Category: Data Source
Who disapproves of Obamacare?
I was somewhat surprised by these numbers:
Fifty-three percent of the uninsured disapprove of the law, the poll found, compared with 51 percent of those who have health coverage. A third of the uninsured say the law will help them personally, but about the same number think it will hurt them, with cost a leading concern.
I wonder if any of this poll was conducted in Spanish, and if not whether that would have changed the results. I found this interesting too:
Of the uninsured who said they were not likely to sign up by the deadline, fully half said it was because of the high cost. Twenty-nine percent said they planned to go without coverage because they object to the government’s requiring it, and 11 percent said they did not need health insurance.
And this:
Seventy-seven percent of the uninsured said they disapproved of the mandate, compared with 65 percent of those who already have health insurance.
Does Ramadan make you happy? Harm output growth?
Filipe Campante and David Yanagizawa-Drott have a new paper (pdf), here is the abstract:
We study the economic effects of religious practices in the context of the observance of Ramadan fasting, one of the central tenets of Islam. To establish causality, we exploit variation in the length of the fasting period due to the rotating Islamic calendar. We report two key, quantitatively meaningful results: 1) longer Ramadan fasting has a negative effect on output growth in Muslim countries, and 2) it increases subjective well-being among Muslims. We then examine labor market outcomes, and find that these results cannot be primarily explained by a direct reduction in labor productivity due to fasting. Instead, the evidence indicates that Ramadan affects Muslims’ relative preferences regarding work and religiosity, suggesting that the mechanism operates at least partly by changing beliefs and values that influence labor supply and occupational choices beyond the month of Ramadan itself. Together, our results indicate that religious practices can affect labor supply choices in ways that have negative implications for economic performance, but that nevertheless increase subjective well-being among followers.
The ultra-Orthodox as (happy) threshold earners
Asher Meir writes to me:
I enjoyed your post today especially since it is one that actually interfaces with my research and not just my teaching of basic micro/macro.
Israeli Ultra-Orthodox are threshold earners in both the positive sense (they don’t on the whole strive to earn more than some basic level) and also the normative sense (they are really more interested in other things.)
Here is an interesting demonstration, you can easily do it yourself using the Israeli CBS “Social Survey Table Generator”. (surveys.cbs.gov.il/Survey/surveyE.htm)
One thing you can easily verify is that the Haredim (you can find them using Topic = Religion and Religiosity, Variable = Religiosity Jews and value is “Ultra Religious/ Haredi) have a reported life satisfaction that is through the roof. It is hugely higher than that of any other sector. (Get there from: Topic = Satisfaction – general; Variable = Satisfied with life.)
But you might say that could be because even though their economic situation is admittedly dire, they care more about other things. Now check out “Satisfaction economic situation”. They still come out way on top. They are not only happiest despite their economic situation, they are happiest with their economic situation. (I am aware that reported happiness and reported life satisfaction are different, I am just expressing myself briefly.) I’m attaching the spreadsheet.
Now here is the real threshold earner criterion: For each group, figure out the average life satisfaction for each earnings level. Then calculate the correlation between life satisfaction and earnings. For every population group it is positive, except for the Ultra-Orthodox. Their coefficient is not significantly different from zero. (J27 is the coefficient, J28 the standard error.)
I’m attaching an Excel spreadsheet that does this for 2012 but I’ve done it a number of times. I do not include the regressions for other sectors but you can easily do so and verify that the income coefficient is positive.
I calculated life satisfaction using a linear weighting, zero for Not so satisfied, one for Satisfied and two for Very satisfied. (Note that the “Not satisfied at all” column is empty. No ultra-orthodox gave this answer.) I used the middle of the income range for income. But in my experience it doesn’t matter much how you do this.
I played around with this once using the WVS to see if I could find some other group in the world for whom life satisfaction was totally uncorrelated with income. I didn’t find any but I imagine that Hal Varian would find it easy to do so.
Those are intriguing results. One possibility is that (some?) religions make people pretty happy. Another is that lack of money does not make you unhappy, provided that a) you can cite a good reason for having a lower income, b) you have peer and family support for your situation/decision, and c) there is no negative selection into the other lower income individuals you will end up hanging around. Bryan Caplan might cite the large number of children as a source of life satisfaction.
If one was looking for grounds to be skeptical, perhaps extremely religious groups use the concepts of happiness and life satisfaction in different ways. For instance complaining about your life satisfaction might be considering a signal of impiety and thus the extremely religious might put a better gloss on things than their actually happiness would warrant. Of course “pretending to be happy” may itself be a possible source of happiness.
