You get what you pay for
Smart women who were shut out of the professions used to become teachers. That was bad for the women but good for their students.
The best female students – those whose test scores put them in the top 10 percent of their high school classes – are much less likely to become teachers today.
“Whereas close to 20 percent of females in the top decile in 1964 chose teaching as a profession,” making it their top choice, the economists write, “only 3.7 percent of top decile females were teaching in 1992,” making teachers about as common as lawyers in this group.
So the chances of getting a really smart teacher have gone down substantially. In 1964, more than one out of five young female teachers came from the top 10 percent of their high school classes. By 2000, that number had dropped to just over one in 10.
Women who do become teachers, however, are better educated today than in earlier years so rather than a total dumbing down there has been a trend towards mediocrity.
Merit pay would lead to better teachers but it is opposed by unions.
This is from the ever-wise Virginia Postrel, NYT password required. Here is a link to the original research. Caroline Hoxby argues that wage compression, often brought on by unionization, is responsible for three-quarters of the decline in the aptitude of female teachers.
Can they read us in China?
Glutter.com reports:
All typepad.com and blogs.com hosted sites are banned in China starting this morning, a week after China has agreed to amend its constitution to respect human rights. This is another move by the Central government to curb free speech and freedom of information on the Internet. This is the first time in two years that China has blocked access to foreign servers that host personal sites.
Please write me from China and tell me this is wrong.
By the way:
81% of all cyber dissidents in the world are held in China: 59 out of 72 logged by Reporters Without Borders compared to 38 out of 48 in November 2003.
The afore-mentioned news is tragic, but if true it is a measure of how influential the blogsophere has become. Thanks to Scott Cunningham for the pointer, check out his blog, which covers a good deal of economics.
Is Russia a normal country?
Conventional wisdom in the West says that post-Cold War Russia has been a disastrous failure. The facts say otherwise. Aspects of Russia’s performance over the last decade may have been disappointing, but the notion that the country has gone through an economic cataclysm and political relapse is wrong–more a comment on overblown expectations than on Russia’s actual experience. Compared to other countries at a similar level of economic and political development, Russia looks more the norm than the exception.
That’s the take of Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman. Here is the full article. Here is a longer unpublished version.
Here is their view on economic performance:
The best estimate is that Russia’s genuine output decline between 1990 and 2001 was small and that it was completely reversed by 2003, following two additional years of rapid growth. Considering the distorted demand, inflated accounting, and uselessness of much of the pre-reform output, it is likely that Russians today are on average better off than they were in 1990.
My take: Mostly I agree. Remember how The New York Times speculated about mass famine, civil war in the streets, or attempted reconquests of the Soviet empire? None of those dire events have come to pass. Parts of the Shleifer piece might be interpreted as Putin apologetics, but put that question aside. For the most part the former Soviet Union has made unexpected progress. If you don’t believe me, read my post from yesterday.
The origins of human intelligence?
Researchers have proposed an answer to the vexing question of how the human brain grew so big. We may owe our superior intelligence to weak jaw muscles, they suggest.
A mutation 2.4 million years ago could have left us unable to produce one of the main proteins in primate jaw muscles, the team reports in this week’s Nature. Lacking the constraints of a bulky chewing apparatus, the human skull may have been free to grow, the researchers say.
The timing of the mutation is consistent with rampant brain growth seen in human fossils from around 2 million years ago, says Nancy Minugh-Purvis of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who helped with the study. “Right at the point you lose power in these muscles, brain size evolution accelerates,” she says.
Here is the full story. Here is the original research. Here is another account, which also reports on the critics of the idea. My gut level lay person’s response is not to believe the hypothesis, but hey, try convincing a physicist of the notion of comparative advantage.
Soviet observations
1. Here is the second sentence of Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine: “We may perhaps put this in perspective in the present case by saying that in the actions here recorded about twenty human lives were lost for, not every word, but every letter, in this book.” That sentence represents 3,040 lives. The book is 411 pages long.
2. Joke: Why are the USSR and America the same? A: Because in the USSR you can joke about America and in America you can joke about America.
3. Stalin famously said: “Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.”
4. In the first weeks of the war the Soviet Union lost 30 percent of its ammunition and 50 percent of its reserves of food and fuel. In the first three months the air force lost 96.4 percent of its planes…By the end of 1942, 3.9 million Russian soldiers had been taken prisoner – 65 percent of the Red Army…It would be pat, but also accurate, to say that from 1933 to 1941 the only human being on earth that Stalin trusted was Adolf Hitler.
