Category: Data Source

I was surprised this number was such a big one

by  Tyler Cowen in

Organized labor lost 10% of its members in the private sector last year, the largest decline in more than 25 years.

I meant to blog this the day I read it but somehow I forgot to; here is one source.  I haven't seen it receive much discussion in the econ blogosphere.  For one thing, it's a sign that the union wage premium isn't so stable.

Haiti fact (?) of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

Is it possible that now almost eight percent of Haiti's population consists of orphaned children?  Reliable data are hard to come by but this one estimate suggests it might be true.  (Current living population is maybe 9.5 million (?), with the number of orphans estimated at 750,000.)  It is also the case that the Haitian government seems reluctant to let these children be adopted abroad, in part because it is difficult to tell which children are truly orphaned.

Addendum: Here is one estimate.

Speech Balloons

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Here from Maya Sen are speech balloons illustrating the importance of various words from the majority and then dissenting/concurring opinions in Citizens United v. FEC (more frequently used words are larger). It's interesting to me that just looking at the balloons I can tell which side was more concerned with the Constitution and which side was more concerned with a particular view of the ideal polity.

KennedyStevensSee Bainbridge for a much more complete roundup of the issues.

Innovative Solutions to the Shortage of Transplant Organs

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Millions of people suffer from kidney disease, but in 2007 there were just 64,606 kidney-transplant operations in the entire world.

Today in the WSJ I discuss innovative solutions to the worldwide shortage of transplant organs from places like  Iran, India, Singapore, Israel and elsewhere.  One interesting bit I haven't blogged about before is routine removal of organs without the donor's or their families consent.  China?  No.  America.  It's been legal here for decades.

In a number of U.S. states, medical examiners conducting autopsies may and do harvest corneas with little or no family notification. (By the time of autopsy, it is too late to harvest organs such as kidneys.) Few people know about routine removal statutes and perhaps because of this, these laws have effectively increased cornea transplants.

Here is another bit on the shadowy definition of death:

Organs can be taken from deceased donors only after they have been declared dead, but where is the line between life and death? Philosophers have been debating the dividing line between baldness and nonbaldness for over 2,000 years, so there is little hope that the dividing line between life and death will ever be agreed upon. Indeed, the great paradox of deceased donation is that we must draw the line between life and death precisely where we cannot be sure of the answer, because the line must lie where the donor is dead but the donor's organs are not.

In 1968 the Journal of the American Medical Association published its criteria for brain death. But reduced crime and better automobile safety have led to fewer potential brain-dead donors than in the past. Now, greater attention is being given to donation after cardiac death: no heart beat for two to five minutes (protocols differ) after the heart stops beating spontaneously. Both standards are controversial–the surgeon who performed the first heart transplant from a brain-dead donor in 1968 was threatened with prosecution, as have been some surgeons using donation after cardiac death. Despite the controversy, donation after cardiac death more than tripled between 2002 and 2006, when it accounted for about 8% of all deceased donors nationwide. In some regions, that figure is up to 20%.

More on markets for organs, presumed consent, and point systems at the WSJ,

Terrorists and false positives

by  Tyler Cowen in

Matt Yglesias calculates:

…monitoring the UK’s 1.5 million Muslims is a lost cause. If you have a 99.9 percent accurate method of telling whether or not a given British Muslim is a dangerous terrorist, then apply it to all 1.5 million British Muslims, you’re going to find 1,500 dangerous terrorists in the UK. But nobody thinks there are anything like 1,500 dangerous terrorists in the UK. I’d be very surprised if there were as many as 15. And if there are 15, that means you’re 99.9 percent accurate method is going to get you a suspect pool that’s overwhelmingly composed of innocent people. The weakness of al-Qaeda’s movement, and the very tiny pool of operatives it can draw from, makes it essentially impossible to come up with viable methods for identifying those operatives.

The decline of Christmas cards

by  Tyler Cowen in

Cards

Agnostic reports:

Using Lexis-Nexis, I found an estimate of 26 Christmas cards for 1990, so that the number of all holiday greeting cards would have been a bit above — probably around the 1987 level of 29 cards across all holidays. The first big drop is visible by 1994, when the number of cards received per household was about 25% lower than in 1987. There was another drop-off starting in 2003, and during the most recent years of 2007 and 2008, the number is down about 40% from the late '80s / early '90s. This does not merely reflect the fact that there are more households now than then, which would tend to lower the ratio even if the total number of cards stayed the same. In 1987, 2.856 billion holiday greeting cards were received vs. 2.117 billion in 2007 — a decrease in sheer volume of 736 million cards.

And what is the upshot?:

1) The various signals of Christmas have been steadily fading since roughly the mid-1990s, at least a decade before the "War on Christmas" debate erupted. Rather than special interests knocking off Christmas-lovers, the general public voluntarily dropped out. None of the changes in the signals is clearly related to the internet, macroeconomic indicators, etc. The only strong association I see is the larger cultural shift away from sincerity and sentimentality toward affectation and irony.

2) They have not been replaced with new signals. Rather, we're pulling out investment from the holiday altogether and shifting it into other holidays like New Year's Eve and Halloween (which Lexis-Nexis suggests was taken over by adults also in the mid-1990s). Anything that will afford us greater opportunities to make the duckface for the cameras.

