Category: Data Source

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.

A Brazilian entrepreneur, that is.  First and foremost, entrepreneurship is predicted by family characteristics, most of all having other entrepreneurs in the family and coming from a large family.  What predicts finding a successful entrepreneur?: "the individual’s smartness and higher education in the family."  Entrepreneurs are not more self-confident than non-entrepreneurs and overconfidence is a big danger.  Social networks predict who becomes an entrepreneur but not who becomes a successful entrepreneur.  Entrepreneurs in Brazil exhibit more trust but this result does not seem to generalize across countries.

Here is the paper, from the World Bank.  I thank Russ Roberts for the pointer.

Work doesn’t seem to limit socializing.  My favorite result was that the better-educated people seem to fear visiting relatives:

Over time, increases in hours of work per capita have created the
intuitively plausible notion that there is less time available to
pursue social interactions. The specific question addressed in this
paper is the effect of hours of work on social interaction. This is a
difficult empirical question since omitted factors could increase both
hours of work and social interaction. The approach taken in this paper
utilizes an exogenous decline in hours of work in France due to a new
employment law. The results clearly show that the employment law
reduced hours of work but there is no evidence that the extra hours
went to increased social interactions. Although hours of work are not
an important determinant of social interaction, human capital is found
to be important. The effect of human capital, as measured by education
and age, is positive for membership groups but negative for visiting
relatives and friends. Also, contrary to expectations, there are no
important differences in the determinants of social interaction by
gender, marital status or parent status. Finally, a comparison between
France and the US show that the response to human capital and other
variables are much the same in both nations.

Here is the paper, I don’t yet see a non-gated version on-line.

No Googling.  Guess in the comments section.  If you are desperate, the answer is here.  Here is a close-up photo.  Here are more good photos, with giveaways as to the location.

…the annual expansion in China’s trade has been larger than India’s total annual trade during last several years.

Here is more, interesting points throughout.  And here is the upshot:

The most important factor that still holds back large [Indian] firms from
entering these products is a set of draconian labour laws in India.
Under these laws, it is virtually impossible for a firm with 100 or
more employees to fire the workers even in the face of bankruptcy. It
is equally difficult for the firms to reassign the workers from one
task to another. These provisions impose very low worker productivity
or a high real cost of labour. Large-scale capital-intensive sectors
such as automobiles, where labour costs are a tiny proportion of the
total costs, can profitably operate in such an environment. But the
same is not true of large-scale labour-intensive sectors labour. Few
foreign manufacturers are willing to enter India outside of a small
subset of capital- and skilled-labour intensive sectors.

I’ve cited the Lancet numbers myself (in qualified fashion), but maybe the estimate of a million Iraqi deaths is far too high:

A new survey estimates that 151,000 Iraqis died from violence in the three years following the U.S.-led invasion of the country…For the new study, however, surveyors visited 23 times as many places
and interviewed five times as many households. Surveyors also got more
outside supervision in the recent study; that wasn’t possible in the
spring of 2006 when the Johns Hopkins survey was conducted…"Overall, this is a very good study," said Paul Spiegel, a medical
epidemiologist at the United Nations High Commission on Refugees in Geneva.
"What they have done that other studies have not is try to compensate
for the inaccuracies and difficulties of these surveys, triangulating
to get information from other sources."

Here is more, here is the study itself.  This new estimate is probably not the final word, but you will recall that anyone who questioned the older Lancet estimate was pilloried at length; there is a lesson here  – Thy Shall Not Use Thy Blog to Squelch Heretics — and I am curious to see who will offer mea culpa and who will not.  "The two estimates aren’t as different as they look" is one way of spinning it; "I was wrong" is another.

Update: Here, and here.

Here is the accompanying article by Matt Yglesias.

My apologies if this list sounds dogmatic or polemic.  I’m not trying to persuade you (now), I’m simply listing the inner contents of my mind, so you may compare this with my post on what I am uncertain about.  Here is an incomplete and desultory list of what I (think I) am nearly certain about:

1. Polarizing America won’t make interest group politics go away, no matter how hard either the right-wingers or progressives wish it so.  It may even make interest group politics worse, and in the meantime the polarizer is simply demonstrating a lack of meta-rationality on the part of the polarizer.

