Pets vs. men — pets win
Pampered pets are becoming women’s priority vs. their partners, according to a study of 901 pet owners by BizRate Research for Shopzilla, the leading shopping search site on the Web, which has seen an increase in luxury pet product searches.
It’s no wonder that women are spoiling their pets. More than half of women (56%) feel that their pets are more affectionate than their partners (vs. 41% of men), and 45% of women think their pets are cuter than their partners (vs. 24% of men).
In the study, women said they had a deeper emotional connection with their pets than men did. Nearly all women respondents (99%) reported that they frequently talked to their pets (vs. 95% of men) and an astonishing 93% of women think that their pets communicate with them (vs. 87% of men) [TC:no more email on this last part, I am simply quoting somebody else here!].
Here is the story, and thanks to Andrew Roth for the pointer.
But will they name a NJ Turnpike rest stop after him?
Bruce Willis has been awarded France’s highest cultural honor. Mr. Willis, 50, was formally inducted yesterday into the French Order of Arts and Letters. The French culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, said the award paid tribute to an actor whose work "epitomizes the strength of American cinema, the power of the emotions that he invites us to share on the world’s screens, and the sturdy personalities of his legendary characters." Mr. Willis, 50, who was in France to promote his latest movie, "Hostage," said that the honor "proves that film has no borders and that we all belong to the same artistic community." Mr. Donnedieu de Vabres said that the actor’s roles could not be reduced to a simple struggle between good and evil, yet he added, "You really have killed a lot of bad guys."
Here is the link. Here are some poets with rest stops named after them.
Why aren’t wages rising more?
Matt Yglesias asks. Brad DeLong answers:
Well, there are three hypotheses:
- Improvements in firms’ ability to squash unions, and thus shift wage bargains toward employers (the Wal-Mart hypothesis).
- A slack labor market–much more labor-market slack than the level of the unemployment rate would lead one to expect–in which firms find it easy to hire workers and workers find it hazardous to ask for higher wages.
- Changes in the international economy that boost the wages of the skilled and educated (whose products can be sold abroad for more) and put downward presure on the wages of the less-skilled and less-educated (who now face much stronger competition from abroad).
I’ll add a fourth:
4. Information technology has become a substitute for many low-wage workers, including those who shuffled papers or performed rote calculations. Note that the gains from the new technologies are often reaped by equity holders. Read more here.
Quite separately, on the consumer side, the Internet has resulted in significant welfare benefits, most of which are not reflected in measured real wages. Admittedly the distribution of these gains is skewed away from the poor. Many years ago Alex and I wrote a paper called "Who Benefits from Progress?" In the early years of progress, most of the benefits are reaped by the relatively wealthy. It is only over time that new innovations become used by, or affordable to, poorer segments of society.
Views I hold without much evidence
1. China will someday just get up and attack Taiwan. Recent progress aside, how many rational decisions have Chinese governments made in the last six hundred years? And its inability to get over the idea of conquering Taiwan will stop China from democratizing anytime soon. I am not in general a "China hawk," but I view Taiwan as, sadly, a goner. I remain amazed by how many "liberal" Chinese simply think Taiwan is "theirs."
2. High-quality American high school students study too much and have too many extracurricular activities. Yes, I am thinking zero-sum game. It would be better for most of them to go out and get jobs bagging groceries. They would learn more about the real world.
3. Shaquille O’Neal is the greatest NBA player ever, bar none. (Well, OK, there is some evidence for this.)
4. The first two Star Wars installments (yes, that includes the one with Jar Jar Binks) were excellent, and will someday be recognized as such. Maybe you view those films as engaged in excessive pandering. I see them as a Bildungsroman (Anakin/Darth) which makes few concessions to popular taste and also presents public choice theory in sophisticated fashion. Lucas simply doesn’t care if the films make no sense in stand-alone fashion, nor should he. By the way, in the interests of personal safety, I’ve decided to limit my number of car trips before May 19.
