Category: Data Source

Some khaki pants are now selling for as much as $1055; $400 and $500 khaki pants are becoming common.

See The Wall Street Journal, May 13-14, p.P7.  Makes you want to sign up with Peter Singer, doesn’t it?

One Saks Fifth Avenue fashion director noted: "For some of these brands, that’s a lot of money."

If you know of other absurd luxury markets, please mention them in the comments.

More than 60 percent of Britons use items
such as screwdrivers, scissors and earrings to remove food from between
their teeth, according to a survey published on Friday.

And they talk about American exceptionalism…read more here.

Here are the Lutherans:

Here are the details and maps of many other religions.

NationMaster, a fun site for quick statistics on countries, is now joined by StateMaster a database of statistics on the US States.

Julie Schor and others have spread the myth that people have less leisure time than before.  Here is yet another smackdown of that claim:

In this paper, we use five decades of time-use surveys to document trends in the allocation of time. We find that a dramatic increase in leisure time lies behind the relatively stable number of market hours worked (per working-age adult) between 1965 and 2003. Specifically, we show that leisure for men increased by 6-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by 4-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in home production work hours). This increase in leisure corresponds to roughly an additional 5 to 10 weeks of vacation per year, assuming a 40-hour work week. Alternatively, the "consumption equivalent" of the increase in leisure is valued at 8 to 9 percent of total 2003 U.S. consumption expenditures. We also find that leisure increased during the last 40 years for a number of sub-samples of the population, with less-educated adults experiencing the largest increases. Lastly, we document a growing "inequality" in leisure that is the mirror image of the growing inequality of wages and expenditures, making welfare calculation based solely on the latter series incomplete.

Here is the paper, and the link.

This one is good news, sort of.  Contrary to common claims, many African nations have HIV-positive rates of only two or three percent.  The truly horrific rates of thirty percent or more appear restricted to the southern part of the continent.  The incorrect estimates stem from placing too much weight on data from urban prenatal clinics.

This January the US imported almost $3 billion in goods from France and almost $0.2 billion in goods from Cambodia.  She collected about $30 million in tariffs on the imports from each country.  In fact she collected slightly more from Cambodia.

Here is the full story.

Here is a population-weighted map of the world, circa 1500:

Here is the projected world population map, circa 2050:

Here are other neat maps.  Here are maps of tourism, emigration, and refugees.  Here is my favorite, a map of the flow of net immigration.  Or try this map of aircraft departures, watch Africa disappear.  Here is the strange geography of fruit exports.  Here is how to make South America look really big, or reallly small (can you guess?).

A recent survey of 180 PhD holders found that 60 percent had paid to have their papers published and a similar percentage had copied others’ work.

Here is the link, and thanks to Yan Li for the pointer.

Or is it Hispanamerica Fact of the Day?

…by 2015, the Hispanic population in the US will have spending power equal to 60 per cent of all consumers in China.

Here is the article, and no I don’t know which exchange rate (ppp or market) is used to make this comparison.  Thanks to Pablo Halkyard for the pointer.

According to a new report released by the Census Bureau, Hispanic-owned businesses now comprise one of the fastest-growing segments the U.S. economy. Between 1997 and 2002, the number of businesses owned by Hispanics grew by 31 percent – three times the national average for all businesses – hitting 1.6 million in 2002 and generating some $222 billion in revenue.

Here is the link, here is another story.  Have I mentioned that both the U.S. and Europe are, unwittingly, building new civilizations?  Which one would you bet on?

Check it out.  I remain shocked that most newspapers still publish stock prices, although this will change rapidly.

84 percent of new car sales in China are to first-time buyers.  In the U.S., just 1 percent are.

That is from 20 March Business Week.

I suspect greater payoffs will come from more data than from more technique.

So said Alan Greenspan and I think he is right.  Think of how much important work, for example, has been based on the Summers-Heston, Penn World Tables.  Yet, most of the time the collectors of data toil in the fields unrecognized and unrewarded.  When original data is collected it’s often hoarded – better to mine it for yourself than open up the commons.  Now, that is a tragedy.

We ought to increase rewards to data collection.  As a salutary example, which might be emulated by the AEA and others, Mike Kellerman points to the Dataset Award given by the APSA Comparative Politics section for "a publicly
available data set that has made an important contribution to the field of
comparative politics."

Given the source, expect a left-wing, anti-neoclassical perspective.  Here are the tallies, with a much longer list at the link:

1. John Maynard Keynes 3,253 

2. Joseph Alois Schumpeter 1,080 

3. John Kenneth Galbraith 904 

4. Amartya Sen 708

5. Joan Robinson 607

6. Thorstein Veblen 591

7. Michal Kalecki 481

8. Friedrich Hayek 469

9. Karl Polanyi 456

10. Piero Sraffa 383

11. Joseph Stiglitz 333

12. Kenneth Arrow 320 

13. Milton Friedman 319

13. Paul Samuelson 319

15. Paul Sweezy 268

16. Herman Daly 267 

17. Herbert Simon 250 

18. Ronald Coase 246

19. Gunnar Myrdal 216 

20. Alfred Marshall 211

At least Milton Friedman beat out Herman Daly.  Poor John Hicks.  And further down the list, does Pierangelo Garegnani, an obscure neo-Ricardian obsessed with commodity own-rates of return, deserve to place ahead of Franco Modigliani?

Thanks to www.politicaltheory.info for the pointer.