Church On Sunday; Porn During The Week
Via Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution comes word that Harvard Business School professor Benjamin Edelman has gotten hold of a data set on the number of broadband subscribers per zip code who pay for adult content. Professor Edelman breaks down the numbers for us by state in a new paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
The porn-consumption winner in all categories is: Utah!
I was mildly surprised by this; perhaps I am too easily surprised.
Professor Edelman provides an analysis of what drives subscriptions, which gives me an opportunity to come up with an additional winner for most (unintentionally?) funny social science inference I’ve seen in a while:
The fourth column reports that in regions where more people report regularly attending religious services (per National Election Studies 2004), overall subscription rates are not statistically significantly different from subscriptions elsewhere (p=0.848). However, in such regions, a statistically significantly smaller proportion of subscriptions begin on Sundays, compared with other regions. In particular, a 1 percent increase in the proportion of people who report regularly attending religious services is associated with a 0.10 percent reduction in the proportion of purchases that occur on Sunday. This analysis suggests that, on the whole, those who attend religious services shift their consumption of adult entertainment to other days of the week, despite on average consuming the same amount of adult entertainment as others.
This competes for attention with:
Furthermore, I found no significant relationship between subscriptions to this adult entertainment service and presidential voting in 2004, based on poll data by congressional district. However, using individual-level data from a Hitwise sample of ten million anonymized U.S. Internet users, Tancer (2008), finds that adult escort sites are more popular in ‘blue’ states that voted for Gore in 2004, while visitors from the ‘red’ states that voted for Bush in 2004 are more likely to visit wife-swapping sites, adult webcams, and sites about voyeurism.
I’m afraid I have no idea what any of this means, really, but what are comments sections for if not interesting speculation? You can read the original paper in PDF format here, but remember, Faustus cheerfully reads academic papers so that you don’t have to!
Postscript: I can’t help also noting that the fourth paragraph of the paper contains a pleasing scholarly corroboration of my February 15th thesis that porn is an engine of progress.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=3158
Well, you might not know exactly what it all means after reading the orginal source, but EroticRogue found an article that drew a very stark conculsion:
Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers
http://www.news...-news
He quoted this part of it, which I particularily like:
“Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by,” Edelman says.”
I love it when I’m invited to “speculate”!
Re: “…adult escort sites are more popular in ‘blue’ states that voted for Gore in 2004, while visitors from the ‘red’ states that voted for Bush in 2004 are more likely to visit wife-swapping sites…”
Over the years both my intimate relationships with the opposite sex, as well as my profession, have allowed me to have considerable access to both liberal and conservative families and to closely observe their behaviors. Subjectively, I would speculate that one thing this shows is that liberals will pay good money for good sex, whereas conservatives seem so tight-fisted that they will settle for what they can get without parting with their cash. The very nature of being conservative, seems to choke-off any real chance of “trickling”, in the “trickle down” theory of economics, which is probably why it is failing. They want a better sex life, and swapping affords them this ability without having to share the wealth.