theatlantic: The No. 1 Reason Americans Are Getting Fatter: We’re Not Smoking “Using the traditional Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique” — a social science method often used to study two groups or components with different credentials; a method, essentially, of comparing apples to oranges — “we find that cigarette smoking has the largest effect: the decline in cigarette smoking explains about two percent of the increase in … Continue reading