Althouse: "Penile length alone can explain over 15% of the between-country variation in 1985 GDP."

July 19, 2011

"Penile length alone can explain over 15% of the between-country variation in 1985 GDP."

"Startlingly the male organ coefficients are statistically significant at
the 1% level in all model specifications."

Scholarship!

68 comments:

KCFleming said...: "Taken at face value the findings suggest that the `male organ hypothesis' put forward here is quite penetrating an argument."; 7/19/11, 7:07 AM
KCFleming said...: "Hence in many ways male organ stands in contrast to other, more contentious
variables..."; 7/19/11, 7:10 AM
The Dude said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 7/19/11, 7:10 AM
KCFleming said...: 'if France with its average size of 16.1 centimetres had male organs on par with United Kingdom's 13.9 centimetres, French GDP would have ceteris paribus expanded by around 15%"; 7/19/11, 7:12 AM
Abdul Abulbul Amir said...: Significant at the 1% level is a statisticians way of saying it is not significant.

95% is the usual threshold for separating significance from coincidence.; 7/19/11, 7:13 AM
JSinAZ said...: My name is Hari Seldon and I approve this message.; 7/19/11, 7:14 AM
KCFleming said...: " the `male organ hypothesis' is
worth pursuing in future research. It clearly seems that the `private sector' deserves more credit for economic development than is typically acknowledged:"; 7/19/11, 7:17 AM
KCFleming said...: Read the paper.

Now I need a cigarette.; 7/19/11, 7:20 AM
exhelodrvr1 said...: What effect will this have on the San Francisco circumcision ban?; 7/19/11, 7:23 AM
Roger J. said...: We are clearly at the end times--"scholarship" has been reduced to this tripe. And what Mr Amir said--95 percent is the accepted standard is statistical regressions.

Word verification fayllys (say it phonetically and see what you come up with--how does WV know this?); 7/19/11, 7:26 AM
Roger J. said...: Riffing on Mr JsinAZ: My name is anthony weiner and I approved this message; 7/19/11, 7:28 AM
virgil xenophon said...: Boy those industrious Finish researchers don't dick around, do they? But I find their academic lingo a bit turgid, tho...perhaps clearer prose might straighten-out their conclusions, thus expanding our further understanding of the import of their research by use of harder, more definitive language--as opposed to the rather flaccid descriptions they currently employ..; 7/19/11, 7:29 AM
Quaestor said...: What about the flexibility of private enterprise versus ridgid state control?; 7/19/11, 7:32 AM
traditionalguy said...: At last. An article that admits that only men count.

All single women are statistical zeros.

Wait, wait, don't men's sizes matter only when joined with a woman? If so, this may be anti Gay propaganda. So many questions and so little time.

Research, research and more research. That's what the world needs now.; 7/19/11, 7:33 AM
KCFleming said...: Seriously, was this an Onion article?

The Journal of Irreproducible Results?; 7/19/11, 7:33 AM
Phil 314 said...: Significant at the 1% level is a statisticians way of saying it is not significant.

95% is the usual threshold for separating significance from coincidence.

I haven't read the paper but some authors when describing confidence intervals will describe in the negative. In other words, 5% as opposes 95%; 7/19/11, 7:37 AM
JSinAZ said...: Left unsaid are analysis of the non-optimal cases: at the rightmost extreme the market is distorted by an oversupply condition that stretches the consumers' capacity, leaving it torporus and unable to respond to the supplier that falls within the standard interval. On the other hand, the undersupply problem leaves the consumptive capacity of the market unsatisfied, with flaccid suppliers unable to cope with unmet opportunities.; 7/19/11, 7:38 AM
AllenS said...: Be very careful what you read on the internets concerning penile length. I spent $50 on a penis enlarger. Bastards sent me a magnifying glass. Instructions said don't use in the sunlight.; 7/19/11, 7:56 AM
Robert said...: Abdul:

You misunderstand the concept of statistical significance. Even at a P value of less than .01, statistical significance is claimed. That's more significant than your .05 (95%) figure.; 7/19/11, 8:06 AM
MadisonMan said...: One of the authors was Hugh G. Rextion?; 7/19/11, 8:09 AM
Chip S. said...: These findings match my personal experience. I find that as the size of my junk expands, I'm less interested in work and more interested in play.; 7/19/11, 8:15 AM
SPImmortal said...: Penile length is just one of those poor proxies for race that show up all the time.

