Category: Data Source

I’ll be spending this weekend on a mission to a Mexican mental hospital; I am helping a friend interview one of the patients, who is also an amate artist.  It is a respectable place, and provided they don’t confuse me with one of the inmates, I’ll have a good time.  I’ll be blogging from an Internet cafe in Cuernavaca and eating tamales in the street.

…the Guardian published what had until then been a government secret: which Brits rake in the biggest subsidies from the profligate European Union.  Near the top of the list was the queen herself, whose farm in Norfolk received 769,000 pounds (approximately $1.3 million) in 2003-4.

That is from the July issue of Reason magazine.  Here is the original story:

A spokesman for the Queen yesterday rejected any suggestion that she received too much money from the taxpayer. "The Queen is a landowner and a farmer. She receives subsidy, just as any other farmer would do."

The total would be higher if subsidies to Scotland — still a secret — were also included.

Perhaps the most pressing environmental problem in the world is indoor air pollution, which kills 2.8 million people each year, just behind HIV/AIDS.  The pollution is caused by poor people cooking and heating their homes with dung and cardboard.  The solution is not environmental (to certify dung) but rather economic, helping these people build enough wealth to afford kerosene.

That is by Bjorn Lomborg, in Foreign Policy, July/August issue. 

Two caveats.  First, the best figure I can find appears to be 1.6 million lives; here is a WHO statement on the phenomenon.  Second, the people die because the smoke renders them more susceptible to pneumonia and other respiratory diseases.  But their poverty makes them more susceptible for a number of reasons.  I doubt if the marginal product of the smoke can be isolated clearly; see this study.  Nonetheless this is a very very serious problem that does not receive much attention.

…two of the nation’s newspapers — The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal — are running extensive multipart series that paint a much darker picture.  The U.S., rather than being a land of opportunity, these stories argue, is increasingly a class-bound place of immobility and stratification, where it’s becoming ever harder for the people at the bottom to move up…

Rather than agonizing over relative comparisons, it may be better to concentrate on the simpler and intuitively satisfying concept of absolute "mobility," — whether you are doing better than your parents did, or whether the living standards of a whole group of people are rising over time.  From this perspective, there are signs that this past decade has had more upward mobility compared with the previous two decades…

There’s yet another big problem: we actually know very little about whether relative mobility increased or decreased during the New Economy decade because complete data don’t exist yet.  With a few exceptions, most studies stop with the mid- or late 1990s.

Here’s what we do know: Over the past decade, virtually every traditionally disadvantaged group made gains in absolute terms.  Take, for example, families headed by immigrants who entered the country in the 1980s.  The poverty rate for such families dropped sharply, from 26.6% in 1995 to 16.4% in 2003…Similarly, a combination of welfare reform and tight labor markets helped drive down the poverty rate for female-headed households with children from 46.1% in 1993 to 35.5% in 2003….it beats the total lack of progress in the previous decade.

That is from 20 June 2005, Business Week, by Michael Mandel.  Here is a new book on who gets ahead in low-wage labor markets.  Here is my previous post on Horatio Alger.  Here is my previous post on the family as a source of inequality.

Malcolm Gladwell "the greatest living storyteller" but has no interest in the rest of the magazine; reads Mr. Gladwell’s stuff online.

Yahoo Finance. "I handle my financial portfolio like it’s a big gambling account." Appreciates array of free info, and "when I started five years ago, it was better developed than others."

Three blogs by economists: MarginalRevolution.com by George Mason University professors Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen, Berkeley professor Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal and the Becker-Posner Blog, by the U of C’s Gary Becker and U.S. Appellate Court Judge Richard Posner.

At bedtime, newsmagazines and People. "I can rarely convince myself that there are books worth reading. And at one point I became brainwashed by my father that it was unmanly to read fiction – so I read Time and Newsweek instead."

Here is the story, and thanks to Laurel for the pointer.

The NameVoyager lets you type in a name and see the number of babies per million that name was given to from 1900 to 2003.  Below is Alex.  Note that the thickness, not the height, of the lines gives the relative use of that variant.

It’s unfortunate that the data only go as far forward as 2003 because obviously the popularity of Alex will have exploded after August 21 of that year.

Thanks to the Freakonomics blog via Amanda Agan for the pointer.

My latest article (with Helland and Klick) is a DataWatch column for the Journal of Economic Perspectives.  The article won’t be of interest to most readers but if you want to do empirical research on torts and civil justice this is the place to start.

Check out the blogad to the right, MA in Economics looking for a Job!  I don’t know the candidate, the ad came across the transom just as do other blogads.  But I do know this job seeker is entrepreneurial, has a sense of humor and has fine taste in blogs.  Someone hire this person!

Japan is running out of farmers, only 40% of whom are under 65.  Moreover, some 70% of farming households derive most of their income from non-agricultural sources.

That is from The Economist, 28 May edition.

Yes there is a new magazine from The Economist, here is the (partially gated) on-line version. So far I give it thumbs-down.  Most of the articles are about culture and trends, but there is little novelty.  I "learned" that the Internet is empowering car buyers, luxury goods are spreading to the general population, the world is getting noisier, art fairs and "world music" festivals are spreading, and the Internet will make "music flow like water."  Calling the issue "Summer" makes it impossible to keep current; besides how can they beat the blogosphere for news of the new?   

You can write your deepest secrets on an anonymous postcard and send it in for web publication.  Other people’s submissions make for fascinating reading. 

A picture is worth how many words?

Thanks to Dave Schuler for the pointer.

Christopher Horner, of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, reports 2010 projections (the source is Brussels, published in Washington Times, 16 May)  How much will various countries be above their promised target levels?

Portugal: 77 pct. above

Spain: 61 pct. above (their greenhouse gas emissions have increased forty percent since 1990)

Greece: 51 pct. above

Ireland: 41 pct. above (NB: This number is where the U.S. will likely end up!)

Luxembourg: 31 pct. above

Finland: 26 pct. above

Italy: 13 to 23 pct. above (the number went up once Italy submitted its official estimate)

France: 19 pct. above, with Belgium at 16 pct. and Netherlands at 10 pct.

The bottom line is that few countries will adhere to this unworkable treaty.  Here  is my previous post on global warming.  Here is a more general article on where Kyoto is headed.