People of class drink alcohol

On his twitter feed one Conor Friedersdorf made a comment about how beer unites people across the ideological spectrum. I raised my eyebrows at this, because I know that a substantial number of Southern white Protestants do not drink alcohol. With a name like Friedersdorf I suspect that Conor probably didn't consider this because of the normative nature of beer consumption in his social circles. I've always meant to look into the differences in alcohol consumption by demographic because I'm sure you've seen all the medical "studies" which claim that drinking in moderation has benefits toward your health. The main concern I have is that a lot of these seem to be correlational studies (though not all), and there are also often conflicts of interest with the funding (the alcoholic beverage industry is naturally happy to front the cash to pursue research so as to make the correlation firmer in the public mind). Now, I have nothing against alcohol personally, I like dark beers and white wines. But I'm a little skeptical when people promote health benefits of a class of product with which a non-trivial minority of the population have substance abuse issues. To sate my curiosity, I decided to look at the GSS. So you can replicate, here are my variables: Row: Drink Column: Year Race Sex Region God(r:1-3"Non-theist";4-5"Believe, But Doubts";6"Know God Exists") Relig Polviews Degree Wordsum Some of the variables are obvious, but in regards to the somewhat garbled gibberishy looking section I "recoded" it so as to combine classes with very small N's and such. Since you have the variable names you can follow up and see what I did if you're curious. Here are some results.... Not too much change over the years.