On Thu, Nov 11, 2004 at 07:02:17PM -0800, Dave Land wrote: > Seeing a mention of it on Eric Zorn's weblog, I took the Catalogue > for Philanthropy's "Generosity Index" (http://tinyurl.com/4xsrv) and > colored it according to red and blue states. > > http://www.mccmedia.com/~dland/red-blue-giving/
This is a subjective way to look at giving -- it is not someone's opinion of how generous someone is that actually accomplishes anything, rather, it is the dollars given that makes a difference. If I were in need, I'd always choose an offered $10 from a billionaire over an offered $1 from a millionaire, even though by the above definition the millionaire is being more generous. And I don't think I'm alone in this pragmatic approach to dollars. In addition, the methodology used to produce the chart is poor. It is not very informative to look at "ranks" separated by arbitrary intervals of meaningful numbers, or binary outcomes with the same problem. I took the data reported on the site referenced above for the total itemized charitable contributions by state, then divided by the state population to obtain average contribution per head. Then I made a scatter plot of Bush's margin of victory in 2004 and 2000 by state vs. the contributions per head by state. http://erikreuter.net/pub/vote3.png Notice that the data looks quite random. Possibly there is a very weak negative correlation of Bush margin of victory with itemized charitable contribution per head (but that could be my imagination). -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
