Category: Data Source

The world’s 25 dirtiest cities

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the article, here is the top of the list:

1, Baku, Azerbaijan

2. Dhaka, Bangladesh

3. Antananarivo, Madagascar

4. Port-au-Prince (pre-quake?  I believe they are now uncontested #1 or will be soon.)

5. Mexico City

Most of the rest are in Africa.  If I did the ranking, Mexico City would do much better than number five, since air pollution isn't as bad as the lack of sanitation in cities such as Conakry (a mere #19).  And why does Bangui (CAR) get such an idyllic photo?  Nor does Google offer up any nasty photos of the place.

Hat tip goes to the essential Rachel Strohm, Twitter feed here.

Who are the friendliest people on earth?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Chug points me to this latest survey, and here is the list:


1. Bahrain


2. Canada


3. Australia


4. Thailand


5. Malaysia


6. South Africa


7. Hong Kong


8. Singapore


9. Spain


10. United States


That means friendly to expats, not friendly to each other.  You’ll notice that English-speaking or English-fluent countries are overrepresented, plus Thailand (ahem).


Here is a critique of the survey and mostly I concur with the criticisms (sorry Omar).  More generally, unless it is a woman seeking marriage, I view “friendliness to expats” as a social strategy, often intended for internal consumption, not necessarily insincere but not reflecting true temperament either.  It’s not driven by actual friendliness.  By the way, how did Spain ever make it to number nine?


Are the Japanese the most or the least friendly people on earth?  “Helpful” isn’t the same as “friendly.”  In what country are you most likely to make real friends?  Marry a native?  Aren’t those two variables inversely related?


“Friendly” is one of the words most likely to arouse my deconstructive suspicions.

Who are the biggest donors to Haiti?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is an interesting visual, which expresses pledged support to Haiti in per capita terms.  #1 is Canada, by a large margin, followed by some of the Nordic countries.

Per capita the U.S. doesn't do so well (NB: I don't think remittances are counted), with less than half of what Guyana supplies.  We're also behind Estonia, Switzerland, and United Arab Emirates, among other countries.  The visual is measuring earthquake aid pledged, not all foreign aid.

In absolute terms here is another visual; U.S. is #1.  I don't think this is using the same metric as above.

Here's another interesting visual.  Relative to per capita gdp, Ghana is the single most significant pledger of aid to Haiti.

For the pointer I thank Rahul Nabar.

The incomes and professions of Haitian-Americans

by  Tyler Cowen in

The blog post is here.  It's a proposal for "diaspora bonds" (I fear that excess corruption is a problem).  I was more interested in this bit:

…nearly one-third of Haitian immigrants in the US belong to households that earned more than $60,000 in 2009. In comparison, less than 15% of the immigrants from Mexico, Dominican Republic and El Salvador in the US had that level of household income. A quarter of Haitian immigrants, especially women, are reportedly in the relatively higher paying health care and education sectors; only a small number of them are in the construction sector.

Hat tip goes to Whirled Citizen.

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.