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No surprise that a reader points out that healthier areas seem to map onto “Blue” areas of the United States. But there is actually more to this than meets the eye: Are Republicans Healthier Than Democrats?:
In the International Journal of Epidemiology, S. V. Subramanian and Jessica Perkins write that, after controlling for age, sex, race, marital status, religious service attendance, highest educational degree, and total family income, Republicans were 25% less likely than Democrats to report being in poor health. They find a key component of this to be smoking: after controlling for that above list of variables, Republicans were 15% less likely to be smokers.
Remember that though Democratic areas tend to be wealthier, the wealthier individuals within Democratic regions tend to be more Republican.
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If you view Republicans as a bunch of Church going moralists, lower smoking rates make sense; if you view Republicans as a bunch of greedy fat cats who love corporations it doesn’t.
Also, did they control for alcohol consumption?
Nicotine tends to moderate neurosis, and most smokers are more inherently neurotic individuals. We know that “liberals” tend to have more anxiety and unhappiness due to being upset about perceived social and economic injustices, so it follows that “liberals” would be more neurotic, and therefore more likely to smoke.
Y’know, when I put this together with a recent post of Peter Frost’s I realized that Greg Cochran’s gay germ theory could explain a lot more than homosexuality. I think if there is such a pathogen it could also be responsible for many more social changes, even the increase in the proportion of bands which write their own songs. Here’s the long explanation:
http://www.corrupt.org/columns/martin_regnen/the_pathogen_theory_of_progressivism
I don’t know if there’s some big hole in that theory that I didn’t see, but it’s more plausible than Agnostic’s genius germs, isn’t it?