It's David Giacalone Day at GSU

Keeping in the time honored tradition of having days at GSU, I thought I'd talk about David Giacalone today.  Mr. Giacalone has the multi-named (and multi -personality) blog which is currently called f/k/a.  We are treated daily to haiku, snarky comments about blawg adverts, and One Breath Punditry (although, as I said the other day I think it could be called ten or twelve breath punditry!).

One of the more interesting themse of note is his commentary on statistics about lawyers.  Are there too many lawyers, do they have big brains, and are they stupid because they don't take the GRE?  Inquiring minds want to know.

This talk about statistics reminds me of Stephen Magee's graph (from this book) on the relationship between lawyers and gdp.  In fact, the relationship is between gdp growth rates and the ratio of lawyers to physicians.

(Click on the image to blow it up).  Now what is interesting is that the gsp growth rate is measured from 1960-1980.  Things are different today, but the long term US GDP growth rate is not much different today than it was from 60-80.  However, Japan's and India's are.  I suspect that India was able to increase its growth rate without resort to any Shakespearean style advocat-i-cide . Japan's problems, in turn, weren't caused by 12 new ABA approved law schools churning out thousands of lawyers a year. 

I should be grading, but I got some data from the AMA, the ABA, and the BEA (plus some population data from the Census).  I then made the following plot like Magee's that shows the average growth of state's gsp per capita versus the lawyer/ratio for each state. (I took some short cuts, so if a more thorough person wants to take a stab at this too, be my guest.)

Interpreting this graph is almost like reading tea leaves, but it appears that there are two types of relationships among the states.  The first type shows relatively no sensitivity between gsp growth and lawyers/doctors.  This includes states like MA, NY, IL, CA, FL, GA (among others) and then there are states like NH, VT,ND,HI,MT,RI that appear to show a different type of behavior.  It is this second group of states that shows the Magee relationship of an inverse relationship between growth and lawyers.  There is no obvious distinction to be made between the flat states and the inverse states.  Commentators can suggest hypotheses and I will try to work on that next week after I finish grading!

Comments

[David Giacalone]

Oh, sure, I get a weekend day, when all the smart readers are out having a life and not reading their favorite risk-e weblogs.

However, I've never been one to look a gift professor in the mouth (and sure don't want to look at the other end). So, of course, I am duly honored, even though this is making it hard to keep my promise to stick to one-breath punditry (especially with my poor lung capacity these days).

I'll try to come up with some theories to go with your interesting updated GDP/lawyer graph. Does the Lawyer Licensing study I discussed last night by Prof. Pagliero, suggest any answers?

p.s. Nice weblog roll, but don't you just hate it when some one uses asterisks but gives no explanation?

p.p.s Your weblog snuck ahead of mine the other day when someone Google "f/k/a." Looks like domain theft to me.

[Mike Giberson]

In response to your remark, "There is no obvious distinction to be made between the flat states and the inverse states."

Actually, one obvious distinction appears right away. The "flat states" all have relatively large populations, while the "inverse states" are small.

Using the census data you cited, the populations of the flat states range from 34.6 million to 6.4 million. By comparison, the inverse states range in population between 1.3 million and 613 thousand.

Another way to make the point is to look at rankings. The flat states listed are ranked 1, 3, 4, 5, 10, and 13 in population; the inverse states listed are 41, 42, 43, 44, 47, and 49.

Without hazarding any sort of a theory, one could check to see if other large population states are "flat" (2. Texas, or 6. Pennsylvania) and other small population states are "inverse" (48. Alaska, or 50. Wyoming).