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Collectors and Hobbyists –the DEMOGRAPHICS:
A while ago I wrote on The Psychology of Collecting: It's kind of a mental thing –running the gamut from a mild quirk to a full blown mental illness. I stress that we all have this quirk to one degree or another. (My own quirk, fr'instance, runs to books, tools and empty barbque sauce bottles.) But what was interesting was how many people seemed to find my ruminations on the topic interesting and wrote back. With this in mind, I offer another take on the world of people who are truly committed to their hobby, but this time with numbers. Not particularly valid numbers, but interesting numbers none the less.
SLICE #1 --the Most Popular Hobbies: This is from Yahoo's GROUPS.... I'm not sure what the noun would be .... 'portal' perhaps. It's a list of bulletin-boards started by various hobbyists. Other hobbyists then surf along and post stuff –opinions, questions & answers, pictures of stuff they have made / collected / found / whatever. Pretty neat actually. People helping people and all. With any statistical abstraction, it's important to ask yourself what does it really say. Seems to me that the following is not so much a picture of how many folks are involved in a given hobby, but rather how many people are involved in a given hobby AND are internet savvy. My own interest in woodworking –for instance- comes in a little lower then I might have suspected, but are the good-old-boys (and girls) who are into making saw-dust also computer geeks? Some are certainly, but not as many as electronic hobbyists for example. Computers operate –as I understand them- with electricity to one degree or another. Notice the popularity of ham-radio as a hobby. Comes in higher then wood-working, and these people can talk to one another on their radios for-goodness-sake. Why would they be attracted to posting things on the internet? Beats me, but numbers don't lie. Except -of course- when they do. I begin with what Yahoo calls simply "Groups". Here are the number of bulletin-boards for each of Yahoo's groups -smallest to largest:
Notice that Hobbies and Crafts really is not that big a category. More important -or more interesting then Government by a few percent, but bupkis compared to things like Entertainment and the Arts or Education. None the less, lets have a look at just how Hobbies and Crafts breaks out.
Beginning with the smallest category, Models, (Home Repair etc doesn't have sub-categories), we have the opportunity to draw some totally unsubstantiated -yet interesting- conclusions about men & women and their hobbies.
From Models, we move on to Collecting. ("Other" doesn't have sub-categories either.) The list of Collectables is way too big to put on a bar-graph, so I offer the above just to give you a feeling of the relative popularity of a few selected collectables. The entire list –with numbers- follows:
From collecting as a hobby, we move on to hobbies as a hobby!!??! One would suspect that collecting ought to be listed as a hobby, but t'aint so. To some degree, if only semantically, collecting is a hobby, but if you scroll up and compare the number of groups dedicated to collecting to those dedicated to hobbies, you find about 19 to 25 thousand. We might just say that collecting is so ubiquitous a hobby as to be something besides a hobby and have done-with-it. None-the-less, here are the numbers for HOBBIES:
Finally, we come to what Yahoo calls "Crafts":
SLICE #2 -How Much People Spend on their Hobbies: This (these?) data come from the
2005 is the most recent year for which I was able to find data. I'm guessing these numbers tell us more about the economy and people's willingness to indulge themselves. Up just a tad in '05
I'd have expected these number to go up more then they did. Appears that the richest people are actually less entertaining then the next to richest. Might have something to do with keeping up with the Joneses.
Looks like the best time to have fun is after you retire. Not a surprise, but nice to see it quantified.
These next tables need a little explanation. The Department of Labor and it's sub department, the Bureau of Labor Statistics deals with the modern "mixed / blended / extended / whatever" family by using what they call a "unit." A unit is 2.5 persons, 0.6 children under 18, 0.3 people over 65, 1.3 earners, and 2 vehicles. Don' ask me why, but it seems as good a solution as any. In any event, I don't know what to make of the numbers above. Considering the table below, it appears that newlyweds have a lot of fun, not so much after baby-makes-three, but when the little dear has grown up a tad, fun ensues again -or the little dear needs lots of expensive toys & crap to keep himself out'a trouble.
Not at all sure what to make of the previous. Unemployment doesn't seem to have much effect on how much we spend on having fun, A little, but not so much.
Now this is interesting. Evidently a mortgage is a particularly onerous thing. Or does it tell us more about retired folks? The 4.2% for the poor renter surprises me a little. And look how much fun the rural folks are having. Is this because this is where all the retired people live, or is it too boring otherwise in the country?
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