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.

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