Simpson’s paradox in the wild

Found on Wikipedia by Kate Owens: a chart of education by income and race. At each level of education, white Americans outearn Asian-Americans. But overall, Asian Americans outearn white Americans. How does this happen?

The answer, of course, is that Asian Americans have a higher level of education overall. If the two groups had the same overall level of education, white Americans would outearn Asian Americans. It’s an example of Simpson’s paradox in the wild. (Note: one example of Simpson’s paradox at the Wikipedia article involves characters called “Lisa” and “Bart”.)

The Wikipedia chart is based on 2003 data. I would like to be able to reconstruct this with present data, but unfortunately more recent data seems to not break out Asian Americans separately.

One thought on “Simpson’s paradox in the wild

  1. Hi! A workmate and me have created an app for mobile which allows us to get probability distributions that many calculators don’t allow us to get. Moreover, it includes examples for exercises in order to learn to differentiate among binomial, normal, hypergeometric and poisson distributions.
    With Estadistica MOBILE you can get your probabilities easily and quickly.

    I put the link here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.jordi.estadistica

    Thanks!

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