Category: Data Source

It is almost unheard of for ordinary Chinese citizens to volunteer to donate their organs after death. Only about 130 people have pledged to donate their organs since 2003, the newspaper stated, quoting Chen Zhonghua, a professor at Tongji Hospital’s Institute of Organ Transplantation in Shanghai.

Here is more; the story concerns the Chinese trying to move away from harvesting the organs of deceased prisoners.

Here's a good blog post on a new Chinese leisure activity.

This neat chart morphs right in front of your eyes; recommended viewing.

• Contrary to popular belief (e.g. here) there is only weak evidence that the implicit association test has good predictive ability.

• Paul Romer on his five favorite live rock recordings, sample line “In this performance, Hendrix may have been high, but he knew what he was doing.”

• The economics of being a Hefner Girlfriend.  One key sentence “In fact, Girlfriends were not allowed to become Playmates because Hef had found that they tended to flee the Mansion as soon as they collected their $25,000 Playmate cheque.”

Bruce Bartlett sends me a link to this interesting paper:

How large are the economies of scale of living together? And how do partners share their resources? The first question is usually answered by equivalence scales. Traditional estimation and application of equivalence scales assumes equal sharing of income within the household. This paper uses data on financial satisfaction to simultaneously estimate the sharing rule and the economy of scale parameter in a collective household model. The estimates indicate substantial scale economies of living together, especially for couples who have lived together for some time. On average, wives receive almost 50% of household resources, but there is heterogeneity with respect to the wives’ contribution to household income and the duration of the relationship.

The data are from Switzerland, in case you are wondering, not the United States.

The reports have come in:

All but seven of the regions reported GDP growth rates above the
bureau’s first-half figure of 7.1 per cent. At the start of the year,
Beijing set 8 per cent as China’s growth target for the year.

…In recent years, provincial figures have suggested consistently the
world’s third-largest economy is bigger than Beijing’s published
estimate, but the discrepancy appears to have widened this year.

…The Global Times, controlled by the People’s Daily, the Communist party
mouthpiece, reported that the public reacted with “banter and sarcasm”
to NBS figures showing average urban wages in China rose 13 per cent in
the first half to $2,142.

It is noted that the state worked on the gdp numbers for a full fifteen days.  Yet not everyone is happy:

The criticism has prompted the NBS to launch a campaign last week,
entitled “Statistical Feelings: We have walked together – Celebrating
the 60th anniversary of the founding of New China,” to boost confidence
among statisticians.

The campaign has already produced works such
as: “I’m proud to be a brick in the statistical building of the
republic.” In another poem, a contributor writes: “I can rearrange the
stars in the sky because I have statistics.”

Here is a clever new idea from Henderson, Storeygard, and Weil:

GDP growth is often measured poorly for countries and rarely measured at all for cities. We propose a readily available proxy: satellite data on lights at night. Our statistical framework uses light growth to supplement existing income growth measures. The framework is applied to countries with the lowest quality income data, resulting in estimates of growth that differ substantially from established estimates. We then consider a longstanding debate: do increases in local agricultural productivity increase city incomes? For African cities, we find that exogenous agricultural productivity shocks (high rainfall years) have substantial effects on local urban economic activity.

Here is the paper. WSJ blogs added:

They also noted how data from night lights can be focused to provide
data on a local level. In Southern Madagascar large deposits of rubies
and sapphires were discovered in late 1998 near the towns of Ilakaka
and Sakaraha, leading to an economic boom. But the data from the
satellites tell the story of where the benefits were felt most deeply.
“Over the next five years there was a sharp growth in the number of
pixels for which light is visible at all, and in the intensity of light
per pixel,” the economists said. “The other town visible in the figure,
Ihosy, shows no such growth. If anything, Ihosy’s light gets smaller
and weaker, as it suffers in the competition across local cities for
population.”

The household savings rate in South Korea
will have plummeted from a world-beating 25.2 percent in 1988 to a
projected world low of 3.2 percent in 2010, according to the OECD.

Here is much more.  In fact:

South Koreans work more, sleep less and kill themselves at a higher
rate than citizens of any other developed country, according to the
OECD. They rank first in time spent online and second to last in
spending on recreation, and the per capita birthrate scrapes the bottom
of world rankings. By 2050, South Korea will be the most aged society
in the world, narrowly edging out Japan, according to the OECD.

And here's one problem with aggregate savings rates:

…South Korea ranks first in per capita spending on
private education, which includes home tutors, cram sessions and
English-language courses at home and abroad.

An obsessive pursuit of educational achievement, it seems, is one of
the driving forces behind the low savings rate. About 80 percent of all
students from elementary age to high school attend after-school cram
courses. About 6 percent of the country's gross domestic product is
spent on education, more than double the percentage of spending in the
United States, Japan or Britain.

Australian Navy submarine cooks may make more money ($160k) than some admirals.

That's from www.geekpress.com.  Alternatively, what would Adam Smith say?

High-tech models developed by quants have, once again, greatly underestimated risk.  What will be the consequences?

In the waning days of April, as federal officials were declaring a public health emergency and the world seemed gripped by swine flu panic, two rival supercomputer teams made projections about the epidemic that were surprisingly similar – and surprisingly reassuring. By the end of May, they said, there would be only 2,000 to 2,500 cases in the United States.

May’s over. They were a bit off.

On May 15, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that there were “upwards of 100,000” cases in the country,..