The benefits of no-fault divorce
In the past three decades, liberalized divorce laws have reduced suicides among women, sparked a dramatic reduction in domestic violence and led to a decline in women murdered by their partners, according to economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers.
Specifically, they claim, these benefits have resulted from the adoption of so-called “no-fault” divorce laws, in which one partner can end the marriage without the consent of the other.
After states adopted no-fault divorce laws, suicides among women dropped by 20 percent, the rate of domestic abuse fell by a third, and the number of women murdered by their partners dropped by about 10 percent, Stevenson and Wolfers found.
Adoption of unilateral divorce laws didn’t affect the suicide rate of men or the likelihood that they would be murdered by their partners. But domestic violence directed at both men and women declined, the researchers reported in a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper.
Here is the link. Here is the original research. Here is the home page of Betsey Stevenson; he is the home page of Justin Wolfers. Here is Wolfers’s summary of the research.
My take: I’m all for family values, but let’s not forget that some families should split up.
Beliefs about welfare
Why does Western Europe spend so much more on welfare payments than does the United States?
Why is the latter system (45% of GDP) bigger than the former system (30% of GDP)?
While 29% of Americans believe that poor people are trapped in poverty, 60% of Europeans share this belief.
While 30% of Americans believe that luck determines income, 54% of Europeans share this belief.
While 60% of Americans believe that poor people are lazy, 24% of Europeans share this belief.
Robert Tagorda continues with the following:
These statistics come from the Economist, which has a fascinating review of Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference. Authored by Harvard scholars Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser, this forthcoming book argues that institutional and political differences lead to contrasting American and European approaches.
More provocatively [we now move to Tagorda citing The Economist]:
The other half of the explanation lies in America’s racial diversity. In spite of 20 years of unprecedented immigration, European countries, particularly smaller ones like Portugal and those of Scandinavia, are still highly racially homogenous. America, by contrast, has great diversity, which is especially wide in some states. In addition, the poor in America are disproportionately non-white. Non-Hispanic whites are 71% of America’s population but only 46% of the poor.
Racial diversity in individual states is correlated with the generosity of welfare. For instance, the authors find that in 1990 Aid to Families with Dependent Children ranged from over $800 per family per month in mainly white Alaska to less than $150 in Alabama and Mississippi, where almost one-third of the population is black. Even after adjustment for inter-state differences in average incomes, the correlation with race remained strong. Across countries, too, racial diversity goes with low government spending on poverty relief.
The reason, argue the authors, is that “race matters”, and they marshal statistical evidence, much of it from opinion surveys, to back this up. People are likely to support welfare if they live close to recipients of their own race; but are antipathetic if they live near recipients from another race. The divergent attitudes of Europeans and Americans to the poor are underwritten by the fact that the poor in Europe tend to be ethnically the same as most other folk. In America, their skin is often a different colour. [Emphasis added by Tagorda.]
My take: I buy the basic results. The sorry truth is that a fully cosmopolitan society is an impossible ideal. Furthermore the proffered questions don’t fully get at the real beliefs of many Americans, which is that most poor people deserve their status. (I think some of the poor are lazy, but being a determinist I don’t assign fault.) That being said, it is such false beliefs that keep American welfare spending at reasonable, non-European levels. By the way, here is a related paper by the authors.
Ebay vigilantes
Imagine spending your spare time perusing ebay for fraudulent listings and stopping them. A fair number of people do exactly that. Read Cronaca.com for the full story.
How does sadness affect market behavior?
Sadness makes you more eager to both buy and sell. It lowers the reservation price of sellers. Not surprisingly, feelings of disgust make you more eager to sell, but less eager to buy. Here is the home page of the one of the researchers. Here is some press coverage.
Randall Parker suggests: “Avoid shopping or selling things when you are sad.”
An alternative interpretation is that retail therapy is exactly what you need. That being said, I suspect that consummating a transaction is what makes you happy, not buying something expensive per se. Your vulnerability may suck you into spending more money than you ought to, but just sitting at home is a mistake as well. And contrary to what anti-market critics might suggest, loft insulation is unlikely to cheer you up. So what is the real lesson? When you are sad, go visit your local public library. They are almost sure to have something you want, and at the right price.
Thanks to Paul Barriere for the pointer.
Senators tell their favorite jokes
Imagine writing all the senators and asking them to relate their favorite jokes.
Here is one of the least funny responses, though the competition is stiff for this honor.
