Category: Data Source

Bottom line: The public thinks the FDA is great. Regular economists think it’s pretty good. And economists who specialize in the FDA think it’s pretty bad.

That is Bryan Caplan, read more here.

Addendum: I’ll grant that those who specialize in studying a particular agency may tend to be the critics.  That being said, the "man in the street" simply has not, in most cases, considered the economic criticisms of the FDA.

At this point, we all face a dilemma.  For instance Paul Krugman cites the predominance of academic Democrats as an argument against the Republican party.  Must he then accept this evidence on the FDA?  Must Caplan become a Democrat?  When is citing professional consensus opinion most persuasive?  What is the professional consensus on this question?

Sweden’s largest trade union admitted that the official 5.5 per cent unemployment rate is hiding a "real unemployment" of 20 to 25 per cent, which includes those claiming long-term sick pay or having taken early state retirement.

Here is the link, and thanks to Tim Worstall for the pointer.  Here is Alex’s earlier post on disability.  Here is my earlier post on disability in the Netherlands.

…the four hundred richest U.S. taxpayers had a combined income in 2000 that exceeded the combined incomes of four of the countries of Mr. Bush’s tropical tour.  The difference was astounding: the $57 billion in combined income of Botswana, Nigeria, Senegal, and Uganda [TC: Botswana and Senegal are relative success stories in Africa, and Nigeria has oil] was the income of 161 million people, who average $350 in income per year, whereas the $69 billion was the income of four hundred individuals.

That is from Jeffrey Sachs’s new The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time.  And you got it right, there is no typo, that is 400 people richer than 161 million people.

Left-wingers think: "My goodness, how can so few have so much?  They were lucky anyway.  Let us raise marginal tax rates." 

Randians think: "Hail the productive powers of capitalism!"

Rawlsians think: "They didn’t produce that wealth, we did."

Others think: "My goodness, Africa is screwed up."

The economist?  The economist wonders why there is not more trade between the two groups…

Check out these images, courtesy of Mahalanobis.  Overall the rich countries are the biggest users, but other patterns are evident as well.  Opiate and heroin seem to be most popular close to the source, including in Russia.  It is the English-speaking world which loves Ecstasy.

Ratio of active workers at General Motors to retirees on its pension rolls: 2:5

Total pension costs of the company per vehicle it produces: $675

Those are from Harper’s Index, April issue.

In one of the largest studies on suicide ever conducted, researchers found that men with especially low scores on intelligence tests are two to three times more likely than others to kill themselves. Men with low IQ scores and only a primary education were no more likely to kill themselves than men with high IQ scores and a higher level of education. But men with low IQ scores and higher education were at a greater risk of suicide. And men with low IQ scores and highly educated parents were at the highest risk of all.

Could the problem be the high expectations of parents?  Or is this proxying for some other relevant variable?  Here is the story.

Teenagers who take virginity pledges — public
declarations to abstain from sex — are almost as likely to be infected
with a sexually transmitted disease as those who never made the pledge,
an eight-year study released yesterday found.

Although young people who sign a virginity pledge
delay the initiation of sexual activity, marry at younger ages and have
fewer sexual partners, they are also less likely to use condoms and
more likely to experiment with oral and anal sex, said the researchers
from Yale and Columbia universities.

Here is the story.  Here is the pledge:

"Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my
family, those I date, and my future mate to be sexually pure until the
day I enter marriage."

The Portuguese, it turns out.  3/4 of them stay up past midnight.  Next in the night owl rankings come Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, Spain, Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia, in that order.

And how about the earliest risers?  91 percent of Indonesia is up before 7 a.m..  Then come Vietnam, Philippines, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Japan (hey, they stay up late too; 41 percent catch less than six hours), India, Finland, and Norway.

The biggest snoozers?  The Australians — 31 percent of them sleep more than nine hours a day, or lie very badly.  As always, we are sampling only those who can and do respond to the survey.  The study was by Nielsen, here is one summary.

A bisexual asexual, Jay began thinking of himself as asexual when he was 15 and came out as asexual while a student at Wesleyan…

Here is the story.  Here is the assocation.  Here is the on-line dating site.  Here is an asexual debate on the wrongness of adultery.  Thanks to www.politicaltheory.info for the link.

The price of gas varies around the world, due to the vagaries of exchange rates but mostly because of taxes and subsidies.  Assuming your car gets 35 miles per gallon, here is how far $20 of gas will take you in various countries around the world:

Germany: 127 miles

Japan: 147 miles

United States: 342 miles

China: 385 miles

Saudi Arabia: 771 miles

Venezuela: 4,624 miles

The data are from Foreign Policy, March/April 2005, p.18.  Here is a related data set.

In Business Week Robert Barro writes:

In 1990 my Harvard colleague Amartya Sen caused a stir by observing…that excess female mortality in China, India, and other Asian countries meant that there were 100 million women fewer in the world than there should be.  The presumption was that the excess mortality came from discrimination against women by men and governments…[this] shockingly large number became a symbol of discrimination against women in developing countries.  Many people think the reason is abortion and the killing of newborn girls.  But new research suggests another reason.  Harvard economist Emily Oster, in her PhD thesis "Hepatitis B and the Case of the Missing Women" suggests that biology explains a good deal of the missing-women puzzle…

Oster argues that this calculation overlooked something crucial — unusually high male-female birth ratios in Asia years before abortion became widespread…Oster sees the high incidence of the hepatitis B virus (HBV) as a major culprit. There is much evidence that parents infected by HBV are more likely to have male children.

In fact carriers of hepatitis B can have boy-girl ratios as high as 1.55. Oster argues that this factor explains 75% percent of the gender gap in China, albeit only 17% in India.  For Asia as a whole, 46% of the gap can be explained.

Here is Oster’s home page.  Here is the paper.

The libertarian in me thinks this amusing advert portrays a dystopia, but the economist in me sees the efficiency advantages.  In the end I come down on the side of "screw efficiency, give me liberty!"  But I am torn and fail to see the principles which will resolve my unease.