5. But progress has already been made. The argument, now, is about whether Bolshevik Russia was “better” than Nazi Germany. In the days when the New Left dawned, the argument was about whether Bolshevik Russia was better than America.
From Martin Amis’s excellent Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. The material is quoted directly from Amis, I have added the numbering.
The benefits of no-fault divorce
In the past three decades, liberalized divorce laws have reduced suicides among women, sparked a dramatic reduction in domestic violence and led to a decline in women murdered by their partners, according to economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers.
Specifically, they claim, these benefits have resulted from the adoption of so-called “no-fault” divorce laws, in which one partner can end the marriage without the consent of the other.
After states adopted no-fault divorce laws, suicides among women dropped by 20 percent, the rate of domestic abuse fell by a third, and the number of women murdered by their partners dropped by about 10 percent, Stevenson and Wolfers found.
Adoption of unilateral divorce laws didn’t affect the suicide rate of men or the likelihood that they would be murdered by their partners. But domestic violence directed at both men and women declined, the researchers reported in a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper.
Here is the link. Here is the original research. Here is the home page of Betsey Stevenson; he is the home page of Justin Wolfers. Here is Wolfers’s summary of the research.
My take: I’m all for family values, but let’s not forget that some families should split up.
Beliefs about welfare
Why does Western Europe spend so much more on welfare payments than does the United States?
Why is the latter system (45% of GDP) bigger than the former system (30% of GDP)?
While 29% of Americans believe that poor people are trapped in poverty, 60% of Europeans share this belief.
While 30% of Americans believe that luck determines income, 54% of Europeans share this belief.
While 60% of Americans believe that poor people are lazy, 24% of Europeans share this belief.
Robert Tagorda continues with the following:
These statistics come from the Economist, which has a fascinating review of Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference. Authored by Harvard scholars Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, this forthcoming book argues that institutional and political differences lead to contrasting American and European approaches.
More provocatively [we now move to Tagorda citing The Economist]:
The other half of the explanation lies in America’s racial diversity. In spite of 20 years of unprecedented immigration, European countries, particularly smaller ones like Portugal and those of Scandinavia, are still highly racially homogenous. America, by contrast, has great diversity, which is especially wide in some states. In addition, the poor in America are disproportionately non-white. Non-Hispanic whites are 71% of America’s population but only 46% of the poor.
Racial diversity in individual states is correlated with the generosity of welfare. For instance, the authors find that in 1990 Aid to Families with Dependent Children ranged from over $800 per family per month in mainly white Alaska to less than $150 in Alabama and Mississippi, where almost one-third of the population is black. Even after adjustment for inter-state differences in average incomes, the correlation with race remained strong. Across countries, too, racial diversity goes with low government spending on poverty relief.
The reason, argue the authors, is that “race matters”, and they marshal statistical evidence, much of it from opinion surveys, to back this up. People are likely to support welfare if they live close to recipients of their own race; but are antipathetic if they live near recipients from another race. The divergent attitudes of Europeans and Americans to the poor are underwritten by the fact that the poor in Europe tend to be ethnically the same as most other folk. In America, their skin is often a different colour. [Emphasis added by Tagorda.]
My take: I buy the basic results. The sorry truth is that a fully cosmopolitan society is an impossible ideal. Furthermore the proffered questions don’t fully get at the real beliefs of many Americans, which is that most poor people deserve their status. (I think some of the poor are lazy, but being a determinist I don’t assign fault.) That being said, it is such false beliefs that keep American welfare spending at reasonable, non-European levels. By the way, here is a related paper by the authors.
Ebay vigilantes
Imagine spending your spare time perusing ebay for fraudulent listings and stopping them. A fair number of people do exactly that. Read Cronaca.com for the full story.
How does sadness affect market behavior?
Sadness makes you more eager to both buy and sell. It lowers the reservation price of sellers. Not surprisingly, feelings of disgust make you more eager to sell, but less eager to buy. Here is the home page of the one of the researchers. Here is some press coverage.
Randall Parker suggests: “Avoid shopping or selling things when you are sad.”
An alternative interpretation is that retail therapy is exactly what you need. That being said, I suspect that consummating a transaction is what makes you happy, not buying something expensive per se. Your vulnerability may suck you into spending more money than you ought to, but just sitting at home is a mistake as well. And contrary to what anti-market critics might suggest, loft insulation is unlikely to cheer you up. So what is the real lesson? When you are sad, go visit your local public library. They are almost sure to have something you want, and at the right price.
Thanks to Paul Barriere for the pointer.
