Category: Data Source
Paraguay fact of the day
This was from an English-language version of El Pais, tucked into my IHT; I don´t see the story on-line:
Official estimates state that seven out of 10 children in Paraguay are only registered with their mother´s last name — in Mexico the rate is one out of six.
A bit of googling turns up a second and related estimate, namely that in Paraguay 6.5 children out of ten are not registered to receive social services.
Hennessey on CAFE
Excellent post, filled with detail, by Keith Hennessey on CAFE. Some highlights:
The NHTSA analyses look at a range of benefits to society, including economic and national security benefits from using less oil, health and environmental benefits from less pollution, and environmental benefits from fewer greeenhouse gas emissions (this is new). They also consider the costs, primarily from requiring more fuel-saving technologies to be included by manufacturers….
Rather than maximizing net societal benefits, [the Obama] proposal raises the standard until (total societal benefits = total societal costs), meaning the net benefits to society are roughly zero…
The Obama plan will increase costs enough to further suppress demand for new cars and trucks. This will cause significant job loss, and probably in the 150K 50K range over 5-ish years, with a fairly wide error band….[updated to reflect an error in calculation, AT]
The Obama option would reduce the global temperature by seven thousandths of a degree Celsius by the end of this century….[and] would reduce the sea-level rise by six hundredths of a centimeter. That’s 0.6 millimeters.
…As early as this fall, greenhouse gases could become “regulated pollutants” under the Clean Air Act. Once something becomes a “regulated pollutant,” a whole bunch of other parts of the Clean Air Act kick in, and EPA is off to the races in regulating greenhouse gases from a much (much) wider range of sources, including power plants, hospitals, schools, manufacturers, and big stores.
One of the scariest elements of this is called the “Prevention of Significant Deterioration” permitting system. In effect, EPA could insert itself (or your State environmental agency) into most local planning and zoning processes. I will write more about this in the future. It terrifies me.
My Markey-Waxman query repeated: what are the climate benefits of the bill?
Barkley Rosser, who is not held in the thrall of the Cato Institute, posts in the comments:
Maybe it's still early but this apparent gap in the literature is not encouraging. I'll repeat my query. What would be the climate benefits of this bill? If you want to cite an estimate involving strategic interdependencies with China and India, fine. But please cite something that puts forward and defends a particular estimate.
Is there a better case for this bill than: "it will raise government revenue, which I favor anyway, and raise the costs of unsavory corporations, which doesn't strike me as so terribly unjust anyway, and on the estimate of climate benefits I will just fudge it and hope for the best and claim we must do something?" David Frum comments.
Matt Yglesias has a different argument: better to start now than never.
I would phrase a related point more technically: acting now may be
keeping open a valuable option on doing more later. Still, I wish to
know what that option is worth, noting that if major action is impossible today it may be impossible tomorrow as well.
In the comments section of this post I'm not interested in being lectured about CO2 in the time of the trilobites, corrupt scientific groupthink, hearing that geo-engineering would be cheaper, or reading that various wimps won't face up to the need for nuclear power. I'm also not interested in hearing whether the costs of shifting to greener energy are high or low, at least not today. I just want to see the benefit estimates on this particular policy and if you put any serious estimate forward in due time I will assess it and report back to you.
Yes it is hard to model international interdependencies and option value — two of the major potential benefits — but we try to model such complexities for other policies all the time. Surely it's worth some group doing a 50-100 page study of what we can hope to achieve. Then we could see how plausible is the case for the bill.
If there is such a study, I promise I won't complain about the discount rate, I won't pretend that uncertainty militates in favor of inaction, and I won't dismiss it by saying a carbon tax would be better and then refusing to judge cap and trade vs. nothing. I want to see whether you need crazy or sensible judgments to get large aggregate benefits from proceeding.
Comments, of course, are open but subject to the above caveats. No trilobites!
TED Talks: Search, Translate, Subtitle
TED has developed a cool new technology that makes it possible to search, caption and translate TED talks. Each talk will now come with an transcript. What's cool is that you can click on any phrase in the transcript and you will jump to that point in the video. If you go to my talk, for example, and click on "open interactive transcript" you can see this in action. What this means is that videos will now be Google searchable.
