Not eating Arby's is a strong indicator you're a liberal

Arby's.
(Image credit: Rick Diamond/Getty Images for Arby's)

If you eat at Arby's, you are probably not a liberal. If you own a dog, a flashlight, and glass bakeware, you are almost certainly white.

Our consumer habits — as well as media consumption, social attitudes, and the way we use our time — correlate strongly with demographic identifiers of gender, income, race, ideology, and education. So strongly do they correlate, in fact, that two University of Chicago economists, Marianne Bertrand and Emir Kamenica, were able to create an algorithm that can predict an individual's demographic details if given information on what they buy, watch, think, and do.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.