The Washington Post has an article about what our (political) book buying says about us, but if you click on the map image on the article it takes you to Amazon.com where you see that 63% of shoppers are buying Barack Obama's Audacity of Hope to 37% of Mitt Romney's No Apology.
So, I'm not quite sure what the map tells us.
4 comments:
The map is accurate. "Red" and "Blue" books are not only the Obama and Romney books. But WaPo ony shows you the head-to-head match-up for the two presidential candidates when it drives you to Amazon.com.
Additionally, you need to account for the number of people in each state. For example, there may be 15 million people in New York buying a "Blue" book compared to just 1 million New Yorkers buying a "Red" book. But in Montana, there are 50,000 people buying a "Red" book compared to 25,000 buying a "Blue" book.
If those were the only two states in the nation, the percentage of people buying Blue books would be 93.8 percent. But half the states would show red. Notice?
You also need to figure in WHO buys books. The better educated and more wealthy tend to buy books. In these economic times, guess who those people are? Yeah: Republinazis. So the nation looks overwhelmingly "pink".
That raises yet another issue: Population vs. book-buying. California may have 37.6 million people living in it. But let's say that only 3 million of them are buying books. New York has 19.5 million people living in it. But let's say that 5 million of them buy books. Let's further assume that, in California, 40 percent of the people "buy Blue". That's 1.2 million. But in New York, 50 percent "buy Blue." That's 2.5 million.
Therefore, nationwide, 3.7 million people "buy Blue" out of 8 million book buyers. That's a national average of 46 percent "buying Blue". But if you were in California, you'd think that statistic is a lie -- since most of your book-reading friends were "buying Red".
But, then the map isn't accurate because the assumption is...maybe just my assumption...that population is the same throughout. Therefore Montana is being held to the same standard as New York or California. Therefore the map is skewed towards "red".
No, the map is completely accurate. You have to look at your state -- not the whole nation.
This is similar to those presidential election maps that show red vs. blue. Most of them show only which party won the vote. So you see solid red or solid blue. Under Bush II, you often saw these seas of red.
But if you looked at the county-level data, you suddenly saw massive amounts of blue. And if you allowed purple (a mixture of red and blue) in its various shades to show how close the election was in a county, all of a sudden the whole world turned purple or blue -- with almost nothing being red.
Statistics are NOT self-interpreting. This is why we have to remain very conscious and very critical of what we are seeing when someone presents us with "statistics that say..."
Newspapers love these kinds of maps, because they are visual. They do NOT, however, depict the complexity of the data which they purport to show -- and hence can be misleading if you are not aware of the assumptions underlying the map.
Then I saw once again...because stats are not self-interpreting, then this map is NOT accurate. Grr.
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