Demonic Demography

A fun thing I did

I'd had this sitting around way too long and now I've finally put it up. Enjoy!

I know there's usually some sort of policy implication or something behind demographic studies. The only thing I can think of is that Estonia's marketing department should consider advertising "Estonia: More metal than Iceland!" It'd win me over.

Poll-itics

In the wake of the New Hampshire primary, there has been much talk about the polls beforehand and where and how they had failed by predicting Obama as the winner. One suggestion tossed around is that the "Bradley Effect" (a specific example of the Social Desirability Bias, itself an example of Observer Effect) caused people to say they would be voting for Barack Obama because they thought the interviewer wanted them to be willing to vote for a black candidate. I see some problems with the assumptions behind this conjecture. First and foremost, there is no evidence so far to suggest that the polls were wrong, per se; they were probably right at the time they were taken. there were lots of undecideds and independents in New Hampshire. Who decided it was time to be surprised when things changed the day of?

But additionally, there is a problematic cognitive process that would have to accompany this turn of events. The first assumption here is that people associate the willingness to vote for a specific black candidate with willingness to vote for a black candidate in general. This particular assumption would be logically followed with the connection between voting for Hillary Clinton and voting for a woman in general, so it also must be assumed that those polled dependably believe that it is more desirable to be seen as non-racist than non-sexist.

This thinking also assumes that race is the only reason claiming to support Obama would appear more favorable than claiming to support Clinton. One must not forget that Clinton is widely thought of with some amount to a lot of disdain. So can we safely assume that the reason that responding in Obama's favor would feel expected by respondents has to be race?

It raises lots of questions: how much does Obama's race factor into people's thinking, compared to Clinton's gender? Are Americans more racist than sexist? Does a genuine dislike of Hillary Clinton overwhelm any such problems of race and gender? What voting patterns in general are thought of as the most socially desirable?

Of course, all of that ignores this. Oops. So much for Observer Bias.

Update: Another possible factor. The primacy effect is one of those things that makes you question how we as people don't just die from forgetting to breathe more often.

Gender and Clothes, or Buy Me a Dress!

I had this thought the other day, and then decided that it's probably a thought lots of people have had before, so I figured I'd just open it to a floor discussion.

I've always been struck by the fact that men's fashion is just less exciting than women's fashion (that is, men's fashion is limited to a few things, just variations on the three piece suit in most cases). I came to the conclusion that this is probably because of the former division of labor by gender in society; women did wear whatever they want (within the limits of other social guidelines) because they do not have the constrictions upon dress of a physical labor environment as men did. Now, men and women have similar labor constraints, but the clothing constraints have not changed for women. This is because the labor environment has also changed to that of a post-industrial economy. So, as the restrictions of women's lifestyles have been eased, so should have the restrictions of men's fashion. So it should be socially acceptable for me to wear a dress.

It's rought, but there's the theory

Project for the Day:

Regardless of how well you know them, call every man/boy you interact with today "Charles," and every woman/girl "Linda." Stick to this. Apologize each time you are corrected, state that you don't know what you were thinking, then procede to keep calling them these names.

Demographic Stuff

This just in from everyone's favorite dixiecrat ex-senator and full time old coot, Zell Miller. Apparently, old Zell has taken time out from his duelling career to try his hand at demography, suggesting that the source of military shortages, the present social security woes, and illegal immigration in America is (get ready for it) abortion. Luckily for everyone, I know a thing or two about demography myself, and can correct mister Miller on a couple of his mistakes.

First, the actual cause of the social security crisis is not the lack of chidren born since 1973, it is the number of children produced by Zell's generation. The Baby Boomers are the ones mucking up the system, as they have been since they started popping out in the late '40s. It is certainly not the fault of the Boomers or their children and younger cousins in Gen X for having avoided a repeat by practicing assorted forms of contraception. And it is certainly not the fault of the US Supreme Court legalizing abortion in 1973, for the reason previously stated, and also because the Baby Boom ended about 9 years prior, in 1964.

The military shortage is partially another effect of the above, but one other thing also comes to mind: there aren't enough people in the military because we keep sending them to die. People also probably notice the way we treat our vets in this country. Not a lot of reasons for people to want to join the military here and now.

