Divorce and Remarriage

Pew, a company that does many surveys, came out with this interactive map of proportions of married, divorced, and 3+x remarried men and women by state. Here is what is remarkable about the rates:

Conservative parts of the country have higher proportions of divorced and multiply remarried residents. The "Red" states that often refer to themselves as the "Real America" and bastions of "family values", homes of the "moral majority", are quite divorce-happy compared to the more liberal states.

Top 5 states for 3+ marriages:
Arkansas (10% men, 10% women)
Oklahoma (9% men, 10% women)
Tennessee (9% men, 8% women)
Alabama (8% men, 8% women)
Mississippi (8% men, 8% women)

Bottom 5 states for 3+ marriages:
Massachusetts (2% men, 2% women)
New Jersey (2% men, 2% women)
New York (2% men, 2% women)
Connecticut (3% men, 2% women)
Minnesota (3% men, 3% women)

Top 5 states for currently divorced residents:
Nevada (13% men, 16% women)
Maine (12% men, 15% women)
Montana (12% men, 13% women)
Wyoming (12% men, 13% women)
Oklahoma (12% men, 14% women)

Bottom 5 states for currently divorced residents:
New Jersey (7% men, 10% women)
New York (7% men, 10% women)
Massachusetts (8% men, 10% women)
California (8% men, 11% women)
Virginia (8% men, 11% women)

The consistently higher proportions of currently divorced women compared to men is probably due in large part to child custody inhibiting remarriage. Women are overwhelmingly granted custody in divorce courts. Divorcees with children in the home have more trouble finding new spouses, and may also be less inclined to try to find a new spouse as the process can cause problems for the children.

As I have written about more extensively in another blog, there is a clear relationship between conservativism and bad decision making that I understand to have a neurological foundation. People who grow up with fear in a strict and belief-based environment develop brains that desire very simple and concrete information (e.g.:America is good. Homosexuality is bad. Muslims are bad.). They are overwhelmed by ambiguity and complexity, and depend on whatever very simple dogma they've been indoctrinated with, or their immediate emotional reactions to make decisions.

This emotional impulsivity, combined with a characteristic avoidance of contemplating the many possible ramifications of actions because that would be too overwhelming and complicated, leads to the following phenomena that we see happening at much higher rates in conservative states than in liberal states (check out GapMinder):

Teen pregnancy
Infant mortality
Violence
Pollution
Divorce (related to young marriage, also in the Pew map)
Poor education
Higher drug use
Earlier death
Obesity

I am sure the list can go on and on. These things all are rooted in impulsive behavior that focuses on emotions and immediate gratification without consideration for consequences and the long term. Conservatives are very hostile towards liberal ideas and values, but the outcomes are clear. The outcomes show us what attitudes and behaviors are best for our country. We need to stop the lies and hypocrisy, and focus on implementing best practices to bring about the good and sustainable outcomes we want for our descendants.

Call for Contributions

Over the course of my life, I have encountered many news articles and clips that misrepresent or confuse information, and advertisements that mislead and manipulate. I started this blog to explain how information has been misused, and provide explanations of the real meanings of the information. However, I have also improved my life by avoiding the more heinous offenders (e.g.: Fox News, commercials, conservatives, etc...), so I rarely come across examples to write about. I have no television, and I limit my internet consumption. I get most of my news from Jon Stewart, since it is easier to handle with some humor. Though I enjoy picking apart incorrect information use and providing accurate interpretations, I will not spend much time looking around for the junk.

If you find an article or video clip that uses statistics to make some claims, and you'd like me to examine it, feel free to send it to me. You can also write your own post and I'll put it up here, totally credited to you.

