Category: Data Source

Here is the accompanying article by Matt Yglesias.

My apologies if this list sounds dogmatic or polemic.  I’m not trying to persuade you (now), I’m simply listing the inner contents of my mind, so you may compare this with my post on what I am uncertain about.  Here is an incomplete and desultory list of what I (think I) am nearly certain about:

1. Polarizing America won’t make interest group politics go away, no matter how hard either the right-wingers or progressives wish it so.  It may even make interest group politics worse, and in the meantime the polarizer is simply demonstrating a lack of meta-rationality on the part of the polarizer.

2. We cannot do economic policy as we might arrange pieces on a chessboard.  What you ask for is rarely what you get, and your recommendations had better be prepared for this discrepancy.

3. Government-dominated health systems, insofar as they work well (a number of them do), succeed simply by lowering costs.  Health care has a murky relationship to human health, pharmaceuticals and broken limbs aside.  A version of the single-payer system, as might be adopted in the United States, would not lower costs.  We would be raising taxes and lowering medical innovation to give poor people a good deal more financial security and a slight bit more health; that is the relevant trade-off.

4. Overall, despite its many flaws, America is a force for liberty in the greater global community.

5. We are programmed to respond to the "us vs. them" mentality and highly intelligent people are no less captive to this framing.  We should try very hard to get away from this framing.

6. America is a beacon of innovation for the world, and it is critically important that we allow the preconditions for American innovation to continue.

7. It would be a disaster if American taxation ever reached 55 percent of gdp.

8. Which institutions work well is often country-specific. 

9. The West European way of life is a marvel, unprecedented in human history.  That said, I am not sure that the degree of economic security to date can persist in a more mobile and more diverse future (this second sentence retreats to what I am uncertain about).

10. No one has a good idea what the equilibrium looks like for nuclear proliferation.  This is very worrying.

11. The possibility of pandemics receives insufficient attention.  The world sleepwalked through AIDS for a long time, mostly because "it doesn’t affect people like you and me."  The next time around could be much worse.

12. It is a big mistake — even in rhetoric — to conflate concern for the poor with comparative egalitarian intuitions.  The left ought to turn its back on this mistake, although it would mean losing one of their most effective rhetorical tools.

13. Most people are sincere in their views (even if wrong), and polemic attacks on them signal a weakness of the attacker, not the attackee.

14. The chance that a protectionism will be an economically rational form of protectionism is very low.

With less than two weeks left in the year, Los Angeles is on track to record its lowest homicide rate since 1970.

   

That year, 394 people were killed in the city as the war in Vietnam raged on and the Beatles called it quits.

   

As
of Dec. 15, 379 people had been killed in Los Angeles this year, with
about 200 of those incidents gang-related. The overall homicide rate is
down 17 percent from last year.

One of the sharpest declines is in gang-related killings.  Here is the link, hat tip to Angus, and no, this is not a pre-timed post.

Even with about a tenth of all subprime mortgages now in foreclosure, only a
small share of all American families — about 0.3 percent — own a home in
foreclosure…

Here is the link, from Mark Thoma.  This is one big reason why I’m not yet convinced by the economic pessimists.  The article also notes how many estimates of the S&L crisis of the 1980s were exaggerated, and suggests the same tendency may be happening today.

Addendum: This piece is a good statement of the case for pessimism.

I haven’t read through this closely, but it seems to be a very important paper:

…we show that, relative to white wages, black wages: (a) vary negatively
with a measure of the prejudice of the "marginal" white in a state; (b)
vary negatively with the prejudice in the lower tail of the prejudice
distribution, but are unaffected by the prejudice of the most
prejudiced persons in a state; and (c) vary negatively with the
fraction of a state that is black. We show that these results are
robust to a variety of extensions, including directly controlling for
racial skill quality differences and instrumental variables estimates.
We present some initial evidence to show that racial wage gaps are
larger the more racially integrated is a state’s workforce, also as
Becker’s model predicts.

Here is the paper.  This version is $5 cheaper.

Matt Yglesias writes:

Via Andrew Sullivan, Eric dePlace notes that "You save more fuel switching from a 15 to 18 mpg car than switching from a 50 to 100 mpg car." And so you do. A 15 MPG car would require 1,000 gallons of gas to drive 15,000 miles while an 18MPG car could get it done in just 833 gallons. That saves 167 gallons of gasoline. By contrast, since a 50 MPG only uses 300 gallons to go 15,000 miles, upgrading to 100 MPG can’t save that much gas — the super-efficient car uses 150 gallons.

It is tricky, because the consumption basket and number of miles driven will not stay constant across alternatives, but this logic is worth keeping in mind nonetheless.

BasePoint Analytics LLC, a recognized fraud analytics and consulting firm, analyzed over 3 million loans originated between 1997 and 2006 (the majority being 2005-2006 vintage), including 16,000 examples of non-performing loans that had evidence of fraudulent misrepresentation in the original applications.  Their research found that as much as 70% of early payment default loans contained fraud misrepresentations on the application.

