Fertility, Generosity, Voting Habit, and Religiosity by State
Posted by Matt W. on February 7th, 2007
About 6 Months ago, upon hearing about some studies about voting habit, religiousity, fertility, and giving, I made this little spreadsheet to test out some of the ideas. Rather than comment on it myself, as I think it is pretty unscientific, I will post it here for your comments. Please note that it requires Microsoft Excel to open.
OK, I’ll bite.
What does having and giving mean in terms of generosity? It seems to me that giving would mean things like making donations, and having would mean more like having the capacity to donate. Is this close? If so, then having the capacity to donate has a stong correlation with actual donating and goes along with blue states.
The other areas seem to be a mixed bag, with random results.
Comment # 1 left by Eric Nielson on February 7th, 2007
Maybe I should explain better.
The Columns for Generosity are
State Name: obvious
Having: States ranked by wealth (Connecticut has the wealthiest people, on average)
Giving: States ranked by Charitable contributions (People in Wyoming apparantly give the most money to charities)
Rank Relation: Having minus Giving
Genorosity Index This is just a 1-50 rank index for the rank relation. Note that the highs are in green and the lows are in red.
I think the rest of the columns are easier to make sense of:
I’ll go ahead and throw this out there too, as a bone. According to my “fast and dirty” assessment, states with high fertility rates are more charitable, more religious, and voted to re-elect George W. Bush.* The most Interesting Item on this study to me is that Utah and Idaho scored so high in survey data for “No Religion”, which made them definite outliers to the general data.
*- Please note I am not Political at all, and so the George Bush, red/blue data is less relative to me, but I am leaving it in anyway.
Comment # 2 left by Matt W. on February 7th, 2007
Using the percentage of residents who do not claim a church seems a poor measure for religiosity, however, I can’t think of a better one either.
Comment # 3 left by Doc on February 8th, 2007
Hmmmm… not sure what I think the actual significance of these numbers is. I live in New Jersey, which has a pretty high “having” index. My parents live in Texas, where I grew up. I know a lot of people that have twice as much money than my family - or more - here in New Jersey and don’t “have” as much. When it comes to the cost of housing, I’d say the multiplier is about 3-4 times. A kind of house you can get for a quarter million dollars in Texas will go for at least 750,000 here. Depending on the area, probably a whole lot more. So while New Jersey residents may have more wealth in sheer numbers, the cost of living distorts the relationship between the giving and having indexes.
And, as a general rule, blue states have a much higher cost of living. I’d be curious to see the chart if it were adjusted to take this into consideration. I don’t think the results would be as dramatic.
Comment # 4 left by M on February 8th, 2007
Doc, I originally tried it by a few different ways, and ended up on this because it was the best I could do.
M, you raise an excellent point. I can not recall the original source of my data now, as I did pull this a few months ago. Boston College recently did a study and had very different results though.
Also Arthur Brooks recently published a whole book on this, but I am not sure of his methodology. It was called “Who really Cares.”
Comment # 5 left by Matt W. on February 9th, 2007
Ok, running against the data set in the link I provided above, there is no correlation between any of the connectiong points and generosity.
Comment # 6 left by Matt W. on February 9th, 2007