Can’t Put Down Your BlackBerry?

It’s a known affliction, especially once summertime hits: the dad or mom at the beach, with the kids in tow, struggling to read the BlackBerry screen in the glare of that damn sun, then tapping out a reply with sandy thumbs. No wonder they call it a CrackBerry. According to Joe Sharkey in today’s New York Times (it’s just a squib, so there’s no link) the Sheraton Chicago Hotel understands this affliction well — and offers to confiscate a guest’s BlackBerry upon arrival and return it once the vacation is over. Kind of like duct-taping your refrigerator shut when you start a diet …

… in other Times miscellany: a brief article the other day about the problem with business meetings — i.e., they waste time and produce little — with the surprising fact that women spend only 2.28 hours per week in meetings, compared to 4.34 hours for men. Personally, I hate meetings. One reason I left my job at the N.Y. Times after 5 years was because, as much as I admired and enjoyed many of the people in the back-to-back-to-back meetings, it was too hard to get any actual work done. I would sometimes look around, watch 20 talented and well-compensated people spending an hour batting around ideas, perhaps 2% of which would come to fruition, and mourn the loss of 20 man-hours and what could have been accomplished individually during that time …

… and Daniel Altman explores an interesting angle of the immigration debate: the performance of second- and third-generation members of immigrant families. It’s a bit of a regression-to-the-mean story: in working-class immigrant families, the next generation climbs the socioeconomic ladder pretty well; among high-education immigrant families, the next generation often achieves less than the parents. What Altman’s article doesn’t address is the tax contribution of those future generations …

…. but that’s precisely the question asked about a different policy issue by William Ledger, a fertility expert at the University of Sheffield in England. Ledger wanted to know the long-term tax effects of British policy to provide free fertility treatments to all couples. As Reuters reports, the benefit could far outweigh the costs. Ledger “looked at the average cost of producing a baby through in-vitro fertilization and the benefit to the government over the person’s lifetime. He and a group of mathematicians and economists used a modeling exercise and calculated that for the average 13,000 pounds ($23,960) it costs to produce a child through in-vitro fertilization (IVF) the government would recoup 143,000 pounds in taxes alone.”