In addition, by linking a translation to the English transcript it's possible to have talks searchable in multiple languages. Thus, TED is now seeking volunteer translators to convert TED talks into some 40 other languages. Here, for example, is Bonnie Bassler's great talk on quorum sensing in bacteria (how bacteria talk to one another) which is translated into Swedish and Spanish. My talk is still in English only but if anyone translates it they will get a shout out from me! With a click, translations and transcripts can be shown as subtitles so not only will TED talks be available in other languages they will also be available to the hearing impaired.
Cultures of sleep, and which is the “most awake” nation?
There is plenty of talk in the blogosphere on who spends the most time eating, but other takes on the new OECD leisure time study focus on who spends the most time sleeping:
France is the industrialized country where people spend the longest
periods sleeping, according to a series of surveys on social habits
conducted by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation
& Development.
The French sleep a daily average of 530 minutes, compared with 518
for Americans and 469 for Koreans — the OECD's "most awake" nation,
according to the study.
The most sociable OECD nation is considered to be Turkey. Some of the New Zealand stereotypes are wrong (they don't play so much sport) and:
Young British girls drink the most for their age. Austrian teens smoke the most.
Look under "Risky Behavior" for information on teenage drunkenness but for teenage boys the U.S. has the lowest rate. Here is a brief summary with a link to the main study.
Chavez and the Power of the State
Between 2002 and 2004 millions of Venezuelans signed petitions calling for a vote to remove Hugo Chavez from office. Signatories were not anonymous and during the petition campaign Chavez supporters hinted darkly that there would be retaliation. Chavez was in fact forced into a recall election, but unfortunately he won (not one of democracy's better moments). After the election, the list of signatories was distributed to government agencies in an easy-to-use database. The database included the names and addresses of all registered voters and whether they had signed an anti-Chavez petition. Technology thus provided Chavez supporters the information they needed to retaliate.
Technology cuts both ways, however, and in a truly remarkable paper, Hsieh, Miguel, Ortega and Rodriguez match information in the petition database to another database on wages, employment and income. What the authors find is shocking, albeit not surprising. Before the recall election, petition signatories and non-signatories look alike. After the election, the employment and wages of signatories drop considerably, about a 10% drop in wages relative to non-signatories. Survey evidence conducted by the authors is consistent with retaliation by Chavez supporters especially in the form of job losses in the public sector. The authors estimate that the retaliation was so widespread, many workers were pushed into informal employment, that the Venezuelan economy was significantly damaged.
This is original, important and actionable research. Bravo to the authors, especially to Ortega who–as of this posting–has a job in Venezuela.
China fact of the day
Power generation in China dropped again in April, indicating that the
macroeconomic rebound the market has expected is yet to appear.
According
to the State Grid’s latest statistics, April’s national power
generation totaled 274.763 billion kwh, a fall of 3.55%, year on year,
and a decline of over 3% from the previous month.
Without a healthy Chinese economy I for one do not see the "green shoots" but of course time will tell.
Interesting fact about sector weightings
Jason Ruspini writes to me:
Financials peaked as a
percentage of s&p 500 market cap in 2006 at 22%. In 1950, tobacco,
breweries and distillers accounted for 22% of UK market cap.
I am told that is from p.23 of Triumph of the Optimists.
Modern Principles: Macroeconomics, Economic Growth
course an embarrassment. In much of the developing world, diarrhea
is a killer, especially of children. Every year 1.8 million
children die from diarrhea. Ending the premature deaths of these
children does not require any scientific breakthroughs, nor does it
require new drugs or fancy medical devices. Preventing these deaths requires
only one thing: economic growth.
That’s the opening paragraph of The Wealth of Nations and Economic Growth, Chapter 6 in Modern Principles: Macroeconomics. Does the opening make you a little bit squeamish? We hope so–we wanted an opening that would jar students out of complacency and remind them how vital economic growth is to human life. Â
Due to its importance, we have more material on growth and development than any other principles text.  In Chapter 6 we lay out the key facts and the basic framework for understanding economic growth. I think we do an especially good job explaining that the proximate causes of growth, increases in capital, labor, and technology must themselves be explained. Why do people save? Why do people invest?  Why do people research and develop new ideas?  It’s these questions which connect macroeconomics to microeconomics and point to the fundamental importance of incentives and institutions. These questions also foreshadow future chapters on savings, investment, financial intermediation and the economics of ideas.Â
For a limited time, you can read Chapter 6 at the link above (and do enjoy the pretty color pictures before you print!).  Tyler and I will be writing more about Modern Principles: Macroeconomics this week; you can also find more information at www.SeeTheInvisibleHand.com.
