Inequality and Web Search Trends | Hacker News Reader

Inequality and Web Search Trends

nytimes.com

> The rise of inequality over the last four decades has created two very different Americas, and life is a lot harder in one of them.

This would be a fascinating appendix for Charles Murray's book Coming Apart. If you liked this article, you might enjoy his quiz about which of these two Americas you are likely to live in: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/white-educated-and-wealt... (Edit: I scored 46 and the description is completely accurate: "A first-generation upper-middle-class person with middle-class parents")

That test was fascinating (especially the explanations). I got a 39. Thanks for sharing that!

The description you suggest is "completely accurate" applies to scores between 11 and 80, on an entire scoring spectrum of 0-99.

I'm not overly impressed.

I scored 27 but I'm a Brit living in the states and a lot of the blue-collar culture stuff doesn't translate (NASCAR).

I'm perfectly fine not being involved with the more pop culture stuff. I've only watched House of the shows they listed.

Is this a worrying new trend though? I'm pretty sure the world has always had its haves and have-nots.

The "coming apart" of American culture isn't because too few people watch NASCAR or eat at Applebee's, it's a problem because in one America lots of people do it and in the other America people never do it. It's slowly creating two separate cultures where people have trouble relating to each other because they're growing up with two distinct sets of cultural experiences. It's only incidental that the divide in culture is being driven by meritocracy picking the haves and have-nots.

I'm not surprised you found the results unimpressive, since Britain has a far different history with class and mobility than the United States. I was impressed with how the questions ascertained that I'd grown up in a rural area then moved to a wealthy suburb in adolescence. Things like going to parades, eating at Applebee's, or going fishing were strongly present in the first half of my life and completely absent in the second half. I crossed a major divide in American culture without even realizing it.

I'd argue that there has always been this divide, or similar divides through the course of US history. There's a rural/urban divide which has slowly but inevitably moved in the direction of the urban side throughout the last 100 years. There's a rich/poor divide which I already referenced as haves and nots. There's an educated/uneducated divide which closely mirrors the wealth divide. None of this is anything new.

You seem to have some beliefs about US history which I don't share. I don't believe in the myth of upward mobility in the US, while there are certainly examples of this, the story is oversold. I don't believe the society is as meritocratic as it is made out to be. The biggest predictor of a person's success is their parent's wealth.

I'd also argue the fact that you apparently crossed this major divide in American culture without even realizing it suggests that maybe you didn't cross a major divide of anything at all.

This is without even going into the immigrant/religious/racial divides that exist. We aren't going to have a homogenous group of 300m people - this isn't a bad thing, and it isn't a new thing.

These results are pretty much exactly what you would expect -- people who are struggling aren't likely to be googling for luxury items -- and I would venture to guess that they would be fairly similar even if The Upshot used only income, or only education level, rather than a blend of six metrics, to determine "hard" and "easy" counties to live in.

What I find especially intriguing are some of the explanations Leonhardt posits, which presume a causal link and attempt to suggest what that cause is. That's part of the reason why I enjoy running Correlated.org -- it's fun to try to guess what the connection might be between two seemingly unrelated things.

But let's remember: Not all correlations entail a causal link. (I prefer that way of putting it over "Correlation does not imply causation," because correlation does imply causation ... it's just that it often wrongly implies it.)

i hate county level data like this, though they did address that they basically had no choice.

I'm not sure you can consider obesity as part of 'a hard place to live'. thats an action an individual chooses regardless of geography. You could argue that poor people have no choice, they are obese because they are poor for example, but that would be like double counting income if they are highly correlated.

income is also tricky since taxes and costs of living has a huge effect. this could possibly explain why the places to live shown are largely opposite to most 'happiness' indicators that I have seen. at least looking at its map: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/upshot/where-are-the-harde...

  There is evidence of the nation’s cultural divide in the results,
  with “Zoolander” (a 2001 movie starring Ben Stiller) and Vengaboys
  (a Dutch dance-pop band) popular in the easiest places and Kenneth
  Nixon, of the rock band Framing Hanley, popular in the hardest
  places."

Vengaboys, huh?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Zbi0XmGtMw

Are the easiest places to live in the TV advertising markets of Six Flags, by any chance?

Wilcox, Alabama...8% disability?

