People of class drink alcohol

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/people-of-class-drink-alcohol/

by iamelgringo • 16 years ago

89 60 16 years ago

blogs.discovermagazine.com

harpastum• 16 years ago

This article seems to be claiming that people with a larger vocabulary (as tested by a vocab test) are more likely to drink, not 'people of class'.

mtrichardson• 16 years ago

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/people-of-cla...

Summary of that comment: Attitudes towards scripture is the primary predictor, though WORDSUM and education still have significant effects.

TheBranca18• 16 years ago

Interesting that this correlates with my experience as well. I moved from New England down to North Carolina and the difference in alcohol intake (and religion for that matter) is truly startling.

J3L2404• 16 years ago

Classy people use small words.

blogimus• 16 years ago

Yes, and they tend not to utilize them.

rosshudgens• 16 years ago

This article seems to be claiming that intelligence = class.

endtime• 16 years ago

Actually, it's implicitly claiming that large vocabulary is the same as class.

mannicken• 16 years ago

Please note that some of the graphs there start with 50% as original y-axis. It creates an appearance of males drinking twice as much as females, for example.

tumult• 16 years ago

I guess if you're the kind of person who likes looking at bars instead of reading the text that gives them meaning as well.

I think a floor set at number like 0.5 and with a linear scale is pretty reasonable for readability, unless you're a lout and ignore those little letters that tell you what things actually are.

chancho4• 16 years ago

WTF is the point of a graph if you have to read the fine print to avoid misinterpreting it? Why not just use a table? A graph is supposed to convey the relative magnitudes of the data points, not just their ranking. If I just wanted to show who drank more than whom I would just list them in order.

Looking at these graphs you'd think that: Almost nobody in the south drinks; The vast majority of blacks do not drink; Catholics are twice as likely to drink as Protestants.

And so on, when in fact these are all false conclusions. The real conclusion, which you would easily get from properly scaled graphs, is that the majority of people drink across almost all demographic groups.

If you blame me for drawing false conclusions from such graphs I blame the shitty fucking graphs for being misleading. I mean, they don't all even start at 50%. One starts at %40 and one at %0. Seriously, these graphs are garbage.

samdk2• 16 years ago

The issue is not at all readability. The issue is that the way the data is presented changes your interpretation of it.

If you try to puzzle out the meaning from these graphs you can. But even if you do you're going to have to fight with the visuals to do so. Is 70 twice 60? No, but it looks like it is when the x-axis starts at 50.

You shouldn't have to try. You shouldn't have to carefully scrutinize all of the numbers there. That's the entire point of presenting the data visually.

mahmud2• 16 years ago

In Australia, people of all classes drink like they have just crossed the Mojave desert, barefoot, after escaping Alcatraz.

bergkampf• 16 years ago

According to this listing, Australia is not even in the top 20: Luxembourg, Ireland and Hungary seem to be the top three.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_co...

mahmud2• 16 years ago

That answers it. Half of my social circle in .au are Irishmen ;-)

jussij• 16 years ago

> According to this listing, Australia is not even in the top 20:

That was back in 2003.

These days Australians take their drinking far more seriously:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/foo_alc_con-food-alcohol-c...

fnid2• 16 years ago

That list doesn't account for the type of alcohol. A liter of whiskey would do more than a liter of beer. Point: Australia could be drunker if they drink relatively more hard alcohol than those higher on the list, giving mahmud the win.

adulau• 16 years ago

I'm wondering if the article in Wikipedia is really based on "alcohol consumption" and not Alcohol reported to be sold in the country?

There is a clear reason why Luxembourg is on top. The taxes on alcohol is (very) low in Luxembourg and a lot of people from the countries closed to Luxembourg (Belgium, France and Germany) are buying their alcohol there. We don't forget the travellers (Luxembourg is a crossroad in EU) making a stop in Luxembourg...

RK• 16 years ago

I hang out a couple times a year in Europe with a group of primarily Irish, Germans, and Danes and the Danes are the only ones I ever see drinking at breakfast. They're also the only ones who've ever commented on the fact that I wasn't having a beer at lunch...

bonsaitree• 16 years ago

Um, have you visited the U.K. recently?! Based on their ethanol consumption, I think embalmers have a pretty easy go of it.

silentbicycle• 16 years ago

Nah, they just score higher on a vocabulary test because they're articulating extra crisply.

