Category: Data Source

Here is a lovely map.  I can’t stand either chain but I sure want to live near them.  I know McDonald’s is hopeless, at least since they stopped frying their potatoes in horse fat.  But couldn’t Starbucks at least sell good mineral water?

The pointer is from the still underappreciated Katie Newmark.

Average number of people who die each day working in or with Chinese coal mines, from physical disasters, such as flooding, explosion, cave-ins, or collapse: 16

Unofficial estimates are 40 percent higher.

That is from the current issue of Scientific American, p.73.

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.

Hezbollah seems to be a rather cheap organization — the highest estimate I can find is $400 million per year, about the cost of a single F/A-22 Raptor.

That is from Matt Yglesias.

Note to readers: There are comments on the new posts, they just don’t yet show up on the "comments counter."

It is basically pro-imigration, finding positive wage effects for most U.S. workers and only slight negative effects for the unskilled.  It uses a general equilibrium model related to that of Borjas, but models physical capital more explicitly.  I’ve yet to read it.  Find it here.  Hat tip to New Economist blog, here is the abstract.

In 2004 about 315 million working PCs were retired in North America…

In 2005 more than 100 million cell phones were discarded in the United States.

That is from Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, by Giles Slade.

"80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year."

"58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school."

"…more people probably read Engadget than all of the top 50 science blogs combined."

Bill Simmons (a good link for NBA fans) thinks that Allen Iverson would have been the greatest soccer player ever to try the game.

You’ll find all of those over at the ever-excellent kottke.org.

Extending the analysis to 1999, we see that the percentage of the world’s population who are native speakers of English actually declined from 9.8 to 7.8 percent.  The percentage of native speakers of the world’s leading language, Mandarin, also declined slightly, from 15.6 to 15.2 percent…The language groups that have increased dramatically as a percentage of the world population are Arabic and Bengali, which each accounted for 2.7 percent of the world’s speakers in 1958, but rose to 3.5 percent and 3.2 percent, respectively, in 1992.  Hindi speakers rose from 5.2 to 6.4 percent, and Spanish speakers from 5.0 to 6.1 percent.  English as a first language has fallen from its mid-century position of second place to fourth as the millennium ended.

That is from William H. Marling’s How "American" is Globalization?  This wide-ranging book is the definitive current source on which cultures are gaining and losing in respective cultural areas.  The bottom line of this book?  The world is not becoming Americanized.  Very highly recommended.

One of the great pleasures of being a professor in recent years is that I no longer have to go the library.  Trudging to the stacks, finding an article, and photocopying it are things of the past.  Almost everything is available online especially at the great JSTOR in the sky, a vast repository of electronic journals some dating back more than 100 years.

Not every university has access to JSTOR, however, and individual subscriptions are costly and limited in scope.  But Kevin Kelly points out that in many places you can get a digital library card which will get you access to many online databases. 

In most states, you can get a library card from a public library
outside of your county of residence — as long as you can prove state
residence (true for the San Francisco Public Library). Often you will
have to go the actual state library in person to pick up your card, but
once in hand, you can access the library from the web. Fanatical
researchers are known to have a wallet full of library cards from
numerous public library systems within their respective states. Some
states, Ohio and Michigan being two of the better known, have statewide
consortiums of private, corporate and public libraries, which allows
you access to the combined services and databases licensing power of
them all.

Suicide is now the biggest single killer among young Chinese people, the country’s first national suicide survey has shown.

Each year more than a quarter of a million people in China are taking their own lives, the study showed.

But the most significant finding was that, unlike almost everywhere else in the world, more women than men commit suicide.

Suicide now accounts for a third of all deaths among women in the countryside.

In the study, to be
published in British medical journal, The Lancet, US and Chinese
researchers discovered there was apparently a significantly lower rate
of mental illness among those committing suicide than would be the case
in the West.

Dr Michael Phillips, who
helped lead the study, told the BBC that while 90-95% of those taking
their own lives in the West suffered significant mental illness at the
time of attempting suicide, around a third of those in China did not.

…the biggest single reason why so many suicide attempts in China are successful is their method.

Nearly two-thirds of them are by consuming pesticides and powerful rat poisons which are extremely easy to buy in China.

Here is the story, courtesy of www.2blowhards.com.
 

My current locale Zurich, it turns out, based on this field experiment.  New York City of all places came in first, but I agree.  There is so much human capital in the city one is always tempted to speak to strangers, given the reasonably high chance you will hear something magnificent in return.  Third and fourth were Toronto and Berlin.  In Europe Moscow and Bucharest were the least polite cities.  Bombay fared worst of all.

Read Austan Goolsbee in today’s New York Times.  Excerpt:

It seems that a child with talent can succeed no matter what the
parents’ skills are, as has been true for centuries in this country. 
But parents whose English is poor have a big negative impact on the
below-average children.