Over the weekend I’ve been gobbling up Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos. I still don’t understand strings, branes, and how the known universe might be a projected hologram, but this book gets me further than any of the other popular science treatments I know. The author favors string theory and the idea of extra, hidden dimensions. He also discusses how we are on the verge of testing some of these exotic ideas. Recommended, especially if you find these ideas intriguing but have a hard time grasping them in intuitive terms.

Forthcoming research suggests that the family is a significant source of inequality:

…differences between families explain only 25 percent of the nation’s income inequality; the remaining 75 percent is explained by differences between siblings. More typical of the United States than President Bush and his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, he suggests, are the White House’s previous tenant, Bill Clinton, and his half-brother, Roger, a college dropout, onetime cocaine dealer and failed musician. Or, for that matter, Jimmy Carter and his ne’er-do-well brother, Billy (emphasis added).

So what in the family matters? It is not birth order, here the analysis become quite intricate:

…his conclusions – that everything from parental job loss or divorce to race and family size can affect siblings differently – don’t lend themselves to catchy headlines, they arguably provide a more nuanced portrait of internal family dynamics than all-purpose explanations like birth order.

Some of his more provocative findings concern middle-borns. In families with three or more children, Mr. Conley says, middle offspring are less likely to receive financial support for their education and may do less well in school than their older and younger siblings. The chances that a second child will attend private school drop by 25 percent with the birth of a third, Mr. Conley found, and the likelihood that he or she will be held back a year increased severalfold. Unlike typical first- and last-borns, he reasons, middle children never experience family life as an only child; instead, they are forced to compete with their siblings for money and attention. (In this sense, he concedes, birth order does matter: not as a psychological variable but as a constraint on family resources.)

Other findings seem to confirm common-sense intuitions. According to Mr. Conley’s analysis, for example, women are more likely to be as successful as their brothers if their mothers worked outside the home. And, like the long-suffering George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the oldest child still at home at the time of a parental death or divorce is more likely than younger siblings to endure negative socioeconomic consequences as a result. Brothers and sisters may even experience race differently, he argues, since skin color can vary considerably within the same family.

So far it seems that the work is well-received. Here is the home page of the researcher, Dalton Conley, a remarkably prolific and rigorous scholar. Here is an earlier MR post on Horatio Alger and intergenerational mobility.

The (provisional) bottom line: Unhappy with your lot in life? It’s not the capitalist system or the Bush tax cuts, blame Mom and Dad. I’ll let you know more once the book arrives and I’ve read the whole thing.

What best predicts whether a marriage will last?

The crucial predictors, say the researchers, are the presence of facial expressions that accompany emotions such as contempt. Gottman says that just watching a couple and looking for this expression, described as a sideways pull of a corner of the mouth accompanied by rolling eyes, is enough to make a good guess about a couple’s suitability. “This is our best predictor,” he says. “Contempt is the sulphuric acid of love.”

We are told that the entire model has a 94 percent success rate in predicting divorce.

Here is some positive advice for Valentine’s Day:

Gottman may also have stumbled across the secret of a lasting relationship – simply ignore the nasty comments from your partner. He says that courting couples tend to ignore negative statements and pay more attention to positive remarks. Once married, this trend often reverses, although couples that remain together into their sixties retain this outlook.

How about gay couples?

…gay and lesbian couples, as well as heterosexual couples that do not marry, hold on to the positive value of courtship better than straight partners who get hitched, he says.

For more information, read The Mathematics of Marriage: Dynamic Nonlinear Models. Are they joking with that title?

Relative to email, that is. Why? Email leaves a permanent record and you are afraid of getting caught in your lies.

Jeff Hancock of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, asked 30 students to keep a communications diary for a week. In it they noted the number of conversations or email exchanges they had lasting more than 10 minutes, and confessed to how many lies they told.

Hancock then worked out the number of lies per conversation for each medium. He found that lies made up 14 per cent of emails, 21 per cent of instant messages, 27 per cent of face-to-face interactions and a whopping 37 per cent of phone calls.

That’s a lot of lying. Here is the full story.

Carry a lie detector in your pocket:

The Love Detector is based on layered voice analysis, a system that was developed for security work by Nemesysco, an Israeli company, and adapted for personal use by V Worldwide, the international distributor.

The Love Detector relies on a simplified form of the technology, said Richard Parton, chief executive of V Worldwide. The security version applies 8,000 algorithms to 129 parameters of a speaking voice, assessing, among other things, levels of emotion, embarrassment and concentration as well as whether what is said reflects certainty, uncertainty or outright lies.

When this reporter tried it informally, both in person and over the phone, the results were arguably accurate; the software detected the split in my attention as I took notes, though it misinterpreted my skepticism about the product as condescension.

Buy one here.

Some versions of the new product will put James Bond to shame:

Later this year V plans to introduce a simplified version built into sunglasses, with light-emitting diodes to signal emotional intensity and truth or falsehood.

Here is one article about the product. Here is the whole story. The article notes that many people will use the product to assess their own emotions, not just the person they are trying to court.

Picture yourself watching a one-minute video of two teams of three players each. One team wears white shirts and the other black shirts, and the members move around one another in a small room tossing two basketballs. Your task is to count the number of passes made by the white team – not easy given the weaving movement of the players. Unexpectedly, after 35 seconds a gorilla enteres the room, walks directly through the farrago of bodies, thumps his chest and, nine seconds later, exits. Would you see the gorilla?

Fifty percent of all observers do not see the gorilla.

This is called inattentional blindness, the link offers some further examples and tests. The bottom line: if you are concentrating on one static task, you often fail to notice dynamic movement. This is one reason why you should not drive and talk on your cell phone at the same time.

The quotation is from the March issue of Scientific American. Here is the the original research. Here are some additional studies, also look here. Here is a page of video exercises, although now you know what and who to look for.

The bottom line for economics? Neither investors nor voters need be rational in procedural terms. Searching more does not guarantee a better outcome. An “obvious” bubble can catch large numbers of investors unaware. And we, as voters, can fixate on some aspects of candidates and miss entirely their most important qualities.