Finding the predictive geniuses

by  Tyler Cowen in

James Acevedo is a "genius," though he admits no one at the
elementary school in Ridgewood, N.J., where he teaches third grade,
knows it.

But the Web site where he competes nightly,
PicksPal.com, was so taken by his record at forecasting sporting events
that it included him last month in a newly compiled list of 30
super-achievers culled from about 100,000 members and began selling
their "genius picks" to the public.

The obvious critical rejoinder is that someone from the group has the lucky touch, but only for a while.

"I go with my gut," he said. "It doesn’t feel like I’m a genius."

James is reluctant to take his wisdom to Las Vegas.  Here is the story, and thanks to Robin Hanson for the pointer.

France fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

While falling birthrates threaten to undermine economies and social
stability across much of an aging Europe, French fertility rates are
increasing.  France now has the second-highest fertility rate in Europe
— 1.94 children born per woman, exceeded slightly by Ireland’s rate of
1.99.  The U.S. fertility rate is 2.01 children.

In addition to birth subsidies, cultural norms encourage women to both work and have kids.  Here is the story.

Mindless eating

by  Tyler Cowen in

The best diet is the one you don’t know you are on.

I am not surprised to read this:

When eating in group of four or eight, light eaters ate more, and heavy eaters ate less.

Those are both from Brian Wansink’s Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.

Here is a New York Times article about the book; it summarizes the book’s practical tips.  Never let yourself forget how much you are eating.  You might also use smaller bowls and wrap transparent candy containers in aluminum foil. 

Why hasn’t Mexico done better?

by  Tyler Cowen in

After all they have NAFTA and democracy, sort of.  Here are the thoughts of Brad DeLong.  I don’t disagree with Brad’s discussion, here are my ideas:

1. The North of Mexico would have done far better, if not for adjusting to brutal competition from China.  They are in fact coping better than most people had expected.

2. The North has in any case done remarkably well.  This implies that the main problems are not of policy per se.

3. Mexico has had a serious internal "immigration" problem, as it tries to digest massive migration from rural areas into urban areas.  Many of these migrants do not have the appropriate cultural capital to support Mexican economic growth.  But this problem will ease over time as the country becomes more integrated.

4. The costs of crime and corruption are significant.  These costs skyrocketed as Mexico became a prime route for cocaine transport to the United States.  Not everything we have done for (to) Mexico has been positive.

5. Mexico will undergo a demographic transition.  Rising population will soon cease to swallow up so many of the per capita the gains from rising total income.

6. The available data significantly understate the standard of living gains in rural Mexico.  Incomes go underreported, or unreported, and new commodities are being introduced all the time.

7. Policy matters less than we economists like to think.

Designing a statistics regime for selfish economists

by  Tyler Cowen in

As my colleague David Levy points out, the economics of economists is a much neglected topic.  But there is some action on the horizon:

The role that competition among scientists will have on researcher initiative bias was discussed by Tullock (1959) who argued that competition would counteract the version of publication bias that occurs when 20 researchers each use different data sets to run the 14 same experiment but when only the one significant result gets published.  Tullock argued that in this case the other 19 researchers would come forward and discuss their insignificant results.  The conclusion Tullock drew from this is that publication bias is more likely to occur in a situation where there is a single data and 20 possible explanatory variables.  In that case, there is no obvious refutation that could be published over the false positive.  The best that can be done is to publish articles emphasizing the number of potential explanatory variables in the data set (as in Sala-I-Martin, 1997) or the fragility of the results to alternative specifications (as in Levine and Renelt, 1992).

That is from a new paper by Ed Glaeser, highly recommended.  Hat tip to New Economist blog.

Does television viewing trigger autism?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Gregg Easterbrook says yes, citing this new study.  Here is part of the abstract:

…we empirically investigate the hypothesis that early childhood television viewing serves as such a trigger [for autism].  Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, we first establish that the amount of television a young child watches is positively related to the amount of precipitation in the child’s community.  This suggests that, if television is a trigger for autism, then autism should be more prevalent in communities that receive substantial precipitation.  We then look at county-level autism data for three states – California, Oregon, and Washington – characterized by high precipitation variability.  Employing a variety of tests, we show that in each of the three states (and across all three states when pooled) there is substantial evidence that county autism rates are indeed positively related to county-wide levels of precipitation.  In our final set of tests we use California and Pennsylvania data on children born between 1972 and 1989 to show, again consistent with the television as trigger hypothesis, that county autism rates are also positively related to the percentage of households that subscribe to cable television.  Our precipitation tests indicate that just under forty percent of autism diagnoses in the three states studied is the result of television watching due to precipitation, while our cable tests indicate that approximately seventeen percent of the growth in autism in California and Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s is due to the growth of cable television.  These findings are consistent with early childhood television viewing being an important trigger for autism.

I am unconvinced.  Precipitation, in these states, is a coastal phenomenon and is proxying for heterogeneity in the gene pool.  Perhaps the coastal areas attract a more "autism-ready" group of individuals.  In fairness to the authors, they do try to control for income and education and population density and diagnosis capacity, among other variables.  Note two worrying features in the results: in California precipitation is not correlated with autism rates at all (there is a north vs. south split for rain, rather than the coast vs. inland), and precipitation is a better predictor of autism than cable viewing is directly. 

