Category: Data Source

If Zambia had converted all the aid it received since 1960 to investment
and all of that investment to growth, it would have had a per capita GDP of about $20,000 by the early 1990s. Instead, Zambia’s per capita GDP in the early 1990s was lower than it had been in 1960, hovering under $500.

That is Bill Easterly, courtesy of Mahalanobis.  And did I mention that fifty years ago, South Korea had about the same standard of living?

Average percentage of the U.K. population that Britons believe to be immigrants: 21

Actual percentage: 8

That is from Harper’s Index, July 2005 issue.

In 1968, the number of pigs in China was 5.2 million; today it is 508 million. The number of poultry in China in 1968 was 12.3 million; today it is 13 billion.

Here is the story.  Yes this is great news, but it is also a reason why people are worried about China as a mixing bowl for an influenza pandemic.

Here is the link, thanks to Randall Parker for the pointer and commentary on the feasibility of wind power.  "Blue" is for superb conditions for wind power, and "red" is for outstanding, in case you can’t read the print on the chart.  And here is a wind map for the last six hours.

Grade inflation has not been constant through time.  Mark Thoma at Economist’s View offers some hypotheses.

There are two episodes that account for most grade inflation. The first
is from the 1960s through the early 1970s. This is usually explained by
the draft rules for the Vietnam War. The second episode begins around
1990 and is harder to explain….

My
study finds an interesting correlation in the data. During the time
grades were increasing, budgets were also tightening inducing a
substitution towards younger and less permanent faculty. I broke down
grade inflation by instructor rank and found it is much higher among
assistant professors, adjuncts, TAs, instructors, etc. than for
associate or full professors. These are instructors who are usually
hired year-to-year or need to demonstrate teaching effectiveness for
the job market, so they have an incentive to inflate evaluations as
much as possible, and high grades are one means of manipulating student
course evaluations.

But what are the consequences of grade inflation?  A new study takes advantage of a tres bon experiment.  In May of 1968 French students rioted, were suppressed by the police, but then joined by 10 million striking workers leading to a near revolutionary situation.  To quiet things down many students that year were accepted to universities which in former and later years they would not have qualified for.  What happened to those students?

Eric Maurin and Sandra McNally write:

We show that the lowering of thresholds at an early (and highly selective stage) of the higher education system enabled a significant proportion of students born between 1947 and 1950 (particularly in 1948 and 1949) to pursue more years of higher education that would otherwise have been possible. This was followed by a significant increase in their subsequent wages and occupational attainment, which was particularly evident for persons coming from a middle-class family background.  Finally, returns were transmitted to the next generation on account of the relationship between parental education and that of their children.

The results are surprising but consistent with Bowen and Bok who argue that affirmative action did not harm minority students who were accepted at universities at which they would not have qualified based on grades alone.

I’m puzzled but not yet ready to retire my reputation as a tough grader – my best students deserve no less.

Comments are open.

I’ll be spending this weekend on a mission to a Mexican mental hospital; I am helping a friend interview one of the patients, who is also an amate artist.  It is a respectable place, and provided they don’t confuse me with one of the inmates, I’ll have a good time.  I’ll be blogging from an Internet cafe in Cuernavaca and eating tamales in the street.

…the Guardian published what had until then been a government secret: which Brits rake in the biggest subsidies from the profligate European Union.  Near the top of the list was the queen herself, whose farm in Norfolk received 769,000 pounds (approximately $1.3 million) in 2003-4.

That is from the July issue of Reason magazine.  Here is the original story:

A spokesman for the Queen yesterday rejected any suggestion that she received too much money from the taxpayer. "The Queen is a landowner and a farmer. She receives subsidy, just as any other farmer would do."

The total would be higher if subsidies to Scotland — still a secret — were also included.

Perhaps the most pressing environmental problem in the world is indoor air pollution, which kills 2.8 million people each year, just behind HIV/AIDS.  The pollution is caused by poor people cooking and heating their homes with dung and cardboard.  The solution is not environmental (to certify dung) but rather economic, helping these people build enough wealth to afford kerosene.

That is by Bjorn Lomborg, in Foreign Policy, July/August issue. 

Two caveats.  First, the best figure I can find appears to be 1.6 million lives; here is a WHO statement on the phenomenon.  Second, the people die because the smoke renders them more susceptible to pneumonia and other respiratory diseases.  But their poverty makes them more susceptible for a number of reasons.  I doubt if the marginal product of the smoke can be isolated clearly; see this study.  Nonetheless this is a very very serious problem that does not receive much attention.

…two of the nation’s newspapers — The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal — are running extensive multipart series that paint a much darker picture.  The U.S., rather than being a land of opportunity, these stories argue, is increasingly a class-bound place of immobility and stratification, where it’s becoming ever harder for the people at the bottom to move up…

Rather than agonizing over relative comparisons, it may be better to concentrate on the simpler and intuitively satisfying concept of absolute "mobility," — whether you are doing better than your parents did, or whether the living standards of a whole group of people are rising over time.  From this perspective, there are signs that this past decade has had more upward mobility compared with the previous two decades…

There’s yet another big problem: we actually know very little about whether relative mobility increased or decreased during the New Economy decade because complete data don’t exist yet.  With a few exceptions, most studies stop with the mid- or late 1990s.

Here’s what we do know: Over the past decade, virtually every traditionally disadvantaged group made gains in absolute terms.  Take, for example, families headed by immigrants who entered the country in the 1980s.  The poverty rate for such families dropped sharply, from 26.6% in 1995 to 16.4% in 2003…Similarly, a combination of welfare reform and tight labor markets helped drive down the poverty rate for female-headed households with children from 46.1% in 1993 to 35.5% in 2003….it beats the total lack of progress in the previous decade.

That is from 20 June 2005, Business Week, by Michael Mandel.  Here is a new book on who gets ahead in low-wage labor markets.  Here is my previous post on Horatio Alger.  Here is my previous post on the family as a source of inequality.

Malcolm Gladwell "the greatest living storyteller" but has no interest in the rest of the magazine; reads Mr. Gladwell’s stuff online.

Yahoo Finance. "I handle my financial portfolio like it’s a big gambling account." Appreciates array of free info, and "when I started five years ago, it was better developed than others."

Three blogs by economists: MarginalRevolution.com by George Mason University professors Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, Berkeley professor Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal and the Becker-Posner Blog, by the U of C’s Gary Becker and U.S. Appellate Court Judge Richard Posner.

At bedtime, newsmagazines and People. "I can rarely convince myself that there are books worth reading. And at one point I became brainwashed by my father that it was unmanly to read fiction – so I read Time and Newsweek instead."

Here is the story, and thanks to Laurel for the pointer.

The NameVoyager lets you type in a name and see the number of babies per million that name was given to from 1900 to 2003.  Below is Alex.  Note that the thickness, not the height, of the lines gives the relative use of that variant.

It’s unfortunate that the data only go as far forward as 2003 because obviously the popularity of Alex will have exploded after August 21 of that year.

Thanks to the Freakonomics blog via Amanda Agan for the pointer.

My latest article (with Helland and Klick) is a DataWatch column for the Journal of Economic Perspectives.  The article won’t be of interest to most readers but if you want to do empirical research on torts and civil justice this is the place to start.

Check out the blogad to the right, MA in Economics looking for a Job!  I don’t know the candidate, the ad came across the transom just as do other blogads.  But I do know this job seeker is entrepreneurial, has a sense of humor and has fine taste in blogs.  Someone hire this person!

Japan is running out of farmers, only 40% of whom are under 65.  Moreover, some 70% of farming households derive most of their income from non-agricultural sources.

That is from The Economist, 28 May edition.