Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

Re:Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Pric... by fooker on Monday June 11, 2018 @09:32PM (#17290088)

I once attended a lecture by a well known statistics professor, who demonstrated a similar correlation between the price of a kg of apples and the rate of divorce in his country.

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Re:Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Pric... by coandco on Tuesday June 12, 2018 @03:06AM (#17291284)

http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations seems relevant here.

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Re:Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Pric... by tonyedgecombe on Tuesday June 12, 2018 @03:03AM (#17291274)

http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

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Re:Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Pric... by DoreenMichele on Monday June 11, 2018 @11:50PM (#17290583)

"An apple a day keeps the divorce lawyer away."

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Re:Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Pric... by paulddraper on Monday June 11, 2018 @10:29PM (#17290260)

Are apples and divorces plausibly related?

Or was the professor simply drawing from an enormous number of metrics to find a spurious relationship (and report just that).

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Re:Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Pric... by ajmurmann on Monday June 11, 2018 @10:44PM (#17290319)

That snake was trying to tell us something!

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Re:Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Pric... by gsich on Tuesday June 12, 2018 @01:48AM (#17290981)

An apple is not mentioned there ;)

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Re:Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Pric... by im3w1l on Monday June 11, 2018 @11:00PM (#17290395)

Well price of apples should approximately reflect general food affordability.

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Re:Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Pric... by paulddraper on Monday June 11, 2018 @11:48PM (#17290576)

Hm...so economic hardship causes high apple prices and high divorce rates.

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Re:Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Pric... by timr on Monday June 11, 2018 @10:44PM (#17290317)

Thank you. It's depressing how nobody here is observing the obvious, uncontrolled co-variate in this "analysis": per-capita income:

https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/december/link...

Correlation vs cause is no problem for HN if the correlation in question confirms a bias!

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