Politically correct researchers have trained themselves to ignore the obvious, which leads them to tout the obscure and bizarre.; 7/19/11, 8:17 AM
Scott M said...: I find that as the size of my junk expands, I'm less interested in work and more interested in play.

That would depend heavily on what your profession is, wouldn't it? I envision male porn stars banging away at someone named Jasmine and daydreaming of filling out forms or inspecting tuck pointing.; 7/19/11, 8:19 AM
Roger J. said...: Robert--IIRC the accepted standard is significance at the .05 level (I buthered that in my previous post)

I think the a p=.05 is greater than a p=.01 But thats just my take

When a researcher undertakes a statistical study it is imperative to demonstrate why the underlying are worth studying and might suggest causality.. We can always correlate one variable against another--absent the literature suggesting why the relationship is important, the study is an exercise in statistics rather than a more rigorous study.; 7/19/11, 8:21 AM
ndspinelli said...: Alan S..very funny! First the garbage disposal of a wang, now this..what would Freud say?; 7/19/11, 8:21 AM
Chip S. said...: @RogerJ:

Significance level.

Anyway, chill. The paper is clearly an economist's version of a joke.; 7/19/11, 8:25 AM
Chip S. said...: @ScottM--Porn guy comes home at the end of the day, wifey offers a cocktail and asks, "Hard day at work?"; 7/19/11, 8:31 AM
Roger J. said...: ChipS--thanks for the admonition--I should have applied the razor to think the finns were having fun with us.; 7/19/11, 8:34 AM
Scott M said...: "Hard day at work?"

A male porn star's wife is 1/3 wife, 1/3 manscaper, and 1/3 fluffer.; 7/19/11, 8:35 AM
Roger J. said...: ChipS--may I have your permission to use your joke--and I wont charge you for the damage done to my monitor when I spewed coffee all over it. :); 7/19/11, 8:37 AM
Chip S. said...: RogerJ, There's a ton of papers that look for correlates with growth, many of them meant seriously. This is a parody of those--at least I hope so.

A popular one for a while was the finding that countries with more lawyers per capita had lower growth. Of course, that one had a distinct air of plausibility....; 7/19/11, 8:43 AM
Chip S. said...: @RogerJ, Sure. I stole it from Milton Berle, anyway.; 7/19/11, 8:45 AM
Beta Rube said...: It's nice to see the AGW guys are getting out more.; 7/19/11, 8:45 AM
Roger J. said...: ChipS--I have forgotten that some academics do in fact have a sense of humor Thanks for reminding me; 7/19/11, 8:46 AM
ndspinelli said...: Alan S, your joke reminded me of a warning attached to new pair of binoculars I purchased a few years back. And, this is not a joke, the warning: DO NOT USE TO LOOK DIRECTLY INTO THE SUN. Thank you, attorneys.; 7/19/11, 9:19 AM
William said...: The trick is to make the penis correlate in size to that of the male ego.. Researchers have found that for every $100,000 of disposable income the penis grows on average .7 inches. Purchase of an expensive car is an accelerant to that growth. In order to achieve optimum penile size men will generally work overtime and develop proficiency in boring skills. On a macro level this leads to a more productive enconomy....It should be noted that penile growth does not happen in a vacuum. The presence of desirable women is a stimulus to penile growth. Too many obese women acts as a disincentive to penile growth. It has been found that communities with too many fat women are economically retarded.; 7/19/11, 9:25 AM
cassandra lite said...: This is very hard to swallow.; 7/19/11, 9:26 AM
Lucien said...: All those instances where it seems like two guys are just trying to measure their dicks -- it turns out they're doing macroeconomic research.; 7/19/11, 9:29 AM
Chip S. said...: penile growth does not happen in a vacuum

Oh?; 7/19/11, 9:33 AM
Tibore said...: Man, there's just a bunch of dicks in this thread today, isn't there?

:-O

(*Runs, hides*)

-----

Word Verification: imonist. I don't know... I'm just disappointed I can't make a dick joke out of it... :(; 7/19/11, 9:41 AM
Gabriel Hanna said...: Their regressions have an R^2 value of 0.2, which is consistent with the article saying that it explains "15%" of the variation.

A correlation this low isn't statistically significant. Two variables taken at random are likely to show a correlation this high: the conventional wisdom is, "the whole world correlates at 0.3".

