Dubbers Asks: The Living Bejeebers

Is foreign intervention euvoluntary? Not according to Chris Coyne. He's found that even using the barest criteria for success forwarded by State Department elites, foreign adventures fail to meet the standards proposed. One cynical way of looking at it is that Coyne felled a lot of trees and spilled a lot of ink proving something everyone already knows: politicians lie. This is hardly a revelation.

What is a revelation is to whom they're lying. And it's a further revelation who it is that endeavors to believe those lies.

On Twitter, to Thy Dungeon Master, Dubbers asks a simple question: "how does war enthusiasm relate to income? My prior: negative correlation." The freight on this question is stamped "GSS" and it so happens that I know how to skipper that vessel, folks. I offered to do the leg work, and I also admit that my priors were the same as Carden's: high income means more aversion to war.

I was disappointed to discover that the GSS doesn't have that specific question (that I could find anyway; there are more than 5000 variables in that bad boy), but it does have a few plausible proxies. I went with USINTL, "take active part in world affairs" with a binary output: [take active part | stay out].

More below the fold. Lots more. Warning: what you'll find below may look pretty technical, but I promise I'll make it as easy as possible for the average reader to understand.