Results for “angus deaton”
42 found

Is the economic crisis still making Americans unhappy?

In a new paper, Angus Deaton says maybe not so much (pdf).  Happiness surveys show a big negative effect from the downturn in 2008, but most of it has since evaporated.  You can conclude that a) things really are better, b) they are not focusing enough on the long-term unemployed, c) I shouldn’t trust happiness surveys, d) this explains why we are still headed off a cliff, or some combination of the above.  For the pointer I thank Eric Barker.

Economics Nobel odds at iPredict

iPredict is running contracts on who will win this year's Nobel Prize in Economics. As I write Oliver Hart heads the field with a 25% chance, Robert Schiller, Richard Thaler, Martin Weitzman come next, all with an 18% chance of winning.

Also listed are William Nordhaus, Jean Tirole, Angus Deaton, Richard Posner, Gene Grossman, Ernst Fehr, Gordon Tullock, Avinash Dixit, Sam Peltzman, Eugene Fama and Robert Barro.

It does seem to be a market based on real money payments, though I am not sure how much liquidity is there.  The direct link to the contracts is here and right now Thaler is leading.  The link cited above is here and for the pointer I thank Eric Crampton.

Tall people are happy

Here is the abstract to a new paper by Angus Deaton and Raksha Arora.

According to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index daily poll of the US population, taller people live better lives, at least on average. They evaluate their lives more favorably, and they are more likely to report a range of positive emotions such as enjoyment and happiness. They are also less likely to report a range of negative experiences, like sadness, and physical pain, though they are more likely to experience stress and anger, and if they are women, to worry. These findings cannot be attributed to different demographic or ethnic characteristics of taller people, but are almost entirely explained by the positive association between height and both income and education, both of which are positively linked to better lives.

 Now if I were in favor of redistribution

The Copenhagen Consensus and its critics

Abhijit Banerjee, Angus Deaton, and Esther Duflo are all upset.  You might recall the most famous recommendation of the Copenhagen Consensus was to invest in anti-HIV/AIDS programs as a higher priority than global warming.  Banerjee writes:

Similarly, the proposal on HIV/AIDS seems to have entirely missed the mounting evidence…that we do not really know how to get people to behave in ways that would reduce the transmission of HIV.

Angus Deaton writes:

Lomborg’s Consensus does not even identify the "we" who are to spend the $50 billion, although it certainly shares Sachs’ confidence in the usefulness of social engineering by well-meaning outside experts.

Maybe that criticism is unfair; Lomborg might say he is playing by the rules of other people’s games.  Esther Duflo writes:

…to my knowledge there is very little rigorous evidence on effective [HIV-AIDS] prevention strategies in Africa.

The three reviews are all in the Journal of Economic Literature, December 2007.  The bottom line is that $50 billion doesn’t go as far as you might think. 

The best mid-sized chunk I read today

…the fraction of Kenyans who are satisfied with their personal health is
the same as the fraction of Britons and higher than the fraction of
Americans.  The US ranks 81st out of 115 countries in the fraction of
people who have confidence in their healthcare system, and has a lower
score than countries such as India, Iran, Malawi, or Sierra Leone.
While the strong relationship between life-satisfaction and income
gives some credence to the measures, the lack of such correlations for
health shows that happiness (or self-reported health) measures cannot
be regarded as useful summary indicators of human welfare in
international comparisons.

That is Angus Deaton, here is more, and here.

Health and Status

A number of studies have shown a startling connection between higher social status and better health, even after controlling for income, education and other factors. Some economists are skeptical, Angus Deaton, for example, suggests reverse causality may be a factor:

The major reason that people retire from the work force is that they’re sick. If you get sick in America, it does terrible things to your social status.

Two remarkable papers by Donald Redelmeier and Sheldon Singh cast some doubt on this explanation. In Survival in Academy Award-Winning Actors and Actresses Redelmeier and Singh compare the longevity of Oscar winners with nominees who did not win. The statistical hypothesis is that all that separates winners and nominees is the random fact of winning (random with respect to other factors influencing health). If winners and nominees are alike but for random factors then any differences in longevity can be causally ascribed to winning the Oscar. R and S find that winners live about 4 years longer than non-winners, a huge difference. The effect does not go away with additional controls.

