Category: Data Source

I will be in NYC tomorrow (Thursday) talking about Bounty Hunters at Victor Niederhoffer’s monthly Junto.  All invited.  Details here.

Percentage of American adults held in either prison or mental institutions in 1953 and today, respectively: 0.67, 0.68

Percentage of these adults in 1953 who were in mental institutions: 75

Percentage today who are in prisons: 97

That is from Harper’s Index, April 2007 issue.

What silly notions did you believe as a kid?  Here is a long list, supplied by volunteers, look to the left for extra links.  Here is one good example of many:

I believed that Girl Scouts could arrest people as the police could, and that Boy Scouts could go to war.

I used to believe that it was the wedding ring which somehow caused children to come (really, and yes I was worried about what this meant for traditional scientific theories of causality).  I also used to believe that a baseball shortstop had to be short, and that dealing with adult life — just the simple mechanics of paying bills and the like — would prove immensely complicated and perhaps beyond my capabilities.

I used to claim — but not believe — that my invisible friend Bing Bing lived under the refrigerator.

The pointer is from the always interesting www.geekpress.com.

What did you once believe?

A loyal MR reader asks:

We know women make less than men.  We know shorter people make less than taller people.  How much of the first is explained by the second?

Not much.  Short men have less self-esteem (recall that male height at the time of high school predicts earnings better than adult male height), but short women, when they are young, feel no worse about themselves than do tall women.  Next?

#28 in a series of 50.

As of 2004 California employed almost 30% of all foreign born workers
in the U.S. and was the state with the largest percentage of immigrants
in the labor force.  It received a very large number of uneducated
immigrants so that two thirds of workers with no schooling degree in
California were foreign-born in 2004.  If immigration harms the labor
opportunities of natives, especially the least skilled ones, California
was the place where these effects should have been particularly strong.
But is it possible that immigrants raised the demand for California’s
native workers, rather than harming it?  After all immigrants have
different skills and tend to work in different occupations then natives
and hence they may raise productivity and the demand for complementary
production tasks and skills.  We consider workers of different education
and age as imperfectly substitutable in production and we exploit
differences in immigration across these groups to infer their impact on
US natives.  In order to isolate the "supply-driven" variation of
immigrants across skills and to identify the labor market responses of
natives we use a novel instrumental variable strategy.  Our estimates
use migration by skill group to other U.S. states as instrument for
migration to California.  Migratory flows to other states, in fact,
share the same "push" factors as those to California but clearly are
not affected by the California-specific "pull" factors.  We find that
between 1960 and 2004 immigration did not produce a negative migratory
response from natives.  To the contrary, as immigrants were imperfect
substitutes for natives with similar education and age we find that
they stimulated, rather than harmed, the demand and wages of most U.S.
native workers.

In other words, if lots of Mexican carpenters move to California, we don’t see the non-Mexican carpenters leaving in droves, due to lower wages. 

Here is the paper.  Here is a non-gated version.  The article makes the interesting observation that if California were counted as a nation (and the U.S. not), it would receive the second largest number of immigrants per year of any country, with only Russia beating it out.

Ceteris paribus, well-being reaches a minimum, on both sides of the Atlantic, in people’s mid to late 40s.

Here is the paper.  It’s a good thing I don’t believe in that nasty happiness research…although here is a good defense of it…

Addendum: Speaking of the limits of economics, here is an excellent piece (excerpts only, buy today’s WSJ) on whether economists should study autism.

…a principal reason for greater income volatility is both simple and benign–motherhood.  In the 1970s, a minority of mothers were in the workforce and their pay was relatively low.  By the 1990s, a majority of mothers were in the workforce and their pay was much higher.  Because women today have a much more prominent role in the economy, their movements in and out of the workforce to take care of children are having bigger impacts on income volatility.  When mothers re-enter the workforce, family incomes increase.  This also counts as income volatility.

That is from The New Rules Economy.  Have any of you seen more on the topic?

