Results for “average is over” 1572 found
The “paradox of choice” is not robust
I missed this one while traveling, so I am grateful to the loyal MR reader who pointed it out to me:
… the psychological effect may not actually exist at all. It is hard to find much evidence that retailers are ferociously simplifying their offerings in an effort to boost sales. Starbucks boasts about its “87,000 drink combinations”; supermarkets are packed with options. This suggests that “choice demotivates” is not a universal human truth, but an effect that emerges under special circumstances.
Benjamin Scheibehenne, a psychologist at the University of Basel, was thinking along these lines when he decided (with Peter Todd and, later, Rainer Greifeneder) to design a range of experiments to figure out when choice demotivates, and when it does not.
But a curious thing happened almost immediately. They began by trying to replicate some classic experiments – such as the jam study, and a similar one with luxury chocolates. They couldn’t find any sign of the “choice is bad” effect. Neither the original Lepper-Iyengar experiments nor the new study appears to be at fault: the results are just different and we don’t know why.
After designing 10 different experiments in which participants were asked to make a choice, and finding very little evidence that variety caused any problems, Scheibehenne and his colleagues tried to assemble all the studies, published and unpublished, of the effect.
The average of all these studies suggests that offering lots of extra choices seems to make no important difference either way. There seem to be circumstances where choice is counterproductive but, despite looking hard for them, we don’t yet know much about what they are. Overall, says Scheibehenne: “If you did one of these studies tomorrow, the most probable result would be no effect.”
That's by Tim Harford. In my view, the so-called paradox of choice is one of the most overrated and incorrectly cited results in the social sciences. The full account is here.
MR vocabulary guide
1. “Self-recommending”: the very nature of the authors and project suggest it will be good or very good. This also often (but not always) means I haven’t read it yet. I am reluctant to recommend *anything* I haven’t read, but I am signaling it is very likely recommendation-worthy and I wish to let you know about it sooner rather than later.
2. An “Assorted link” that ends with a question mark: Worth thinking about, but I wish to distance myself from the conclusion and the methods of the study, without being contrary per se.
3. Hansonian: of, or relating to Robin Hanson.
4. The Jacksonian mode of discourse. I am opposed to this. Political and economic pamphlets in the Jacksonian era were excessively polemical and sometimes the Jacksonian mode is still used today, in 2009, believe it or not.
5. Wunderkind: Take the average age of that person’s relevant peers. If said person is either under twenty or less than half that average, that person may qualify for “Wunderkind” status.
6. Markets in everything: Some of these are celebratory but many of these are sad or tragic. Usually I am trying to get you to think about — as a philosophical question — why the market exists at all and not whether it should be legal.
7. Tyrone is my brother and alter-ego who believes the opposite of what Tyler believes. Trudie offers personal advice. Neither has good time management skills and thus they don’t write very much these days.
8. “Shout it from the rooftops”: What to do with wordy, obscure truths which the world badly needs to learn.
What have I left out?
Political vs economic competition, or why a two-party system can be OK
Max Kaehn, an occasional MR commentator, expressed a common sentiment when he wrote:
You think a voting system that sticks us with a two-party cartel instead of a diverse market in political representatives isn’t a major problem? Are you sure you’re an economist?
Here are a few reasons why political competition isn't the same as economic competition:
1. Economic competition lowers costs. For the average worker, it cost a month's wages to buy a book in eighteenth century England and today it might cost well under an hour's wage. The competitive incentive to use and introduce new technologies drove that change. Political competition may support cost-reduction enterprises in an indirect manner, by providing good policy and spurring the private sector, but the mere ability to supply candidates and parties at lower cost is no great gain.
2. Having lots of parties means you get coalition government. This works fine in many countries but again it is not to be confused with economic competition. Coalition government means that say 39 percent of the electorate gets its way on many issues, while 13 percent of the electorate — as represented by the minor partner in the coalition — gets its way on a small number of issues. Whatever benefits that arrangement may have, they do not especially resemble the virtues of economic competition.
3. Many people think that greater inter-party competition, and/or more political parties, will help their favored proposals. Usually they are wrong and they would do better to realize that their ideas simply aren't very popular or persuasive.
