yeah that would be a really good argument if they showed that the people that are not ‘rich enough’ and the people that don’t understand how the internet fundamentally differs from other major media platforms are also the parts of the population most likely to read book. What I remember from statistics I have seen there is a correlation between reading and being relatively well to do, and furthermore in my personal experience the people who understand that the internet fundamentally differs are also the people most likely to read. For these reasons I think the contrarian argument that the young will continue reading books despite the internet is uh, bullshit.

I agree with Henry’s skepticism on the two articles. These analyses examining the identity perspective of different demographics do bring up interesting points, yet I am not convinced that there will be more democrats in the future that still avoid computers. I love reading, and I don’t think books are going to go extinct- but I do think that it will be necessary for everyone to use the internet and computers. Computers are necessary for anyone that has a hope for a decent job.

But when we had to type them, many students couldn’t do footnotes correctly. (Remember working out the line count? And recasting sentences to make room? Ow.) Of course, your average person resents having to do footnotes, which probably slows mastery.

On the other hand, I’d expect GenP2P to understand being on one side or the other of a host, so the ISP problem is more confusing…. Unless ‘I couldn’t get to JSTOR’ is the new ‘dog ate it’.

Interesting, thanks. But you can still ask if cohort or age effects (or neither) explain the differences in party ID between different age groups, right? Especially if, as Gelman discusses, you constrain the effects to some space of the “reasonable”.

Would you agree that the patterns in the data from the Washington Post site offer some (weak) support for a cohort effect, and (stronger) grounds for rejecting a meaningful age effect?

Your scepticism is warranted, teens read more books than ever, cf. e.g.:

Teens buying books at fastest rate in decades
Who says teens don’t read?
Generation R (R Is for Reader)

The assumption that a new medium necessarily inhibits the consumption of older media is fundamentally flawed, because most people consume several media simultaneously and media usage as such has increased immensely. For example TV hurt the film industry for a while in the fifties and early sixties, but it didn’t have any negative long term effects.

Well, yes. What’s wrong with that?

you have no idea what happens to the positions of individuals within age cohorts. there could be event effects, life cycle effects, etc.

Well, no.The aggregate data are enough to reject the idea of life cycle effects. There clearly is not a relationship between age and party ID, at least not one that is strong & stable enough to matter. As far as whether there is a cohort effect, you’re right, this is just suggestive. With more detail, it’s possible the apparent cohort effect would disappear. But it still tells us something.

By the way, the Gelman paper Henry links to discusses doing exactly the same analysis: estimating age, cohort and period effects using just annual breakdowns of party ID by age. So obviously he (and presumably Henry) don’t agree that such an analysis leaves you with “no idea” about the underlying dynamic.

Barack Obama was born in 1961.

A possible explanation for why Obama speaks so well across the ideological divide: He grew up as a liberal in a time of conservative reaction, and he chose to learn how to modulate his rhetoric.