Exercise Science

There's been a lot of hubbub lately about barefoot running, since some guy wrote a book and has been on various talk shows. I love to run, but constantly worry about injuries and whatnot. I also love to learn the truth of matters. I started searching for real information about barefoot running. There's a lot of junk out there from believers and people trying to sell books or fancy "barefoot shoes". I finally came across a blog by two doctors of exercise science. Ross and Jonathan at Sportsscientists.com take care to hunt down and critique studies on many facets of exercise, and address exactly the questions and criticisms I would have reading the studies. They are readable, thorough, and open to reader questions and comments. They qualify their comments, and don't claim certainty when there's no good support. If you want to know the truth about how much to drink while you exercise, how to run, or a wide variety of other exercise topics, dig through their archives. We need more folks like them. Don't just listen to Gatorade or Nike.

Willingham's Execution - The Injustice System

Big fuss right now about Texas wrongfully executing another man. The New Yorker article is quite long, and reminiscent of Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line. To summarize: a guy's house burns down with his three kids in it. He has a criminal record and likes rock music, so some biased cops pressure witnesses to say certain things, and the cops evaluate the scene with a bunch of invalid beliefs. The guy, Willingham, is convicted of murdering his kids, and is executed 12 years later. Right before he was executed, a scientist who actually knows what he's doing sends a report to the authorities showing that Willingham's testimony matches the evidence and the original arson investigators were as wrong as they could possibly be. The authorities promptly ignored the report completely.

What does this case mean?
Well, not a whole lot by itself. Remember that this sort of thing is very rare, and constructing a perfect system is practically impossible. Your chances of getting wrongfully jailed are low, and executed even lower. If you're going to worry about something, worry about your diet and driving habits. However, it is yet another example of many of the pervasive problems in our justice system, which we have a moral and ethical imperative to improve. The original article is very thorough in pointing them out. What is most disturbing is that we as a society have known about these problems for decades, but the justice system largely refuses to fix itself.

1) Eyewitness testimony is fallible and easy to manipulate. Even how a question is worded affects witnesses' responses. Our memories are not recordings, but are loose connections between salient concepts. Memories require attention to be stored, aided by rehersal and thinking about the meanings of the information, but warped by biases. They are altered over time through a cycle of recall and restoring, affected each time by attention, biases, and thoughts again. Experiments on witness recall are sadlarious (Alan Alda watched a good one on Scientific American Frontier once) as people so frequently report remembering things that never happened, forget what did, and change many details.

2) Expert testimony is also subject to manipulation and bias. Any lawyer can cherry-pick an "expert" to do what he wants. The two psychology experts in this case were an MFT way out of his specialty and an obviously corrupt psychologist who lost his license because of his inappropriate testimonies. Real psychological evaluation is a long and deep process involving interviews and standardized instruments. Anyone who claims to be able to determine sociopathy by looking at the posters in a guy's house is a charlatan and fraud. But cops and juries don't know that. The average person doesn't know much at all about specialized professions, and take an "expert's" word. I think that expert testimony is definitely vital when it is done correctly, and there needs to be a process by which it can be included in trials with safeguards. Any expert should be able to back up what he says with citations subject to the scrutiny of peers.

3) Cops are ignorant and overconfident. It is unfortunate that our society's body of knowledge regarding how memories are manipulated, how witnesses should be questioned, how fires should be investigated, etc... is completely passed over by police who believe that they know what they're doing, believe they are always right, and believe that they don't need to study more about what they do. Judges and cops think they are good at detecting lies, but they aren't. When these people are allowed to act on their self-serving beliefs instead of empirically validated information, the justice system fails.

What would help?
We need a system, a culture, that applies the information and empirical methods that we have. We know that this would lead to the most accurate outcomes. We need better training of police, judges, and juries to monitor and cast off their overconfidence and biases. We need more accountability and tracking, so that it's more obvious that something is wrong if a prosecutor, judge, expert, or region has abnormal rates of convictions. We need to stop telling jurors to make "gut" decisions. I'd prefer having only well-educated citizens as jurors who are more likely to understand and evaluate information, and less likely to make decisions out of an emotional drive for revenge, sympathy, or just which lawyer was most attractive.