4. Often the U.S. system is best understood as a "no-party" system, albeit not at the current moment, not yet at least. The bigger a party gets, often the less disciplined it will be.
5. Stronger electoral competition, in many cases, brings outcomes closer to "the median voter or whatever else is your theory of political equilibrium." That's better than autocracy, but again there are limits on how beneficial that process can be. It's not like economic competition where you get ongoing cost reductions in a manner which saves lives, brings fun, and enriches millions.
The bottom line: Political competition is better than autocracy, but its benefits are not well understood by a comparison with economic competition.
Range voting
A few readers asked me to discuss range voting. Wikipedia defines it as following:
Range voting (also called ratings summation, average voting, cardinal ratings, score voting, 0–99 voting, or the score system or point system) is a voting system for one-seat elections under which voters score each candidate, the scores are added up, and the candidate with the highest score wins. Range voting was used in all public elections in Ancient Sparta in the form of measuring how loud the crowd shouted for different candidates.[1] Approval voting can be considered to be range voting with only 2 levels (approved (1) and disapproved (0)).
The main question to get out of your head is whether or not range voting satisfies Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. (In fact it doesn't, most forms of range voting violate the independence of irrelevant alternatives, but don't worry about that!). There's no major reason why a democratic system should follow all of Arrow's axioms as defined across universal domain, which means you have to rule out the very possibility of paradoxes. Can anyone do that? No, not even when you're deciding which book to read next. (But should you stop reading? No.) We do, however, care if the system can:
1. Deliver decent economic growth and an acceptable level of civil liberties.
2. Build consensus and legitimacy going forward, and
3. Toss out the truly bad politicians.
Ideally, we'd even like:
4. The democratic process itself educates people, raises the level of discourse, and makes for a better society.
On those counts, it is not clear what advantage range voting brings over either a two-party winner-take-all system or some form of proportional representation. Do we really need to count the preference intensity of voters? That could sooner be harmful in extreme situations. Do we really need to teach voters complicated aggregation systems? The relatively well-educated Germans used a "vote twice but ultimately only the party vote counts" form of PR and for decades most of them never understood it and now they are changing it, finally.
Most countries don't use range voting. Ireland and Tasmania have had some experience with the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system. What happens is that a bunch of candidates run for each post, party identification is weak, and reps emphasize constituency service. That's probably the major dominant effect, namely that most systems of range voting weaken political parties.
The bottom line: Range voting is a solution in search of a problem. The main problems with democracy include poorly informed, irrational, and short-term voters and politicians. Range voting doesn't cure any of those and arguably by weakening party affiliation it makes some of them worse.
Referees get worse as they age
They titled the piece "Older but not Wiser." Here is the summary result:
Michael Callaham, editor-in-chief of the Annals of Emergency Medicine in San Francisco, California, analysed the scores that editors at the journal had given more than 1,400 reviewers between 1994 and 2008. The journal routinely has its editors rate reviews on a scale of one to five, with one being unsatisfactory and five being exceptional. Ratings are based on whether the review contains constructive, professional comments on study design, writing and interpretation of results, providing useful context for the editor in deciding whether to accept the paper.
The average score stayed at roughly 3.6 throughout the entire period. The most surprising result, however, was how individual reviewers' scores changed over time: 93% of them went down, which was balanced by fresh young reviewers coming on board and keeping the average score up. The average decline was 0.04 points per year.
"I was hoping some would get better, and I could home in on them. But there weren't enough to study," says Callaham. Less than 1% improved at any significant rate, and even then it would take 25 years for the improvement to become valuable to the journal, he says.
I thank Michelle Dawson for the pointer; I wonder when the editor who ran the study, Callaham, thinks he should resign. He's totally gray.
*Mathletics*
The subtitle is How Gamblers, Managers, and Sports Enthusiasts Use Mathematics in Baseball, Basketball, and Football and the author is Wayne L. Winston.