Here is the worst pun, don’t miss the accompanying photo.
Here is John Kerry’s joke.
Olympia Snowe won the vote for funniest joke.
I found Rick Santorum to have the funniest response, this is a PG-13 blog but for extra perspective read Dan Savage on the Senator, and no I won’t give you the link.
Thanks to Geekpress.com for the pointer.
Good economics makes for strange company
As you may recall, I showed that the CEA’s employment forecast, wrong as it has been, was simply a prediction of a return to trend and that Paul Krugman’s charges that the CEA has become corrupt are irresponsible and unjustified. (Sadly, Brad Delong has also signed on to these charges.)
I find myself in surprising company. In Salon, the left-leaning James K. Galbraith presents almost the same graph and the same conclusion.
Was Economic Team Bush getting its job targets, as many suspect, from Karl Rove? Did the professionals turn prostitute, as Krugman charges in no uncertain words?….Our new chart shows that the Bush forecast did not imply unusually rapid job growth for an economic expansion. …the failure of the jobs forecast did not occur because economic recovery forecasts were abnormal. They were not. So far as we can tell, it did not occur because someone cooked the books, under instruction or otherwise.
Shouldn’t DeLong and Krugman be worried when they fall to the left of Galbraith?
See also Econopundit who writes, “every economist who, like me, runs models with new quarterly data giving alternate (and possibly less-optimistic) employment forecasts is owed an apology. I have falsified nothing, but my results have been similar to those shown in the chart. I have reported the numbers that resulted from running a known model openly available to any and all (including Paul Krugman) who are competent to use it.”
Thanks to The Big Picture for the Galbraith link.
Marc Andreesen on comparative advantage
What a delight, Marc Andreesen, the internet pioneer, correctly explains comparative advantage to John Robb and then goes on to list America’s advantages. Tyler earlier pointed out this USA Today piece on Andreesen’s support for outsourcing.
Punkers for capitalism
With his mohawk, ratty fatigues, assorted chains and his menagerie of tattoos – swallows on each shoulder, a nautical star on his back and the logo of the Bouncing Souls, a New York City punk band, on his right leg – 22-year-old Nick Rizzuto is the very picture of counterculture alienation. But it’s when he talks politics that Mr. Rizzuto sounds like a real radical, for a punk anyway. Mr. Rizzuto is adamantly in favor of lowering taxes and for school vouchers, and against campaign finance laws; his favorite Supreme Court justice is Clarence Thomas; he plans to vote for President Bush in November; and he’s hard-core into capitalism.
“Punks will tell me, `Punk and capitalism don’t go together,’ ” Mr. Rizzuto said. “I don’t understand where they’re coming from. The biggest punk scenes are in capitalist countries like the U.S., Canada and Japan. I haven’t heard of any new North Korean punk bands coming out. There’s no scene in Iran.”
Here is a New York Times article, don’t forget to check out the pictures (password required). Here is a website for GOP punkers, they seem to approve of Reagan’s famous threat to bomb the Soviet Union. Or perhaps it is just irony. They stress that they are not libertarians because America is “at war” with the left, and the libertarian philosophy is not well-suited to fighting a war. Here is their cited critique of the Canadian health care model. Good economics, but these punkers, oppositional by nature, feel a kneejerk need to defend every action of the Bush administration. Here is the ConservativePunk.com website, which offers an interview with right-wing punker Johnny Ramone. Here is yet another site, which cites right-thinking punk bloggers. And will National Review be pleased that MyEvilMinion.com links to them approvingly?
My take: Punk music needs an idea of evil and an oppositional stance. So punkers will adopt every position of defiance they can find, including in-your-face right-wing politics. But in the long run? Remember what The Clash sung: “You grow up, you calm down, working for the clampdown…”
Is Microsoft the new language arbiter?
Microsoft has decided to write Windows for Welsh.
Microsoft programmes already run in 40 languages including English, Spanish, Arabic and Chinese variants.
A Welsh start menu and some commands will be available in about six months.
Microsoft said it has received complaints from places such as Catalonia, Malaysia and the Arctic regions of Canada.
They claim the switch from native languages online is also affecting everyday speech, said BBC North America Business Correspondent Stephen Evans.
Some argue the fewer languages the better for global trade and understanding, but Microsoft is siding with “linguistic diversity”, he said.
The other big linguistic groups to benefit from the expansion will be speakers of Gujarati and Tamil in India, of Catalan in Spain, and of Bahasa in Malaysia.