The Cost of Raising a Kid

Nancy Gibbs has a pretty bad essay in the back of the August 24 2009 issue of Time. She starts with the claim that kids cost over $220,000 to raise, which she bases off of a commercial website's (selling baby products) reference to an annual USDA report that she didn't understand. She seems to confuse in a couple places what parents decided to spend with what kids have to cost. Perhaps a better estimator of a child's cost is what the lower-income group spent instead of the middle-income group, since they are likely to spend less on non-necessities. She also uses the 2008 dollars total without explaination. Assuming an average inflation rate of 3.05%, the cost will be about $60,000 more, which is useful information to people who do not automatically think about inflation.

What the report really shows is that rich people spend more money on their kids than poor people, but smaller percentages of their pre-tax incomes. Also, it costs more to get a bigger home when you live in an area in which homes are expensive. Parents with more money buy more unnecessary stuff for their kids. Big kids eat more than little kids, and are more able to get themselves to where they need to go.

There are a lot of problems with the assumptions made, but the researchers did what they could with what they had. It's really hard to collect so much information from thousands of families over time. The report does not take into account money spent by non-custodial parents, which applies to a large portion of families these days. The housing assumptions are shakey, but probably better than alternatives. These numbers are definitely not hard and fast, and there is variance.

Nancy also says that parents with more kids "get a bulk discount". Sure, there are economies of scale for things like food and transportation, but this does not tell the whole story, based on the USDA's methods. What we are also seeing is that parents like spending some discretionary amount of money on their kids beyond necessities, and it gets split up among the children they have. A single child gets all the unnecessary money, but siblings have to share. When that second kids comes along, maybe you'll switch to store-brand products instead of name-brand, Target instead of the Gap. We don't know what people are buying, just what they're spending.

Nancy also says that children are recession-resistant, even though the April 13th issue of Time reported that unit sales of "Baby needs" were down 10.7% compared to the same 8-week period in 2008. Contraception unit sales are only up 1.5%, so I'd be surprised if the drop in baby products was largely due to a drop in the birth rate.

Probably what is most annoying to me is upper-class Gibbs's materialism. From her Ivy League, award-winning tower, she preaches for the unnecessary consumption typical of the high-income bracket, widening that divide between the mandatory cost of having children (useful information) and what people with money decide to spend (not as useful). Her Barbie-like comments that "SpongeBob is so last season", $60 per month is not enough for clothes, "the bureaucrats have not been to a mall lately", and the report should include the cost of sedatives are grating. The bureaucrats in this case are a couple of people with Ph.D.s who wrote a very transparent research report.

Nancy spends half the essay trying to convey the benefits of having children in one's life, even though studies show that having kids is stressful, and reduces quality of life on average. People should really think and plan more before having kids, and maybe the information in the USDA report will be helpful. Children can be a great addition to one's life, if there is relational, emotional, and financial stability, and a foundation of realistic expectations.

GoldLine.com

I just caught a commercial for GoldLine.com. I am not knowledgeable enough to comment on the wisdom of investing in gold in general, but I do know shady marketing techniques when I see them. GoldLine.com is using just a lot of slimy tricks to get people's money. Here's a rough rundown of what I remember:

1) Testimonials
The commercial had a former Fed commissioner, I think. The website has more testimonials, including Glenn Beck, who I plan to write about in the future for his consistently manipulative behavior. Never pay heed to testimonials. Ever. Even when they're not paid (and I bet these are paid), they're not a representative sample. They are useless for making good decisions. It's a trick.

2) Fear-mongering
The commercial started out with the heavy implication that the US economy is in a death spiral that will destroy old people's savings, leaving them penniless. This gets the fear up, so the old folks watching CNN in the middle of the day will pay attention to the rest of the commercial, eager to learn how to protect themselves.