I read only the sections on the NBA. He proposes a four-factor model to evaluate teams: Effective Field Goal Percentage, Turnovers per Possession, Offensive Rebounding Percentage, and Free Throw Rate, or how often a team gets to the line. He claims you can raise your PER by taking lots of bad shots and for that reason PER isn't a great measure. Kevin Garnett was an underrated player. Playing four games in five nights hurts you by an average of four points. The raw data, unadjusted for the Lucas Critique, indicate that when you are up by three points, and there are less than seven seconds left, you should not foul the other team.
Some people will enjoy this book. Baseball receives the most attention. Each chapter simply ends and the author moves on to another topic without any overarching narrative other than the statistical method itself.
Here is some of his blogging.
Why are some CDs longer than others?
Adam Smith, a loyal MR reader (yes that is his name), writes to me:
I had a very MResque thought today I wanted to share with you. Why are the typical lengths of albums across different music genres so different? In particular, I was thinking most of my rap albums are at least over the hour mark and many run all the way up to the 80-minute maximum. They're usually packed with intros, skits, and lots of 5 minute tracks that have extended intro and outro instrumental beat only sequences. My metal albums, on the other hand, have an average run length of no more than 40 mins. Most albums are between 8 and 10 tracks with little in the way of tangential material. These different run-times show up in other places too. For example, my older jazz albums (i.e. Kind of Blue, Time Out, Blue Train) typically run around 45 mins with a half dozen or so tracks yet my newer jazz albums like MMW's The Dropper run almost the whole 80 mins. Also, prog. rock bands tend to produce much longer albums than garage rock bands. Even adjusting for the fact that prog bands emphasize longer musical passages, they could compensate by just having fewer songs or garage rock bands could just have twice as many (like the White Stripes did on their first album).
Is there a relative price argument for these differences? Or even signaling? Perhaps there is a rat race among rappers to signal they're capable of coming up with enough material to fill out the maximum length, even if it includes lots of filler. Perhaps the recording costs are lower as instrumentation relies so heavily on sampling. Maybe metal runs into diminishing returns after 30 mins or so where the listener becomes numb to the intensity.
I'll offer a few points:
1. The average career of a rapper is short. A long CD increases the chance that something will "stick" and the rapper won't get too many other chances to try.
2. Some metal bands develop great loyalty among their followers and achieve durable franchises. That gives them a lower discount rate and they are more inclined to save up material for the future. Plus they are marketing an overall sound — rather than clever particular innovations — and if the first forty (five?) minutes don't convince you nothing will. Rap songs probably have a higher individual variance.
3. Many older albums are short for technological reasons, plus the albums were due in relatively rapid succession for contractual reasons. In the 1960s there was lots of technological advance in music, so if you sat on the sidelines for a few years you could become obsolete.
4. It is relatively easy for a contemporary jazz artist to tack on additional improvisations and he can choose standard compositions if necessary. Other forms of popular music cannot expand quantity so easily without hitting a wall in terms of quality. One prediction here is that "compositional jazz" albums should be shorter in average length than albums of jazz improvisation, contemporary that is.
5. If you wanted a somewhat strained explanation, you could argue that the longer CD is a more bundled product and it will make economic sense as a form of price discrimination, the more varied the valuations of the audience. This would require that rap CD buyers have a higher variance of marginal valuation.
Teacher Absence in the Developing World
In South Africa the problem of teacher absence is so bad that frustrated students rioted when teachers repeatedly failed to show up for class. But the problem is not limited to South Africa, teachers are absent throughout the developing world. Spot checks by the World Bank, for example, indicate that on a typical day 11% of teachers are absent in Peru, 16% are absent in Bangladesh, 27% in Uganda and 25% in India.
Even when teachers are present they are often not teaching. In India, where a quarter of the teachers are absent on any particular day, only about half of those present are actually teaching. (These are national averages, in some states the problem is worse.)
The problem is not low salaries. Salaries for public school teachers in India are above the norm for that country. Indeed, if anything, absenteeism increases with salary (and it is higher in public schools than in private schools, despite lower wages in the latter). The problem is political power, teacher unions, and poor incentives.
Teachers are literate and they vote so they are a powerful political force especially where teacher unions are strong. As if this were not enough, in India, the teachers have historically had a guarantee of representation in the state Legislative Councils so political power has often flowed to teachers far in excess of their numbers. As a result, it's virtually impossible to fire a teacher for absenteeism.
