Results for “seth stephens-davidowitz” 13 found
*Who Makes the NBA?*
That is the new book by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, with the subtitle Data-Driven Answers to Basketball’s Biggest Questions. Most notably, it was written in thirty days with the help of GPT-4.
It’s quite good! Excerpt:
A statistically significant percentage of sons of NBA players shoot free throws at a higher clip than their fathers.
Jokic, by the way, started off playing water polo, and that is partly why he passes as he does and has such good court vision. And this:
And the average NBA player shoots free throws 1.5 percentage points lower in clutch moments in playoff games.
Is some of that due to being more tired rather than choking? On average taller players choke more on free throws, which is perhaps consistent with this hypothesis? Being very tall, they are less likely to be athletic and well-conditioned, in equilibrium that is?
I really liked this book, kudos to the author(s)!
Who is rich in America?
We now know who is rich in America. And it’s not who you might have guessed.
A groundbreaking 2019 study by four economists, “Capitalists in the Twenty-First Century,” analyzed de-identified data of the complete universe of American taxpayers to determine who dominated the top 0.1 percent of earners.
The study didn’t tell us about the small number of well-known tech and shopping billionaires but instead about the more than 140,000 Americans who earn more than $1.58 million per year. The researchers found that the typical rich American is, in their words, the owner of a “regional business,” such as an “auto dealer” or a “beverage distributor.”
That is from Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (NYT), who covers some other interesting wealth/happiness topics as well.
How heritable are various sports abilities?
Let us start with data from identical twins:
Take wrestling. Of 6,778 Olympic wrestling athletes, there have been something like thirteen pairs of identical twins. This implied that the identical twin of an Olympic wrestler has a better than 60 percent chance of becoming an Olympic wrestler himself.
That is from the forthcoming Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life. From such reasoning you can divine the relative import of genetic factors for success in various sports. Here are the derived calculations, with the number indicating “Percent of Same-Sex Siblings Who Are Identical Twins” (when both make the Olympics, or achieve some other status):
Track and field: 22.4%
Wrestlers: 13.8%
Rowers: 12.4%
NBA players: 11.5%
Boxers: 8.8%
Gymnasts: 8.1%
Swimmers: 6.5%
Fencers: 4.5%
Shooters: 3.4%
NFL players: 3.2%
MLB players: 1.9%
Alpine skiers: 1.7%
Divers, equestrian riders, and weightlifters: All zero percent.
*Everybody Lies*
That is the new and fascinating book by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, with the subtitle Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. Here is one of many interesting bits:
Urban areas tend to be well supplied with models of success. To see the value of being near successful practitioners of a craft when young, compare New York City, Boston, and Los Angeles. Among the three, new York City produces notable journalists at the highest rate; Boston produces notable scientists at the highest rate; and Los Angeles produces notable actors at the highest rate. Remember, we are not talking about people who moved there. And this holds true even after subtracting people with notable parents in that field.
Many of the results in the book are taken from Google data and Google searches. I was a little chuffed to read this part:
A child born in New York City is 80 percent more likely to make it into Wikipedia than a kid born in Bergen County.
[Actually I was born in Hudson County, but grew up in Bergen.] And this:
Of the trillions of Google searches during that time [2004-2011], what do you think turned out to be most tightly connected to unemployment? You might imagine “unemployment office” — or something similar…The highest during the period I searched — and these terms do shift — was “Slutload.” That’s right, the most frequent search was for a pornographic site.
USA NBA fact of the day
Overall, I estimate that the average white player in the N.B.A. has a fan base that is 56.7 percent white and 22.7 percent black. The average black player has a fan base that is 46.7 percent white and 32 percent black, a significant difference…
If a white and a black player are similar on paper, it is the black player who will have more fans.
Among black Americans, black players are roughly twice as popular as comparable white players. But black players get a slight boost from fans of every racial group. Compared with white players who are similar to them in all ways I could think to measure, black players have more fans among white Americans, Hispanic Americans and Asian-Americans.
Honestly, I was blown away by the overall size of this advantage. Roughly speaking, I estimate that a white player would have to score 10 more points per game to have as big a fan base on Facebook as he would have if he were black.
That is from Seth Stephens-Davidowitz at the NYT, there is much more discussion at the link, though no mention of The Incandescent Rex. In other words, if the styles of the black players are in some way more dynamic and thus more popular (Rex being an exception, Pete Maravich another), and if we could adjust for that variable, how much of the race effect would go away?
Google data on when people search for jokes
It seems we search more for jokes in better, cheerier times:
…Monday is actually the day we are least likely to search for jokes. Searches for jokes climb through the week and are highest on Friday through Sunday. This isn’t because people are too busy with work or school on Mondays. Searches for “depression,” “anxiety” and “doctor” are all highest on Mondays.
