Not sure what you are playing at, but your insistance on “show me” and your complete failure to investigate any of the links provided makes me question your stated motives.
If you really are interested in educating yourself on the subject the CDC has a website chock full of smoking related data.
As someone said upthread, my experience is based more on culture and peers than education when it comes to smoking.
For instance, in my experience, the more stressful and customer-driven the job, the more the employees are likely to smoke. Back when I worked in the restaurant industry, I could count the number of nonsmokers on one hand compared to the smokers. Ditto retail. At my present job the nonsmokers now outnumber the smokers, but there are still enough smokers around for the company to designate an actual smoking area.
If everyone smokes at home, the likelihood the child eventually will, too. I know this for a fact because it happened to me.
I think that part of this is because in some industries, going out for a smoke doesn’t count as a break. So if you want breaks, or more of them, you take up smoking.
When my husband was in Air Force boot camp, the smokers got regular breaks, while the nonsmokers got to police the area (they had to go around picking up trash). So my husband took up smoking, thinking that he could quit any time. If smoking is rewarded, then more people will smoke.
No, no, I appreciate the links, honest. I’ll sift through the raw data, too, if that’s all there is, though I’m a little surprised that no one seems to have published an actual book on the subject–I’d think that would make fascinating reading. As to my insistence on “show me,” well, this IS GQ, isn’t it? I asked a question, stated my uniformed biases on the subject, and got accused of making some sort of pernicious argument slandering the good smokers of the world. Not the way GQ is supposed to work, izzit?
I just hopped around your CDC site for a few minutes, checked out two states, NY and AL, and found some interesting stuff, interesting to me anyway:
NY is below the national average of smokers, AL above
In both states, the highest percentage of smokers is American Indians, and in both whites are likelier to smoke than blacks.
Education is enormously indicative of smoking–in both states, having less than a high school education makes you twice as likely to smoke as someone who went to (not graduated from) college.
I don’t have the time or training to go through all this stuff and draw valid conclusions (that’s what I’m hoping someone has written a book about) but this quick and dirty glance seems to bear out at least some of my biases.
In NJ and PA, African-American smokers are more prevalent than white smokers. In all four states I’ve viewed so far, Asians seem resistant to smoking, American Indians crazy high. Correlation between smoking and lack of education continues high.
In MS., trends continue. particularly education. The part I’m not getting, maybe the part that messes me up is that the totals (“finished high school,” “less than high school,” “more than high school”) would seem to equal 100%, yet add up (in MS.'s case) to 77%–so who is the other 23%?
Questions like these are why I need someone to interpret the statistics for me.
I mean Mississippi by “MS,” i might have used the wrong postal abbreviation.
I think the chart means that X% of people in each of these educational categories are smokers (in which case there is no reason why the percentages should add up to 100%), not X% of smokers fall into each category.
Thanks, that makes sense… I’m convinced that sifting through raw data is not a good use of my time.
Right. The statistics don’t prove causation. It could be the case that smoking itself causes teenagers to be more likely to drop out (i.e. that if a random high school student starts smoking, the effects of the tar or nicotine cause mental changes that increase the likelihood of the person dropping out of education or losing motivation in continuing on to college or grad school), but the statistics don’t prove that either.
This is certainly one of the more bizarre GQ threads I’ve seen. I’ve been working in the area of smoking cessation research for a few decades now, and I can tell you that in the US at least, the fact that, statistically speaking, smokers are on average poorer and less well educated than nonsmokers is so thoroughly documented that it would never occur to anyone in the field to think otherwise. This is why, in any epidemiological study of the risks of being a smoker, you have to control for factors like that – you can’t just take a bunch of smokers and a bunch of nonsmokers, find that the smokers have (say) worse teeth, and conclude that smoking causes bad teeth – any reviewer would say “come back when you’ve controlled for income”.
Or that bad teeth causes smoking.
I’m well educated, consider myself intelligent, earn a good salary, am not at all religious, drive an SUV, live in a different country, own no guns, watch the BBC, and vote Liberal Democrat.
Which puts you at zero for nine. Well done!
Interestingly, I consider people who make baseless assumptions and random generalisations to be unintelligent and uneducated. Freaky, eh?
Right, since the survey of a thousand people out of a few million smokers is much more accurate that what I mentioned. Again, I’m commenting on your biased assumptions. My defensiveness usually increases around smug non smokers.
As Hicks said “My biggest fear if I quit smoking is I’ll become one of you.”
This thread, as most on the smoking topic, was started by a non smoker looking to go after smokers. That’s the sad part. By the way, are you 12? Getting int ogeneric put downs of comments rather than discussing it, very original. What next? Attacking my grammar?
Okay: “You’re bias” should be “Your biases” in the first quote, and “non smoker” is better written as “nonsmoker” or “non-smoker,” depending on your style of choice.
Seriously: does no one understand that a general trend in a population does not hold for every individual in that population? It would be nice to have some clarity as to which studies are about American smokers and which are about smokers worldwide, but otherwise, face facts. You may be an outlier or an exception, and for all I know the smoke may lend the gentle scent of violets to your hair and clothing, but there is a substantial body of evidence from which it is indeed possible to generalize without bias.
You forgot to dis him for the “int ogeneric” typo.
The tobacco plant is of traditional cultural significance to native people.
Are smokers more defensive than non-smokers? More thin-skinned? More irritable? Less grammatical? With smaller penises? And more back hair?
You know, if you’re serious, and I think you might be, I would like to know what use tobacco make of this information in their long-range marketing plans. What trends have there been over the years in American Indians’ smoking habits? If they’re holding steady, or increasing, while every other market is shrinking, I’d think big tobacco would be interested in this area.