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Archive for July, 2011

More Evidence of Blue Monday Effect?

A new study by two economists from the University of British Columbia, John F. Helliwell and Shun Wang, shows that Americans are happier on weekends. This is more true for men than for women, as well as for married couples.
Abstract here:

This paper exploits the richness and large sample size of the Gallup/Healthways US daily poll to illustrate significant differences in the dynamics of two key measures of subjective well-being: emotions and life evaluations. We find that there is no day-of-week effect for life evaluations, represented here by the Cantril Ladder, but significantly more happiness, enjoyment, and laughter, and significantly less worry, sadness, and anger on weekends (including public holidays) than on weekdays. We then find strong evidence of the importance of the social context, both at work and at home, in explaining the size and likely determinants of the weekend effects for emotions. Weekend effects are twice as large for full-time paid workers as for the rest of the population, and are much smaller for those whose work supervisor is considered a partner rather than a boss and who report trustable and open work environments. A large portion of the weekend effects is explained by differences in the amount of time spent with friends or family between weekends and weekdays (7.1 vs. 5.4 hours). The extra daily social time of 1.7 hours in weekends raises average happiness by about 2%.


QE3? Not So Fast. Let's Debate the Merits of QE2 First

The Fed’s second round of monetary stimulus, the $600 billion QE2, ended on June 30. Since then, financial markets have rallied on news of another Greek bailout, and then fallen on weakening jobs and economic news from the U.S. The Dow is basically back to where it was when QE2 ended on June 30. So the world hasn’t ended, and yet there are those who think we need a third round. The minutes of the latest meeting of Federal Reserve officials, released Tuesday, show them divided on whether to implement a third round of monetary stimulus. Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s first assess QE2. For that, we turn to two of our regular contributors, Justin Wolfers, and James Altucher.


What Would a Millennial-Generation Budget Look Like?

The average age of Congress is 57.4 years-old. With all the talk (from both sides of the aisle) about how our ballooning debt is stealing from today’s young people, shouldn’t they have a voice in deciding how to solve our long-term fiscal problems, considering they’ll be the ones paying for them? And yet, now that Rep. Aaron Schock (R-IL) has turned 30, not a single member of Congress is in his/her twenties.
What would a budget designed by the Millennial Generation look like? We now know thanks to a group of 18- to-26-year-olds who have released a budget proposal reflecting their priorities. It’s even been scored by the CBO. Organized by the Roosevelt Institute’s Campus Network, the group, along with a handful of think tanks, was given a $200,000 grant by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation to craft a budget proposal.


Australia's Rising Political Star Is an Award-Winning Economist

My good friend Andrew Leigh is the winner of the Young Economist Award, granted every two years to the best Australian-based economist under the age of forty. It’s really a rather splendid achievement. And entirely well-deserved.
Andrew’s career has been quite extraordinary. You see, economics was neither his first career, nor is it his current career. He began life as a star lawyer—clerking for the Aussie equivalent of the Supreme Court, and joining one of the big city firms. He then moved on to his second act as a policy advisor for the center-left politicians in both Australia and the UK, and a think tank in the U.S.
Finally, he began his third act, as an academic economist.


A Solution to Car Accident Rubbernecking: Setting Screens

A few posts ago I wrote a piece about traffic incidents —some of them quite bizarre—that can cause road congestion. Many of these are due to reasonable or at least understandable causes; for example, we need to have road construction, although here in L.A. we wish we didn’t (more about our “Carmageddon” when the results come in.)
But perhaps the most galling and unnecessary source of incident-related congestion is “rubbernecking.” As we all know, terrific jams can be caused even when the wreck(s) is moved out of the traffic lanes, as passing drivers gape at the carnage. It’s been quite a long time since we shared a common ancestor with the vulture, but evidently an evolutionary tie is still there.
Rubbernecking is one of the more interesting cases of moral whipsawing I can think of. All the time we sit in the jam we curse the drivers in front of us for their blood lust. But when it’s our turn at the front of the line… well, just a quick peek.


Is It Time to End the "War on Salt"?

The assault on dietary salt has been growing, and salt sales have been trending slightly downward. Is this a good fight?
According to Scientific American, perhaps not:

This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.

(HT: Eric Jones)


Did Yankees Fan Really Get Hosed in Deal for Jeter Homerun Ball?

A lot of people are saying that Christian Lopez, the guy who caught Derek Jeter‘s 3,000-hit homerun ball, got hosed by the Yankees when he gave it back in return for some signed memorabilia and Yankees tickets worth an estimated $70,000. According to a Bloomberg article, the ball’s estimated value could be as high as $250,000. So the knee-jerk reaction of a lot of headlines was to assume that Lopez left $180,000 on the table, even though last month, Bloomberg reported a much more conservative estimate of between $75,000 and $100,000 for Jeter’s 3,000-hit ball. I’m not saying it couldn’t go for $250,000, but assuming it’s a given seems presumptive.


