Biplots in Stata

I've been examining qualitative data using biplots, which are readily available in Stata using Ulrich Kohler's excellent package. For example, here is a biplot of a rich data set of poor white men on variables such as drug use and other risk factors:

There are several useful features of biplots: first, they concisely summarize a wealth of information in one graph, including relationships among both cases and variables; second, in line with Tufte's dictum, biplots have a high data-to-ink ratio; third, since cases are not directly modeled, biplots help with integrating qualitative and quantitative data (i.e., cases are not "hidden" by a hyperplane, as in a classical linear regression model); finally, there are absolutely no frequentist statistics to deceive the analyst.

Daniel Bell, Master Sociologist

The NYT posted an excellent profile of my late friend Dan Bell, the master sociologist (and big thinker). Even though he was a big-thinking social theorist, I remember that Dan told me, emphatically in fact, that he was a quantitative sociologist! This makes sense, since his big books often included quantitative data of trend lines (which is in many ways advantageous over modeling the data and then focusing on the model parameters, such as regression coefficients or standard errors).