Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Friday, April 01, 2005

Culture of Life: Mathematically Rigorous Update

On account of my commitment to the scientific method and all that jive, I entered into my statistical software package (SPSS™), for each of the 50 states, the percentage of the vote received by George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election (at least as reported) and the number of years of life lost prematurely per 100,000 population, as computed by the Centers for Disease Control. The correlation (Pearson's r) was .269, p=.059. Removing Utah, an obvious outlier, the correlation is .338, p=.017.

For each hundred years of life lost prematurely per 100,000 population, the percentage of the vote received by Bush goes up by about 2.

Oddly, I haven't heard Mr. Bush promising to do anything to save the lives of all those weak and vulnerable people who voted for him. I'm sure he's planning to get around to it.

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