5. High-quality barbecue (alas, not available here in Virginia) is better than most expensive French restaurants. And I love most expensive French restaurants, especially when someone else is paying.
6. Aesthetic judgments are, in principle, objective rather than arbitrary.
New blog project: avian flu
I have started a new blog project, this time on avian flu. Go visit Avianflu.typepad.com. If you write a blog, and enjoy MR, please link to this new endeavor, if only as a courtesy.
Avian flu looms as a real danger, so I thought it important to set up a single-site resource for information on the topic. Right now the blog is mostly informational, but over time there will be more emphasis on appropriate public policy responses to avian flu. That is, if avian flu spreads.
Here is the mission statement of the new blog.
Don’t worry, MR will continue as you know it. Avian flu is a group blog, and I will post there only at times. Right now the very smart Silviu Dochia is a major poster. Randall Parker of Futurepundit.com will post sometimes, and Alex promises an occasional post or two. More bloggers may be assembled, depending how the issue develops.
I have longer-range plans to set up (but not write for) blogs on other single issue topics, sometimes on very short notice or lasting for very short periods of time.
It’s odd to start a blog that you hope nobody reads, but that is what this is.
Your comments and suggestions would be most welcome. And if you would like to submit a guest post to the new blog, please contact Silviu through the Avianflu.typepad.com website.
Does it cost more to take care of the young or the old?
…some economists are sanguine about the country’s ability to support
the elderly and at the same time provide for the young. Gary Burtless,
a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, noted that the decline in
fertility rates since the 1960’s means that the burden of caring for
the young has decreased dramatically – freeing resources to channel to
the old.The overall burden on the employed will grow, but not
to unprecedented levels. The ratio of people of working age to those
either under 20 or over 65 will decrease to 1.2 in 2050 from about 1.5
today. But this is still an easier load than in 1965, when the country
was awash with children, and the ratio of the working-age population to
each dependent was only 1.1.True, the young are cheaper to
maintain than the old. In 1990, economists at Harvard and M.I.T.,
including David M. Cutler and Lawrence H. Summers of Harvard, estimated
that people over 64 consume 76 percent more than children.Still,
Mr. Burtless estimated that in 2050 a worker will have to sacrifice
49.6 percent of his or her wages – through taxes or other means – to
maintain society’s dependents. That is nearly 6 percentage points more
than in 2000, but it is merely 0.8 percentage points more than 1965.
And the percentage could well be smaller if people work later in life
to pay for more of their keep.The notion of incredible
competition between what the public spends on the aged and what it
spends on the young is driven by fear, Mr. Burtless said. "But so far
the fears have not been grounded," he said. "In fact, we seem to be
able to do both kinds of things. Increase spending on aged and protect
spending on the young."
This is the most hopeful notion I have heard in some time. Here is the story. Here is the home page of Gary Burtless.
Let us not forget about the utility dimension in addition to the fiscal. Is it more fun to care for the very young or the very old? The evidence is not so clear cut. Many people do not enjoy their children as much as they claim; read more here.
Watch out for Big Brother
Big brother is watching. So are we.
New cheeseburger recipe
New to me, that is. Make your patty boxier than usual. Stuff it with maytag blue cheese, and some high-quality butter as well. Then cook it. You can add other touches as well, but that is the basic idea.
Rich Man, Poor Man; Rich State, Poor State
Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science is one of my favorite new blogs. It is primarily written by Andrew Gelman, a professor in the Departments of Statistics and Political Science at Columbia University.
A recent post looks at the difference between red and blue states and red and blue individuals. We all know that in the recent election poorer states tended to vote Republican while richer states tended to vote Democrat. On the basis of the famous maps many people jumped to the conclusion that poorer individuals were voting Republican (Nascar Republicans) while richer individuals were voting Democrat (trust fund Democrats). But the inference is a fallacy, the ecological fallacy. In fact, high-income individuals, as opposed to high-income states, vote Republican with greater likelihood than low-income individuals (the effect is not huge and it may be declining but it is significant).