Here is the latest autism news on the genetic front.

Addendum: Steve Levitt is also skeptical.

Markets in everything, canine edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

Ice cream maker Good Humor and pet food producer Pedigree have announced plans to produce ice cream sandwiches for dogs.

Apparently this is not a stupid pet snack. The companies said they needed a special formula for the dairy treats, as many dogs are lactose intolerant and cannot easily digest regular ice cream.

Here is the story, and thanks to Robert Stewart for the pointer.

Should we diversify our charitable giving?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Citing Steve Landsburg, Tim Harford argues:

Someone with $100 to give away and a world full of worthy causes should
choose the worthiest and write the check.  We don’t.  Instead, we give $5
for a LiveStrong bracelet, pledge $25 to Save the Children, another $25
to AIDS research, and so on.  But $25 is not going to find a cure for
AIDS.  Either it’s the best cause and deserves the entire $100, or it’s
not and some other cause does.  The scattershot approach simply proves
that we’re more interested in feeling good than doing good.

Many people are unconvinced by this argument–which I owe to Steven Landsburg–because
they are used to diversifying their financial investments (a bit of
Google stock and a bit of Exxon, too) and varying their choices
(vanilla ice cream AND bananas). But those instincts are selfish: They
are not intended to benefit both Google and Exxon, nor both the
ice-cream company and the banana growers. With charity, the logic is
different, and a truly selfless donor would bite the bullet and put his
entire donation behind one cause. That we find that so hard to imagine
is just one more indication of how hard it is for us to think ourselves
into a truly selfless view of the world.

We can think of charitable projects, at least in ex ante terms, as aligned along a continuum of expected returns.  The highest-return project is just a wee bit better than the runner-up candidate.  In that setting, it is hard, as always, to evaluate the efficiency consequences of differing distributions of wealth.  But in a Rawlsian sense — what would a poor person want if he did not know which group he would end up assigned to? — the poor would prefer that any particular gift is diversified.  Even if the dollar rate of return falls by a small amount, the insurance value of that giving rises. 

Keep in mind that a single donation is itself supporting a bundle of projects, not a single giving opportunity.  (What would a truly specialized donation look like?)

I agree with Harford’s point in a different regard.  The fixed costs of processing a donation are relatively high, if only because the charity will send further letters asking for more money.  For that reason it may be better to focus our giving on a single charity.

The behavioral economics of pain

by  Tyler Cowen in

The two main lessons, as I read this paper, are a) pain is less bad when the sufferer can see the endpoint, and b) pain is less bad when the sufferer feels in control to some measure.

The concluding discussion of "happiness economics" is on the mark:

…my personal reflections are only in partial agreement with the literature on well being (see also Levav 2002).  In terms of agreement with adaptation, I find myself to be relatively happy in day-to-day life – beyond the level predicted (by others as well as by myself) for someone with this type of injury.  Mostly, this relative happiness can be attributed to the human flexibility of finding activities and outlets that can be experienced and finding in these, fulfillment, interest, and satisfaction.  For example, I found a profession that provides me with a wide-ranging flexibility in my daily life, reducing the adverse effects of my limitations on my ability.  Being able to find happiness in new ways and to adjust one’s dreams and aspirations to a new direction is clearly an important human ability that muffles the hardship of wrong turns in life circumstances.  It is possible that individuals who are injured at later stages of their lives, when they are more set in terms of their goals, have a more difficult time adjusting to such life-changing events.

However, these reflections also point to substantial disagreements with the current literature on well-being.  For example, there is no way that I can convince myself that I am as happy as I would have been without the injury.  There is not a day in which I do not feel pain, or realize the disadvantages in my situation.  Despite this daily awareness, if I had participated in a study on well-being and had been asked to rate my daily happiness on a scale from 0 (not at all happy) to 100 (extremely happy), I would have probably provided a high number, probably as high as I would have given if I had not had this injury.  Yet, such high ratings of daily happiness would have been high only relative to the top of my privately defined scale, which has been adjusted downward to accommodate the new circumstances and possibilities (Grice 1975).  Thus, while it is possible to show that ratings of happiness are not influenced much based on large life events, it is not clear that this measure reflects similar affective states.

As a mental experiment, imagine yourself in the following situation.  How you would rate your overall life satisfaction a few years after you had sustained a serious injury.  How would your ratings reflect the impact of these new circumstances?  Now imagine that you had a choice to make whether you would want this injury.  Imagine further that you were asked how much you would have paid not to have this injury.  I propose that in such cases, the ratings of overall satisfaction would not be substantially influenced by the injury, while the choice and willingness to pay would be – and to a very large degree.  Thus, while I believe that there is some adaptation and adjustment to new life circumstances, I also believe that the extent to which such adjustments can be seen as reflecting true adaptation (such as in the physiological sense of adaptation to light for example) is overstated.  Happiness can be found in many places, and individuals cannot always predict their ability to do so.  Yet, this should not undermine our understanding of horrific life events, or reduce our effort to eliminate them.

Here are Dan’s papers, and here.  Here are Dan’s riddles.