Saturday, May 8, 2010
Smart People Drink More Alcohol - Martini Straight-Up Please.
Some data fiend decided to see how data on drinking habits correlated with all sorts of other fun factors like religion, education and politics. Educated godless liberals with large vocabularies, it seems, enjoy a beverage more than most.
Razib Khan of Discover Magazine, used data from the General Social Survey (a big sampling of Americans on various social questions that's been conducted since 1972) to make all sorts of interesting graphs looking at the percentage of people who drink by year, race, sex, region, a belief in god, religion, political views, education level and how they scored on a vocabulary test.
The results are simultaneously surprising and just... not. Conservative, religious types tend to drink less. Uneducated people tend to drink less. People in the South tend to drink less. The strangest result came, however, when vocabulary test results were plugged in. Wordier people definitively drink more.
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Blog calls to mind the memoir by journalist Pete Hammil "My Drinking Life" -
ReplyDeleteHamill, know for his "brutal frankness and the candid nature of his writing" quit drinking at 37 - but continued to write. Though as a journalist at the NY Post, I guess he didn't need to be all that "wordy".