How "Patent Trolling" Taxes Innovation

Applying for a patent is expensive. Fees can exceed $25,000, and most applications require at least a couple years of effort. We might expect that anyone considering applying for a patent would be fairly certain of the merits of their case for one. And yet, of the patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) that are subsequently litigated, 40% are declared invalid in court.
A court’s declaration that a patent is “invalid” means it should never have been granted in the first place, usually because the invention has been done before, or because it’s obvious to anyone familiar with the patent’s particular scientific or technical field. So why do so many people spend so much time and money filing for patents that are ultimately declared invalid?


L.A.'s Carmageddon: Would Building a Train Be Smarter Than Widening the 405?

The “mother of all traffic jams,” in the words of L.A. County supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, is coming to Los Angeles. On the weekend of July 16/17, an 11-mile segment of Interstate 405 will be closed as part of a $1 billion widening project. Reading of the expected traffic jams, and having recently returned from western Europe, where I traveled mostly by train, I was reminded of an earlier traffic nightmare.
This example I learned from Robert Caro’s 1974 masterpiece The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Robert Moses was New York City’s “master builder” in the mid-20th century, and famously hated public transportation.


Are the Benefits of Prescription Drugs Large Enough to Excuse Overdose Deaths?

That is the question I found myself asking while looking at a new Centers for Disease Control report that analyzes drug-overdose deaths in Florida from 2003-2009. I am guessing the answer is a resounding yes, but it’s probably a question worth asking. During that period, the death rate for prescription drugs rose 84.2 percent, from 7.3 to 13.4 per 100,000 people. (Note that these numbers represent unintentional deaths, not suicides — although when you’re talking about death by drugs, the intention isn’t always clear.) Interestingly, the death rate from illicit drugs — primarily heroin and cocaine — has fallen 21.4 percent, to 3.4 per 100,000 people.


A Debate on University Tenure

With only 8 percent of private employees belonging to trade unions, job security outside government employment has become a sometime thing. One group of employees, however, does have nearly total job security: tenured university professors. Faculty tenure is under attack as never before in the past 50 years.
I like tenure, but why should my group of workers get special protections against the vicissitudes of demand for our “product?” Self-interested arguments about job protection are unsatisfactory. I recently “debated” a journalist on this issue, with the resulting short video from the Texas Tribune:


Try Our "Surprise Me" Button

One of the cool features we’ve added to the new blog is the “Surprise Me” button that allows you to randomly sample our archive of blog posts. You’ll find it all way at the bottom of the blog in the footer; second from the bottom in the left column. Give it a click, and you’re immediately transported into any one of our more than 5,000 posts. It’s a great way to find older posts you may not have seen. Remember, the blog started back in 2005, with this inaugural gem, titled, “Unleashing Our Baby.”


"We Are Creating Magic" With Trees and Grass

From China Daily:

A successful forestation and grassing program in Ngari prefecture in the Tibet autonomous region is effectively battling sandstorms and improving people’s livelihoods.
“We are creating magic, because no one has successfully planted good trees and grass in an area sitting 4,000 meters above sea level,” 45-year-old Han Junwen, an expert with the agriculture and animal husbandry bureau in Gar county told China Daily. …
Local government statistics show the average elevation in Gar is 4,500 meters and it has an annual precipitation of about 73.4 mm, which makes plant seeding extremely difficult.
But after six years of research and planting, Han and his team have now successfully planted 267 hectares of Lucerne grass.
Though land reclamation, grass seeding and forestation are increasing, there is still a long way to go. Tibet still ranks third in the list of areas suffering desertification in China, even though more than 11 percent, about 14 million hectares, is covered with forest.


Worried About the Latest Jobs Report? You Should Be

The latest employment numbers have already caused plenty of consternation. But they are actually worse than you may realize.
Most attention focuses just on the headline number, which says that only 18,000 new jobs were created last month. But the employment report actually contains many indicators, which rarely line up perfectly. The problem is that this time they do.


Is High Unemployment Hurting Kids' Grades?

A new study from a group of Duke economists finds that large-scale job losses have a negative impact on student test scores, particularly in math. Previous studies have shown how kids whose parents lose their jobs perform worse on tests. This study shows that job losses have a much broader effect, and impact kids whose parents remain employed. Here’s the abstract:


Income = Happiness? A Strangely Tough Sell in Aspen

I spent last week at the Aspen Ideas Festival, talking about Betsey’s and my research on the Economics of Happiness. You might think that my message—that income and happiness are tightly linked—would be an easy sell in Aspen, which is the most beautiful and most expensive city I’ve ever visited. But in fact, it’s the millionaires, billionaires and public intellectuals who are often most resistant to data upsetting their beliefs. You see, the (false) belief that economic development won’t increase happiness is comfortingly counter-intuitive to the intelligentsia. And it’s oddly reassuring to the rich, who can fly their private jets into a ski resort feeling (falsely) relieved of any concern that the dollars involved could be better spent elsewhere.