Skeptics will posit other mechanisms but R and S have a lesser known but equally important paper on screenwriters who win the Academy Award. Surprisingly, they find that winning screenwriters die about 3 years earlier than non-winning nominees. At first, these two results appear to be quite contradictory suggesting some problem in the studies. But on second look there is a compelling logic to the findings. The difference between actors who win the Oscar and screenwriters is that even winning screenwriters get no respect. Who remembers a screenwriter’s name? I think it’s in the movie Bowfinger that Steve Martin says of the lovely ingenue something to the effect, “She’s so dumb she’s sleeping with the screenwriter to get to the top.” Winning screenwriters have longer and more successful careers (4 star movies) than non-winning writers so income and other material factors would suggest greater longevity but even a winning screenwriter is almost surely destined to have his lines mangled by a lousy but famous actor and perhaps this stress drives them to an early grave.

On U.S. life expectancy disparities

From the excellent Dylan Matthews:

Case and Deaton are highlighting a real problem, confirmed by other researchers: Americans with different levels of education die at different rates, and the least-educated Americans have seen their death rates surge in a way that more-educated Americans have not.

But the relevant divide does not seem to be between people who earned a bachelor’s degree — who remain a minority among American adults — and people who didn’t. Other research suggests that the problem is concentrated in specific areas of the US, and between the very least-educated Americans (particularly high school dropouts) and the rest of the country, rather than between college grads and non-grads.

Moreover, the cause of the divergence between high school dropouts and the rest of the country does not seem to be caused by “deaths of despair.” There is no doubt that the opioid epidemic in particular has wrought spectacular damage in the US. But some researchers are finding that stagnating progress against cardiovascular disease is an even bigger contributor to US life expectancy stalling out, and to mortality divides between the most- and least-educated Americans.

A lot of what you read about “deaths of despair” is in fact wrong or misguided.

Assorted links

1. David Zetland’s economics of water book is now free.

2. How Ira Glass works.

3. Did Medicare Advantage get better?  And where is “the pizza belt”?  Is this the most important theory about pizza?  I agree with the claims in that article.

4. Claims about deception detection.

5. Should robots have diverse personalities?

6. Which are the most correlated web searches with hard and easy lives?

7. More on RCT debates: is there a gold standard?

New issue of Econ Journal Watch

Comments:

In Growing Public, Peter Lindert suggests
that the welfare state may be a free lunch, and points to Sweden to
make the case. Here, Andreas Bergh empirically challenges Lindert’s
characterization of Sweden and the role Sweden plays in his argument.
Lindert responds.

Ronald Michener and Robert Wright rejoin the debate with Farley Grubb over money supply in colonial America.

Economics In Practice:The top journals have drastically reduced
critical commentary. Robert Whaples suggests an explanation, namely the
quest for citations to the journal. Philip Coelho and James McClure
respond with another explanation, the quest for citations to editorial
insiders.

Do economists reach a conclusion on road pricing? Robin Lindsey
finds that on the main issue of using pricing to manage congestion,
there is a strong consensus among economists working in the field. But
there is little consensus on secondary issues—how to price road usage,
whether to subsidize, whether to earmark revenues, whether to privatize.

Character Issues:A previous article assessed the 1981 open
letter signed by 364 economists protesting the macroeconomic policy of
the Thatcher government. Philip Booth provides the list of signatories,
among them A.B. Atkinson, David Austen-Smith, Partha Dasgupta, Angus
Deaton, John Eatwell, Frank Hahn, Nicholas Kaldor, Mervyn King, J.E.
Meade, Andrew Oswald, Joan Robinson, Amartya Sen, and John Sutton.

Intellectual Tyranny of the Status Quo:The Real Bills Doctrine, Pro and Con:  Richard Timberlake replies to Per Hortlund.