2. We cannot do economic policy as we might arrange pieces on a chessboard.  What you ask for is rarely what you get, and your recommendations had better be prepared for this discrepancy.

3. Government-dominated health systems, insofar as they work well (a number of them do), succeed simply by lowering costs.  Health care has a murky relationship to human health, pharmaceuticals and broken limbs aside.  A version of the single-payer system, as might be adopted in the United States, would not lower costs.  We would be raising taxes and lowering medical innovation to give poor people a good deal more financial security and a slight bit more health; that is the relevant trade-off.

4. Overall, despite its many flaws, America is a force for liberty in the greater global community.

5. We are programmed to respond to the "us vs. them" mentality and highly intelligent people are no less captive to this framing.  We should try very hard to get away from this framing.

6. America is a beacon of innovation for the world, and it is critically important that we allow the preconditions for American innovation to continue.

7. It would be a disaster if American taxation ever reached 55 percent of gdp.

8. Which institutions work well is often country-specific. 

9. The West European way of life is a marvel, unprecedented in human history.  That said, I am not sure that the degree of economic security to date can persist in a more mobile and more diverse future (this second sentence retreats to what I am uncertain about).

10. No one has a good idea what the equilibrium looks like for nuclear proliferation.  This is very worrying.

11. The possibility of pandemics receives insufficient attention.  The world sleepwalked through AIDS for a long time, mostly because "it doesn’t affect people like you and me."  The next time around could be much worse.

12. It is a big mistake — even in rhetoric — to conflate concern for the poor with comparative egalitarian intuitions.  The left ought to turn its back on this mistake, although it would mean losing one of their most effective rhetorical tools.

13. Most people are sincere in their views (even if wrong), and polemic attacks on them signal a weakness of the attacker, not the attackee.

14. The chance that a protectionism will be an economically rational form of protectionism is very low.

With less than two weeks left in the year, Los Angeles is on track to record its lowest homicide rate since 1970.

   

That year, 394 people were killed in the city as the war in Vietnam raged on and the Beatles called it quits.

   

As
of Dec. 15, 379 people had been killed in Los Angeles this year, with
about 200 of those incidents gang-related. The overall homicide rate is
down 17 percent from last year.

One of the sharpest declines is in gang-related killings.  Here is the link, hat tip to Angus, and no, this is not a pre-timed post.

Even with about a tenth of all subprime mortgages now in foreclosure, only a
small share of all American families — about 0.3 percent — own a home in
foreclosure…

Here is the link, from Mark Thoma.  This is one big reason why I’m not yet convinced by the economic pessimists.  The article also notes how many estimates of the S&L crisis of the 1980s were exaggerated, and suggests the same tendency may be happening today.

Addendum: This piece is a good statement of the case for pessimism.

I haven’t read through this closely, but it seems to be a very important paper:

…we show that, relative to white wages, black wages: (a) vary negatively
with a measure of the prejudice of the "marginal" white in a state; (b)
vary negatively with the prejudice in the lower tail of the prejudice
distribution, but are unaffected by the prejudice of the most
prejudiced persons in a state; and (c) vary negatively with the
fraction of a state that is black. We show that these results are
robust to a variety of extensions, including directly controlling for
racial skill quality differences and instrumental variables estimates.
We present some initial evidence to show that racial wage gaps are
larger the more racially integrated is a state’s workforce, also as
Becker’s model predicts.

Here is the paper.  This version is $5 cheaper.

Matt Yglesias writes:

Via Andrew Sullivan, Eric dePlace notes that "You save more fuel switching from a 15 to 18 mpg car than switching from a 50 to 100 mpg car." And so you do. A 15 MPG car would require 1,000 gallons of gas to drive 15,000 miles while an 18MPG car could get it done in just 833 gallons. That saves 167 gallons of gasoline. By contrast, since a 50 MPG only uses 300 gallons to go 15,000 miles, upgrading to 100 MPG can’t save that much gas — the super-efficient car uses 150 gallons.

It is tricky, because the consumption basket and number of miles driven will not stay constant across alternatives, but this logic is worth keeping in mind nonetheless.