The situation in South Africa is not that different than in India. The NYTimes article on South Africa has this to say:
“We have the highest level of teacher unionization in the world, but their focus is on rights, not responsibilities,” Mamphela Ramphele, former vice chancellor of the University of Cape Town, said in a recent speech.
Some reforms are planned in South Africa, including greater monitoring of teacher attendance but this offhand remark suggests the difficulties:
“We must ask ourselves to what extent teachers in many historically disadvantaged schools unwittingly perpetuate the wishes of Hendrik Verwoerd,” [President Zuma] recently told a gathering of principals, implicitly challenging the powerful South African Democratic Teachers’ Union, which is part of the governing alliance (!). (Emphasis added, AT.)
Arlington vs. Tysons Corner
As I had expected, I could do the whole walk on little more than one street, Clarendon Blvd. (it is called Wilson going the other way), with but a bend at Fairfax Drive. I never had to cross a major road, run across a road, come near a major highway, or circumnavigate a major shopping center. The main artery was straight enough to be followed by a single line Metro line throughout. I was never more than seven or eight minutes from a Metro stop, if that. And if I had done this walk thirty years ago, while the buildings and shops would have been very different, and many fewer, the physical geography of the walk would have been the same.
In contrast look at Tysons Corner (you have to type in "Tysons Corner" yourself). The whole area is carved up by major roads, including three significant highways, one of which could be called massive. Try crossing Rt. 123 at Tysons Corner or try crossing Rt.7. Even some of the "small" roads on this map are harder to cross than is the main Clarendon/Wilson thruway in Arlington. It's not just the roads and the overpasses; crossing or circumventing either major shopping center is a daunting experience. Furthermore very little is laid out in a line and thus the presence of Metro stops (right now there aren't any) would not cover the area nearly as well as they do in central Arlington. Tysons is more like a large box with distant extremities protruding, all laid on top of some multi-level and impassable thick bones. Overall there is plenty of this, except it's usually much busier. There's also plenty of this. Making Tysons denser in residential terms, whatever its virtues, won't eliminate those barriers and in some ways the current plan will make them worse.
In contrast here's what Google images pulls up on Clarendon Boulevard.
Now let's turn to the debate. When Ryan Avent writes: "Tyler seems to approve of the fact that a local planning board will dictate the size of buildings which can be built [at Tysons]" I would offer a different narrative of what I believe, also citing my comment on Matt's blog.
"We made past mistakes, we won't institute congestion pricing or other congestion ameliorations, local government is a cesspool of rent-seekers and homeowners, and so we're stuck for the foreseeable future, on top of which the public choice critique means that even apparently sensible deregulatory pro-density plans will in practice be turned into additional subsidies for suburban growth, the latter observation in fact being derived from a broader point frequently offered up by Matt Yglesias in a variety of other contexts.
Believing the above paragraph is not well described as "favoring regulation and subsidy." I think it is also a deeper understanding than:
"Let us build more densely in the most congested areas and it will work out for the better, even though road policy is terrible and lobbyists will de facto control all plans."
For many years privatizers and deregulators have been criticized for moving too quickly, before the right conditions for reform are in place. China has been praised over Russia, etc. Some privatization and deregulations have indeed backfired and maybe this one would too, unless it is done properly and that means done in conjunction with good roads policies.
That all said, I do in fact favor denser development at Tysons, even without road reform, though not without limits. In the big proposed plan, I'm most of all opposed to broader roads (I'll explain why this is a coherent position some other time but the "average cost equalization" property of transport equilibria can generate such apparently counterintuitive recommendations.)
Random points: Crystal City tried residential density and it didn't work nearly as well as Arlington. It's a dead zone. The earlier attempted dense development of Skyline Drive also stalled and was beaten out by Tysons. Or look at the new (and failing?) complexes on Rt.29 and Gallows Rd. and Strawberry. In 1989 I moved into a tall apartment building, right at Tysons, which had stores on the ground floor so residents would not have to drive to shop. I was delighted but within six months all those shops had closed for lack of interest. At the risk of sounding like Gustav Schmoller, each case really is different, just as Tysons is different from Arlington.
