I know just one person over 100 with an actual birth certificate.
Across U.S. states, the total and per capita numbers of supercentenarians dramatically decline right after the introduction of birth certificates (blue line).
Also, have you ever noticed that supercentenarians are more common in areas with more crime, more poverty, and lower average life expectancies?
Here's data for England:
The same pattern of supercentenarian numbers being correlated with poverty holds in (A, D) England, (B, E) France, and (C, F) Japan.
Across countries, you just see the same things over and over, from age heaping to weird correlations, so the conclusion is clear:
Supercentenarian numbers are driven less by regionally exceptional longevity and more by people defrauding pension systems and making up their ages.
Oh, and if you wanted to learn how to live a long life from the "blue zones" in Sardinia, Okinawa, and Icaria, good luck. Those places have low life expectancies and literacy levels, high crime, and lots of poverty.
Their long-lived people are not able to validate their ages.
This also applies to Loma Linda (not all that exceptional of a place).
In fact, across the whole U.S., at least 17% of centenarians were found to be non-centenarians in 2019 when someone just read through two plain-text files and found dates didn't match.
And this also applies to Nicoya, which is riddled with fraudulent ages:
If someone says they know someone super old, ask them: Where were they born? If it's in some place that was poor in the not-too-distant past, then they probably have the wrong age.
After the Counter-Reformation began, Protestant Germany started producing more elites than Catholic Germany.
Protestant cities also attracted more of these elite individuals, but primarily to the places with the most progressive governments🧵
Q: What am I talking about?
A: Kirchenordnung, or Church Orders, otherwise known as Protestant Church Ordinances, a sort of governmental compact that started cropping up after the Reformation, in Protestant cities.
Q: Why these things?
A: Protestants wanted to establish political institutions in their domains that replaced those previously provided by the Catholics, or which otherwise departed from how things were done.
What predicts a successful educational intervention?
Unfortunately, the answer is not 'methodological propriety'; in fact, it's the opposite🧵
First up: home-made measures, a lack of randomization, and a study being published instead of unpublished predict larger effects.
It is *far* easier to cook the books with an in-house measure, and it's far harder for other researchers to evaluate what's going on because they definitionally cannot be familiar with it.
Additionally, smaller studies tend to have larger effects—a hallmark of publication bias!
Education, like many fields, clearly has a bias towards significant results.
Notice the extreme excess of results with p-values that are 'just significant'.
The pattern we see above should make you suspect if you realize this is happening.
Across five different large samples, the same pattern emerged:
Trans people tended to have multiple times higher rates of autism.
In addition to higher autism rates, when looking at non-autistic trans versus non-trans people, the trans people were consistently shifted towards showing more autistic traits.
In two of the available datasets, the autism result replicated across other psychiatric traits.
That is, trans people were also at an elevated risk of ADHD, bipolar disorder, depression, OCD, and schizophrenia, before and after making various adjustments.
Across 68,000 meta-analyses including over 700,000 effect size estimates, correcting for publication bias tended to:
- Markedly reduce effect sizes
- Markedly reduce the probability that there is an effect at all
Economics hardest hit:
Even this is perhaps too generous.
Recall that correcting for publication bias often produces effects that are still larger than the effects attained in subsequent large-scale replication studies.
A great example of this comes from priming studies.
Remember money priming, where simply seeing or handling money made people more selfish and better at business?
Those studies were stricken by publication bias, but preregistered studies totally failed to find a thing.
It argues that one of the reasons there was an East Asian growth miracle but not a South Asian one is human capital.
For centuries, South Asia has lagged on average human capital, whereas East Asia has done very well in all our records.
It's unsurprising when these things continue today.
We already know based on three separate instrumental variables strategies using quite old datapoints that human capital is causal for growth. That includes these numeracy measures from the distant past.
Where foreign visitors centuries ago thought China was remarkably equal and literate (both true!), they noticed that India had an elite upper crust accompanied by intense squalor.