Second, I compared searches for jokes to the weather. I did this for all searches in the New York City area over the past five years. Rain was a wash, but there were 6 percent fewer searches for jokes when it was below freezing. There were also 3 percent fewer searches for jokes on foggy days.
Finally, I looked at searches for jokes during traumatic events. Consider, for example, the Boston Marathon bombing. Shortly after the bombing, searches for “jokes” dropped nearly 20 percent. They remained almost as low in the days after the attack, including the Friday when Boston was in lockdown while the authorities searched for the bomber who was still on the loose. They didn’t return to normal until two weeks later.
Sure, some other entertainment searches, like “music” and “shopping,” also dropped after the bombing. Declines in these searches, however, were smaller than declines in searches for jokes, and some entertainment searches, like “games,” actually rose during the manhunt.
That is from Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (NYT). I am mostly convinced, in part because of the Boston data, still I wonder how much searching for jokes is in fact correlated with better moods. I would think of myself as being in a rather sad state if I had to find humor from impersonal sources on-line, rather than from people I know.
Rhetoric so often fails to achieve what we wish to achieve
Mr. Obama also said, “It is our responsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country.” But negative searches about Syrian refugees rose 60 percent. Searches asking how to help Syrian refugees dropped 35 percent. The president asked us to “not forget that freedom is more powerful than fear.” But searches for “kill Muslims” tripled during his speech.
There was one line, however, that did trigger the type of response Mr. Obama might have wanted. He said, “Muslim Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes and yes, they are our men and women in uniform, who are willing to die in defense of our country.”
After this line, for the first time in more than a year, the top Googled noun after “Muslim” was not “terrorists,” “extremists” or “refugees.” It was “athletes,” followed by “soldiers.” And, in fact, “athletes” kept the top spot for a full day afterward.
That is from a fascinating new piece by Evan Soltas and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.
How nepotistic are we?
In just about every field I looked at, having a successful parent makes you way more likely to be a big success, but the advantage is much smaller than it is at the top of politics.
Using the same methodology, I estimate that the son of an N.B.A. player has about a one in 45 chance of becoming an N.B.A. player. Since there are far more N.B.A. slots than Senate slots, this is only about an 800-fold edge.
Think about the N.B.A. further. The skills necessary to be a basketball player, especially height, are highly hereditary. But the N.B.A. is a meritocracy, with your performance easy to evaluate. If you do not play well, you will be cut, even if the team is the New York Knicks and your name is Patrick Ewing Jr. Father-son correlation in the N.B.A. is only one-eleventh as high as it is in the Senate.
Emphasis added by me. And this:
An American male is 4,582 times more likely to become an Army general if his father was one; 1,895 times more likely to become a famous C.E.O.; 1,639 times more likely to win a Pulitzer Prize; 1,497 times more likely to win a Grammy; and 1,361 times more likely to win an Academy Award. Those are pretty decent odds, but they do not come close to the 8,500 times more likely a senator’s son is to find himself chatting with John McCain or Dianne Feinstein in the Senate cloakroom.
That is all from Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.
Facts about fame (in praise of college towns)
From Seth Stephens-Davidowitz in today’s NYT:
Roughly one in 2,058 American-born baby boomers were deemed notable enough to warrant a Wikipedia entry. About 30 percent made it through art or entertainment, 29 percent through sports, 9 percent through politics, and 3 percent through academia or science.
…Roughly one in 1,209 baby boomers born in California reached Wikipedia. Only one in 4,496 baby boomers born in West Virginia did. Roughly one in 748 baby boomers born in Suffolk County, Mass., which contains Boston, made it to Wikipedia. In some counties, the success rate was 20 times lower.
…I closely examined the top counties. It turns out that nearly all of them fit into one of two categories.
First, and this surprised me, many of these counties consisted largely of a sizable college town. Just about every time I saw a county that I had not heard of near the top of the list, like Washtenaw, Mich., I found out that it was dominated by a classic college town, in this case Ann Arbor, Mich. The counties graced by Madison, Wis.; Athens, Ga.; Columbia, Mo.; Berkeley, Calif.; Chapel Hill, N.C.; Gainesville, Fla.; Lexington, Ky.; and Ithaca, N.Y., are all in the top 3 percent.
Why is this? Some of it is probably the gene pool: Sons and daughters of professors and graduate students tend to be smart. And, indeed, having more college graduates in an area is a strong predictor of the success of the people born there.
But there is most likely something more going on: early exposure to innovation. One of the fields where college towns are most successful in producing top dogs is music. A kid in a college town will be exposed to unique concerts, unusual radio stations and even record stores. College towns also incubate more than their expected share of notable businesspeople.