It’s even true that rich counties tend to vote Republican with greater likelihood than poorer counties. Gelman links to this graph which nicely illustrates the ecological fallacy. The three lines show that within each state higher-income counties are more likely to vote Republican but when you look between states the correlation between income and voting Republican is negative. (Click to enlarge).
My Sharona
Here is the music on Bush’s iPod. Add in van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, and George Jones. No Sex Pistols.
Aspirin and the FDA
If aspirin were invented today it might not be approved by the FDA. Keep this in mind when thinking about Vioxx, Bextra and other pain-relief drugs that have recently been taken off the market. This is not to say that the new pharmaceuticals are "safe," but rather that all pharmaceuticals involve tradeoffs.
The Ricardo effect
The United Arab Emirates says it will use robots as jockeys for camel races from next season.
The move comes after widespread international criticism of the use of young children to ride camels during the long and often hazardous races.
Aid workers say there are up to 40,000 child jockeys working across the Gulf. Many are said to be have been kidnapped and trafficked from South Asia.
The issue of child camel jockeys has been an embarrassing one for the Emirates, says the BBC’s Gulf correspondent Julia Wheeler.
Read more here, and thanks to Dylan Alexander for the pointer.
Addendum: Geekpress offers a photo. And here is yet another photo, with an excellent quotation, courtesy of a new and excellent blog on the Arab Emirates.
Bryan Caplan on me
Aside: Tyler Cowen said it [my, Bryan’s, paper] was unpublishable. I told him he was wrong after Social Science Quarterly took it, but he replied that I was being "too essentialist"!
Here is Bryan’s full post. Here is some background.
DeLong on Hazlitt
Brad DeLong criticizes Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson. First, "because at least half its pages hint that the works of John Maynard
Keynes are an abomination without ever grappling with the Keynesian
argument."
Hazlitt did not say much about Keynes in his famous introduction to economics but he certainly grappled with the Keynesian argument in his lesser-known
The Failure of the ‘New Economics’: An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies.
Second, DeLong quotes Hazlitt:
There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate
saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of
economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of
these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might
the prodigal son of a warning father: "In the long run we are all
dead." And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the
ripest wisdom.
According to Brad this quote is "dishonest" and a "misrepresentation," but Keynes did deprecate saving and recommend squandering. Famously:
To dig holes in the ground,” paid for out of savings, will increase,
not only employment, but the real national dividend of useful goods and
services. (General Theory, Ch. 16).
Brad seems to think that Hazlitt quoted Keynes out of context because "What Keynes actually wrote in his Tract on Monetary Reform" was:
Now ‘in the long run’ this [way of summarizing the
quantity theory of money] is probably true…. But this long run is a
misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead.
Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in
tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long
past the ocean is flat again.
But the misreading is Brad’s not Hazlitt’s. Keynes is criticizing classical economics for focusing on the long run and this certainly includes the classical focus on savings as a key to economic growth. Hazlitt, as Brad notes, is restating classical economics so when Hazlitt points out the long-run problems with using spending to increase short-run aggregate demand, Keynes does, in effect, reply "We are all dead in the long run."
For some, it seems, one lesson is not enough. 🙂
Do we have too many *ideas* to choose from?
Mark Steckbeck (his blog is very good) writes:
Barry Schwartz believes that Americans suffer from too many choices. (PDF file) The result is that we become overwhelmed with too many choices, become depressed, and consequently lead less fulfilling.
I’m certain that Schwartz did not mean that there are too many ideas from which to choose to believe in, but why not? It’s overwhelming listening to political ads during campaigns or editorials and stories on major topics in newspapers. As Ronald Coase said, the reasons for regulating markets for goods is no different than the reasons for regulating markets for ideas, execpt that there’s probably more reason to regulate the latter.
I wonder which ideas Schwartz recommends we eliminate from the set from which we choose.