That is from a Fitch Ratings report (summary here, with an eventual link to buy it), the rest makes for very gory reading as well.  Thanks to a loyal MR reader for the copy of this report.

Here was my earlier post on the topic, now Ban Chuan Cheah is kind enough to send me questionnaire data from the World Values Survey.  The question is:

With which of these two statements do you tend to agree? (CODE ONE ANSWER ONLY)
A. Regardless of what the qualities and faults of one’s parents are, one must always love and respect them.
B. One does not have the duty to respect and love parents who have not earned it by their behaviour and attitudes.

1. Always
2. Earned
3. Neither

Some rates of answering "Always" are:

Netherlands: 31.9 percent, Denmark: 35.9, Germany: 59.2, Belarus: 70.9, Japan: 71.6, France: 74.7, United States: 77.2, Canada: 77.6, India: 88.8, China: 94.5, Puerto Rico: 97.5, Vietnam: 99.3.

Based on these and other numbers, I tentatively conclude that wealth breeds parental disrespect, being Asian brings greater respect for parents, and having a strong welfare state is correlated with disrespect for parents.  Being a former East Bloc totalitarian state doesn’t have nearly the oomph I would have expected; many East European countries fall into the 70-80 percent range.

Data on cohabitation suggest that the answer is no, whether for gay men or cohabiting heterosexuals.  The standard selection story is that women are more likely to choose the high earning men and marry them.  But why don’t women live with these men too?  Does living together not transfer enough resources?  Could it be that real legal marriage is proxying for the ability to commit, which is positively correlated which other determinants of job success?

Memphis wins the competition, but:

Had we included every area on the list, the smaller cities of
Huntington, W.V., and Ashland, Ohio, on the West Virginia, Kentucky and
Ohio state borders would have far outpaced every city on the list with
obesity rates of 45%. Of the 50 cities we did rank, Boston entered
last, with only 19%.

Here is the full story.  Residents of San Antonio are the most likely to patronize fast food restaurants, with an average (or is it median?) of 20 fast food days a month.  I’ll note that Latino fast food is better than average and it involves a smaller health penalty, relative to the non-fast food.  Here are photos of the most obese American cities, though oddly they show the buildings far more than the people.  Would an article about tall or wide buildings show only the people?  Could they not find heavy people?  Or do they think we simply don’t want to look at them?

The three countries in which the [movie piracy] losses to U.S. studios were highest were not East Asian countries, and two of them were not developing countries: Mexico, the United Kingdom, and France accounted for over $1.2 billion in lost revenues, or 25% of the non-U.S. total – and slightly less than the U.S. total of $1.3 billion.

You will notice that China is not mentioned in that summary.  Go to p.13 of the paper: Russia has a per capita piracy rate lower than that of Germany and about equal to that of Japan.  And, out of the first eleven nations studied, China comes in sixth in absolute terms for movie piracy losses and eleventh in per capita terms.  In per capita terms, nation #10, Russia, has almost ten times the piracy losses as does China.  Per capita piracy losses are about twenty times higher in the United States than in China.  If eleven more nations are added to the rankings (see p.15), only two (Korea and India) have lower per capita piracy losses than China.  Overall that puts China at 20th out of 22 sampled countries when it comes to per capita piracy losses on movies. 

Hungary, however, is a major, major offender.  Chinese piracy is highly visible to those who visit major Chinese cities, because it takes the form of DVD sales in the streets.  But the real grabbers are countries where everyone has a VCR or DVD player, and where the domestic film industry is relatively weak.

These numbers may not be highly accurate, but they do put things in perspective.  Hat tip to China Law Blog.

The entire market in subprime debt is just 1.4% of the size of global equity markets. Or, to put it another way, a 1.4% downward fluctuation in stocks erases the same amount of value as if all subprime-backed bonds were collectively marked to $0.

Here is the link.

The Asian
Development Bank presented official survey results indicating China’s
economy is smaller and poorer than established estimates say. The
announcement cited the first authoritative measure of China’s size
using purchasing power parity methods. The results tell us that when
the World Bank announces its expected PPP data revisions later this
year, China’s economy will turn out to be 40 per cent smaller than
previously stated……The number of people in China living below the
World Bank’s dollar-a-day poverty line is 300m – three times larger
than currently estimated.

Here is more.

When next summer’s Olympics roll around, the Beijing Weather Modification Office will be poised to intercept incoming clouds, draining them before they get to the festivities.  No fewer than 32,000 people
nationwide are employed by the Weather Modification Office — "some of
them farmers, who are paid $100 a month to handle anti-aircraft guns and rocket launchers" loaded with cloud-seeding compounds.

Here is the story.

Or is it Europe fact of the day?  Switzerland fact of the day?

Beijing is now Europe’s largest source of manufactured imports, but the 27-nation bloc, with a population of about 470 million people, exports less to China than it does to Switzerland.

Here is the article.