Category: Data Source

France fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

While falling birthrates threaten to undermine economies and social
stability across much of an aging Europe, French fertility rates are
increasing.  France now has the second-highest fertility rate in Europe
— 1.94 children born per woman, exceeded slightly by Ireland’s rate of
1.99.  The U.S. fertility rate is 2.01 children.

In addition to birth subsidies, cultural norms encourage women to both work and have kids.  Here is the story.

Lancet

by  Tyler Cowen in

Left-wing bloggers, such as CrookedTimber, Brad DeLong, and Tim Lambert, are supporting the claim of about 600,000 extra deaths in Iraq.  Jane Galt (scroll down for a few posts) and Steve Sailer raise some concerns.

I am a bit skeptical, but in any case the sheer number of deaths is being overdebated.  Steve Sailer notes: "The violent death toll in the third year of the
war is more than triple what it was in the first year."  That to me is
the more telling estimate.   

A very high deaths total, taken alone, suggests (but does not prove) that the Iraqis were ready to start killing each other in great numbers the minute Saddam went away.  The stronger that propensity, the less contingent it was upon the U.S. invasion, and the more likely it would have happened anyway, sooner or later.  In that scenario the war greatly accelerated deaths.  But short of giving Iraq an eternal dictator, that genie was already in the bottle.

If the deaths are low at first but rising over time, it is more likely that a peaceful transition might have been possible, either through better postwar planning or by leaving Saddam in power and letting Iraqi events take some other course.  That could make Bush policies look worse, not better.  Tim Lambert, in one post, hints that the rate of change of deaths is an important variable but he does not develop this idea.

We all know that the political world judges Iraq by the absolute badness of what is going on (which means Bush critics find a higher number to fit their priors), but that is an incorrect standard.  We should judge the marginal product of U.S. action, relative to what else could have happened.  (North Korea, and the UN response, will give us one data point from another setting.)  In that latter and more accurate notion of a cost-benefit test, U.S. actions probably appear worst when deaths are rising over time, and hitting very high levels in the future. 

Of course the rate of change of deaths is not exactly the proper variable.  Ideally we would like some measure of the contingency of eventual total deaths, relative to policy.  I am not sure what other proxies for that we might have.

Addendum: Let me put my comment up here on the front page: "Many of you are misreading the post by focusing only on the first case
of "bottled up killing," which is presented as only one of two
scenarios.  Reread that if deaths are rising over time and possibly
contingent — and yes I do say this is the relevant and uncontroversial
fact — this suggests a very negative evaluation of Bush policies." 

I don’t want to take the bait on why I am skeptical, the whole argument is that possible skepticism doesn’t have that much import once we consider the broader context of rising deaths and the possible contingency of those deaths. 

Why don’t redistributionists like big band music?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Gabriel Rossman writes to me:

A few days ago there was a discussion on this blog about the book Conservatize Me and more broadly, about taste and politics.  Many of the questions can be answered systematically since in 1993 the General Social Survey included a list of questions about musical taste.  The simplest question to ask is how different types of music correlate with ideology (polviews).  Generally speaking, the stereotypes hold up.  Country is correlated with the right whereas classical, rap, rock music, and heavy metal are all correlated with the left.  Opinions about folk music aren’t correlated with politics.  Note though that even the strongest correlations are relatively weak (r<0.20) so there are plenty of liberals out there listening to country and no shortage of conservative rap fans.

Another way to look at it is to break politics into two dimensions.  Let’s treat whether the government should reduce income differences (eqwith) as a measure of economic attitudes.  Folk, classical, and big band music are very unpopular with redistributionists.  (I guess nobody dreamt about Joe Hill the night before the survey).  Rap, metal, and blues are popular with redistributionists.  Country, rock, and bluegrass aren’t correlated with fiscal attitudes.  For social attitudes, let’s use opinion of sex before marriage (premarsx).  Folk, country, classical, bluegrass, and big band fans tend to disapprove of fornication, whereas rap, rock, metal, and blues fans think it’s fine.  (If you substitute gay sex for premarital sex the pattern is the same, except for rap fans who tend to oppose it).  I experimented with looking for distinctively "libertarian" taste patterns but couldn’t find any.

This is all back of the envelope stuff.  A more sophisticated analysis would use factor analysis on dozens of attitudinal questions and find corresponding patterns in them.

You can find the 1993 GSS at Princeton’s Cultural Policy and Arts National Data Archive.  http://www.cpanda.org/codebookDB/sdalite.jsp?id=a00006.  There’s a self-explanatory web engine that allows you to compare any two variables.  (Want to know how many opera fans have been in fist fights?  Or how people who have paid for sex feel about nuclear power? Now is your chance.)  More advanced users can download the full dataset in SPSS, ASCII, or CSV and do whatever they want with it.

