In my opinion, this plot represents one of the MOST important facts about American society today. The white population has a huge extra hump of older people that other demographics don't have.
I think that hump could explain why there's so much fear around how America is "changing". The younger generation is more mixed so the normal intergenerational conflict is perhaps being magnified by the fact that the younger generation doesn't "look like" the older generation.
I suspect age contributes to racial differences in politics in two ways. The first is obvious. Young people have different wants and needs from older people. So it matters that whites are proportionally so much older.
Second, the plot suggests that younger white people probably have a support network that's filled with lots of older white people. That probably makes a big difference in how much younger white people need to rely on government.
It would be silly to think that one factor could explain everything completely. But I do think that if you factor in relative age and having older support networks, almost everything about racial politics today makes a little bit more sense.
The huge size of the older white hump also gives some insight into why they have the numbers to hold on to political power, and why they need so many resources to begin with relative to the other much younger demographics.
Bottom line: it's possible that the current racial anxiety has more to do with the white population aging than anything non-white people are doing, and if the median age of whites was under 30 like it is for other groups, maybe there would be a lot fewer race problems right now.
I'm not a demographer so please feel free to chime in. I just thought this plot was fascinating and I haven't seen people discussing this elsewhere.
One more interesting observation. As far as I can tell, the whole narrative about Gen X being smaller than Millennials and Boomers seems to be a completely white population specific thing. Other groups don't look like that.

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More from @kareem_carr

25 Jun
⚠️ Statistician here. It’s unclear how much “signal” there is here. He at least needs to ask his unvaccinated friends if they’ve had any unexplained illness over a designated time period to establish a background rate of illness. Then compare the vaccinated in that period.
It’s still not good enough because his friends are non-random, likely to share his biases, and he probably doesn’t have enough of them to get anything statistically significant. 🤣
Sounds like people are also seeking him out to give him information. That’s a source of selection bias. There are likely even more biases going on like tending to ask more probing questions of the vaccinated than the unvaccinated.
Read 4 tweets
20 Jun
"The cognitive demands of those jobs mean a lot more white people qualify than black people."

This video is full of misuses of statistics! A thread. 🧵👇

1. First of all. CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION. As a statistician, I'm contractually obligated to let you know that these patterns that he's talking about are all correlations. They are not proof of causation.
2. An IQ difference of 12 points is NOT "a lot". The distribution of IQ and the distribution of human height are very similar. They follow what's called a bell curve. So, we can get an intuition for IQs by thinking about heights which we are typically more familiar with.
Read 24 tweets
19 Jun
IQ often gets used to promote racism on the internet but it's also highly mathematical so people don't really understand it.

In this thread, I will explain:

1. How the math of IQ works at a high level (don't worry no formulas!)

2. Why IQ is partly socially construct... 🧵👇
An IQ test is basically a list of questions that a psychometrician (kind of a cross between a psychologist and a statistician) thinks might measure intelligence. If you give such a test to a lot of people, you will get a range of scores.
The first thing you might notice is that the distribution of scores isn't a nice shape. So psychometricians adjust the scores so that a certain number fall within certain percentiles so you get a nice bell curve like this:
Read 16 tweets
18 Jun
As a black statistician, I felt the need to look into this plot going around Twitter. As far as I can tell, it's being used to push the narrative that black people's poor relationship choices are causing bad outcomes for black children.
At first, I thought the analysis looked sloppy based on just the plot but I decided to dig in and realized the methodology was much better than I thought and it actually addressed my major concerns BUT the narratives on Twitter don't seem to reflect what's in the actual report.
1. CAUSATION. The actual analysis WARNS against making CAUSAL claims and admits that a "number of factors not measured...may confound the associations between family structure and child outcomes".
Read 15 tweets
14 Jun
I have mixed feelings about the criticism that the public health community didn't do a good job communicating with the public. On the one hand, it's clear that things could have gone better. On the other hand, the criticism strikes me as extremely unfair.
First of all. Who was the public listening to? They were listening to random people on the internet with no expertise at all. They were listening to science communicators with no connection to government or authority over anything.
They were listening to professors in universities. Physicists and aerosol chemists and virologists. They were even listening to silicon valley venture capitalists.
Read 9 tweets
12 Jun
I think a lot of anti-CRT people would agree that "white" isn't a very useful label. People are Irish or Italian or German heritage or whatever or better yet we are all just individuals that deserve dignity. "Black" and "white" are weird social constructs that somebody made up.
If "black" and "white" and "race" in general are all just constructs that keep us divided then shouldn't we work together to dismantle these arbitrary categories so we can all just live our lives as individuals?
The good news is I think a lot of CRT folks also agree with this. As far as I can tell, many CRT folks also want to get to a point where we can abolish these arbitrary racial constructs so we can live in a freer society.
Read 9 tweets

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