{"id":224,"date":"2009-12-08T14:41:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-08T22:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10083047.post-3290376300632967208"},"modified":"2009-12-08T15:11:40","modified_gmt":"2009-12-08T23:11:40","slug":"food-stamps-unemployment-go-together-duh-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2009\/12\/08\/food-stamps-unemployment-go-together-duh-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Food stamps &amp; unemployment go together (duh)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Derek Thompson at <a href=\"http:\/\/business.theatlantic.com\/2009\/12\/are_americas_fattest_states_also_the_most_jobless.php\">The Atlantic<\/a> has a post <a href=\"http:\/\/business.theatlantic.com\/2009\/12\/are_americas_fattest_states_also_the_most_jobless.php\">Are America&#8217;s Fattest States Also the Most Jobless?<\/a>. The county-level data on unemployment only goes back to 2008 (at least that I can find online). But I do have data on obesity at the county-level too. What&#8217;s the correlation? 0.32. Pretty modest. If I correlate for white obesity it goes down a little, 0.23 (though remember that I estimated white obesity, so be cautious about this). Since I also have food stamp utilization data I looked at that. Correlation is 0.56. If you think of this as r-squared, how much of variance of Y can be explained by X by squaring the correlation, it&#8217;s a much stronger association. I constructed a quick regression where % unemployed on the county-level was the dependent variable, and % black, obese, median household income and % on food stamps were the independents. <b>Except for food stamps none of these variables generated statistically significant <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Standardized_coefficient\">beta coefficients<\/a>.<\/b> In other words, regional level differences in unemployment in 2008 which tracked obesity are probably best explained as emerging out of a general poverty factor (though do note that median household income itself isn&#8217;t very predictive once % on food stamps gets put into the equation).<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t doubt that all things equal the obese would be fired first. That being said, all things are often not equal.<\/p>\n<p><b>Update:<\/b> I realized I left something out. Looking at the correlation college degree holding on the county-level and unemployment in 2008, I found it to be -0.43. So I popped that into the regression, and here are the coefficients with standard errors (all statistically significant):<\/p>\n<p>Black                  1.20987610  (0.33416977)    <br \/><b>College Degree         -7.64273043  (0.62394667) <\/b><br \/>Percent on Food Stamps        0.14095962  (0.00946762)   <br \/>Median Household Income  0.00002967  (0.00000523)   <br \/>Obesity               -0.06840311  (0.01494881)<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll let readers wonder what&#8217;s going on here, though I assume it has something to do with the changes in the education premium and such with globalization.<\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\"><img width='1' height='1' src='https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/10083047-3290376300632967208?l=www.gnxp.com%2Fblog%2Findex.php' alt='' \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Derek Thompson at The Atlantic has a post Are America&#8217;s Fattest States Also the Most Jobless?. The county-level data on unemployment only goes back to 2008 (at least that I can find online). But I do have data on obesity at the county-level too. What&#8217;s&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-data","category-food-stamps"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":226,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions\/226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}