Thursday, January 14, 2010

Fun with Statistics

After a conversation with hannah about populations and demographics I decided to have a look for myself. The UN has a great database with information on just about every country. Because we were talking about populations of young men, I started by getting trend data on age and gender for the twenty largest countries in the world. We focused on young men because there’s a conventional wisdom meme that claims large populations of young men lead to wars.


Here’s the link to the entire spreadsheet:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tIIoL4lufmnKMrtTr9fClqw&output=html




The first page has some interesting statistics comparing the populations across countries and then there is one page for each country, in order from largest on down. All the raw numbers are in thousands. So in the first table (T1) on the front page, for T1-China:2000 it has the number 9731 – that’s 9,731,000 people. More specifically, those 9.7 million people are all young men, ages 15-29, that did not have a corresponding woman of the same age. On the individual country pages, I called this statistic “extra men.”




The UN output format isn’t the greatest in the world. It took some time moving the numbers around to bring out the relevant data. The second table (T2) on the front page is labeled “USA 2000-Baseline.” Here I took the number of extra men in the US in the year 2000 and set that as 1.00 – then I divided all the other figures on extra men by that number from T1-USA:2000 (1196) to help put the numbers of the other countries in perspective. For example, right now in 2010, the US has 1.25 times as many extra young men compared to back in 2000. Remember, this isn’t the raw number of young men, this is the difference between the number of young men and the number of young women. A change from 1 up to 1.25 is a fairly subtle shift. Compare the USA’s current number, 1.25, with China’s, 13.71, and your eyes might pop a bit. Right now, China has nearly 11 times as many extra young men compared to the US.


How much of that can be accounted for by difference in population size? Well, China’s population is about 4.2 times larger than ours. That should indicate that something different is going on between the US and China. People often say that China is missing women. There may be some error in statistics reported in China due to the “one child” policy, but I don’t really know much about that. More likely, the aberration is due to infanticide of baby girls which has been reported on in numerous places. The statistics seem to imply something similar has taken place in India. We shouldn’t think that the US’s numbers are rock bottom. I haven’t looked at a way to find the “normal” balance between young men and women yet, but the US has quite a few "extra men" as well.




So what about that “young men = war” idea? Well, these stats don’t tell us too much so far. The fact is that I would need to look at historical data to see just how we should interpret that claim. Does that mean that large groups of “extra men” increase the chance of war? Or does it mean that a population, as a whole, which has more young men is more likely to go to war? If that’s the case, Iran looks far more dangerous than China. They have the youngest, most-male population among the 20 largest countries in the world. Has there been any trouble in Iran lately? Another reason that historical data would be important here is that all around the world, medical care is improving and populations are getting older. There will be fewer spikes in the numbers of young men. So is the phenomena in question a matter of a magical tipping point – you get X percent of young men and you will have a war? Or is it a relative issue where the most lopsided countries in the world get to light the firecrackers? Furthermore, what if aging populations just lead to stretches in the longevity of our social roles. “30 is the new 20, son, so go grab your gun and your balaclava!”


For the information that statistics can tell us, they sure leave us with a lot of questions.



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