Dropping the landline hazardous to your health?

Here’s a great case of a third variable causing a correlation between two things that are themselves unrelated.

 

“We know the wireless-only population is more likely to binge-drink, more likely to smoke, more likely to be be uninsured,” said Stephen Blumberg, a senior scientist at the CDC’s National Center for HealthStatistics.

 

Younger adults are more likely to have only a cellphone, not a landline.  And younger people are more likely to binge-drink, etc.  It’s not the cellphone that causes binge drinking, and not binge drinking that causes you to drop your landline.

 

http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/oklahomans-cut-the-cord-but-vermonters-dont-629/