Is that entire county committing disability fraud? What's going on there?

http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/

In Hale County, Alabama, nearly 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability.[2] On the day government checks come in every month, banks stay open late, Main Street fills up with cars, and anybody looking to unload an old TV or armchair has a yard sale.

Sonny Ryan, a retired judge in town, didn't hear disability cases in his courtroom. But the subject came up often. He described one exchange he had with a man who was on disability but looked healthy.

"Just out of curiosity, what is your disability?" the judge asked from the bench.

"I have high blood pressure," the man said.

"So do I," the judge said. "What else?"

"I have diabetes."

"So do I."

Man, I need to find that guy's doctor and lawyer. I could start collecting disability checks for my high blood pressure.

I'm 24, can run three miles and work 50 hours/week.

High blood pressure is not a disability.

High blood pressure can be disability depending on (1) the specifics of the condition ("high blood pressure" is a broad range, not a single binary condition that manifests identically in all people suffering from it), and (2) the persons usual line of work -- disability determinations are generally [1] made based on your ability to do the work you did before the disabling condition manifested.

> High blood pressure is not a disability.

Your high blood pressure, as it currently is, is clearly not a disability for you in the work that you do. That does not mean that high blood pressure is not a disability.

[1] The exception is that each state agency also has a "List of Impairments", a catalog of specific conditions and combinations of conditions that are considered unconditionally disabling; if you have a condition on that list, or one judged as severe as one on that list, you are considered disabled without analysis of the specifics of your previous work.

That was a great story -- I thought of it for this question, too. Social Security Disability has become a long-term welfare program for the unemployable. They cite judges and administrators who will basically approve SSD if you can demonstrate that no one would employ you, just so people with little chance of retooling their skills can make it to 62 and start drawing from regular Social Security. (Example: A high school dropout who's performed low-skilled labor in a mill/factory for 30 years but then the plant closes, leaving him/her with few skills and 10-15 years until retirement.)

This is another good argument for Basic Income: SSD keeps people from earning some money through whatever skills they have (cleaning houses, selling food, making clothes, day labor, etc.) because of the strict income restrictions on how much you can earn while on SSD. If everyone knows it's a program for the unemployable, why keep up this charade that it's actually for the disabled? Just write them a $1000 check every month and allow them to earn extra income however they choose.

Disability determinations are based on your usual work before the injury/condition on which disability determinations are based, not just the condition you have -- so the particular industries dominant in a region may have a very large impact on disability, not just because of the particular health risks associated with the industry but because of the kind of health conditions that will make someone disabled for the kind of work being done. (Also, changes in economic conditions can cause those able to work to move out to where the work has moved to -- and not be replaced, as the absence of work fails to draw new people in -- resulting in a disproportionate share of unable-to-work left behind.)

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/09/how_to_be_mean_to_you...

It's squishy whether it's fraud or not. The unemployability is real, the medical conditions are a matter of semantics, and it's in nobody's interest to dig at it too deeply.

This troubles me.

nb-4l

If this is the #3 search term, the data must be thin. Anyone familiar with this dataset want to chime in? I have a similar camera that is used pretty often and I couldnot even recognize the name without a google search. Did I just get lucky by buying 2x nb-6l ? maybe the nb-4l is really a pain point? Maybe some users of the elph series have real issues with this thing?

> If this is the #3 search term, the data must be thin.

I can see why one might think that, but it's actually not necessarily the case.

I'm not sure how they're defining 'highest correlation to our index' (there are a few different ways to interpret that statement), but for example, with a latent Dirichlet allocation[0][1], a word or phrase that is rare but is almost exclusively limited to a given subgroup might still end up being one of the top associations for that group.

Another example using a similar technique: For "The Real Stuff White People Like"[2] we analyzed millions of fairly lengthy profiles, and still the results yield some phrases that you might think are relatively uncommon (though not rare), but are very highly associated with certain groups. We did the same thing for sexual orientation[3], and you can see similar effects there.

One other thing to keep in mind is that search terms are usually a few words, which is much shorter than the typical OkCupid profile.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_dirichlet_allocation

[1] An LDA is only one possible way of analyzing data of this sort, but it's a reasonably common one so it's easy to find other examples for comparison

[2] http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-real-stuff-white-peopl...

[3] http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/gay-sex-vs-straight-sex/

"Dog Benadryl"

What if the only thing poor, unhealthy, superstitious regions really need is more hobbyist cameras?

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