Liberal/Conservative

Damon Darlin's Extra Weight, Higher Costs claims

...have you considered what [Christmas cookies another eggnog] will do to your wealth? The sugar and fat will add pounds, which can lead to heart disease, diabetes and a shortened life span.

There is another consequence to packing on extra weight: being fat costs money — tens of thousands of dollars over a lifetime.

Heavy people do not spend more than normal-size people on food, but their life insurance premiums are two to four times as large. They can expect higher medical expenses, and they tend to make less money and accumulate less wealth in their shortened lifetimes. They can have a harder time being hired, and then a harder time winning plum assignments and promotions...

“Being overweight can be dangerous to your wealth,”... While the health problems ravage savings, an overweight person may have difficulty accumulating a nest egg in the first place.

Only towards the end of the article do we see

A chicken-or-egg question invariably pops up. Are people fat because they are poor or poor because they are fat?

Absolutely. Correlation is not causation. Nonetheless, the article does cite some studies regarding discrimination:

Evidence from decades of discrimination studies has led Mark V. Roehling, an associate professor at the School of Labor and Industrial Relations at Michigan State University, to the conclusion that there is “consistent evidence of weight discrimination.”... Mr. Roehling is convinced that weight bias is stronger than bias stemming from race. You can test that thesis yourself with the Implicit Association Test, at implicit.harvard.edu/implicit. It was created by researchers at Harvard, the University of Virginia and the University of Washington to plumb an individual’s attitude toward race, ethnicity and religion. Take the test for prejudice against overweight people and compare your result against the similar test for race.

So I click on the link, where I have to register, and find that my "Political Identity", lies along a single dimension, ranging from "strongly liberal" to "strongly conservative", even though at least 10% of Americans are libertarian.



Meanwhile, "Religious Affiliation" includes affiliations like Buddhist, Hindu, and Sikh. I notice (to their credit) that the "Race" category includes both East Asian and South Asian; does that mean the staff is South Asian? But then the site has the mainland Chinese flag for a simplified Chinese version, but not a Taiwan flag.

Update
I complained and got answer, to wit:

We fully realize and appreciate the diversity of political attitudes and affiliations. That being said, much of the research on political identity has shown that a single, unidimensional question, like the kind we have on our research site, can be much better psychometrically than multiple items. The type of item that we have generally accounts for a large proportion of the variance (> 75%) found in multidimensional measures.

The religious affiliation responses on based on a list of U.S. churches with congregations with more than 50,000. We also added some other religions.

We don't yet have an international collaborator for Taiwan. If you know of anyone who's interested, please let us know.