Contrary to the author's suggestion, I am inclined to see the internet at work here, even if it doesn't explain the entire series.  If you stay in touch by Facebook, what's the point of the yearly reminder?  This is another example of how the internet can lower measured gdp yet raise welfare.

If you scroll down on the blog, you'll find other indicators of the decline of interest in Christmas.

More Engineers in Jihad

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Gambetta and Hertog find that “the share of radical Islamic engineers is no less than nine times greater than the share we could expect if the proneness of engineers to radicalize was the same as that of the male adult population.”  (Tyler blogged this paper several years ago.)

Here is the latest bit of evidence:

Mr. Abdulmutallab grew up in a rarefied slice of Nigeria, the son of an affluent banker. He attended one of the West Africa’s best schools, the British School of Lomé in Togo. After high school, he went to Britain and enrolled at the University College London to study engineering.

Are Old Scientists Less Innovative?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Paul Romer is interviewed in From Poverty to Prosperity, an excellent new book from Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz.  When asked about threats to progress Romer says the following:

One factor that does worry me a little is the demographic changes. Young people, I think, tend to be more innovative, more willing to take risks, more willing to do things differently and they may be very important, disproportionately important, in this innovation and growth process.

And then he gives an example of his worry in practice:

…instead of young scientists getting grant funding to go off and do whatever they want in their twenties, they're working in a lab where somebody in his forties or fifties is the principal investigator in charge of the grant.  They're working as apprentices, almost, under the senior person.  If we're not careful, we could let our institutions, things like tenure and hierarchical structures and peer review, slowly morph over time so that old guys control more and more of what's going on and the young people have a harder and harder time doing something really different, and that would be would be a bad thing for these processes of growth and change.  I'd like to see us keep thinking about how we could tweak our institutions to give power and control and opportunity to young people. 

Here is a graph from Jason Hoyt showing how much the average age of NIH grant recipients has already increased.

Scientists
Hat tip for the graph to Aleks at Statistical Modeling….  Data here.

Will Medicare cost reductions stick?

by  Tyler Cowen in

ChartD
The graph above, which portrays Medicare as a percentage of gdp, is from this SSA piece.  In contrast, Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, and others have touted a new short essay as evidence for the claim that the Obama health reform plan will succeed on the cost control front, or at least offer a reasonable chance of succeeding, or at least offers some components which will not be reversed.  Here is one key paragraph:

Virtually all of the Medicare cuts enacted in 1990 and 1993, which accounted for a significant portion of the savings in those large deficit-reduction packages, were implemented. And most of the savings enacted in 1997 other than the SGR cuts – nearly four-fifths – were implemented as well.

Given that Medicare spending growth slowed significantly more than was anticipated after 1997 – in 1999, for the first time ever, it was actually lower than the previous year’s level – and the budget was balanced in 1998 for the first time in 28 years, it is surprising that Congress did not scale back even more of the savings enacted in 1997. There is little likelihood that the positive budgetary outlook that encouraged some easing of the 1997 cuts will return in coming years.

See also Box 2 in the piece (which starts slowly, so skip ahead to the meat I am citing).  If you're wondering about discrepancies between these numbers and the SSA graph, the latter is as a percentage of gdp.

My view is this: the aggregate data show that Medicare expenditures, as a percentage of gdp, have expanded at a healthy clip for every medium-run period you can find since 1973.  I don't doubt that the future — like the past — may well show some shorter periods which look better than others but cost control has never worked in the past on anything but a temporary basis.  Citing a bunch of short periods of time doesn't convince me; they didn't stick!  And only one three-year batch of cost controls showed up, as a success, in the aggregate historical data at all.  (Would you believe a worsening alcoholic who pointed to many days or even weeks where his rate of drinking was declining and also mentioned that he drank less for a few years starting in 1993?  Or maybe this reminds you ever so slightly of the debates over recent global cooling and short vs. long-term trends?  Most progressives recognize that a few years of cooling do not contradict the evidence about the long-term trend and yet here is an odd flip of emphasis on a few short-term improvements.)

In Figure D you'll also see that the savings from the 1993-1996 partially period are offset by later, more rapid increases in Medicare spending as a percentage of gdp.

Three additional points are worth consideration:

1. The period of Medicare cost savings, in the early to mid 1990s, coincides roughly with a more general period of cost savings in health care, due to managed care.  This was soundly rejected by the American public, both in their roles as consumers and voters.

2. There will be more and more older voters in the years to come.

3. We should give at least some consideration to a "mean reversion" theory, by which current cost savings increase the pressure for future splurges.  I don't want to push this view too hard, but the aggregate data, as I eyeball them, seem to imply "do not reject" for this hypothesis.

On the other side of the ledger, you might argue, pro-Obama, that the very act of passing the legislation represents a countervailing force against this long-run trend of rising costs.

You can still argue for the bill on this basis: "Congress will increase future spending on Medicare as much as it can.  Any other expenditures in the meantime serve a "stuff the beast" function and slow down the future rate of growth on Medicare expenditure.  We'd rather spend the money on extra coverage now, realizing that the threat of future fiscal crisis will force later Medicare cuts."

That's not my point of view, but it's what I think the debate on cost control boils down to.  The best case scenario for the bill is that it won't much help cost control, may not hurt it, but by pre-emption will result in more money spent on coverage and less money spent on old people.