As I mentioned in my column, the correlation which supposedly proved that whiny kids grow up to be conservatives was .27. Any number of Derb-like statitistics types have inundated me with email that I wasn’t hard enough on this point. This reader speaks for many:

Thanks for the article Jonah. At the George Mason (go Patriots!) School of Public Policy we’re taught that if you don’t have a .6 correlation you don’t have publishable research. A .27 correlation with a sample size of 100 is random noise but I guess if you are a Berkeley liberal that’s all you need.