Coming soon
There is a Micro book and a consolidated text as well. Please do contact Alex or me if you are interested in classroom use.
Addendum: Arnold Kling comments.
Laissez-Faire, eh?
U.S. government spending as a percentage of GDP is now equal to Canada's and rising, leading one Canadian op-ed writer to crow about Canada's low tax, free market economy. Damn that hurts.
Google Data
Google has tied BLS data to a nifty graph utility making it very easy to examine say unemployment rates across counties, states and so forth. Do a search for unemployment rate, click on the top graph and check it out. More is planned.
Hat tip to Flowing Data.
Debating Economics
Intelligence Squared has held a series of debates in which they poll ayes and nayes before and after. How should we expect opinion to change with such debates? Let’s assume that the debate teams are evenly matched on average (since any debate resolution can be written in either the affirmative or negative this seems a weak assumption). If so, then we ought to expect a random walk; that is, sometimes the aye team will be stronger and support for their position will grow (aye after – aye before will increase) and sometimes the nay team will be stronger and support for their position will grow. On average, however, we ought to expect that if it’s 30% aye and 70% nay going in then it ought to be 30% aye and 70% nay going out, again, on average. Another way of saying this is that new information, by definition, should not swing your view systematically one way or the other.
Alas, the data refute this position. The graph shown below (click to enlarge) looks at the percentage of ayes and nayes among the decided 
before and after. The hypothesis says the data should lie around the 45 degree line. Yet, there is a clear tendency for the minority position to gain adherents – that is, there is an underdog advantage so positions with less than 50% of the ayes before tend to increase in adherents and positions with greater than 50% ayes tend to lose adherents. What could explain this?
I see two plausible possibilities.
1) If the side with the larger numbers has weaker adherents they could be more likely to change their mind.
2) The undecided are key and the undecided are lying.
For case 1, imagine that 10% of each group changes their minds; since 10% of a larger number is more switchers this could generate the data. The problem with 1 and with the data more generally is that we don’t seem to see a tendency towards 50:50 in the world. We focus on disputes, of course, but more often we reach some consensus (the moon is not made of blue cheese, voodoo doesn’t work and so forth).
Thus 2 is my best guess. Note first that the number of “undecided” swing massively in these debates and in every case the number of undecided goes down a lot, itself peculiar if people are rational Bayesians. A big swing in undecided votes is quite odd for two additional reasons. First, when Justice Roberts said he’d never really thought about the constitutionality of abortion people were incredulous. Similarly, could 30% of the audience (in a debate in which Tyler recently participated (pdf)) be truly undecided about whether “it is wrong to pay for sex”? Second, and even more doubtful, could it be that 30% of the people at the debate were undecided–thus had not heard arguments in let’s say the previous 10 years that converted them one way or the other–but on that very night a majority of the undecided were at last pushed into the decided camp? I think not, thus I think lying best explains the data.
Some questions for readers. Can you think of another hypothesis to explain the data? Can you think of a way of testing competing hypotheses? And does anyone know of a larger database of debate decisions with ayes, nayes and undecided before and after?
Hat tip to Robin for suggesting that there might be a tendency to 50:50, Bryan and Tyler for discussion and Robin for collecting the data.
False Economy, by Alan Beattie
I enjoyed the book, most of all the chapter comparing Argentina and the United States. I was struck by this bit:
New York is the only one out of the sixteen largest cities in the northeastern or midwestern states whose population is larger than it was fifty years ago.
Over that same time period our national population has roughly doubled. The subtitle of the book is A Surprising Economic History of the World.
Assorted Links
- Hayek v. Keynes in elegant powerpoints developed by Roger Garrison. Hat tip to Taking Hayek Seriously.
- The Independent Review (I am an assistant editor) appears in several scenes in the new Crowe, Affleck movie, State of Play. David Theroux says the movie would have been better had the writers paid more attention to the contents.