Matt Yglesias wrote:
…why on earth isn’t the libertarian take on this that we should permit high density construction and let the market decide what happens?
When it comes to the current Tysons plan, it is not "the market deciding." It is a mega-plan with road widening, the bane of progressive pro-environment, pro-urban advocates, and also massive subsidies for growth and not just density of growth. More generally, when road policy is so politicized, it is never the market deciding in any case.
Call me odd, but I'm not opposed to urban (or suburban) planning and in fact anyone who recognizes the ongoing existence of public roads has to end up in the same place. I might add that postwar Germany did a good job of such planning. Tysons Corner is not, right now, doing a good job of it. You can believe that whether or not you're a libertarian.
Addendum: In closing, let me toss out a random, radical idea. How about putting up some high-density housing in the vastly underused, nearby residential section of Pimmit Hills and putting in shops and office buildings and the like as well? Why obsess over reforming Tysons per se? Might the answer be to, in some way, work around the Tysons mess and along some margins outcompete it? After all, that's what they ended up doing with Seven Corners.
I may soon consider a few other of my favorite parts of NoVa.
Addendum: Here is a reply from Ryan Avent.
Facts about Japanese health care, and *The Healing of America*
The Japanese are the world's most prodigious consumers of health care. The average Japanese visits a doctor about 14.5 times per year — three times as often as the U.S. average, and twice as often as any nation in Europe…The Japanese love medical technology; they get twice as many CAT scans per capita as Americans do and three times as many MRI scans. Japan has twice as many hospital beds per capita as the United States, and people use them. The average hospital stay in Japan is thirty-six nights, compared to six nights in the United States…Japan lags, though, in terms of invasive surgery; Japanese patients are much less apt than Americans to have operations such as arthroplasty, transplant, or heart bypass. This is partly economics — since the fees for surgery are low, doctors don't recommend it as often — and partly cultural. As a rule, Japanese doctors and patients prefer drugs to cutting the body. On a per-capita basis, the Japanese take about twice as many prescription drugs as Americans do.
Japan, by the way, has invented a smaller and more basic MRI machine, which costs about one-tenth of the cost of the machines used in the United States.
That is all from T.R. Reid's The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care. I thought this book was very readable, very interesting, and has very good information about different health care systems around the world. The author is extremely critical of the U.S. system; the premise of his book is that he takes his shoulder injury to doctors in many different countries. Since not much can be done for the shoulder, the expensive and complicated U.S. system doesn't come off looking very good. Not everyone will agree with the author's perspective but overall I recommend this book.
Sputum markets in everything
South Africans in an impoverished township are profiting from an illegal trade in a precious new currency †‘ saliva.
Tuberculosis
sufferers in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, were found to be selling samples
of their sputum to healthy people to pass off as their own in a scam to
gain medical grants.
An investigation by the West Cape News
identified people with TB charging R50-100 (£4.10-£8.20) for saliva
samples contained in bottles stolen from health clinics.
The
paper said that buyers of the samples were then able to get a card from
a clinic indicating they have TB and use this to fraudulently obtain a
temporary disability grant of R1,010 per month from the department of
social development.
It seems to be a competitive market:
A 54-year-old man told a reporter that he makes an average of R500 per
month from selling his saliva to people seeking to trick their way on
to the benefits system. But he said business was "not good" because so
many people were infected with TB in the township that he had a lot of
competition.
I thank Jonathan Thomas for the pointer.
In praise of Annandale
It's one of the smaller NoVa communities and it has a coherent downtown. For me it has a useful frame shop, tennis club, dentist, a Western Union branch, Giant (easy in and out), and it has one of the best public libraries around, all within walking distance on a single strip and one side road. Natasha gets her massage there. There are plenty of small shops, ethnic and otherwise. It has the best food of any single locale in the D.C. area, including a Korean porridge shop, Korean barbecue, gloopy, disgusting Korean noodles, Korean fried chicken, a Korean tofu restaurant, a Korean bakery (the best hangout around, period, plus the best bakery around), a Korean restaurant specializing in pumpkin dishes, non-disgusting noodle houses, a Korean crab and fish and chips place (with kimchee too), at least two restaurants with "Korean-Chinese" food, and a bunch of 24-7 Korean restaurants, with varying emphases but with Yechon as having the best late night or early morning crowd. Many of the other places stay open until 2 or 3 a.m. (you'll find many reviewed here). The town has over 900 small businesses run by Koreans and catering mostly to Koreans.
