Chance News 110
Quotations
Forsooth
Statistical artifacts
Interracial marriage
Peter Doyle sent a link to this chart from the Economist:
- Daily chart: Interracial marriages are rising in America
- Economist, 12 June 2017
,Quoting from the article, one reader commented:
"Of the roughly 400,000 interracial weddings in 2015, 82% involved a white spouse, even though whites account for just 65% of America’s adult population. " If you lump the population into just two groups A and B, 100% of intergroup marriages will involve a spouse from group A, no matter what fraction of the population belongs to group A.
Exercise: 2015 census data is available by googling "us census quickfacts". While the categories don't precisely match those in this piece, you can use this data to get a rough estimate the fraction of interracial weddings that would involve a white spouse under random pairing. What do you get? Is your answer more or less than 82%?
Peter notes that he got just over 82%. Here is his solution (using Mathematica):
