth Taylor or Zsa-zsa Gabor, in which case the run-of-the-mill non-churchgoer numbers would be more in line with the churchgoers.
Tim-
ReplyDeleteBy the source, the graph shows what percentage of Christian respondents were divorced by how frequently they attended church.
Thus, divorced five times is weighed the same as divorced once.
It is a good question, but it was really easy to answer.
Tim, I understand that this is an oblique approach. That's why it will take me a while to develop it. It seems to make sense, but it will all hinge on the top 10 per cent. In terms of footing the bill, they dominate. Extending it to the top 20 per cent might be interesting, too.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I count for two of those divorces in the weekly category. But that's another story.
ReplyDelete:-)
Foxfier:
ReplyDeleteI agree that's what it *sounds* like he means, but I've run into a lot of cases where people say that a statistic that they got from somebody else means one thing, but it really means something else [1]. The thing is, if the divorce rates he cites are supposed to be "percentage of people who have ever been divorced", then if I compare this to the general divorce rate among people that I actually know, his numbers sound much too high. Of the people I am personally familiar with, the rate is probably more like 1 in 8 or 1 in 10. I'm pretty sure that if I went to, say, the local Catholic church and polled people as they came out the door, I wouldn't get nearly 30% of them saying they had been divorced, although I suppose I could be wrong. Maybe I just hang out with an unusually monogamous crowd or something. Still, it looks fishy to me.
[1] The most aggravating case of statistics abuse was when a number of people told me that were trying to tell me that farms used more energy than was contained in the food they produced, but then they conveniently didn't give me the source of this statistic. I eventually found the source more or less by accident after about 5 years. It turned out that what the original paper that produced the statistic *actually* said was that most plant-based food as it comes off of the farm contains *more* energy than is needed to produce it. If you include meat, and the energy involved in shipping, packaging, and cooking, *then* there is more energy used to produce food than the food contains. Which is a bit different from what people had been trying to tell me. Which is why I am reluctant to take statistics at face value without checking them, especially when they seem to fly in the face of my own experience.
"How to Lie with Statistics" by Darrell Huff is an interesting book, I think everybody should read it. The sad part is that, even though it has been in print for 50 years, the examples he gives are still things that you see people pulling today.
Just because someone *can* lie with statistics doesn't mean you should assume they *did*, especially when they tell you exactly where they got the information: Data from the General Social Survey, 1985-2004, Christian respondents only (including evangelical, mainline Protestants, and Catholics). N = 18,392.The data is there, although I'm not having a lot of luck with the built-in data analysis tools it looks as though the chart he offers is taken directly from the tools provided.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure that if I went to, say, the local Catholic church and polled people as they came out the door, I wouldn't get nearly 30% of them saying they had been divorced, although I suppose I could be wrong.Please notice that the scale doesn't say how many never attend Church but consider themselves Christian. (Also, there are many, MANY Christian churches that don't have a problem with divorce; the Catholic Church, on the other hand, has a big problem.)
Hope this works, it should show how often folks go to church.49.6 of respondents (not counting n/a) go to Church less than once a month. Considering how many "surveyed Catholics" are pro-abortion and haven't been to Church in years, going off of the folks you know from church wouldn't be checking the same sub-set that were surveyed.
Besides, along with lying with statistics is the old saying: the plural of anecdote isn't data; it can let you know if data might be flawed, but you've got to be sure you're comparing oranges to oranges.
An interesting thesis, I checked the web and found this:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/11/religiosity_and.html
From this study wealthier countries tend towards being less religious. Within the US, wealthier states tend towards wealthier people being less religious; but in poorer states the wealthy are more religious.
ANon, that's entirely possible. Again, because of our wildly skewed tax base, it could be that the ultra-rich don't go to church. The data sometimes goes in different directions.
ReplyDeleteI would submit, however, that the behaviors of church-going people are more likely to lead to wealth than the behaviors of secularists. Building wealth, for most people, is all about self denial.
Foxfier, you impress me with your statistical acumen. Well done!
ReplyDeleteI'll tell my mom you like it, KT-- she started us with a "statistical proof" that carrots are deadly poison, and went from there. ;^p
ReplyDelete