On the strip is also the area's best Afghan restaurant, a good Peruvian chicken place, and just off the strip is an excellent Manchurian restaurant, A&J. There is a decent community of antique shops, including a place with some good Afghan textiles. South of 236 you can find a colony of contemporary homes, rare in most parts of Fairfax County. Annandale has the central branch of a 60,000 student community college. The traffic is bearable for the most part, the rents are reasonable by NoVa standards, and you have easy access to the major arteries of 495 and 395. The schools are well above the national average.
Exxon/Mobile has a base on the edge of town. The first (third, according to some sources) toll road in America, ever, ran through Annandale. Mark Hamill once lived there. It has a lovely Civil War church and a rustic barn. Its history dates back to 1685 and it is named after a Scottish village. Many of the people in Annandale are very physically attractive.
What's not to like?
West Annandale is more of a cultural desert than is East Annandale, though it has some Korean cafes and billiard shops. All of Annandale is ugly, with a vague hint of unjustified pastel in the central downtown area. The Into the Wild guy grew up there. They did fight on the wrong side in the Civil War but that has little relevance to the current town. The used CD shop has closed up.
The pluses outweight the minuses. You get all that — and more — for only 50,000 people or so. Boo to Annandale naysayers. Hail Annandale.
From the comments:
I was thinking about the interesting contrast between Annandale which is ugly but is very livable and has wonderful services, vs. some small towns abroad I've visited which had a beautiful town square but limited and overpriced services and few really good or interesting restaurants, with everything being very expensive. Undoubtedly, some tourist visiting the latter towns and spending "summer money" in the busy clubs and cafes would feel the latter superior, and might think Annandale a wasteland. But they may not want to live in said quaint town, especially if salaries were below Virginia standard.
Did highways cause suburbanization?
Via RortyBomb, that is a research paper by Nathaniel Baum-Snow. Here is the abstract:
Between 1950 and 1990, the aggregate population of central cities in the United States declined by 17 percent despite population growth of 72 percent in metropolitan areas as a whole. This paper assesses the extent to which the construction of new limited access highways has contributed to central city population decline. Using planned portions of the interstate highway system as a source of exogenous variation, empirical estimates indicate that one new highway passing through a central city reduces its population by about 18 percent. Estimates imply that aggregate central city population would have grown by about 8 percent had the interstate highway system not been built.
You can quibble with the model specification but I accept the paper's general conclusion. A few points:
1. I am reluctant to call this a subsidy without qualification. Visit an old medieval city like Esternach, Luxembourg ("a formidable fortress erected by Count Siegfried in 963"). The main buildings are grouped together on a hill. It's value-enhancing that later governments adopted policies, such as near-free trade and national defense, which eased those constraints and spread out the population. I wouldn't say that the resulting population distribution of say Paris is best thought of as resulting from a subsidy because they're not all on top of a hill somewhere, I would say it is the result of greater wealth and trade opportunities and law enforcement, with some element of subsidy. So if you favor the construction of the interstate highway system, as I think most commentators do (try driving for long on Rt.1), it is a rhetorically loaded decision to invoke the word "subsidy" as the major mode of explanation.
2. Greater wealth, transport, and trade naturally cause people to seek out larger homes and greater living space. In a world with no policy distortions this may well be the dominant effect in various long-run settings. The rise of the suburbs is not all subsidy-driven by any means.
3. I recall the D.C. area quite well before it had either the Orange Line on the Metro (serving the Virginia suburbs) or Rt.66 going into Washington. The construction of both enabled the suburbs to spread further westward. But which was more important in driving this process? Mass transit also can encourage suburbanization, especially the city has abominable public schools. A longer and better Metro system — most of all with better parking — would have meant even more people moving to the suburbs.
