Can you imagine going through life where all the television shows that you like get cancelled? All of the items that you like in the grocery store get discontinued. All of the movies you like get low scores on rotten tomatoes. It would be as if your whole life was a constant swim against the tide until you eventually died of some disease that no one ever gets.
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As has been said many times before: Cory’s a writer, not an editor 
that might apply to discounted products and cheap housing but would it apply to things that don’t depend on income like tv show preferences and political candidates? (sorry i should probably actually read the article. ha)
I kind of wanted to say something along those lines, as it kind of sounded like some of the rust belt working-class towns I grew up in and people I knew.
Start with a generation or two where the local schools aren’t exactly great, and many kids neither try nor are pushed to really learn anything, because they can just get a job down at the factory when they’re older! (narrator: This would not, in fact, be the case.)
Remove any sex ed. Sprinkle in teenage drinking, and add in some teenage pregancies and/or getting married at a young age largely for the sake of cultural expectations. Factor in the economic stressors of industrial decline to produce a higher-than-average divorce rate.
Television becomes their primary leisure activity because it’s cheap, easy and convenient, feeding hours and hours of advertising straight to the retinas. Reading is either too difficult or disdained as being ‘too intellectual’.
Altogether, you get a population of single parent households, maybe with underdeveloped critical thinking skills and/or impulsive, emotional decision making and low socioeconomic mobility. The housing they can afford isn’t particularly valuable and doesn’t really gain much worth when the market’s up, and gets hammered when the market drops. They don’t really stop and question advertising, and dependably go buy the newest shiny gimmick. Sure, they coupon, but they aren’t saving money getting a deal on something they didn’t need in the first place, or can’t eat or use all of it before it expires.
The people the study describes exist, but I think they mis-attribute certain behaviors for economic or cultural pressures.
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Conveniently, while you were mansplaining the use of zip codes in statistics data to me, you made my point. They are arbitrary, and if the study is going to state a hypothesis that it is a relevant controlling variable, they need to make the case up front why that is valid. They have to propose and describe a mechanism for the effect they believe exists around zip codes before looking at the data, or it ain’t science. And if it ain’t science, they don’t get to carry around the trappings and credibility of science. That frustration is what I was expressing. When marketers, economists, and others try to act like finding patterns in big data sets is science.
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Poor is caused by the lack of education…or lack of education is caused by being poor…probably feeds into a cycle…so, they you may watch TV shows that have certain characteristics and vote for certain candidates…etc.
And his name was… Mick Jagger!!!
Excuse me?
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That’s simply not true. They had to select some geographic unit to compare; the provenance or origin of the unit type doesn’t matter.
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And that they’d cluster together by accident. Assuming such people exist, their defining trait is that they made decisions, including which neighbourhood to live in, in the same way.
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I was like this with perfume, anything I liked was limited edition or less popular with women.
I simply stopped caring and moved on to whatever people gift me at Xmas.
If I had time I would probably take the problem in my own hands and make my own perfume, it’s not that hard to source the ingredients and reverse engineer the right notes.
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But, the betamax was the superior technology. The master tape, so to speak.
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For me, it seems it is the complete opposite, instead of behaving like the average citizen/consumer, they are just playing the game with different rules/weights and end up as looking like losers.
Maybe it is intentional and they are non-conformist, but it might also be that they are trying to behave like an average person but fail due an inability to catch up fast enough.
It might even be that those two groups are seem as just one, because the consequence of their behavior looks the same.
Do you have a source for that or are you just speculating?
I’m really curious to know if they are measuring poor people who got scammed or if it is more generic.
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Notwithstanding the obvious correctness of your main point, that data mining is not proof of anything, I really don’t understand the objection to using zip codes. Of course they’re arbitrary. Of course there might be some kind of confound buried in there, because they’re arbitrary and not random. Do you have a specific concern about the use, though?
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It’s pretty interesting to see everyone’s preconceptions on display here. “Oh look it’s a study that reaffirms my beliefs! Let’s all accept its truth without question and draw conclusions from it that the study authors wouldn’t agree were supported”.
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([cough]Currently trading at 8x when GM sold their share…)
Having been raised in a household that fits the description in many ways, I can tell you that actually being poor isn’t the necessary condition. Having been poor, or having carries a social stigma would fit the bill. Current financial and social situation aside, being on “the loosing side” is a way of living which you don’t choose, but which you at some point adopt.
Not voluntarily. But you live it, and it is terribly hard to get out of this vicious circle.
I would wager that even a correlation between dying of generally treatable cancer and all the other mentioned variables - real estate, financial investment, failing products and failing political candidates or even parties (European here, don’t forget) - would emerge with a statistical significance I can only dream of in my own (ecological) datasets.
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I think it is a bit premature to flip tables when you haven’t looked at the methods in the linked study. There’s a Sci-Hub mirror right there and they detail their methods, which answers several of your questions.
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I’ll see your “mansplaining” and raise you some gatekeeping.
Read the paper. You’ll note that providing a causal mechanism is a completely different bucket of worms than showing correlations. Some papers show interesting correlations from multi-variate analyses, some papers show causal mechanisms, some papers do explicit controlled experiments. There is not one exclusive type of paper that qualifies as Real Science.
Zip codes are arbitrary, sure, but unless you have a specific suggestion for a better way to geographically cluster groups of people then I don’t understand why you want to be so frustrated by this. We have databases already-built that use zip codes and we can do meaningful work to generate preliminary data with them. I, for one, support reseachers making use of data already at-hand instead of waiting to get a grant to finally build The Perfect Database in 5 years.
There’s another important point here that bears highlighting, re-quoting you with added emphasis:
They have to propose and describe a mechanism for the effect they believe exists around zip codes before looking at the data, or it ain’t science.
While it is fair to have a testable and falsifiable mechanistic hypothesis before starting the project or analyzing the data, it’s a bad idea to try to fit the data, its analysis, or its interpretation in support or contravention of that mechanistic hypothesis before analyzing, reviewing, and replicating the results. Then you can look at whether or not the mechanistic hypothesis was supported or rejected, but not before.
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