Commenter Michael linked to a blog by somebody called The Last Psychiatrist, discussing the recent study by Rank and Hirschl estimating that half the kids in America in the 1970s were on food stamps at some point in their childhood. I’ve commented on some statistical aspects of that study, but The Last Psychiatrist makes some good points regarding how the numbers can and should be interpreted.

P.S. I flipped through The Last Psychiatrist blog and it was pretty interesting; mixed amidst the rants were thoughtful comments on interesting-looking psychological studies. But I was really, really irritated by the blogger’s style of putting only a picture and a single sentence on each entry, then you have to click through to read the rest. Doing this on occasion is fine–Lord knows, not all our readers here want to see all 10 versions of whatever red-state, blue-state map I happen to be playing with this week–but to do it for every damn blog entry, that’s just silly, and it degraded my reading experience enough that I gave up after clicking back and forth on a few entries. Maybe I’ll go back some other time and read the rest.

P.P.S. Seeing the commenters at that blog (and others) makes me really appreciate what we have here. Although I guess anybody could get intelligent, sobersided commentators by the simple expedient of throwing in enough blogging about hierarchical models, statistical computation, and so forth, to scare off the casual readers.