4. Do not forget "white flight." For American cities, this paper suggests that each black arrival lead to, on average, 2.7 white departures. When it comes to DC, "black flight" has been a significant phenomenon and it is a major reason why the city has been losing population.
5. Canada is much less suburbanized than is the United States and the greater "flight from blight" in the U.S. seems to be a major reason (see p.8 here). When I think of U.S. suburbanization, I think of the failures of our municipal public sector as very important in this process. In contrast, Fairfax County and Fairfax City governments are of reasonable quality.
6. For competitive Tiebout-related reasons, it is no accident that the public schools are so often better in the suburbs than in major cities. Countries with strong social norms, such as Sweden, have this problem less.
7. One simple model (which I am not endorsing straight up) is that most American people with kids have a near-lexical preference for living in the suburbs. Anything that enables them to do so can be called a cause of suburbanization and measured as such. But isolating and measuring these marginal impacts, in the econometric sense, distracts us from seeing how general and how strong the underlying infra-marginal forces are and those are very often preference-based.
A Theory for Why Latvian Women are Beautiful
Recently a colleague returned from a trip to Latvia and remarked on how beautiful the women were. A discussion ensued at which it was agreed that women in a number of other countries were also very beautiful but markedly less outgoing than the Latvians. As you may recall, beautiful Latvian women like to parade their beauty. My colleague further informed us that the latter event was not unique, having witnessed something similar himself.
Is my colleague's observation a mere statement of prurient preference? Does this kind of thing belong in a family blog? Don't worry, at Marginal Revolution we never serve our prurience without a little theory.
Sociosexuality is a concept in social psychology that refers to how favorable people are to sex outside of commitment. It can be measured by answers to questions such as "I can
imagine myself being comfortable and enjoying "casual" sex with
different partners" (agree strongly to disagree strongly) or "Sex without love is ok," as well as with objective measures such as the number of sexual partners a person has had. A low score indicates subjects who favor monogamous, long-term, high-investment relationships. A high score indicates subjects more favorable to sex for pleasure's sake alone. with less regard to commitment. On average, males have higher sociosexuality scores than females but sociosexuality scores for females vary widely across countries.
Why might female sociosexuality scores vary? One hypothesis is that in cultures with low operational sex ratios (the number of marriageable men/number of marriageable women) female sociosexuality will be higher. The argument is that when the relative supply of males is low, competition for mates encourages females to shift towards the male ideal, i.e. when supply is scarce the demanders must pay more. (Note that this theory can also explain trends over time, e.g. Pedersen 1991).
Ok, where does this get us? Well in Sociosexuality from Argentina to Zimbabwe, Schmitt (2005) surveyed some 14,000 people on sociosexuality and he correlated female sociosexuality with the operational sex ratio. Here are the results:
Notice that Latvia has one of the highest rates of female sociosexuality in the 48 nations surveyed and the lowest sex ratio.
Thus, the theory is that Latvian women appeal more strongly to the male ideal because the number of marriageable men in Latvia is low relative to the number of women. Is it any wonder that my colleague found the Latvian women beautiful?
Bill Maher unleashes his inner Bryan Caplan
Bill Maher at the Huffington Post:
Or take the health care debate we're presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can go home and "listen to their constituents." An urge they should resist because their constituents don't know anything. At a recent town-hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his Congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare," which is kind of like driving cross country to protest highways.
I'm the bad guy for saying it's a stupid country, yet polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is….
Nearly half of Americans don't know that states have two senators and more than half can't name their congressman. And among Republican governors, only 30% got their wife's name right on the first try.
Sarah Palin says she would never apologize for America. Even though a Gallup poll says 18% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth. No, they're not stupid. They're interplanetary mavericks….
People bitch and moan about taxes and spending, but they have no idea what their government spends money on. The average voter thinks foreign aid consumes 24% of our federal budget. It's actually less than 1%….
And I haven't even brought up America's religious beliefs. But here's one fun fact you can take away: did you know only about half of Americans are aware that Judaism is an older religion than Christianity? That's right, half of America looks at books called the Old Testament and the New Testament and cannot figure out which one came first.
And these are the idiots we want to weigh in on the minutia of health care policy?
Very funny. If only it were not true.