Drinking Alcohol More Makes You Richer (Or Does It)

Or not.

But I got your attention, didn't I?

I'll get to the drinking in a minute. Before that, more broadly in social sciences, we run into the problem that most things that humans do are caused by a multitude of things. So the things we observe are caused by a bunch of other things. We ought to try and measure or observe those as completely as possible.

But the problem is worse than that. In understanding the relationships between those variables, omitting relevant variables is a much bigger problem than including irrelevant variables. 

So something that should set off all of your mental alarms is an overly broad claim based on an overly narrow set of variables.

For example, claiming that a single thing like drinking alcohol causes one to be richer. That's crazy, right? But that's what you might readily conclude from this:

Hmmm. Three richer areas have more drinkers, and two poorer areas have less drinkers.

The message here is that when you see something like this, every instinct should be to add other variables to see if this relationship goes away. If it does, then there is no relationship. If it persists, there's never an end to the process, but the more things you try which, in spite of their presence or addition, the relationship remains ... the more confident you should be that you've found something important.

This infographic comes from Visual Capitalist, a site which is pretty good at producing catchy graphics. Your takeaway should be that maybe those graphics require deeper thought.