Statistics can be used to shed light on a specific case or incident, by comparing results in situations that are well controlled, that is, EXPERIMENTAL controls. But those situations are not common in social sciences research, its near-impossible to rule out the effects of extraneous factors. And statistical comparisons certainly can’t be used to determine the validity of a particular ideology applied to all cases in general.

At first glance, it appears a lot of the blues are urban industrial states, the reds seem to be more rural/agricultural. I note that most of the blue states are high population. I also know there are more Repub states in the union, although the party population is split much more evenly over the whole country. Maybe the military bases are distributed preferentially, I don’t know, and to be honest, I really don’t care. In any multi-dimensional statistical layer cake, you can always pick a plane to slice it through that will give you the graph you want.

This is a common problem in astronomy. Most of the stars you see in the night sky are bright giants very far away, but by far the most common stars in the galaxy are faint dwarfs. But there is no dwarf star visible to the naked eye, so a census of naked eye stars would give you a very misleading population distribution. Even with photographic techniques, this bias creeps in big time, and unraveling truth out of the observations is very difficult, and it is easy to get lost in the data, accidentally or deliberately. Astronomers argue about this sort of thing all the time, and they have no ideological stake in it. Massaging the data to look for trends is not worthless, but a volume full of statistics and graphs is often countered by one from the other side, and in the long run, it is consensus and negotiation that determines the “truth”. And even the refereed journals tend to favor some schools and ideologies more than others. I talked about this at length in one of my “breast essays” in Off-Topic”.

This is why you have to be very careful about statistics used to support political positions, or any positions in the social sciences. They are not necessarily faked, but they are often misleading, either by deliberate bias, cherry-picking, or downright fraud, or by honest misinterpretation of the data by conscientious researchers who are subconsciouly swayed one way or the other. Even if the data and the stats are totally legit, how they are interpreted and weighed makes a big difference. Differences between conclusions are not necessarily because one side is lying through their teeth, they simply see the data differently. And even if you can prove some “fact” incontrovertibly, how does that translate into justifying or discrediting an entire political philosophy?

It’s why I don’t like getting into that kind of argument here. I simply don’t know enough about the social sciences, and I do not have enough confidence in my own impartiality, to trust my conclusions based on data sources I am not familiar with. I don’t feel that way about the physical sciences where I am more comfortable with the data and the methodology, but even there I often make a fool of myself.

As for the Tea Partiers benefitting from government giveaways, there is no doubt about that. I suspect most of them don’t think of SS and Medicare as government aid because they feel they “paid” for it. But for that matter, most “welfare” goes to the middle class, not the poor. If you can afford to send your kid to college, do you think your tuition check covers the cost of his education? Most of the expenses are at least partially covered by government subsidies to the universities. In other words, if you can afford to send your kid to college, the taxpayer who can’t pays part of your kid’s bill.

Another data point I read recently was that over 50% of self proclaimed Tea Party members who are on social security and medicare say they get no government assistance whatsoever.

The question now arises, does political preference determine the financial category, or is it the other way round?

It is also interesting to note that those states who get more than they contribute outnumber the others by 64% to 36%. Of course, I have made no effort to further break down this data by population, or wealth, which no doubt play a role here. It also might be interesting to determine whether this ranking has been fairly stable through time, whether it has fluctuated wildly, or whether there has been some long term trend evident through history.

In fact, I’d be willing to bet that this statistical display proves absolutely nothing, one way or the other. And like most numerical exercises of this sort, data and criteria are either selected ahead of time because they tend to prove some ideological position that the compiler subscribes to a priori, or, they have survived a complex statistical analysis that has systematically emphasized what the analyst wanted to prove, while other relations were conveniently discarded as irrelevant.

Statistics don’t mean shit. You can always find a metric that will support your case, whatever it is.
Statistics can be a great tool to figure out what is going on, but it is worthless if the investigator is biased. People simply tend to interpret the data to reveal what they want to see.
It’s not lying or fraud, we just can’t trust ourselves to be objective. Its why scientific journals have referees. And even they sometimes can’t be trusted, especially in the social sciences. Have you ever looked at an education journal?