Freshman physics students will often fit their data and report the R^2 value as evidence they did it right, but you can fit a line to a plot of a quadratic and get over 0.95. These numbers have to be interpreted carefully.; 7/19/11, 9:53 AM
RonF said...: ndspinelli - I am a bit of an amateur astronomer. It's obvious to people (one should hope) that you should not use a telescope or binoculars to look directly into the sun.

However, what's not so obvious, and is something that the manufacturers have to legitimately warn people about, is that pointing them at the sun (to use them like you'd use a magnifying glass to burn holes in paper or blow up ants) will very likely damage the instrument to a very expensive extent.; 7/19/11, 9:59 AM
Gabriel Hanna said...: @ronf:pointing them at the sun (to use them like you'd use a magnifying glass to burn holes in paper or blow up ants) will very likely damage the instrument to a very expensive extent.

This is very true--optical coatings, for example, may not stand up this treatment.; 7/19/11, 10:02 AM
edutcher said...: At least no inflatable dolls were harmed in this study.; 7/19/11, 10:11 AM
Chip S. said...: @GabrielH: Just for the record--'cause if this blog is about anything, it's about mathematical precision--in a bivariate linear regression an R^2 of 0.2 corresponds to a simple correlation of about 0.45 if an intercept term is included.; 7/19/11, 10:24 AM
Titus said...: I am not into Porn much but I do like Girth Brooks.; 7/19/11, 10:25 AM
raf said...: Perhaps the causality is the other way around. Higher GDP leads to greater penility. It takes a lot of discretionary income to afford all those enlargers.; 7/19/11, 11:12 AM
clint said...: This tells you basically everything you need to know before reading about *any* study claiming to reach *any* conclusion by comparing populations.; 7/19/11, 11:16 AM
ndspinelli said...: Thanks, RonF. However, the warning was a safety one so it meant not to look into the sun. Probably, some nose breather did, burned his retina, got a shyster and sued. Thusly the warning. I use binocs a lot and I ruined a good pair just having them exposed to the sun/heat.; 7/19/11, 11:30 AM
Roman said...: I took a photo of my manhood for my ex once. After giving it to her, I asked: "what are you going to do with it?"...she said "have it enlarged." Hence, the ex.; 7/19/11, 11:51 AM
jamboree said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 7/19/11, 11:55 AM
SJL said...: The binoculars warning reminds of the gas station warning - "do not siphon by mouth". Yikes!; 7/19/11, 12:01 PM
Luke Lea said...: In my high school the guys had already discovered by 1957 that the angle of the dangle equals the cube of the boob. It wasn't Bedford Stuyvesant either.; 7/19/11, 12:09 PM
JAL said...: For obvious reasons the male organ narrative yields little in terms of feasible policy recommendations.Beyond mass [im]migration, not much can be done
on the average size of male organ at the population level. Still, one practical and serious implication stands out. Namely, these findings spell trouble for countries with large male organs since they evidence both low levels and growth rates of GDPs.

...

It clearly seems that the `private sector' deserves more credit for economic development than is typically acknowledged.

I see Pogo beat me to it.

I, too, wondered if this wasn't another one of those pieces done by the likes of Alan Sokal.

There is a video on youtube of Miss America candidates answering a question about whether math should be taught in schools. It was discovered by a discussion list which has science and medicine educated people on it and the comments are hilarious in that they could not see it was a parody, because they so believe the stereotype of stoopid-beauty queen-Christian-hick that it had to be true.

This penis piece -- or at least the way it was written up jangled my alarm bells also. (? Who proposed the idea? On what basis? Who measured? Who paid? And WHY??)

wv heh -- I don't have the nerve to put in the wv. ;-); 7/19/11, 12:13 PM
JAL said...: @ Luke It wasn't Bedford Stuyvesant either.

I think you mean Stuyvesant High School (Manhattan), not Bed Stuy -- a tough Brooklyn neighborhood.

When Trooper wakes up he'll tell you.; 7/19/11, 12:23 PM
AllenS said...: SJL said...
reminds of the gas station warning - "do not siphon by mouth".

I buy 5 gallons of gas at a time, and then siphon those containers to put gas into my tractors. You know what? Since the introduction of ethanol, gas isn't as bad as it once was. Way back when, when you could buy regular gas. Getting any in your mouth meant hours of a bad gas taste. Now, within 2, 3 minutes you can't taste a thing.

