I was on the Yahoo front page checking the temperature in these parts as I wanted to go out for a short run this Friday evening. This is when I spied this WTF article in the Yahoo News tab titled thusly: Alcohol use helps boost income: study. Since I tipple once in a while, I thought this is an article I must take a look at. Here is the opening gambit:

"The study published in the Journal of Labor Research Thursday concluded that drinkers earn 10 to 14 percent more than teetotalers, and that men who drink socially bring home an additional seven percent in pay."

But before I exclaimed "holy moly" and reached for my (nearly empty) bottle of Grey Goose Vodka in order to put that 14% bounce in my measley income, I read this:

The authors acknowledged their study, funded by the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank, contradicted research released in 2000 by the Harvard School of Public Health.

"We created our hypothesis through casual observation and examination of scholarly accounts," the authors said."

which made me pause for a bit before I glugged direct from the bottle. Why? Because something is fishy in Denmark. One of the great dangers of social science research is that if you have a hypothesis to prove (drinking will boost your income, Saddam is hiding a nuke in his ass, all working women are bitches etc), you can tailor enough data (with appropriate statistical massaging) that will prove it for you.[1]

I am sort of lazy to unearth the orginal research paper from one of academic databases but I managed to find this executive summary type report these researchers wrote for the think tank that funded their research. Looking at their methodology and data merely confirms what I said above in [1]. Why? First take a look at some of the numbers:

Number of male

Drinkers : 4,259 Barhopping drinkers : 1,114 Abstainers : 988 Barhopping abstainers: 46

Do you smell the statistical dope already? The number of drinkers (a definition we will get to shortly) in their survey data is roughly six times that of abstainers. So even without even getting into the mess of sampling etc, this dataset tilts towards drinkers. Now their definitions of drinkers and "bar hopping" drinkers:

"The survey question on alcohol asks respondents, “Do you ever have occasion to use any alcoholic beverages such as liquor, wine, or beer, or are you a total abstainer?” From this question we create a dummy variable where drinkers have a one and abstainers have a zero.

The survey also asks respondents the frequency with which they go to a bar or tavern. Choices include the following: almost every day, once or twice a week, several times per month, about once per month, several times a year, about once a year, never, and don’t know. From this question we create a variable indicating whether an individual frequents a bar or tavern at least once per month. This somewhat crude measure attempts to capture whether one drinks in social or nonsocial settings."

Going to a bar at least once a month is these folks definition of "bar hopping"!! Not a minor issue really when they draw the following grand conclusions based on their "study":

They concluded that men who drink earn 10 percent more than abstainers and women drinkers earn 14 percent more than non-drinkers.

However, unlike men, who get a seven percent income boost (in addition to the 10 percent premium that drinkers have over abstainers) from drinking in bars , women who frequent bars at least once per month do not show higher earnings than women drinkers who do not visit bars.

In order to explain these conclusions, they regurgitate the "common sense" wisdom that men who frequent bars:

a) "socialize more with clients and co-workers, giving drinkers an advantage in important relationships"

b) "learn people, business, and social skills" from the opportunities that drinking may also provide individuals.

But but, dem womens "bar hopping" ain't gonna see no income bounce because (in their words) "perhaps, women increase social capital apart from drinking in bars.". Me thinks, since they are grave academics, they couldn't say (even if they really really wanted to), "well old chap, we all know that women who bar hop, do so in order to exchange bodily fuilds with manly men like us (17% more $$s we have than those non-drinking wimps) rather than to exchange business cards."

Before you think this is all satire, no I am not dissing this study for it now provides the following (excellent) smoke screen for we men, who have to go do the "guy" thing rather than "bond" with you women folks:

"Honey, hanging out with Tom, Dick, and Harry at the Girls-R-Fun Bar is gonna be real good for my career."

Now if you will excuse me kind readers, it's time for the Grey Goose, er, income opportunity.

Gaurav did it again, and tagged me with this meme - I suspect only after all the lovelies he wanted to cyber-flirt with declined to participate in his silliness. ;-)

Anyway, I decided to hop over and look at my webcounter which races ahead like a turtule (but turtles live long I say to myself to fool myself as to why I am not a blog celebrity yet) day after day. A look at the last hundred visitors tell me that majority of the search terms to Buoy lead folks to movies/ TV content I posted about (The Angrez, Dasi, Malgudi Days, Der Unterganag (Downfall)) or poetry and poets (Wendell Berry, Naoi Shahib Bye, Anna Akhmatova, Li Young Lee) I may have archived under "Big Book Of Poetry" - and none of these visitors dwadle around, click at other links, wander in these sleepy groves of words.

This only goes on to show how boring I am, and the things I concern myself with are. But to go back to the Silly Search Term Meme, this was the sillest search term (in the last 100 visitors, roughly in two days):

groin rock band

This as I predicted pointed to this list of names dreamt by the humor columnist Dave Barry which I had dumped aeons ago here. I will update this for the next week or so to see what else brings folks to this Forest of the Carnutes.*

*Ref: Asterix & The Goths; Antville is based in Germania