New Book!
I am working on a new book called You Would Choose Now: Measuring America’s Progress Toward Fairness and Tolerance. It’s a data-driven exploration of progress (or not) in public opinion and civil rights.
I posted the first two chapters as an Early Access edition on LeanPub (a platform for posting work in progress like this): https://leanpub.com/ywcn
If you would like to check it out, the “Free Sample” has just the first chapter. If you sign up with an email address, you can get the “Community Edition”, which has the first two chapters — and that’s all there are for now. Chapter 3 is scheduled for October 1.
As I add chapters over the next six months, I will post excerpts on Substack. So if you only follow this blog and not my Substack, you might want to sign up over there. I will continue to post on other topics here.
What’s it about?
If you read this post from a couple of weeks ago, you already know the premise of the book: in 2016, Barack Obama gave a commencement address at Howard University, where he said
If you had to choose one moment in history in which you could be born, and you didn’t know ahead of time who you were going to be — what nationality, what gender, what race, whether you’d be rich or poor, gay or straight, what faith you’d be born into — you wouldn’t choose 100 years ago. You wouldn’t choose the fifties, or the sixties, or the seventies. You’d choose right now.
That was a bold thing to say to new college graduates, even in 2016. So I read Obama’s address with a skeptical eye. I wondered if he was right in 2016, and if so, whether he would still be right in 2026. And I thought about how to prove or disprove it. That’s what the book is about.
Chapter 1 is an introduction that includes an example of the primary statistical method I’ll use, period-cohort analysis. Chapter 2 is about sexual orientation. I plan to publish Chapter 3, which is about gender, on October 1. And then Chapter 4, about race, on November 1.
Part of the reason I am publishing incrementally is to encourage reader feedback, so I welcome comments and suggestions.
And if you are interested in the technical details, there’s an appendix that explains the analysis.