Purchasing power parity across Israel and the Palestinian territories
I’ve already remarked how much the West Bank reminded me of visiting Israel. I did some googling, and found only a source from 2000, yet it is consistent with my admittedly limited experience (not for Gaza) in 2013:
Most likely, Israeli prices are the upper level of prices for the WBG residents. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the price level in the WBG in fact may be a bit lower than in Israel, especially for a number of non-tradable goods, e.g., housing, and, in Gaza, for some food products, fresh fruits and vegetables. The (statistically significant) parallel movement in the price of level of tradable goods, e.g., food, clothes and furniture in the WBG and Israel, however, generally supports the assumption that most prices in Israel and the WBG are nearly the same.
The Media Doesn’t Talk About Suicide
Slate has been collecting media reports on gun deaths since Newton. What they found was a big discrepancy between the gun deaths reported in the media and the actual gun deaths as counted by the CDC. Chris Kirk explains:
The CDC counts about 32,000 people killed with guns each year, while Slate’s database only has one-third of that. Why the huge discrepancy?
Earlier this month Slate launched an effort to categorize the gun deaths in our system. That effort verified the source of the discrepancy: suicides. We’ve missed nearly all gun-related suicides, because our information is based on media reports, and the media typically avoid reporting on suicides.
The Media’s Picture of Gun Violence (suicides in red)
The CDC’s Picture of Gun Violence (suicides in red)
Justin Briggs and I also have an article in Slate on suicides and guns. I’ll cover that in another post.
Assorted Thoughts on the Market for New Econ PhDs
Here’s the good news. There were 1,243 new econ PhDs in 2012 and the AEA has 2,790 job listings. Compared to other fields where quantity supplied far outstrips quantity demanded, econ is doing very well.
Why are there fewer PhDs than jobs? One factor may be that women are underrepresented in economics. Women earn 34% of the PhDs in economics which is below the 46% of doctoral degrees earned by women overall. (On the other hand, economics is more gender-balanced than psychology where 72 percent of all degrees are earned by women). If women earned more degrees in economics would total degrees increase? Perhaps, although that hasn’t happened in medicine where the cartel has limited total physician supply.
What about the bad news? The number of new jobs for econ PhDs fell by 4.3%. The fall was especially pronounced in academia where the number of new jobs fell by 6.6%. New jobs tumbled in 2008 and since that time there has been some recovery but no catch-up. Are we seeing the transition to a new equilibrium?
On the university side, Clay Christensen’s prediction that half of all universities may go bankrupt in the next 15 years is not yet showing up in the data. Should I file that under good news or bad news?
The nature of the Medicaid cost problem
Harold Pollack writes:
The bottom 72 percent of Illinois Medicaid recipients account for 10 percent of total program spending. Average annual expenditures in this group were about $564, virtually invisible on the chart. We can’t save much money through any incentive system aimed at the typical Medicaid recipient. We spend too little on the bottom 80 percent to get much back from that. We probably spend too little on most of these people, anyway. For the bulk of Medicaid beneficiaries, cost control is less important than improved prevention, health maintenance and access to basic medical and dental services.
The real financial action unfolds on the right side of the graph, where expenditures are concentrated within a small and incredibly complicated patient group. The top 3.2 percent of recipients account for half of total Medicaid spending, with average expenditures exceeding $30,000 annually.
Many of these men and women face life-ending or life-threatening illnesses, as well as cognitive or psychiatric limitations. These patients cannot cover co-payments or assume financial risk. In theory, one might impose patient cost-sharing with some complicated risk-adjustment system. In practice, that is far beyond current technologies and administrative capabilities. Even if such a system were available, we couldn’t push the burden of medical case management onto these patients or their families.
Very much worth a ponder, and there is more in the post.
The “new rich” are about twenty percent of the U.S. population
Hope Yen reports:
It’s not just the wealthiest 1 percent.
Fully 20 percent of U.S. adults become rich for parts of their lives, wielding outsize influence on America’s economy and politics. This little-known group may pose the biggest barrier to reducing the nation’s income inequality.
The growing numbers of the U.S. poor have been well documented, but survey data provided to The Associated Press detail the flip side of the record income gap — the rise of the “new rich.”
Made up largely of older professionals, working married couples and more educated singles, the new rich are those with household income of $250,000 or more at some point during their working lives. That puts them, if sometimes temporarily, in the top 2 percent of earners.
Even outside periods of unusual wealth, members of this group generally hover in the $100,000-plus income range, keeping them in the top 20 percent of earners.
I have been predicting that this group will do increasingly well over time, relative to lower earners.
Health care loses jobs (not)
Man bites dog, but this time it is good news, sort of:
For just over 10 years—121 straight months—there was one constant in the monthly jobs report: Health care jobs would go up.
Not anymore.
Health care lost 2,500 jobs in September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics concluded in estimates released last month. And if that number stands, it would be the first net loss for the sector since July 2003.
That is from Dan Diamond.
Addendum: Revising the revision, the BLS now tells us that health care did not lose jobs after all. Dog bites man, once again, though this time with duller teeth.
