Category: Data Source

[Richard] McKenzie did a fair amount of real-world research on the popcorn front,
and his most important finding (as far as I’m concerned) is that if
you’re in a cinema which gives you a choice between buying a medium bag
of popcorn and a large tub of popcorn, there’s a greater-than-50%
chance that the medium bag will actually contain more popcorn than the large tub.

That’s from Felix Salmon.

Kyoji Fukao,
professor at Hitotsubashi University’s Economic Research Institute,
thinks so too. The team he heads provides much of the Japanese data
that go into international comparisons. He argues that the usual
measures of service sector efficiency – value added per man hour and
total factor productivity, which incorporates capital and labour inputs
– are crude and hard to compare across borders.

He cites Japan’s
retail sector, regularly branded as inefficient. The basic measure of
retail-sector productivity is how much of a product an employee can
shift in an hour. On this measure, Germany does well. That turns out to
be because of restricted opening hours, which oblige customers to make
hefty purchases in one go. Japan does badly. Cavernous US superstores
do better than cramped noodle or tofu shops. Japan also has a dense
network of convenience stores on almost every city block, open 24
hours, allowing people to shop whenever they want. This makes them
inefficient, since purchases are less concentrated.

No allowance
is made, either, for the fact that Japanese shops tend to be within
walking or, at most, cycling distance. Figures do not capture the
inconvenience of having to travel, or the externalities associated with
long shopping expeditions: traffic accidents, pollution, road
maintenance.

Here is the full article, interesting throughout.  The quality of Japanese service, by the way, is miles ahead of anywhere else (though stores don’t like to take returns) and those subjective pleasures of the shopping experience don’t get picked up by the numbers either.  I can’t imagine how a Japanese would feel moving to Germany or Austria.

You’re hearing this a lot these days, most of all from Kevin Phillips.  David Leonhardt sets the record straight.  Here is one excerpt:

During the 1980s and 1990s, though, did you ever stop and marvel at what a small share of your paycheck you were spending at the supermarket? I didn’t. I also didn’t really notice that gas cost less in the late 1990s than it had in the 1980s. Yet lately, every time my wife or I pass a new benchmark for filling up our tank – $40, $50 and now $60 – we have a conversation about it.

Price increases are simply more noticeable – more salient, as psychologists would say – than price decreases. Part of this comes from the notion of loss aversion: human beings dislike a loss more than they like a gain of equivalent size. If you have to sell your house for less than you bought it for, you’re really unhappy. You hate that ground chuck now costs $2.83 a pound, but you didn’t notice that oranges are 31 percent cheaper than they were a year ago.

…The price of major appliances has been flat over the last year. Furniture is 1 percent less expensive. A decade ago, a basic four-door Toyota Corolla LE cost $16,018, according to the company. The 2009 basic model costs $16,650, and it’s a safer, more powerful, more fuel-efficient car than its predecessor.

To top it all off, most people don’t buy any of these items very often. “People tend to remember things they do frequently,” says Stephen Cecchetti, an economist at Brandeis University who studies inflation. “And what do you buy more frequently than gas and food?”

Arthur Brooks reports:

Who are all these gun owners? Are they the uneducated poor, left
behind? It turns out they have the same level of formal education as
nongun owners, on average. Furthermore, they earn 32% more per year
than nonowners. Americans with guns are neither a small nor downtrodden
group.

Nor are they "bitter." In 2006, 36% of gun owners said they were "very
happy," while 9% were "not too happy." Meanwhile, only 30% of people
without guns were very happy, and 16% were not too happy.

In 1996, gun owners spent about 15% less of their time than nonowners
feeling "outraged at something somebody had done." It’s easy enough in
certain precincts to caricature armed Americans as an angry and
miserable fringe group. But it just isn’t true. The data say that the
people in the approximately 40 million American households with guns
are generally happier than those people in households that don’t have
guns.

The gun-owning happiness gap exists on both sides of the political
aisle. Gun-owning Republicans are more likely than nonowning
Republicans to be very happy (46% to 37%). Democrats with guns are
slightly likelier than Democrats without guns to be very happy as well
(32% to 29%). Similarly, holding income constant, one still finds that
gun owners are happiest.

By the way, if you are curious, I have never even touched a gun.

Addendum: Arthur has a new (and very good) book out, Gross National Happiness.

Nonetheless, elevators are extraordinarily safe–far safer than cars, to
say nothing of other forms of vertical transport. Escalators are scary.
Statistics are elusive…but the claim, routinely advanced by elevator professionals,
that elevators are ten times as safe as escalators seems to arise from
fifteen-year-old numbers showing that, while there are roughly twenty
times as many elevators as escalators, there are only a third more
elevator accidents. An average of twenty-six people die in (or on)
elevators in the United States every year, but most of these are people
being paid to work on them. That may still seem like a lot, until you
consider that that many die in automobiles every five hours. In New
York City, home to fifty-eight thousand elevators, there are eleven
billion elevator trips a year–thirty million every day–and yet hardly
more than two dozen passengers get banged up enough to seek medical
attention. The Otis Elevator Company, the world’s oldest and biggest
elevator manufacturer, claims that its products carry the equivalent of
the world’s population every five days.

And I like this passage:

Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety
elevator. The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what
paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator,
there would be no verticality, no density, and, without these, none of
the urban advantages of energy efficiency, economic productivity, and
cultural ferment.

Here is the article, interesting throughout.

The link, which has further explanation, is here.  Chris’s prediction markets blog is here.

Economics comes in 4th, with an average of $43,419.