Senators tell their favorite jokes
Imagine writing all the senators and asking them to relate their favorite jokes.
Here is one of the least funny responses, though the competition is stiff for this honor.
Here is the worst pun, don’t miss the accompanying photo.
Here is John Kerry’s joke.
Olympia Snowe won the vote for funniest joke.
I found Rick Santorum to have the funniest response, this is a PG-13 blog but for extra perspective read Dan Savage on the Senator, and no I won’t give you the link.
Thanks to Geekpress.com for the pointer.
Punkers for capitalism
With his mohawk, ratty fatigues, assorted chains and his menagerie of tattoos – swallows on each shoulder, a nautical star on his back and the logo of the Bouncing Souls, a New York City punk band, on his right leg – 22-year-old Nick Rizzuto is the very picture of counterculture alienation. But it’s when he talks politics that Mr. Rizzuto sounds like a real radical, for a punk anyway. Mr. Rizzuto is adamantly in favor of lowering taxes and for school vouchers, and against campaign finance laws; his favorite Supreme Court justice is Clarence Thomas; he plans to vote for President Bush in November; and he’s hard-core into capitalism.
“Punks will tell me, `Punk and capitalism don’t go together,’ ” Mr. Rizzuto said. “I don’t understand where they’re coming from. The biggest punk scenes are in capitalist countries like the U.S., Canada and Japan. I haven’t heard of any new North Korean punk bands coming out. There’s no scene in Iran.”
Here is a New York Times article, don’t forget to check out the pictures (password required). Here is a website for GOP punkers, they seem to approve of Reagan’s famous threat to bomb the Soviet Union. Or perhaps it is just irony. They stress that they are not libertarians because America is “at war” with the left, and the libertarian philosophy is not well-suited to fighting a war. Here is their cited critique of the Canadian health care model. Good economics, but these punkers, oppositional by nature, feel a kneejerk need to defend every action of the Bush administration. Here is the ConservativePunk.com website, which offers an interview with right-wing punker Johnny Ramone. Here is yet another site, which cites right-thinking punk bloggers. And will National Review be pleased that MyEvilMinion.com links to them approvingly?
My take: Punk music needs an idea of evil and an oppositional stance. So punkers will adopt every position of defiance they can find, including in-your-face right-wing politics. But in the long run? Remember what The Clash sung: “You grow up, you calm down, working for the clampdown…”
Is Microsoft the new language arbiter?
Microsoft has decided to write Windows for Welsh.
Microsoft programmes already run in 40 languages including English, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese variants.
A Welsh start menu and some commands will be available in about six months.
Microsoft said it has received complaints from places such as Catalonia, Malaysia and the Arctic regions of Canada.
They claim the switch from native languages online is also affecting everyday speech, said BBC North America Business Correspondent Stephen Evans.
Some argue the fewer languages the better for global trade and understanding, but Microsoft is siding with “linguistic diversity”, he said.
The other big linguistic groups to benefit from the expansion will be speakers of Gujarati and Tamil in India, of Catalan in Spain, and of Bahasa in Malaysia.
Native languages from Northern Canada and Ethiopia will also be added.
My take: Whether or not a language is focal will be determined with increasing rapidity.
Thanks to Cronaca.com for the link.
Small families can decrease social mobility
…it is among larger families that the household or kin effects on the success of children are the weakest. Not only do children from larger families do worse on average than those from smaller families, but they also experience more randomness. In other words, parents’ class status affects their offspring more weakly in large families than in small ones. Likewise, siblings resemble one another less in larger families. For example, sibling similarity in income levels is approximately 24 percent stronger in families with three siblings or fewer than in families with four or more children. For net worth levels…the degree of sibling similarity is 59 percent greater in smaller families.
Those are significant effects, what will they mean?
What all this means for the class structure of American society is that as families get smaller, there may be less socioeconomic mobility, not more. Parents will be able to more carefully control the environments of their offspring and thereby reproduce their own class status.
There is a caveat:
Of course, this depends not just on the overall average number of kids that families are having, but also on the distribution. If the most dramatic declines in family size occur among the economically disadvantages segments of American society then we could have more equality of opportunity.
In other words, having larger families, across the board, will mean that subsequent income is less correlated with family history. But on average it will not raise the prospects of people from poor families.
From Dalton Conley’s excellent The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why. Follow this link and here for my earlier writings on Conley.
Income inequality over time
How great a share has the top ten percent of the American income distribution earned over time?