A survey released today by Prince & Associates in collaboration with wealth consultant Hannah Grove found that 70% of today’s multimillionaires said being wealthy gave them “better sex.”  (You can request a free copy via email here.)  A majority also said wealth gave them “more adventurous and exotic” sex lives.

The survey polled nearly 600 men and women with net worths of more than $30 million and a mean net worth of $89 million…

The survey’s most-surprising findings relate to the impact that money has on the sex lives of women…Among the respondents, nearly three-quarters of the women surveyed (about 150) said they’d had affairs, compared to about 50% of the men.  While the male numbers are in keeping with findings for the broader American population, the figure for women is almost twice as high as the national average, according to sex researchers.  (More than half of all the men and women surveyed had been divorced at least once.)

Fully 63% of rich men said wealth gave them “better sex,” which they defined as having more-frequent sex with more partners.  That compares to 88% of women who said more money gave them better sex, which they defined as “higher quality” sex.

“This tells us that the women as a whole receive more sexual benefits from wealth than men,” says Ms. Grove.

The article has more, but this is a family blog…

…the risk of death for an 18-year-old male driver is about the same as that for an 80-year-old female driver, but both are safer than the operator of a motorcycle.  And counterintuitively, risk is higher in the mountains in summer than in winter…the risk of death for vehicle occupants who are 16 to 20 years old, on weekdays, is 13.86 per 100 million trips between 8 a.m. and noon.  But between 8 p.m. and midnight it is 30.51 per 100 million trips, more than twice as high.

Here is an article on a new web site for calculating the risks of travel.  Here is the web site.

1. Brazil $327.71

2. India $222.27

3. Sweden $213.03

4. Denmark $208.25

5. Belgium $205.81

6. France $205.80

7. Finland $205.80

8. Ireland $205.79

9. UK $195.04

10. Austria $192.86

11. Netherlands $192.86

12. Spain $192.86

13. Italy $192.86

14. Germany $192.46

15. China $179.84

16. South Korea $176.17

17. Switzerland $175.59

18. New Zealand $172.53

19. Australia $172.36

20. Taiwan $164.88

21. Singapore $161.25

22. Mexico $154.46

23. U.S. $149.00

24. Japan $147.63

25. Hong Kong $147.35

26. Canada $144.20

Casual conversation and commentary lead most Americans to think that this accumulation of reserves corresponds to a large trade surplus in China, achieved by holding the value of their currency down.  In fact, the Chinese trade surplus is not that large.  It is well under 5% of GDP, smaller in percentage terms than the U.S. trade deficit.

That is from A. Michael Spence, in today’s Wall Street Journal; here is more.

The price level in Brazil is approximately 5 trillion times higher today than it was in 1972.

Here is the source.

Paramus is one of the nation’s strongest shopping magnets, generating roughly $5 billion a year in retail sales, an amount about equal to the gross domestic product of Cambodia, Nicaragua or the sultanate of Brunei.

…In an already densely populated state, Paramus has more parking spots than people…It is a Faustian bargain that brings 200,000 cars a day into town during December, turning the roads into virtual parking lots, but also keeps property tax rates in Paramus relatively low – $1.55 per $100 of assessed value, compared with $3.88 in Maywood, the next town over.

…Already, Paramus has 320 stores with more than $1 million in annual sales each, second in the country only to the 10021 ZIP code on the East Side of Manhattan.  The vacancy rate for stores is 3 percent, several percentage points below the rate for similar real estate elsewhere.  Some properties are filled even before the previous tenants move out.

Here is the full story.  I liked this bit:

Irma Weishaupt and her husband, Lou, who have lived in Paramus for 45 years, say they stick to side streets and sometimes leave town to shop.

In 1992 the average tariff level in China was about forty percent.  By 2007 it is expected to be 6.8 percent.

That is from Robert Lawrence, "China and the Multilateral Trading System," a good overview of what the title promises.  Here are non-gated versions of the paper.

Here is a further exploration of data issues.

Another post worth reading is The Conspiracy Against Cuckolds.