African-Americans who grew up around Tuskegee did very well in achieving Wikipedia fame. Yet how much a state spends on education does not seem to matter. And this:
…there was another variable that was a strong predictor of Wikipedia entrants per birth: the proportion of immigrants. The greater the percentage of foreign-born residents in an area, the higher the proportion of people born there achieving something notable. If two places have similar urban and college populations, the one with more immigrants will produce more notable Americans.
The piece is fascinating throughout, and you will note that Seth is a Google data scientist with a Ph.d. in economics from Harvard. His other writings are here. Some of you may wish to see my book What Price Fame?
Did “race” cost Obama many votes?
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, job market candidate from Harvard, has an interesting paper on this question:
Abstract: Traditional surveys struggle to capture socially unacceptable attitudes such as racial animus. This paper uses Google searches including racially charged language as a proxy for a local area’s racial animus. I use the Google-search proxy, available for roughly 200 media markets in the United States, to reassess the impact of racial attitudes on voting for a black candidate in the United States. I compare an area’s racially charged search volume to its votes for Barack Obama, the 2008 black Democratic presidential candidate, controlling for its votes for John Kerry, the 2004 white Democratic presidential candidate. Other studies using a similar empirical specification and standard state-level survey measures of racial attitudes yield little evidence that racial animus had a major impact in recent U.S. elections. Using the Google-search proxy, I find significant and robust effects in the 2008 presidential election. The estimates imply that racial animus in the United States cost Obama three to five percentage points in the national popular vote in the 2008 election.
The question and method of this paper are excellent. I cannot in polite company reproduce the Google key word used to proxy for negative attitudes about Obama. What Google key word might you try if you were looking for districts were the race factor boosted his vote total? Laredo, Texas is the area with the least interest in the negative search word, but I am not sure that is the best proxy for “support because of race.” (See the author’s p.19 for a discussion of related topics.) How about searches for the title of his autobiography?
Page 29 ranks the states by their interest in “racially charged searches.” West Virginia is the worst, Utah is the best, and Pennsylvania and Michigan and New Jersey are the worst northern states, coming in at #3, #6 and #10, respectively. The graphs and charts at the end of the paper are all interesting, including p.36.
Addendum: You might think I got the pointer from @RovingBandit, but actually the paper led me to him rather than vice versa.
Given that Trump is winning, which other views should we update?
I asked this question to Nate Silver, but didn’t myself have a chance to address it. Since most of us have been surprised by the rise of Trump, presumably other, broader views must be updated too. But which ones? I see a few options, which are not for the most part mutually exclusive:
1. Social media are more powerful than we had thought, and more powerful in politics in particular.
2. Republican voters are less conservative, less “Tea Party,” and less libertarian than many people had thought. And the “periphery Republicans” are stronger and more numerous and more easily excited than we had thought.
3. Republican primary voters are more racist than we had thought.
4. Backlash against immigration and immigrants sets in more quickly, when middle class wages are stagnant, than we had thought. And true cosmopolitans are hard to find.
5. The value of commanding and dominating media attention, in a year with no clear front-runner Republican candidate, is higher than we had thought.
6. Trump is more skillful at trolling and pulling levers of public opinion than we had thought.
7. Democracy is less stable than we had thought.
8. New Yorkers are more nationally marketable than we had thought.
Perhaps all of these are true, and yet Trump’s leading role still remains a fundamental surprise. Which other hypotheses am I missing? In any case, it is time for some updating…
Addendum: Stephens-Davidowitz has numerous good thoughts, such as:
The Black Swan view of the world makes even more sense. We wrongly think things that are different are impossible.
Charisma matters more than we thought and is hard to pin down
People REALLY HATE politicians more than we thought …
Something that is off-the-charts entertaining is hard to stop. The media has a huge incentive to keep it going.
Among others.
The culture that is America (Googling for God)
In the United States, there is more interest in heaven than in hell, at least based on searches. There are 1.5 times more searches for “heaven” than “hell,” 2.8 times as many searches asking what heaven looks like than what hell looks like, and 2.75 times as many searches asking whether heaven is real than whether hell is real.
…Relative to the rest of the country, for every search I looked at, retirement communities search more about hell. In retirement communities, there are a similar number of searches asking to see visuals of hell as visuals of heaven.
And:
There are 4.7 million searches every year for Jesus Christ. The pope gets 2.95 million. There are 49 million for Kim Kardashian.
That is from Seth Stephens-Dawidowitz.
Assorted links
1. 140 Google interview questions.
2. Jim Manzi on Piketty and executive compensation.
3. OrderStatistic on AD, AS, and Paul Krugman.
5. Data on white nationalists.
6. The wisdom of the confident crowd? And top economists do not generally favor monetary policy rules. And Barry Eichengreen has a new forthcoming book. It looks like a major work.