People often like to take pot-shots at statisticians, psychologists and other data-driven professionals for seeing correlations and relationships where none really exists. Especially if it involves an over-complicated model.
But rarely does such criticism come from inside those professions. And even more infrequently does it come through the medium of satire. But out of the blue, a paper by “Uchen Benzimeni” (apparently serb-croat for ‘Unnamed Scholar’) does just that.
Age is often found to be associated with a plenitude of socioeconomic, politico-administrative, biological and thanatological variables. Much less attention has been paid by scholars, however, to explaining `age’. In this paper we address this unfortunate scientific lacuna by developing a model of `age’ as a function of several factors suggested by (post)rational choice and social constructionist theories. Using state-of-the-art multilevel statistical techniques, our analysis allows the determinants of age to vary with the institutional characteristics of European countries. Our findings convincingly show that generalized trust in strangers, support for incumbent extremist political parties in provincial elections held in the month of January, and the percentage of overqualified women in the cafeterias of national parliaments are all statistically significant explanations of `age’. Our findings have obvious implications for conspiracy theorists, organizational advisors, spin doctors and ordinary charlatans.
The only thing I’m left thinking about is how the hell it got past the editors.
