
Inequality and Web Search Trends - programmernews
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/19/upshot/inequality-and-web-search-trends.html?_r=0
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eastbayjake
> 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...](http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/white-educated-and-wealthy-
congratulations-you-live-in-a-bubble/) (Edit: I scored 46 and the description
is completely accurate: "A first-generation upper-middle-class person with
middle-class parents")

~~~
antoko
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.

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eastbayjake
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.

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antoko
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.

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jawns
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.)

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autokad
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...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/upshot/where-are-the-hardest-
places-to-live-in-the-us.html?abt=0002&abg=1)

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bcoates

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

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

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josephschmoe
Wilcox, Alabama...8% disability?

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

~~~
bluedino
[http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/](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." _

~~~
josephschmoe
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.

~~~
dragonwriter
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.

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001sky
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?

~~~
chimeracoder
> 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](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...](http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-real-stuff-white-people-like/)

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

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oo7jeep
"Dog Benadryl"

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

