Category: Data Source

According to a voluntary survey cited in the report, 48% of Caribbean adolescent girls surveyed described their own "sexual initiation" as forced.

That is from "Cost of Caribbean Crime Grows," 4 May 2007, The Wall Street Journal.  The Caribbean is now the most crime-ridden part of the world, according to the World Bank.

The combined earnings of the world’s top 25 hedge fund managers of more than $14bn (£7.49bn) exceeded the national income of Jordan last year and three individuals took home more than $1bn, according to the biggest annual industry survey.

Here is the article, which illustrates the role of powerful capital markets in promoting income inequality.  Here is an NYT piece.

What we see are the fearless super-rich having the resources and the liquidity to bid away the equity price premium, plus grab extra profits on the side.  Why should they worry about risk?  The result is improved resource allocation.  The losers are future investors, who now, if they buy, pay higher prices.  That means people like me, wealthy enough to be buying equities but not fancy enough to do anything but buy and hold.  The investment question is whether the price run-up is mostly over, or whether it has just begun to take off.

Click here for a map, via Kottke.

Here is the list, via Kottke, and here.  My favorites:

Prediction #22: Store Purchases by Tube. Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles. These tubes will collect, deliver and transport mail over certain distances, perhaps for hundreds of miles. They will at first connect with the private houses of the wealthy; then with all homes. Great business establishments will extend them to stations, similar to our branch post-offices of today, whence fast automobile vehicles will distribute purchases from house to house.

Prediction #23: Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today. They will purchase materials in tremendous wholesale quantities and sell the cooked foods at a price much lower than the cost of individual cooking. Food will be served hot or cold to private houses in pneumatic tubes or automobile wagons.

And strawberries will be as large as apples.

I’ve had many people asking me whether Jacob Hacker’s results about "the great risk shift" hold up.  The CBO weighs in:

Since 1980, there has been little change in earnings variability for both men and women.  There is some evidence that, between 1960 and 1980, earnings variability increased for men but was offset by a decrease for women.  Those findings are consistent with most existing studies of the topic that use publicly available survey data, which tend to find higher levels of earnings variability for men in the 1980s and 1990s relative to the 1970s, but little change since around 1980.

Here is the paper.  I’ll read through it soon, and report back if my deeper impression runs in the other direction.  If you know of relevant defenses of Hacker, please do leave them in the comments.  I’d like to get to the bottom of this.

…of the 3,220 Chinese citizens with a personal wealth of
100 million yuan ($13 million) or more, 2,932 are children of high-level
cadres.  Of the key positions in the five industrial sectors–finance, foreign
trade, land development, large-scale engineering and securities–85% to 90% are
held by children of high-level cadres.

Here is the longer story, interesting for its dissection of "China scholars."

Thanks to Kent Guida for the pointer.

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.