The happiness of economists
There is a new paper by Lars P. Feld, Sarah Necker, and Bruno S. Frey, and here is the abstract:
This study investigates the determinants of economists’ life satisfaction. The analysis is based on a survey of professional, mostly academic economists from European countries and beyond. We find that certain features of economists’ professional situation influence their well-being. Happiness is increased by having more research time while the lack of a tenured position decreases satisfaction in particular if the contract expires in the near future or cannot be extended. Surprisingly, publication success has no effect on satisfaction. While the perceived level of external pressure also has no impact, the perceived change of pressure in recent years has. Economists may have accepted a high level of pressure when entering academia but do not seem to be willing to cope with the increase observed in recent years.
You will note that “Economists tend to report a high level of life satisfaction.” Furthermore this does not vary by gender. Here are the nationality effects:
Compared to German economists, Italian, French and researchers from Eastern European countries have a statistically significantly lower probability to report being “highly satisfied” (significant at least at the 5%-level). A similar effect is observed for economists from Spain, Portugal, and Austria; the effects are, however, at most significant at the 10%-level. Researchers from Switzerland, North America and Scandinavian countries tend to be more happy.
For the pointer I thank Viktor Brech.
China fact of the day
…the pace of actual trade settlement in renminbi has failed to keep up [with its role in finance]. It still accounts for just 0.8 per cent of the global total, a lower share than the Thai baht or the Swedish krona.
That is from the FT, via Amni Rusli. The recently reported fact that the renminbi is now the #2 trade financing currency seems to be simply measuring the carry trade, not the true ascendancy of the Chinese currency as a global reserve currency.
The 25 most dangerous street corners in the United States
They are mostly in the Midwest, some South Carolina too.
For the pointer I thank Craig Richardson.
The rise of West German wage inequality
This paper (pdf) by Card, Heining, and Kline appeared earlier this year and is published in the QJE and somehow it escaped my notice. Here is the first part of the abstract:
We study the role of establishment-specific wage premiums in generating recent increases in West German wage inequality. Models with additive fixed effects for workers and establishments are fit in four sub-intervals spanning the period from 1985 to 2009. We show that these models provide a good approximation to the wage structure and can explain nearly all of the dramatic rise in West German wage inequality.
…two-thirds of the increase in the pay gap between higher and lower-educated workers is attributable to a widening in the average workplace pay premiums received by different education groups. Increasing workplace heterogeneity and rising assortativeness between high-wage workers and high-wage firms likewise explain over 60% of the growth in inequality across occupations and industries. Finally, we investigate two potential channels for the rise in workplace-specific wage premiums: establishment age and collective bargaining status. Classifying establishments by entry year, we find a trend toward increasing heterogeneity among establishments that entered the labor market after the mid-1990s, coupled with relatively small changes in the dispersion of the premiums paid by continuing establishments. The relative inequality among newer establishments is linked to their collective bargaining status: an increasing share of these establishments have opted out of the traditional sectoral contracting system and pay relatively low wages.
I would put it this way: there are “high human capital firms” and “low human capital firms” to a greater extent than before. This change represents increasing German wage inequality fairly well, although it cannot be inferred that this increasing segregation causes the inequality increase.
Since newer firms reflect higher inequality and higher segregation, and I don’t foresee a major return of unionization, I take this as prima facie evidence that wage inequality in Germany (and many other places) is likely to continue to rise. This is another example of “the great reset,” as the newer firms offer a greater glimpse into the German economic future.
By the way, it is papers like this which increase my skepticism about the signaling model of education. The relevant signals being fed into these markets haven’t changed that much. Wage patterns are changing a lot.
For the pointer I thank Christian Odendahl.
U.S. Immigrants’ Attitudes Toward Libertarian Values
It is very important to serve up the other side of the story. Here is a 2013 paper by UCSD psychologist Hal Pashler:
Abstract:
While there has been much discussion of libertarians’ (generally although not universally favorable) attitudes toward liberal immigration policies, the attitudes of immigrants to the United States toward libertarian values have not previously been examined. Using data from the 2010 General Social Survey, we asked how American-born and foreign-born residents differed in attitudes toward a variety of topics upon which self-reported libertarians typically hold strong pro-liberty views (as described by Iyer et al., 2012). The results showed a marked pattern of lower support for pro-liberty views among immigrants as compared to US-born residents. These differences were generally statistically significant and sizable, with a few scattered exceptions. With increasing proportions of the US population being foreign-born, low support for libertarian values by foreign-born residents means that the political prospects of libertarian values in the US are likely to diminish over time.
Arnold Kling’s bad demographic news for libertarians
Arnold’s post is this:
Married households with children were 40.3% of all US households in 1970; in 2012, that share had fallen by more than half to 19.6%. Interestingly, the share of households that were married without children has stayed at about 30%. Other Family Households, usually meaning single-parent families with children, has risen.
I am afraid that the number of households married to the state has soared.”
Another way to put this is that we are consuming more of potential gdp in the form of not being around those we do not wish to be around. This is a kind of extreme individualism in the personality-based sense, though not in the political sense.