It is easy to learn the average income of a resident of El Salvador or Albania. But there is no systematic source of information on the average income of a Salvadoran or Albanian. In this new working paper, research fellow Michael Clemens and non-resident fellow Lant Pritchett create a new statistic: income per natural – the mean annual income of persons born in a given country, regardless of where that person now resides…Almost 43 million people live in a group of countries whose income per natural collectively is 50 percent higher than GDP per resident. For 1.1 billion people the difference exceeds 10 percent.

The pointer is from Will Wilkinson, here is the paper itself.  By the way, can you guess the country with the highest income per natural?  It’s the United States (ahem), with Norway and Luxembourg close behind.  Scroll to pp.34-35 of the paper for a full list.  Bermuda does surprisingly well.  Guyana has the biggest difference between income per capita and income per natural, at over 100%.

The latest word is here, namely that the previously established relationship between cohabitation and marriage failure seems to have gone away.  I hope I have made a few of you happy today.

Using growth in GDP per head rather than crude GDP growth reveals a strikingly different picture of other countries’ economic health. For example, Australian politicians often boast that their economy has had one of the fastest growth rates among the major developed nations–an average of 3.3% over the past five years. But Australia has also had one of the biggest increases in population; its GDP per head has grown no faster than Japan’s over this period. Likewise, Spain has been one of the euro area’s star performers in terms of GDP growth, but over the past three years output per person has grown more slowly than in Germany, which like Japan, has a shrinking population.

Some emerging economies also look less impressive when growth is compared on a per-person basis. One of the supposedly booming BRIC countries, Brazil, has seen its GDP per head increase by only 2.3% per year since 2003, barely any faster than Japan’s. Russia, by contrast, enjoyed annual average growth in GDP per head of 7.4% because the population is falling faster than in any other large country (by 0.5% a year). Indians love to boast that their economy’s growth rate has almost caught up with China’s, but its population is also expanding much faster. Over the past five years, the 10.2% average increase in China’s income per head dwarfed India’s 6.8% gain.

Here is more.  Of course it is wrong to think that one measure is necessarily better than the other.  And immigration and more births both raise absolute gdp though you may not view the gdp gains in each case as having the same moral status.  One simple adjustment that could be made is to subtract the income an immigrant would have earned, had he or she not moved to a new country.

Glen Whitman reports:

I went back to the original data source (imagine that!) and found that the stereotype is dead wrong: suicide rates are notably lower for teenagers than adults…Suicide rates do rise throughout the teen years, but they plateau at about age 20 and remain flat throughout the years 20 to 65. Then they jump again for the 65+ demographic.

In case you’re wondering, teen suicide rates have not been rising, either. They’ve been in decline since the late 1980s.

Yet these teens still take the most risks.

By the turn of the century [2000], according to some reckonings, 70 percent of Irish manufactured exports were by US-owned firms…

This was, of course, encouraged by tax breaks and a form of industrial policy.  But part of this process was a shift away from English investment:

Between 1960 and 1970 British-owned companies represented 22 percent of new industrial enterprises in Ireland.  But by 1980 they accounted for less than 2 percent.  Significantly, the proportion of exports to Britain from Ireland halved between 1956 and 1981.

In other words, Ireland found a more complementary economic partner, namely the United States.  The Irish economic miracle is in part the American economic miracle.

That is from the often interesting Luck & the Irish: A Brief History of Change from 1970, by R.F. Foster.  Here is a previous MR post on the Irish economic miracle.

Here is some wisdom, from the non-libertarian, non-right-wing,  never-asked-to-contribute-to-the-WSJ-Op-Ed-page Lane Kenworthy:

Poverty comparisons across affluent nations typically use a “relative”
measure of poverty. For each country the poverty line – the amount of
income below which a household is defined as poor – is set at 50%
(sometimes 60%) of that country’s median income. In a country with a
high median, such as the United States, the poverty line thus will be
comparatively high, making a high poverty rate more likely…

Using a relative measure, the U.S. poverty rate is higher than Romania’s and only slightly lower than Mexico’s (see here). Similarly, Mississippi’s relative poverty rate is the same as Connecticut’s.

So when you hear that the U.S. poverty rate is about 20 percent, keep this in mind.  Here is more, including links to research.  Here is a response from Paul Krugman.  Note that Krugman’s initial Op-Ed stresses how the measured rate has not fallen over (some periods of) time, but his response simply cites a ranking of the U.S. among other wealthy nations, based on an absolute poverty rate.  Have the time series comparisons been jettisoned or should we stand by them?

Here is more useful information.  It’s also worth noting that poverty rate numbers do not take into account food stamps, housing subsidies, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Medicaid, among other benefits.  Not to mention black market income and underreported income (often for EITC reasons); yes it is worth referring back to consumption data which show that the poor do quite a bit better than income data alone would indicate.  That said, a very good case can be made that we overinvest in fighting the poverty of the elderly and underinvest in fighting the poverty of children.

The bottom line: Be very suspicious when you hear talk about the poverty rate.  The real question, as stressed by James Heckman, is what rate of return we can hope to achieve from feasible interventions in favor of poor, young children.  That’s a much harder question to argue.  Heckman of course finds a high rate of return, so I suspect the key question centers around what is "feasible" given the imperfections of politics.  It’s worth noting that many federal anti-poverty programs have in fact failed, or so changed that we don’t even call them anti-poverty programs any more.  At the end of the day that calls for "better action" rather than inaction, but softening people up with overly pessimistic and uncritically presented numbers will probably make a good program less rather than more likely. 

It’s not quite a fact, but here goes:

According to China Mobile, there were already 400,000 cracked iPhones using its cellular network by the end of 2007.
That number, if accurate, is astonishing. It would mean that there
are more unauthorized iPhones in China than there are authorized
iPhones in Europe. It would account for the largest part of the
so-called “missing” iPhones.

It’s a fact if you believe China Mobile, which I do.