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New Article: New Article: New Article: New Article: New Article: Core Concepts: Core Concepts: Graph: Graph: Graph: Graph: |
Spirit Level AddendaThanks to data published in the 2009UK-2010US book The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, we see an interesting pattern. That book presents graphs to support their case that income inequality is tied to many health and social problems. They create a nine factor health and social problems index that correlates about 88% with either military spending or income inequality. However, when you compare military spending correlations with income inequality correlations for these nine factors side by side, there is about a 3% difference in favor of military spending as the strongest overall. When you drop the three weakest correlations, where neither factor has any robust correlations and look at only the top six where military spending has six 75% or better correlations and income inequality has only three that strong, military spending has a 13% lead with an average correlation of 82% to the income inequality average of 69%. Clearly, among the most relevant correlations, military spending has the stronger explaining power for: prisoners (85 to 66); teen births (82 to 74); homicides (80 to 57); mental illness (79 to 74); and for obesity (75 to 52). Overall, for military spending, the strongest factors are the economic ones, followed by the health and social problems, followed by the environmental factors. The economic relationships with military spending are very strong indicating that all these relationships most probably begin with the economic relationship. Incidently, the correlation between the military spending and income inequality is a robust .765 (Note, I'm using R not R2 for my percents)
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REAL ECONOMY |