3) Impressive-sounding irrelevant information
3A) "Gold is worth three times as much now than it did in 2000!" When it comes to investments, past performance does not predict future performance. If that were true, everyone would be rich because we would all invest in things that had increased in value in the past. This just does not happen. In fact, there are risks that investments are overvalued (tech stock 10 years ago, houses 18 months ago), which leads to a "correction", in which their value drops. GoldLine.com may be trying to dump its gold right before a correction. It is interesting that they compared the current value of gold to that of 2000, when the economy had tanked because of the DotCom bubble.

3B) "GoldLine.com has over a half-billion dollars in sales!" This is a shady tactic used by some online auction and investment sites in which they report a number based on the sales of things through the site, without the site ever owning the stuff, making the site look like it has a lot of capital when it really has nothing and just collects trading fees. I don't know to what extent that applies to GoldLine.com, but I've seen it before.

3C) "Gold has never had a zero value!" Neither has pretty much anything else, except some stocks and defaulted bonds. So, that is marginally relevant when you're investing. Of course, at $900/oz, you're probably not so worried about a zero value as you are a value of anything less than $900/oz.

Poorly Presented Stats in Men's Health

A client no-showed, so I grabbed the May 2009 issue of Men's Health from the waiting room to occupy myself. I generally enjoy Men's Health. It does have good nutrition and exercise tips sometimes. It also suffers from poorly presented statistics syndrome, especially in its "Facts of Life" segments.

"Facts of Life - 1: Percentage by which your stroke risk rises for each fast-food joint in your neighborhood."

What this could imply as written:
You are more likely to have a stroke the more fast-food joints are in your neighborhood, no matter what.

What this really means:
The average rate of strokes among residents of a neighborhood is 1% higher per additional fast-food joint in that neighborhood compared to other neighborhoods.

What this really implies:
People tend to eat fast-food more if it is more available to them, and fast-food increases risk of strokes, probably via increasing blood pressure and clots.

How to use this information:
Pay attention to your eating behavior. Choose to not eat fast-food, even if it is very convenient. In fact, fast-food is more likely to cause you other health problems than strokes. So, if you're not scared by the relative stroke risk (notice that no base rates are given), think about obesity, heart disease, and diabetes when you drive past a McDonald's.


"Facts of Life - 96: Percentage spike in the number of doctor visits for diabetes since 1996."

What this could imply as written:
Twice as many people have diabetes now? Diabetes exists at the same prevalence, but is being diagnosed better due to improvements in processes or technology? People with diabetes go to the doctor twice as often now? Probably some combination of those, but we can't determine it.

What this really means:
Just that there are about twice as many doctor visits for diabetes (I am assuming they combine both types) now as there were in 1996.

What this really implies:
Nothing useful at all. Someone pulled this stat out of its context, and we are not able to logically derive anything from it with confidence.

How to use this information:
Let it inspire you to find more information. We do already know that type II diabetes rates are skyrocketing due to obesity. We also know that many health care providers, insurance providers, and the city of New York have been trying ways of getting diabetics to be more compliant with managing the disease. There has been a lot of new encouragement over the last few years to get diabetics in for regular checkups, since it reduces the frequency of vastly more expensive emergency care and amputations, etc... If you have or think you have diabetes, see your doctor regularly and comply with your treatment regimen. It is a manageable illness.


"Facts of Life - 80: Percentage increase in a man's heart disease risk if he has erectile dysfunction."

What this could imply as written:
Erectile dysfunction increases a man's risk of heart disease by 80%. That is the worst way to read it, anyway.

What this really means:
Men who have erectile dysfunction are 80% more likely to have heart disease than men who do not have erectile dysfunction.

What this really implies:
Again, it's hard to tell. The stat has been removed from its context. There is possibly some phenomenon that causes erectile dysfunction that also increases heart disease risk. Based on my understanding of the disorders, stress and anxiety are likely culprits.

How to use this information:
If you have ED, talk with your doctor about it and your other heart disease risks at your regular check-up. Use the ED more as a warning sign that something else is wrong. You should also just generally be aware of your stress levels, and take care of yourself emotionally. Practice mindfulness and get some exercise. Connect and ally with your partner; iron out any problems in your relationship.