Posted by Jay Livingston
Jonathan Soma claims to have gotten a D+ in statistics in college. But he has created the coolest interactive statistical tools. The best known is his corrective to the usual map of where the singles are.* In February of 2007, National Geographic published this map.
(Click on the map for a larger view.)Looks like things are pretty good for single guys, especially here in the Northeast – 195,000 more single women than single men in the New York metro area. On the West Coast, not so much.
Soma was skeptical, probably because he lives in Brooklyn and wonders where all those single girls are. So first, instead of using absolute numbers, he adjusted for population size to make a ratio.
If you go to his site, you can toggle back and forth between numbers and ratios. Better than that, he has a slider at the top that you can move so as to select the age range you’re interested in.
The original map included ages 18-64. But most single guys in their twenties probably don’t care much about the over-thirty women, and to a great extent that’s who’s represented in red circles.
If you slide the brackets to the left to select 18-29 crowd, the world resembles a Bud Light commercial – a lot of desperate single guys, not so many girls.
But for more mature men, things look better, just so long as they’re not trying to pick up 23-year-olds.
Go to Soma’s site, move the slider, and watch the bubbles change size and color.
* I found it via Sociological Images, but it’s been linked to by some of the blogosphere biggies – The Wall Street Journal, Gawker, Andrew Sullivan, etc.
it's conceivable that some of the "bud light" effect is driven by actual population differences in gender ratios (perhaps driven by greater male immigration) but i'm betting that "age choice" (aka, cradle-robbing) has a lot more to do with it. (of course it's an easily verifiable empirical question, but i'm too lazy to do more than speculate).
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