Native languages from Northern Canada and Ethiopia will also be added.
My take: Whether or not a language is focal will be determined with increasing rapidity.
Thanks to Cronaca.com for the link.
Small families can decrease social mobility
…it is among larger families that the household or kin effects on the success of children are the weakest. Not only do children from larger families do worse on average than those from smaller families, but they also experience more randomness. In other words, parents’ class status affects their offspring more weakly in large families than in small ones. Likewise, siblings resemble one another less in larger families. For example, sibling similarity in income levels is approximately 24 percent stronger in families with three siblings or fewer than in families with four or more children. For net worth levels…the degree of sibling similarity is 59 percent greater in smaller families.
Those are significant effects, what will they mean?
What all this means for the class structure of American society is that as families get smaller, there may be less socioeconomic mobility, not more. Parents will be able to more carefully control the environments of their offspring and thereby reproduce their own class status.
There is a caveat:
Of course, this depends not just on the overall average number of kids that families are having, but also on the distribution. If the most dramatic declines in family size occur among the economically disadvantages segments of American society then we could have more equality of opportunity.
In other words, having larger families, across the board, will mean that subsequent income is less correlated with family history. But on average it will not raise the prospects of people from poor families.
From Dalton Conley’s excellent The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why. Follow this link and here for my earlier writings on Conley.
Income inequality over time
How great a share has the top ten percent of the American income distribution earned over time?
Ben Muse tells us (based on, Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998, by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez):
In 1917, the top 10% of “tax units” had about 40% of national income. The percent of the income earned by this group rose until about 1929, ranged from about 44% to about 46% until 1940, then plummeted to the area of 32% during the war, and sat there until about 1972. From 1972 to 1998, the share of income received by this group rose almost continuously, ending the period in the area of 42%.
Here is the graph (click to expand):
Breaking the top 10% into even finer gradations we see that:
Percentiles 90-99 appear to rise gradually from 1917 to 1940, do the 1940 WWII drop, then, following the war, begin a long sustained increase through 1998.
But the top percentile is all over the place. The authors had enough data to start this series up in 1913, before the start of WWI. It plummets on U.S. entry into the war and during a post-war depression, rises through the boom of the 1920s, peaking in 1929, plummets with the onset of the Great Depression, and again with the onset of WWII, then continues to fall following the war, bottoming out about 1972, and then rising over the period 1972-1998. A large part of this last rise takes place in 1987 and 1988, following the Tax Reform Act of 1986….
What else do we learn? War and other disruptions appear to damage capital income more than labor income. If that is the case, a healthy and peaceful society might have increasing income inequality. In other words, if we are lucky, income inequality will increase even more.
A bloody fool
Istvan Kantor has been banned from many of the finest museums for scrawling a large X in his own blood on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and other galleries. (NYTimes)
Thus it might not seem surprising that On March 10, Kantor found himself once again being escorted by several security guards at Canada’s National Gallery. Except this time, Kantor was being escorted into the building to receive the Governor General’s award in visual and media arts, one of the highest artistic awards in Canada. Along with the award came more than $12,000 in taxpayer funds.
Kantor’s other artistic achievements? “A video showing two performers slashing the throats of two cats and wearing their bleeding bodies as hats.” Also a peformance ensemble featuring fornicating file cabinets.
I try to keep an open mind about the avant-garde, really I do, but it’s this sort of nonsense that gives Jesse Helms a good name.
Acting white
When John McWhorter argued in Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America that aspects of African-American culture, such as anti-intellectualism, were debilitating and counter-productive he was accused by some of being a self-hating sellout. It’s going to be harder to take that line against Henry Louis Gates, distinguished scholar and chair of Harvard’s African and African American Studies Department.
At a recent talk in Washington to promote his new book, Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans, Gates had this to say:
I remember a poll where black kids were asked to list the things they considered ‘acting white. The top three things were: making straight A’s, speaking standard English and going to the Smithsonian. Now, if anybody had said anything like that when we were growing up in the ’50s, first, your mother would smack you upside the head and second, they’d check you into a mental institution.
Talking about the misogny, homophobia, and violence found in hip-hop culture Gates said:
What I’m trying to figure out is why our kids…embrace those modes of behavior as authentically black. It is killing our people. And it makes me sick….Our leaders are geniuses at jumping on white racism…when anti-black racism by anybody manifests itself, I’ll be right there pouncing on it, too. But unless we do the second, necessary, act of leadership, which is to critique pathological forms of behavior with any African American community, our people will be doomed, doomed to perpetuate the class divide…
Was it good for you?