Ben Muse tells us (based on, Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998, by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez):
In 1917, the top 10% of “tax units” had about 40% of national income. The percent of the income earned by this group rose until about 1929, ranged from about 44% to about 46% until 1940, then plummeted to the area of 32% during the war, and sat there until about 1972. From 1972 to 1998, the share of income received by this group rose almost continuously, ending the period in the area of 42%.
Here is the graph (click to expand):
Breaking the top 10% into even finer gradations we see that:
Percentiles 90-99 appear to rise gradually from 1917 to 1940, do the 1940 WWII drop, then, following the war, begin a long sustained increase through 1998.
But the top percentile is all over the place. The authors had enough data to start this series up in 1913, before the start of WWI. It plummets on U.S. entry into the war and during a post-war depression, rises through the boom of the 1920s, peaking in 1929, plummets with the onset of the Great Depression, and again with the onset of WWII, then continues to fall following the war, bottoming out about 1972, and then rising over the period 1972-1998. A large part of this last rise takes place in 1987 and 1988, following the Tax Reform Act of 1986….
What else do we learn? War and other disruptions appear to damage capital income more than labor income. If that is the case, a healthy and peaceful society might have increasing income inequality. In other words, if we are lucky, income inequality will increase even more.
How to market culture, Italian style
When all else fails, offer a discount:
The cover of the current issue of Poesia, an Italian poetry magazine, shows a caricature of Eugenio Montale, a Nobel laureate in literature, standing on a cloud next to a tall stack of books. The headline reads, “One million volumes.”
It is a reference to the special edition of Montale’s poetry distributed during February with some copies of the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera, which has a daily circulation of 686,000. Though the book reached that number in part because it was a giveaway, experts were nonetheless impressed, as well as by the book offered as an option along with the newspaper the following Monday: poems by Pablo Neruda. That book cost readers 5.90 euros, or about $7.20, and it sold more than 250,000 copies. There’s more poetry where that came from. Corriere della Sera plans a series of 30 books featuring the works of great poets, one each Monday, and at a relatively low price…
The strategy has been so successful that today nearly every Italian paper on the newsstand sells at least one discounted product – a book, DVD, CD or videotape – at least one day a week. The sales have helped raise circulation modestly and have given an unexpected infusion of cash to newspapers.
In other words, give newspapers a high prestige gloss, to mobilize eyeballs for advertisers. Note that cheap advertising than subsidizes quality poetry. Here is some more on the economics:
Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso, which publishes La Repubblica and the weekly L’Espresso, last month cited the editorial initiatives as a reason that its net profit rose 47 percent last year, to 67.8 million euros, or about $82.9 million. In 2003, the two newspapers sold 34 million books, 2 million DVD’s and 1.6 million compact disks at prices ranging from 4.90 to 12.90 euros. La Repubblica itself costs 1.20 euros at the newsstand; L’Espresso costs 2.80 euros. Cost-cutting and improvements in online operations also helped raise profit, the company said.
“We thought we were going to appeal to a niche market because Italians aren’t known as being great readers,” said a spokesman for Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso, who said company policy required anonymity.
He said the publisher expected to break even by selling 50,000 copies in the first series, but that around 500,000 copies of each of 50 volumes of 20th-century masterpieces were sold.
“It was instead an incredible success,” he said, “and created a new phenomenon for the Italian market.”
La Repubblica is now selling a six-volume set of Italian poetry from the 13th century to the present. The paper has sold about 120,000 copies of each volume at 7.90 euros a book.
If the numbers are good for newspapers’ bottom lines, they have book publishers worried. Almost half of the 100 million books sold in Italy in both 2002 and 2003 were sold with newspapers and magazines at newspaper kiosks, according to the Italian Publishers Association.
“Newspapers are no longer just vehicles for information – they’ve become a distribution system,” said Federico Motta, president of the publishers association.
Newspapers have several advantages over traditional book publishers, he said, starting with a distribution network of around 40,000 newsstands throughout Italy.
Click here for the full story. Americans, in contrast, sell books at discount superstores, such as Wal-Mart. Or now you can buy digital music at Starbucks. Not to mention those Picassos
The bottom line: The sale of culture is increasingly about the best way to mobilize notice and attention. Over the next century, expect traditional cultural intermediaries to disappear or be radically transformed. When you buy art from a traditional gallery, sales and certification are bundled together in the same institution. As the division of labor increases, we should expect sales and certification to become separate functions, performed by separate groups of people. The reality is that coffee shops, newspaper stands, Wal-Marts, or whatever are now the institutions that hold our attention. They will become our new cultural suppliers.