There's a popular saying that if you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart, but if you're not a conservative by 40, you have no brain.
It might be more accurate to imagine that people's formative years have large, persistent impacts on their beliefs. A study by Andy Gelman showed how.
In the Gelman model, high presidential approval during a (White) birth cohort's teen years leads them to favor that president's party for the rest of their lives. Whatever the reason, it's as if they're acting to bring back the 'good old days' of their cognizant childhood. To get an idea of how this looks, look at Eisenhower Republicans:
The Eisenhower Republicans were those who missed most of the FDR years and were socialized in ten straight years of Republicans, of which the Eisenhower years had positive spin. As a result, that cohort became very pro-Republican, but then the very pro-Democrat Kennedy and Johnson years moderated them back to being a bit less pro-Republican.
The 1960s Liberals were born a bit later than the Eisenhower Republicans and they got to experience the pro-Kennedy and Johnson years in their formative years, but the next 25 years of strongly pro-Republican sentiment brought them to near-neutrality.
One of the most well-known political generations is the Reagan Conservatives. This generation got to experience strong pro-Republican sentiment and they ushered in the real Reagan Revolution: a cohort with strong pro-Republican leanings and little moderation due to the balance of sentiment between Clinton and Bush II, and Obama's nearly neutral sentiment.
Other cohorts like the New Deal Democrats and Millennials have their own biases that follow from the same dynamics, and if you plot them all together, you get a clear picture of the sentiment of the White electorate:
Now do note, I said Whites. This model works slightly better for non-Southern than for Southern Whites, and compared to those two groups, it works less than half as well for non-White minorities.
In any case, this model based on formative year impacts can explain roughly 90% of the variance in vote choices in the electorate. If you want to get people's votes, get them early in life, and you might be able to hold them through waves of less popular candidates from your own party.
Details are scarce, but it appears Trump is about to double the price of...
80% of drugs?!
We have no idea if this applies to Bulk, APIs, or just finished drugs. It only says "Pharmaceutical Product", but just in case, I have simple advice: stock up now!
About 78% of those arrested by ICE in Republican states are either criminals, have charges pending, or have committed some other violation.
In Democratic states, the number is about 60%.
Another interesting thing is that, as the arrests have increased, the severity has fallen:
The people ICE is arresting aren't as seriously criminal as they used to be, but there are more of them.
It's interesting to see this common tradeoff crop up in deportations, too!
The common tradeoff I'm referring to is that, as the number of people included in some category increases, the seriousness of the category often tends to fall.
For example, melanoma incidence went up, and became more benign.
For example, in Denmark, the broader the definition of autism (blue = broadest; red = narrowest), the more autism diagnoses have increased.
Crucially, this study also replicated the finding that symptoms are stable, while diagnoses are up.
I've previously noted that this same thing was observed elsewhere.
For example, it was seen in Sweden: stable symptom scores (i.e., the things defining autism), but people kept getting diagnosed at higher rates.
We can see this replicated in another cohort that showed that, as the percentage with autism diagnosed increased, the severity of their autism declined in lock-step:
On the right, you can see states with policies that give schools more money when their students are diagnosed with autism.
When these policies pass, autism diagnoses increase by almost 25% in one year!
Incentives matter for autism diagnosis.
For example, people on SSI receive larger payouts if they're diagnosed with autism.
After the economic downturn in 2008, the most heavily impacted age group started getting diagnosed with autism at an incredible rate:
Similarly, because laws in many places mandate providing more resources to autistic children, parents have sought to get their mentally retarded children diagnosed as autistic.
Using California as an example, more than a quarter of the rise 1992-2005 was due to this:
The thing about anti-vaxxers is that they don't know things
They clamor to find ways to suggest vaccines are bad, but their arguments are silly because they don't know the basic institutional background that gave rise to today's "autism epidemic"
Thread on a ridiculous paper🧵
This paper is by David A. Geier.
He's had some papers retracted.
A lot of his work has to do with other people having conflicts of interest—like working at a public health agency—, which makes some of the retractions extra funny, because they've been about his COIs.
David Geier is not a doctor.
But he has been punished for practicing medicine without a license.
Ironically, given his claim that public health officials are biased, he is heading up the HHS' autism initiative, set to announce they've found the cause of autism today.