Tyler blogged about the economics of orgasm several weeks ago, but if you want more – and who doesn’t – Steve Landsburg explains what the subject has to do with the fourth and fifth amendments to the constitution. I kid you not.
Born to Sue?
Frank Sulloway’s Born to Rebel (BTR) was a smash hit when it was published in 1996. Sulloway’s thesis, that laterborns are born to rebel while first-borns are conformist defenders of the status quo, was initially greeted with some skepticism among experts who knew of an earlier review of the large literature on birth order that had found little evidence for an effect on personality. The thesis struck a cord with the public, however, and Sulloway seemed to have gathered so much data from so many different sources (including scientific revolutions, political revolutions, religious revolutions etc.) that with a few exceptions (such as the great Judith Harris) the book won over skeptics and carried the day. Michael Shermer, Mr. Skepticism himself, said, for example, that Born to Rebel was “the most rigorously scientific work of history every written.”
Two devastating studies of BTR, however, have just now been published in the September 2000 issue of Politics and the Life Sciences (alas this issue is not online, perhaps for reasons discussed below). After exhaustive efforts, the studies failed to replicate key results in BTR – that is the authors tried to replicate what Sulloway said he did, on the data that he said he used and they could not reproduce anything close to his results. Now, you may be asking, how it is that the September 2000 issue of PLS has only now been published? And therein lies a story.
When Politics and the Life Sciences decided to publish the initial critique of BTR by Frederic Townsend, after peer review by four referees, it invited Sulloway to respond along with a number of others in a roundtable format that they had used in previous debates. Sulloway was guaranteed ample room to respond to Townsend and was invited to submit his own names for roundtable participants. He initially agreed but shortly thereafter he wrote to Gary Johnson, the editor of the journal, threatening that if the critique were published he would sue both the journal and the editor personally for what he considered to be defamation. Even if the Townsend article were thoroughly revised he insisted to the editor that it would be “appropriate – indeed legally mandatory – for you to preface his article with an editorial forewarning that reads more or less as follows”:
It is not normally the policy of this journal to publish data that are known, in advance, to be actually or potentially in error, especially when such data are being used in an attack on another scholar. However, as editor of this journal, I have decided…to publish these erroneous data in their present form. Readers are warned, however, that none of Townsend’s empirical claims, or the conclusions based upon them, can be trusted with any degree of certainty. Townsend has also made other blatant errors of fact and interpretation that are now known to the editor and that seriously affect the credibility of this paper….
Of course, the editor refused this absurd request. Sulloway later wrote to the president of the editor’s university (with copies to the chair of the Board of Trustees and the university’s legal counsel), saying:
…I intend to file charges of misconduct against one of your faculty members, Gary R. Johnson….these allegations include, but are not necessarily limited to: defamation/libel, false light invasion of privacy, fraud, promissory estoppel, and breach of fiduciary duty…I will also be blowing the whistle by filing formal charges of scientific misconduct against Gary Johnson with the American Political Science Association, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, members of Congress who have shown a concern about science fraud, and all other professional organizations with which Professor Johnson or his journal….are affiliated.
Bear in mind that Johnson is only the editor of the journal and not even the primary critic! Naturally, Sulloway’s threats delayed publication of the journal, as more referees were involved and revisions took place, but the worst was yet to come. The journal’s publisher refused to publish the debate unless the parties involved committed not to sue him, his printer, his distributor, the journal, or the association. Of course, Sulloway refused. The heroic Johnson and the association then decided to publish the journal on their own. As a result, the final publication, including Sulloway’s response, is nearly five years late.
All of this, and there is much more that I have not reported, is from Johnson’s shocking editorial explaining the long delay. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the whole ordeal is that our legal system, sometimes described as Russian Roulette, has gotten sufficiently capricious and arbitrary that Sulloway’s abusive legal threats were nearly successful. Johnson writes:
The virtual terror that Sulloway’s legal threats have prompted in some of those associated – directly or indirectly – with the events described in this editorial suggests to me that contemporary science must adapt to a changed socio-legal environment if the capacity for open dialogue and critical exchange that is the lifeblood of science and scholarship is to be protected. Scholars, scientists, and publishers cannot focus properly on what should be their principal concerns if the threat of catastrophic legal costs hangs over them and their organizations and journals.