Now for something totally different: alcohol and life expectancy

I am sure that everyone is tired of reading about politics, so I have decided to do something different today: comparing alcohol consumption and life expectancy, across US states.
My alcohol consumption data came from

http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/Resources/DatabaseResources/QuickFacts/AlcoholSales/consum03.htm

which is a pretty official site, although there are lots of questions about methodology when it comes to alcohol consumption! The data there breaks it down into beer, wine, liquor and then the total consumption, and I just used the last.

The life expectancy data came from

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/sep2006/db20060913_099763.htm

this table in businessweek, which refers to the Harvard Center on Public Health. It might not be the best data, but it passes my giggle test.

So, when we put them together, we get:Almost nothing!
There are significant outliers in all four directions, some of which make sense at first (why Utah and Nevada have low and high alcohol consumption rates) and some of which might be surprising at first (Delaware and New Hampshire are not, to my mind, such hard drinkin' states, but I only had to think about it for a minute to figure out why they are where they are).
Otherwise, there doesn't seem to be much pattern between alcohol consumption and life expectancy.
There are a lot of different things that could be done with this data, and I already have some ideas. There may be a pattern when slightly different data are looked at, and I may do that soon.

Much as before: college, high school and politics

This entry is a second set of three graphs, with the same premise as yesterday's. But these graphs look at Oregon and its counties, instead of the US and its states. I do this because I am (more or less) an Oregonian, and Oregon also provides somewhat of a political and social cross section.

Also, bowing to reader pressure, I have decided to "label" my "axes". I guess that is what the cool kids do.

So, starting off, this is a scatterplot of Oregon's high school and college graduation rates:
Much like with the US as a whole, there is a vague trend, with significant outliers on either end, and then a big ball in the middle. Much like with the US on the whole, high high school completion seems to be a necessary, but not sufficient cause for high college attainment.
For those not familiar with Oregon geography, some of the outliers should be explained: Benton County, in the upper right, is a small county that is the home of Oregon State University, which is why it has high education rates. Malhuer and Gilliam counties are both small, rural counties (although separated geographically). Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington counties are the counties that make up Metro Portland, and they have about 1/3rd of Oregon's population.

Our next diagram shows Obama's margin and high school attainment rates:


I show the percentage of high school completion in comparion to the state average for clarity's sake...although it might actually do the opposite.
Much as in the US map as a whole, there is not a lot of pattern to this scatterplot. The state with the highest percentage of diploma holders voted for Obama, and the state with the lowest voted for McCain, but otherwise it is a pretty vague shape: Multnomah and Grant counties have about the same rate of high school graduation, but had a 100 point difference in their margins in the elections.

Our scatterplot of Obama's margin and college graduation rates takes us safely back into the conventional wisdom: there is a fairly obvious relationship between
college attainment and being politically liberal. Of the five counties above the 25% mark, (which is also about the average for Oregon on the whole), all five of them voted for Obama. McCain's biggest support seems to come from states that are at or below the 15% mark of college attainment. Much like with the US on the whole, while a fair amount of low-college counties went for Obama, there were no high-attainment counties that voted for McCain.
Also, again for those without knowledge of Oregon geography, the five counties in the top-right quadrant of the graph make up close to half of Oregon's population, which makes the strength of Obama in high-college areas even more significant.

High school & college attainment, and political leanings.

Our first set of scatterplots shows the relationship between high school and college education attainment, and how both of these do (or do not) correlate with political preferences, as measured by Obama's margin in the 2008 election.

The first scatterplot shows US states, by high school and college graduation rates. Intuitively, these are two variables that could assumed to be correlated. However, the trend is fairly weak: there are a cluster of states with low attainment in both high school and college (most of which are located in the South or Appalachia), but otherwise the trend isn't very strong. If you you look at the "USA" point, all of the states to the right and down of it are states with above average high school graduation rates, but below average rates of college attainment. Likewise, some states have the opposite pattern: California and New York being two of the most important. Also, notice at the very right of the diagram, Alaska and Wyoming have the two highest high school graduation rates.
Which brings us to our second point. There has been, at some points, conventional wisdom that Democratic candidates are more succesful with a better educated electorate. But the presence of Alaska and Wyoming over on the very right of the diagram makes one wonder if this correlation holds up for high school graduation rates.
This chart, which compares high school graduation rate (as measured in difference from the national average, a somewhat confusing trick I used to make the graph look better) to Obama's margin in the 2008 election, does not provide any obvious evidence that states with high high school graduation rates are more politically liberal. In fact, almost the opposite: the upperleft hand corner of the diagram shows that Utah, Alaska and Wyoming, three states with very high high school attainment are also some of the most conservative. Strangely enough, McCain's support seems to come in two clusters: mountain and prairie states with high high school attainment, and a group of southern and Appalachian states with low high school attainment. And then Oklahoma in the middle. Obama states seem to run the gamut.


This diagram seems to return us to our conventional wisdom: the states with the highest levels of college attainment also were the biggest Obama supporters. However, as with any real world data, this information is not always the stereotype engine it could be. Utah, Kansas and Hawaii all have very close levels of college attainment, and yet have very different politics. Another thing of interest is that there seems to be a number of low-college states that supported Obama, but the inverse is not true: there are not many high-college attainment states that supported McCain.

There are many conclusions and guesses to be made from this data, but I will leave that to the reader to determine. I should also point out that there are many caveats about trying to operationalize educational data, since graduation rates across states may not always mean the same thing.

The data for these scatterplots was taken from census.gov, and uselectionatlas.org I tried to be accurate, but there may have been artithmatic or data entry errors. There are many other caveats I could make, but according to my cat I have to go to bed.