Stan Cox writes in his new book Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer), that air conditioning was a boon to the Republican Party because it helped fuel the population growth in the South and West:
The invention has also changed American politics: Love it or hate it, refrigerated cooling has been a major boon to the Republican Party. The advent of A.C. helped launch the massive Southern and Western population growth that’s transformed our electoral map in the last half century.
OK, my many hours in social science methodology courses in grad school make me question this assertion. Why would air conditioning attract more conservatives than liberals? Don’t liberals like to be comfortable? Why would the warm weather in the South and West attract more conservatives wanting to get away from snow and ice than liberals? Does this make any sense? Not to me.
Or maybe he doesn’t mean emigration when he refers to “population growth.” Maybe he means that after we got air conditioning here in the benighted South we discovered that it was finally comfortable enough to engage in the kind of activities that result in more population, if you know what I mean.
Admittedly, this is an excerpted sentence in a review, but it pretty much speaks for itself. I think what we have here is called spurious correlation.
