Yesterday, I looked at the relationship between drug use and politics. We saw that states that voted for Obama had higher levels of
marijuana and cocaine use than those that voted for McCain. But perhaps
economic factors lie behind those political trends. We know that Obama
drew from less affluent minority voters and also from more
well-educated, creative class voters. Perhaps the associations between
drug use and voting patterns reflect deeper economic patterns.
The conventional wisdom is that economic hardship is a key factor in drug use. Anyone who watches crime shows like The Wire gets this picture really fast.
To get a first approximation of this, we examined the relationship between drug use and unemployment. Not surprisingly, the use of illegal drugs is correlated with state unemployment (.31). And the correlations are even a bit higher when we look at marijuana (.36) and cocaine use (.36).
Correlation coefficient: 0.31*
But things get more interesting when we look at the relationship between drug use and economic development. While there is no relationship between economic output and illegal drug use overall, there is a significant relationship between state economic output and marijuana, and an even stronger correlation between economic output and cocaine use, as the charts below show.
Correlation coefficient: 0.31*
Correlation coefficient: 0.61**
But there's more to the story. Tomorrow, I will turn to the relationship between drug use and the class structure of state economies.
Note: * indicates statistical significance at the .05 level; ** indicates significance at the .01 level.
Richard Florida
Correlations are interesting but why don't you just run a multivariate model? It seems you have a theory...why not actually try to test it?
Does this mean that A.) Drug users are less productive or B.) the production and sales of drugs are not included in these economic measurements? I don't think there would be much of a question here if there were some sort of legalization and taxation. Also, what the hell is up with Rhode Island!
I think I must have forgotten all my college statistics... Your correlation coefficients (r) which give us coefficient of determination (r^2) seem awfully low for you to be making any kind of claim- for instance, on your first scatterplot, you get an r^2 of ~0.1, which isn't really convincing. Then again, it's been a while since I took stat.
Also, how did you compute statistical significance for those r values? What I had learned involved using charts like this. What is the underlying distribution for this data?
this is all patent nonsense; you're just trolling for hits, latching onto a hot button issue and making sweeping pronouncements based on a few threadbare calculations. correlation is not causation and you simply can't encapsulate the end result of all the various facets of a nation's economy and industrial policy over the course of decades with some pithy statistical handwaving. this sort of reasoning that you present is particularly pernicious because it has been used by morally bankrupt employers since the reagan years to justify pre-employment drug testing, a practice which violates the privacy of employees and if nothing else helps to turn the sort of pronouncements as you make into a self fulfilling prophecy by reducing labor market mobility and potential earnings of recreational drug users. folks need to be judged on whether or not they can get the job done, not what they do during their off hours at home.
furthermore, as marcados implies, i think there is a significant amount of employment and profit generated by the recreational drugs trade, a fact that is not captured in your analysis since the activity is underground. for instance, here in michigan, i am proud to say that cannabis was estimated to be the number one cash crop in the entire state a year or two ago, and i believe that this was the case for several other states as well.
why not instead have a well-regulated market where producers and users can come out of the closet? you can put some legit jobs on the books and tax the trade, and do right by a lot of people who are forced into the margins by our society, ostracized, by a bunch of misguided puritans.