[lbo-talk] Better live in Sweden than in the US: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better

Miles Jackson cqmv at pdx.edu
Thu Feb 18 10:01:27 PST 2010


Wojtek S wrote:
> RE: A distinguished sociologist I know, who prefers to remain nameless, said
> that Wilkinson's results are very sensitive to how you specify the equations
> or set up your country universe
>
> [WS:] I just had a quick look at the charts, but I do not think that the
> above is valid criticism. First, the selection includes only high income
> countries, which controls for variance that is associated with income
> level. Second, this is almost the entire *population* of high income
> countries, not a sample, therefore the concept of statistical significance
> is meaningless. Statitical significance denotes the probability that the
> difference observed in the sample will be null if were to draw other samples
> of the same size from that population. If that probablity is relatively
> high (typically higher than 5%) the null hypothesis cannot be rejected by
> convention. However, if the difference is observed in th epopulation, it is
> THE difference, as repeated samples of the same size would yield the exat
> same difference.
>
This raises an interesting statistical question: what is the population of interest in research like this? All high-income nations at a single point in time? All high-income nations at any point in time? Within some time window? Whether or not a statistical significance test is relevant depends on your assumptions about the population.

Miles



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