Category: Data Source

The political slants of the news diets of media figures

by  Tyler Cowen in

Jesse Shapiro and Matt Gentzow start off their short note as follows:

We use data from comScore,Mediamark Research & Intelligence (MRI), and The AtlanticWire “Media Diet” to study the news diets of media figures such as David Brooks and Tyler Cowen.

This is what they find:

Tyler Cowen’s news diet is relatively liberal: 45.7 percent of users of the average news outlet he visits are conservative.

This means that Cowen’s news diet is more conservative than 11 percent of all Internet users, and 8 percent of all media figures interviewed by the Atlantic Wire.

David Brooks’ news diet is relatively conservative: 60.4 percent of users of the average news outlet he visits are conservative. This means that Brooks’ news diet is more conservative than 74 percent of all Internet users and 72 percent of all media figures interviewed by the Atlantic Wire.

pp.3-4 in the paper offer the measurements for other media figures, including Jeff Goldberg, Felix Salmon, Marc Ambinder, and David Frum.

What do you think?  Do the more conservative commentators have a more conservative media diet?  Which factors determine the political slant of the media diet of a public intellectual?  Does it matter, for instance, where you were born?  I'll predict that conservatives who grew up in the Northeast are more likely to spend a lot of time with The New York Times than conservatives from the South.

Here is a previous MR post on this line of research by the authors.

Social welfare expenditures in the United States and the Nordic Countries

by  Tyler Cowen in

Price Fishback has a new paper and perhaps this abstract should be screamed from the yttertak:

The extent of social expenditures in the U.S. and the Nordic Countries is compared in the early 1900s and again in the early 2000s. The common view that America spends much less on social welfare than the Nordic countries does not survive closer inspection when we consider the differences in the structures of social expenditures. The standard comparison examines gross social expenditures. After adjustments for direct and indirect taxes paid, the net social expenditures in the Nordic countries are much closer to American levels. Inclusion of mandatory and private social expenditures raises the American share of GDP devoted to social expenditures to rank among the middle of the Nordic countries. Per capita net public social expenditures in the U.S. rank behind only Sweden. Add in the private spending, and per capita spending in the U.S. is higher than in all of the Nordic countries. Finally, I document the enormous diversity across time and place in public social expenditures in the U.S. in the early 1900s and circa 1990.

Fishback does discuss how, in line with intuition, the U.S. system is more porous and less universal.  He also stresses how common it is that people do not claim or apply for benefits for which they are eligible.

Here are some of Fishback's papers on-line, but I do not see an ungated copy of this one.

California fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

Chug sends a good link to me, on default estimates, here is the bottom line:

The six with rankings more worrisome than California are Venezuela (the worst), followed by Argentina, Pakistan, Greece, Ukraine and the Emirate of Dubai. California ranks ahead of the Republic of Latvia, the Region of Sicily and Iraq.

As sovereign debt crises unfold, you will see increasingly innovative attempts to avoid uttering the simple words: "The government spent too much money here."

See also here for a list of "sovereign tighteners" and "sovereign wideners."

Sentences to ponder, discount babies edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

The paper finds the cost of adopting a black baby needs to be $38,000 lower than the cost of a white baby, in order to make parents indifferent to race. Boys will need to cost $16,000 less than girls.

Presumably that holds at the margin only, not for all parents.  Here is more, from Allison Schrager.  It seems that most couples prefer to adopt non-black girls.  Here is Allison's Twitter feed.

Addendum: Here is a related story on rabbinical rulings.

Facts about Europe

by  Tyler Cowen in

The country in Europe with the biggest untaxed, or “shadow,” economy as a proportion of GDP is Greece. Next is (gulp) Italy. Then Portugal and Spain. On the chart below, in fact, the bars look unsettlingly like dominoes.

There is more information and a good chart here.  There is this too:

Massive tax evasion helps produce large public-sector deficits. Let’s make some simple back-of-the-envelope calculations: if the shadow economy is adding 25 percent to GDP, with income going untaxed, and if the average tax rate on such income is a conservative 20 percent, recovering such tax revenues would imply an additional 5 percent of GDP in tax revenues, which would bring down the Italian 2009 deficit to zero. As deficits cumulate into debt, prolonged tax evasion could explain – by itself – the whole of the Italian public debt, now projected at 118.4 percent of GDP.

China (India) fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

China alone loses between 100 million and 200 million tons of coal each year to mine fires, as much as 20 percent of their annual production, according to the International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, based in Enschede, Netherlands. The Institute estimates that carbon dioxide emissions from these fires are as high as 1.1 billion metric tons, more than the total carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles in the United States. Second to China is India, where 10 million tons of coal burns annually in mine fires, contributing a further 51 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

The full article is here and I thank Jim Ward for the pointer.

Are girls now worse drivers than boys?

by  Tyler Cowen in

This was only one study, but it fits into some broader social trends:

In a survey of teenage drivers, Allstate Insurance Co. found that 48% of girls said they are likely to drive 10 miles per hour over the speed limit. By comparison, 36% of the boys admitted to speeding. Of the girls, 16% characterized their own driving as aggressive, up from 9% in 2005. And just over half of the girls said they are likely to drive while talking on a phone or texting, compared to 38% of the boys.

Nor are these teens meta-rational:

The study found that 65% of the respondents, male and female, said they are confident in their own driving skills, but 77% said they had felt unsafe when another teen was driving. Only 23% of teens agree that most teens are good drivers.

College students are working less hard, it seems

by  Tyler Cowen in

Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks report:

Using multiple datasets from different time periods, we document declines in academic time investment by full-time college students in the United States between 1961 and 2003. Full-time students allocated 40 hours per week toward class and studying in 1961, whereas by 2003 they were investing about 27 hours per week. Declines were extremely broad-based, and are not easily accounted for by framing effects, work or major choices, or compositional changes in students or schools. We conclude that there have been substantial changes over time in the quantity or manner of human capital production on college campuses.

An earlier, different and ungated version is here.  A closely related paper, by the same authors, is here.

Which Americans are “best off”?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I know that is a tricky concept, and I wouldn't personally use those words, but if you consult human development indices the answer is Asians living in New Jersey.  The standard is:

The index factors in life expectancy at birth, educational degree attainment among adults 25-years or older, school enrollment for people at least three years old and median annual gross personal earnings.

What does New Jersey do right?  How much of that is selection?:

Across the 50 states and the District of Columbia, Asian Americans were worst off in Louisiana. Their New Jersey counterparts lived an average of nine years longer and earned more than twice that of Asian Americans in Louisiana.

Overall Asian-American life expectancy is 86.6 years.  Here's a scary sentence:

Washington, D.C. offered the highest level of human development among whites.

African-Americans fare best in Maryland, which also may be a DC effect.  There is this too:

Latinos outlive whites, on average, by over four years, and in all but four states

The full blog post is here and for the pointer I thank DavidMWessel.