Gabriel Rossman is very smart.  Here is his home page.  Here is a summary of his dissertation.  Here is an abstract of his paper on the Dixie Chicks and where they received less play time.  Here is his paper on "Who Picks the Hits on Radio"? 

Addendum: Here is Benny Goodman on YouTube.  Here is Stan Kenton.  Here is Count Basie.  I could give you more.

Unknown but incredibly important inventors

by  Tyler Cowen in

Shane Greenstein asks me for examples of:

…unknown inventors whose work greatly benefited society and who deserve more recognition.  Ask for nominations! 

…And I will start with nominating Robert Noyce and Jack Kilby, the inventors of the microchip.  I do not know a school boy who has ever heard of them, but everyone uses their invention.

Comments are, of course, open.  How about Fred Soper?

I didn’t believe it at first

by  Tyler Cowen in

…we conjecture that binge drinking conveys unobserved social skills that are rewarded by employers.

Here is the full and very carefully done paper.  I’ve known for a while there is a correlation between drinking and wages, but only recently have I started thinking it might be more than a trick in the data.  The effect disappears for women, once educational attainment is taken into account.  So should you encourage your sons to drink, so as to learn rituals of social bonding, or is their binging simply a signal of sociability?  I’ll note, by the way, that I am a not very social person who also doesn’t drink much, verging on not at all.

Addendum: Andrew Gelman has much more to say on the topic.

Defining Terrorism Down

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Would you believe that the median sentence length given to a terrorist has fallen since 9/11?  In fact, it’s fallen by a lot, from 41 months of prison time to just 20 days of prison time.  Have we gotten soft on terrorism?  Of course not.  In my judgment, sentence length has fallen because in an effort to increase the terrorism stats and scare us all into compliance the FBI and other government agencies have defined terrorism down. The situation has gotten so absurd that in recent years Federal prosecutors have declined to prosecute approximately 90% of the international terrorism cases brought to them by the investigative agencies.

Read the whole report here.

I am at least heartened by the fact that our decentralized system of justice means that prosecutors need not feel that they must march in lockstep with the agencies and the administration.  This is another reason to oppose abandoning the traditional American system of justice for "military tribunals" and other dependent courts not subject to checks, balances and review.

Hat tip to Boing Boing Blog.

China fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

Or is that India fact of the day?

China invests $7 on roads, ports, electricity and other backbones of a
modern economy for every dollar spent by India and it shows.  Ports here
[in India] are struggling to handle rising exports, blackouts are frequent and
dirt roads are common even in Bangalore, the center of the country’s
sophisticated computer programming industry.

Here is the full story — recommended — on India’s rapid but bumpy rise as a manufacturing power.

WashingtonWatch

by  Alex Tabarrok in

WashingtonWatch.com is a new website that presents estimates of the costs or savings per family or person for a variety of bills.  Here’s the latest DOD budget cost:

S. 2766 would authorize appropriations for fiscal year 2007 for the
military functions of the Department of Defense (DoD), for activities
of the Department of Energy (DOE), and for other purposes, including
operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Cost Per Family: $5535.19

The website is a useful collection but be aware that there is no attempt to do any cost-benefit or incidence analysis.  The numbers are just brute government estimates of the total program spending or tax reduction divided by the number of families or persons.  I can guarantee you, for example, that the following calculation for the "average family" is way, way off the mark.

H.R. 5638 makes the estate and gift tax permanent; increases the
estate and gift tax credit to a $5 million effective exclusion amount,
making any unused effective exclusion amount portable between spouses;
and reduces rates, as well as making other changes in tax law.

Savings per average family: $1896.79

I love lefties

by  Tyler Cowen in

Highly educated people earn more if they are left-handed.  The pay gap, relative to right-handers, is especially strong for those with low earnings relative to their level of education (e.g., academics).  If they are men they earn 15 percent more.  Here is the paper.

This earnings result appears ungrounded but it does not surprise me.  Left-handers have idiosyncrasies, obsessions, and downright insanities which lift some of them into productivity heaven.  If they are not earning a lot they probably love what they do.

I like other left-handers (yes I am one) at a disproportionately high rate and they fit disproportionately into the right-hand-tail of the distribution of my liking.  One of my absurd beliefs is that I can tell which people are
left-handers simply by observing their personalities and their charming bits of ever so slight yet always on the surface awkwardness.

Did you know that lefties also have higher rates of irritable bowel syndrome? 

For some odd reason, I play all sports but basketball with my right hand.