Category Archives: data

The Left Thinks Muslims in the U.S. Have it Bad. Really, Really Bad.

  A new Rasmussen poll highlights the divergence between left and right on perceptions of who’s persecuted. And just, wow. From the data, one gets the impression that it’s the allegedly cold-hearted right more alarmed about the plight of religious … Continue reading

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Atheists: Not So Angry After All

  You mad, bro? According to a new study, it’s a myth that atheists are an especially angry bunch. (Grumpy? Maybe.) Atheists are often portrayed in the media and elsewhere as angry individuals. Although atheists disagree with the pillar of … Continue reading

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Conservatives respect atheists less

This clip by S. E. Cupp is making the rounds. I often find Cupp to be glib, so it’s no surprise that I disagree with many of the details of what she is saying. In particular it struck me as … Continue reading

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Are the Republicans the socially conservative party?

Charles Murray ruminates on why Asian Americans are not Republicans. Many of his observations are broadly consonant with my supposition that Asian American disidentification with the Republican party has to do with cultural markers (i.e., Asian Americans have become less … Continue reading

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Japan has always been secular

In an otherwise fascinating column on Japan’s peculiar demographics, Ross Douthat presents one misleading fact: Japan is facing such swift demographic collapse, Eberstadt’s essay suggests, because its culture combines liberalism and traditionalism in particularly disastrous ways. On the one hand, … Continue reading

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On the Economics of the Pill

Interesting report here in the New York Times: The recent controversy over contraception and health insurance has focused on who should pay for the pill. But there is a wealth of economic evidence about the value of the pill – … Continue reading

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The double standard

A few years ago Markos Moulitas wrote a book, American Taliban: How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right. This is in a long tradition of demonization of American Christian conservatives by the Left. All’s fair … Continue reading

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Birth Control and the Prevention of Abortion

Wherever you stand on the abortion debate, the idea that access to contraception does not reduce the number of abortions ought to seem, to say the least, counter-intuitive, yet that’s what Kirsten Powers ends up arguing in this Daily Beast … Continue reading

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Europe, the big five

The New York Times Magazine has a Europe-themed edition. I thought it would be interesting to look at the five big Western European nations in Google Data Explorer.

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Don’t be shocked by polls

You all know about the issues of weighting samples to achieve representativeness. In polling this is an art. But even if you get to representativeness, depending on the average sample sizes the polls themselves will exhibit a distribution of outcomes about … Continue reading

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