Wow!  This means we may be able to decrease alcoholism rates among Mexican Americans—and maybe everybody!—by increasing their time in college.  Couple trillion here, couple trillion there, and we’ll have stuffed classrooms and no more alcoholics.  For an academic, it doesn’t get any better.

But there’s a major oopsy here—correlation is not causation. All that Wan and co-author Yanlei Du found was a correlation between lower levels of alcoholism and higher levels of education. But of course’s there’s a correlation.  I mean, they’re alcoholics!  They’re focusing on Jack Daniels, not finals. Stuffing hard core alcoholics into a college classroom won’t fix their problem.

I wrote to Professor Wan, and she responded, quite rightly, that “Our study is a retrospective cross sectional study, instead of a prospective study, which does not allow us to draw a causative relationship.” 

So why did she proceed to imply a causative relationship?

Wan also pointed out in yeoman’s English (which is far better than my Chinese): “In our studied population, 60% alcoholics reported the age when the drinking first interfered with school, work or other responsibilities were older than 20 years old. This finding suggests that less education lead to alcoholism rather than alcoholism lead to less education. Education can do a lot of thing including improve the chance to get a job. However, none of these was the focus of the paper. The key point of our paper was to give an example to show the interaction of a specific gene polymorphism with an environment factor in contribution to alcoholism.”

What Wan just said was that is that education was not the focus of her paper, which was instead focused on genes and an environmental factor—which happened to be education. 

Which is kind of hard to parse.

But any intelligent person (except an academician indoctrinated to be blind to the possibility of innate differences in intelligence), would consider the possibility that some of the alcoholics in Wan’s study did not go on to higher education because those particular alcoholics weren’t very bright, which made classroom learning a chore. The real difficulty then wouldn't be their lack of higher education--it would be their lack of intelligence.  More than that, a stupid alcoholic is probably the last person you’d want to use as a reliable source to discover when behavior first began to interfere with education.

Who vets this stuff, anyway?  If Wan studied the relationship between lower levels of alcoholism and a richer sex life, would she also find a correlation?  Voilà!  Prostitution would be a cheaper reform.

Teaser image from Encyclopedia of Stupid: Alcohol.

Homeless alcoholic image from Naked Man in the Tree.