Data analysis: more money == less sex, for the young | Hacker News Reader

Data analysis: more money == less sex, for the young

tableausoftware.com

33 pointsnod21 comments

This has a simple explanation that the article doesn't account for, namely that the busier you are with work at a young age (and hence better income), the less time you have for sexual activity within or without an associated relationship.

Well, the author does mention "Or maybe you're just left with less time to go to work." in the 4th paragraph.

The thing of interest to me, though, was the gender-based age difference in the inversion point of the money/sex correlation. I would have expected the opposite, frankly, given society's "breadwinner" v. "trophy wife" archetypes.

Since the analysis is based on comfort with financial position, not absolute financial position, I would suspect this reflects the fact that women feel the need for financial security before being able to feel relaxed at a younger age than men. In other words, more or less keeping with societal norms.

This explanation rings very true in the lives of the post-college people I know. Indeed I think this is the strongest effect in the system: the spreads between the two financial groups are about 10-20% at all points EXCEPT FOR the spread for males in the 20-30 age group where the spread looks more like 50%.

It doesn't surprise me that females aged 20-30 don't show this spread.

I'd expect to see a similar dynamic in sex versus grades for college age males. It's the stereotypical example of partying versus studying on a Thursday or Friday night, with $$$ substituted for grades!

That could be the most I've ever seen someone confuse correlation and causation in one article. He doesn't even understand the difference between the amount of money you have, and the amount of satisfaction you have with your financial situation. I know poor people who rarely think of money and rich people who worry about it all the time.

I have to stop clicking these links, they're always among the dumbest here.

I don't think people take advantage of the flag option as much as they should. In my opinion it's something to be used liberally. Then garbage like this (as well formatted as it is) wouldn't get through.

All valid criticisms. You're right, if it were an academic article I'd never get away with it, but I decided to take a little more leeway with my blog post. I hoped my readers would be astute enough to take my implication of an obviously false causality as tongue in cheek and just appreciate the very cool correlations. You obviously feel differently - I'll try to be more responsible in my future posts.

On the topic of financial satisfaction != amount of money, that's very true, and opens the door to all kinds of alternative theories about what causes the correlations. Unfortunately, the salary data included with the GSS isn't very good, so if you want to argue that maybe financially dissatisfied young people are having more sex because of a different confounding variable (they tend to be risk-taking maximizers or something like that), there's not much I can say to argue with you.

To what confidence interval? The article is interesting, but light on the statistics. Since everything is nicely binned up into "satisfied with money" and "not satisfied," you could easily do a hypothesis test to reject that the two categories have the same mean sex rate.

Of course, an obvious extension of this research is to take financial and age distributions into account with one's statistical voyeurism (http://xkcd.com/563/).

Talk about a perfect example of correlation not equaling causation.

It could be a matter of priorities.

Or it could be a matter of risk taking.

Or it could be a matter of location (higher salaries and less intimacy in bigger cities).

A shocking study would be more money == less sex, for older men.

the correlation alone is interesting

As much as the article claims that it's not conflating correlation with causation, this sort of sentence really throws some red flags for me:

"The moral is clear though - If you want to keep the fires burning into your golden years, get your financial affairs together early. (Not too early, though. Right around age 35 would be perfect.)"

Overall, the author seems to be forcing trends that simply aren't there. Looking at this data set, it seems just as likely that all of these trends can be explained with the idea that young people don't have as much money and have more sex than old people. The sex-per-year differential within any age and gender group is less than 5 times per year.

What's with all the sex stories lately? Spring is here, so hormones are flowing?

Not just on this site. io9.com has even opened up a "Spring Mating Season" category. Facebook and FriendFeed are covered in sex-related stories. Nothing wrong with that, really.

I call bullshit. I'm broke and still not getting any.

why do they assume satisfaction with financial situation equals financial situation? there are plenty of people making 6 figures that want more, and there are plenty of people making 40k that are happy with their lives.

All I know is if I were bartending, or working at starbucks, Id be getting laid far more often. As a hacker/entrepreneur, women don't play a significant role in my life.

To paraphrase Eldridge Cleaver, sex and power are one in the same. Poor folk comparatively get down more often because they cannot exert influence. The rich have less sex because they're too busy controlling others.

Joke is on the rich.

Hm...seeing that he wrote that from prison, I wouldn't be so sure. Either way, check out Soul on Ice if you're interested.

Sure will. BTW, any good erlang tutorials/references?

Armstrong's book plus the style guide...I'll post the link to that when I get a chance. It's overlooked.

Edit: Submitted the style and efficiency guides, check "New."

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