----- Original Message ---- From: Matthias Wasser <matthias.wasser at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Monday, March 2, 2009 9:15:05 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] conservatives love porn too...
Doesn't really hold up - in addition to the massive ecological fallacy in there, they're basing porn consumption on credit card receipts. The portion of people who pay for porn (who, exactly?) is probably not representative of the portion of people who consume it (most men, a good deal of younger women.)
[WS:] The latter would be an objection only if there were non-random distribution of the three-party transactions in questions e.g. people in "red" zip codes were more likely to use someone else's credit card to buy online porn. If three party transaction use were randomly distributed, however, it would not produce any differences among zip zodes.
Furthermore, your objection assumes that in three party transactions the payer and the user have different value-systems or poltiical preferences, eg. the payer is more conservative than the user. That assumption seems rather dubious to me.
As to ecological fallacy - that crossed my mind too. I agree that it would be far better to make association on the individual rather than collective level. However, zip code is a rather low level of aggregation and it can be indicative of general trends among the peopulation living there (birds of feather...) so the ecological fallacy does not seem to be too big of a problem here.
Wojtek