I'm probably the only commenter on this blog that still siphons gas. Am I right?; 7/19/11, 12:32 PM
Cedarford said...: I looked for an APR 1st date on the Finnish article. Nope.

"The GDP-maximizing length can be identi ed at around
13.5 centimetres. One striking result is the collapse in GDP after male organ
exceeds the length of 16 centimetres."

The article goes on to say that Koreans have a dick size of just under 9 centimeters on average whereas the Congolese have 18 centimeter dicks.

So this is basically a polite way of saying that smart industrious little dicked Asians naturally are more prosperous than dumb, lazy, oversexed big dicked niggahss - on average.

Thus by making the distinction a penile one...the Finns avoid the PC repercussions on them of one race being smarter than another, one race harder working than another.

Left unanalyzed are why Jews with bigger dicks on average than Japs are more wealthy...or their co-Semite Palestinian 'cousins'.
Or why big-dick Dutchman are more prosperous than smaller average dick length Irish...; 7/19/11, 1:16 PM
Scott M said...: ...and here I thought niggahss only had one 's'. You, sir, are a veritable fount of knowledge.; 7/19/11, 1:18 PM
Cedarford said...: AllenS - "I'm probably the only commenter on this blog that still siphons gas. Am I right?"

No, but you are probably the only commentor that still siphons gas, kerosene, etc, that has not gone out and purchased a squeeze bulb siphon with a vaccum breaker valve on the top for 6.95.; 7/19/11, 1:20 PM
AllenS said...: Cedarford,

I had a nice squeeze bulb siphon with a vaccum breaker valve on the top, but it went kaput 10 years ago. Purchased something else, but it didn't work. So I'm back doing it the old fashioned way. My original pump came with the kerosine heater that I purchased from a friend.

WV: holes

Ha! That's why the siphon didn't work.; 7/19/11, 1:42 PM
Bart Hall (Kansas, USA) said...: Okay. I checked the original paper. The spoof part is probably that it got published at all.

So they did a regression analysis. Yip. Yip. Yip. Yahoo! More to the point, their R-squared was 15% ("explain over 15% of the ... variation in 1985 GDP"), which is pitiful, and suggests a correlation coefficient of about 0.39, which back in my geo-chemistry days we'd regard as pretty well insignificant.

They had bupkis, but got it published as a joke, to wit the obvious puns.; 7/19/11, 1:59 PM
JackOfClubs said...: Taking 1 Tim 6:10 literally, could we say, "Small penis size is the root of the root of all evil"?; 7/19/11, 2:05 PM
AllenS said...: Cedarford,

I just ordered one of these through The Althouse Woman's Amazon link:

http://www.amazon.com/World-Mktg-DH-10-Manual-Siphon/dp/B000DZH8BG/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1311105356&sr=8-10

Just like what I used to have. I'll keep my home made siphon apparatus just in case.; 7/19/11, 3:00 PM
jimbino said...: Statistical assertions like this have been shown to be wrong 95% of the time.; 7/19/11, 3:28 PM
george said...: If this is true then why hasn't it helped us that we elected a "dick" for president?

Between he and Hillary our economy should be BOOMING!; 7/19/11, 3:52 PM
sorepaw said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 7/19/11, 5:39 PM
JAL said...: @ AllenS I'm probably the only commenter on this blog that still siphons gas. Am I right?

This commenter's husband (who think this commenter might be nuts for all the time spent on Althouse) has been known to siphon gas. ;-)

The most notable occurrence when he accidentally (because he was being a jerk) put some diesel in my gas fueled car a number of years ago. Sigh. That was a bit labor intensive, but turned out okay in the end.

You might want to be careful about that stupid ethanol gas -- the 10% mixture -- it is wreaking havoc on the older auto gas engines, trimmers, lawnmowers etc. (The 15% mix car manufacturers are writing out of their warranties on many cars.)

Check our favorite mag, Popular Mechanics.

Hubby has been putting aviation fuel in our lawnmower. A bit pricey so I wonder whether it is worth it .... Tractor is off road diesel, so not sure what the sulphur deal is there.; 7/20/11, 9:45 AM
lorita said...: I makes sense that the USA would be essentially average, considering it has far less of a common genetic background than other nations that might cause it to skew towards either end of the spectrum. Other nations represented here are more “closed” systems that would allow for such a phenomenon to occur over hundreds or even thousands of years. The USA, on the other hand, is a mixture of many countries.; 7/23/11, 9:48 PM