Working in a public library is a good way to dispel illusions about drinking being classy, by the way. We could always tell when some of the veterans got their monthly checks...

Also: Bike thieves do suck, and these graphs would send Tufte on a crying jag.

claymmm• 16 years ago

People always shoot the messenger for pointing this out, so I'll expect about a million downvotes for it, but in case you case didn't know it already GNXP is the cryptoracist camp along with Charles Murray and Steve Sailer. Seriously, check out some of the comments.

Okay, now you can downvote me.

puppetsock• 16 years ago

In other words, we should dismiss a priori the possibility of any racial correlates?

psyklic• 16 years ago

From another article: "In the 1998 to 2004 data, each point higher on the Wordsum test causes a $1,200 decrease in income." [http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/07/higher_intellig.html]

So where does "smartness" fit in? I hate to imply causation, but maybe:

"Wordsat smartness" -> annoying person who uses big words other people don't understand all the time -> social isolation -> less money -> alcohol!

Whew!

disturbances• 16 years ago

> I knew that blacks were more likely to be teetotalers, and expected that women would be as well.

Is there anything scientific about this at all? The whole article sounds fishy.

tmsh2• 16 years ago

Ironically, I learned a new word: 'confound' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding ). And then I realized that the last chart has confounds. Intelligence and vocabulary are correlated, but worth differentiating in this case.

A higher vocabulary is pretty strongly correlated with being well-read. I think we can trust that. And being well-read implies being exposed to different things (though it is by no means the only way to be exposed to different things -- i.e., those who are well-read [subset operator] those who are exposed to a wide variety of things.

But those who are exposed to a wide variety of things are highly correlated with those who wish to take risks to be exposed to new things. And the latter group seems pretty well correlated with those who drink.

Note, intelligence only 'lurks' near vocabulary.

ramchip• 16 years ago

being well-read implies being exposed to different things [...] But those who are exposed to a wide variety of things are highly correlated with those who wish to take risks to be exposed to new things

I don't follow this reasoning. Being well-read implies being exposed to a lot of different books, not a lot of different activities. In my experience, people that read a lot are not people who take risks to be exposed to new things, precisely because they have rather intellectual hobbies and they have less free time due to reading a lot.

tmsh2• 16 years ago

Good point. And I don't know how the vocabulary test was made. I think the monotonicity can be explained by, in general, people who read marginally more are marginally exposed to more things (even after to discounting for the important fact that there is less free time and they're more intellectual, etc.). But it's a very good point.

It seems like there are a lot of different factors.

amk• 16 years ago

I don't know about the word test scores but the rest of the demographic info doesn't look right. For instance, the second chart. The data suggests that statistically, the odds of a girl drinking are higher than an african-american drinking.

By the way, very very misleading graphs. I was totally shocked by going through them. I had to read the comments here to realize what was being shown.

matrix• 16 years ago

I was curious where the data came from, since the article didn't really explain it. Here's the details:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Social_Survey

GFischer• 16 years ago

Apparently, here is the vocabulary test used at the GSS and referenced in the last graph:

http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2010/04/gss-vocabulary-test....

KirinDave• 16 years ago

At first I was like, “Oh shit how can anyone not get a 10, these words are easy. Society is doomed!”

Then I saw how the choices were actually really strange for some of them. For example, “Emanate” is meant to be matched to “come”, but that's a very poor match. Similarly “Space” matching to ”room” is a tricky sense.

pw0ncakes• 16 years ago

I thought this was a linkbait title, but it actually is the title of the original article.

One of many thoughts appropriate to this dubious claim: often, questions like, "Do you smoke pot?" or "Do you drink?" have more to do with identity than with the actual frequency of consumption.

I'd bet that people "of class"-- well-to-do, educated, liberal-- are more likely to say "yes" to the question, "Do you smoke pot?" However, a large number of such people are those who haven't smoked for 20 years-- those who wouldn't be averse to smoking pot if it came their way, but haven't looked for it or been near it in a long time. (I have no problem with people who use marijuana, but the fact is that to get regular access often requires association with "unclassy" characters, because most drug dealers are creepy and the process of asking for access is degrading.)

If you look at who is actually smoking pot, and weight by frequency of consumption, I'd guess that the correlation goes away. Same with alcohol.

People of class drink alcohol

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