Lastly, the illegal immigration thing. Now, this one at least shows some interesting critical thinking, and possibly even some amount of research on the part of the senator. It is true that underpopulated countries seem to be more likely to experience great amounts of in-migration. Countries like Spain, Russia, and Sweden are good examples of this. However! Given the number of unemployed people in this country, I'd say this one becomes hard to argue in this case!

So there you have it. Trust twenty-two year old college kids with blogs on matters of demography and public policy, not crazy old men with long government resumes and religious agendas.

Many Blogs, part 1

Ok, ladies and germs, inspiration has come, courtesy of, among other things, Richard and Tara's comments in the last post. I now have four things to blog about, the first of which will be the shortest and in response to Richard's suggestion.

Personal experience is, as a wise professor once told me, a source of systematic error when relied upon to judge patterns or make generalizations. A real life example of this can be taken from my place of work. As regular readers will note, I work at a pawn shop in Bellingham, Washington. This experience has taught me that the primary uses of a tile and brick saw are to take up space and annoy pawnbrokers. Every day, we must wheel it out of the store (it always gets caught on the door frame) and chain it up around a column. Then, at the end of the day, we must unchain it and wheel it back in (it always gets caught on the door frame again).

And yet, just looking at the name of the object tells us that it must have a use beyond pissing us off. It's called a tile saw, or a brick saw, not a pawnbroker irker, or a Mike annoyer. It is clearly designed to cut bricks, tiles, and similar objects. This is why it is heavy and has a large, electric blade mechanism. And yet, in my experience, it has never done any cutting of anything. Thus, my experience is not reliable for judging the uses of a tile and brick saw.

Incidentally, the price tag on it is $905. Please come by, pick it up, and put it to its originally intended use. Please.

Pawn Shopper Profile #1

Name: Unknown
Age: late 20s to early 30s
Ethnicity: Arabic
This fellow can only be described as an Arab hippie, his hair long and unkempt, held back in a white do-rag.
Our friend entered the store around closing time today to get a portable cd player. I showed him the case where we keep them. He wanted one fairly cheap, and with a radio in it. The ones with radios cost more than he wanted to spend, so I grabbed one without that was pretty cheap. At the counter, after paying, he asked if it had a radio. After establishing that he really needed the radio, we got him a couple more. Only the radio worked on one, and the other didn't work at all. So, he ended up taking the working cd player and the working radio, totalling the price that was marked originally on the working sans-radio cd. All along, he kept asking if we had any Madonna cds. He didn't seem interested in looking himself. We only had a Madonna single, and he wasn't interested in that. Before he left, he asked about our firearms.

An odd cat.

Social Construction of Science?

Last night, I was discussing with my room mate, an aspiring and studying geologist, his field of study. The topic turned to how easy it would be, with some amount of education in the field, to convince lay people of just about anything about rocks. He could make up subclassifications of rocks and arbitrarily assign them, and most would be none the wiser as he spoke. "See that?" he might ask Joe or Jane Businessperson, "it's slightly darker than the others, which means that it's not just a grain of sand, but a small piece of goobernatitious rock."

I thought then that the same could indeed be said of any field of physical science, and indeed a few other fields. If someone claims (rightfully) to be a physicist, or a linguist, or a historian (not to be mistaken for an historian), then none would question him or her as they spoke as voices of authority on laws of motion, or the mechanics of glottal stops in Koisan languages, or the events preceding the Prussian Social Reform (easily the most boring sounding social movevment ever named).

I, on the other hand, am a social scientist. I study society. As such, people tend to think that I am no more qualified to talk to them about my field than they are. After all, they are part of society. They can clearly see that everyone who is X does Y more than those filthy Zs. Nevermind that the Z turn out to be fabulous Yers, if one looks at the numbers, whereas the X types tend a lot more towards ∂.

Fun fact: before the work of August Comte (about 1830), sociology was called "social physics." Maybe if it weren't for Comte's egomaniacal renaming frenzy, the field would be taken more seriously by the public (but probably all the less seriously by physicists).