From the Comments: Lay Off the Fake Car Horns

In response to our post about our Prius/”conspicuous conservation” podcast, a reader named Fred writes in to say:

If you did an analysis on your listenership, I’m pretty sure you’d find, in common with most podcasts, that consumers of audio are more likely than not mobile. Old time radio’s image of the rocking chair next to a wireless the size of a substantial piece of furniture is outdated. With podcasts especially, people are more likely to strap on their choice of pod, and listen whilst jogging, StairMastering, cycling, commuting –- it’s a very mobile listenership.
Most podcasters realised this, and when talking travel, transport or cars in particular do not use the hackneyed, clichéed, passé and superfluous sound of a car horn. For the reason that it is unmuffled by earbuds or car windows, it comes directly into the ear and announces forcibly that you are jogging or cycling into danger.


FREAK-est Links

This week: No more drunk puppy-buying; the price tag of a hit song; a human homerun; the end of the mancession; why Americans’ cars are getting heavier; and why a pretty woman causes some men to crave war.


Where Does "Wham, bam" Come From?

I’m back to inviting readers to submit quotations whose origins they want me to try to trace, using my book, The Yale Book of Quotations, and my more recent researches.
merry staser asked:

“‘Wham, bam … thank you ma’m'” We have been looking for this one all over and can’t seem to find out where it came from … (travelling in a carriage … was one we found … but not a full explanation). Thanks.”

I don’t have a full explanation (and I’m not sure one is necessary, the meaning of the expression is obvious). The earliest occurrence I know of is in the 1948 play Mister Roberts, where a sailor character says “Well there goes the liberty. That was sure a wham-bam-thank-you ma’am!”


Another Case of Teacher Cheating, or Is It Just Altruism?

From the results of this year’s high-school “maturity exam” in Poland (courtesy of reader Artur Janc), comes this histogram showing the distribution of scores for the required Polish language test, which is the only subject that all students are required to take, and pass.
Not quite a normal distribution. The dip and spike that occurs at around 21 points just happens to coincide with the cut-off score for passing the exam. Poland employs a fairly elaborate system to avoid bias and grade inflation: removing students’ names from the exams, distributing them to thousands of teachers and graders across the country, employing a well-defined key to determine grades. But by the looks of these results, there’s clearly some sort of bias going on.


The Wastefulness of New Jersey's Gas Pumping Restrictions

Driving through New Jersey we stop for gas and sit for a few minutes until the attendant comes to fill our tank. My son tells me that is because New Jersey has one of the most wasteful restrictions in the Union: There is no self-service gasoline; all gas must be pumped by an attendant. This wastes drivers’ time—it’s almost always quicker to pump gas oneself. The labor of the attendants is thus devoted to generating economic waste and could be spent productively elsewhere rather than in promoting economic inefficiency. Perhaps at one time the restriction was based, as they usually are, on health/safety, or perhaps on preventing pilferage. But today, with credit-card pumps and few (no?) cases of people burning themselves pumping their own gas, the restriction has no rationale—other than protecting the attendants’ jobs.


Was There Insider Trading on DSK News?

A month ago, we ran a post featuring a handful of the latest odds on Intrade, including the chances (84% at the time) that Dominique Strauss-Kahn would be found guilty of at least one charge. Those odds have dropped below 10% in the last week, on the news that his accuser may have credibility issues. But when exactly did that price move start?
Reader Chris Reed wrote in asking us to look into the possibility that there was insider trading in the prediction markets on the DSK news. The initial New York Times piece that broke the story that the DSK trial was on the verge of collapse was first posted online Thursday night, June 30, before appearing on the front page of Friday’s paper. The Times doesn’t time-stamp its articles, but the Huffington Post does. Their story linking to the Times piece is time-stamped 9:38 PM ET.


The Suicide Attempt That Ended With a Kiss

Having just completed an hour-long radio program on suicide, and having just visited mainland China for the first time, I was drawn to this incredibly moving story from Shenzhen, by Shi Yingying in China Daily:

Like a real life version of Snow White, Liu Wenxiu‘s kiss literally saved the life of a 16-year-old boy.
Liu just passing by a pedestrian bridge in downtown Shenzhen on June 11 when she spotted hundreds of onlookers watching a young man with a knife in his hand, threatening to jump.
“I saw him get more and more excited – everybody around was just looking, nobody was trying to step up and help,” said Liu, a 19-year-old hotel waitress.
“He had to be saved – because I’ve been there before and I knew exactly how it was,” continued Liu, who had attempted suicide several times. …
“He told me he didn’t have a home anymore, nobody cared about him and no one trusted him. I said nothing but showed him the scars on my right wrist. … With the boy crying even harder, Liu knew he had a sense of being understood.


Ridding the Streets of Dog Poop, One DNA Test at a Time

It’s been quite a while since we proposed a novel solution for ridding our cities of dog poop — DNA registration of pets, and subsequent DNA identification of wayward dung — but it seems to be slowly, slowly gaining acceptance. The Israeli city Petah Tikvah gave it a try, and now the New York Post reports (and Gothamist follows) about an apartment complex in Rockville Center, Long Island, that’s using the DNA method to punish owners who don’t pick up after their dogs. Good to see the power of poop still rolling on.


How Is Law School Like the NFL Draft?

Here’s a smart take on the current state of law schools from Jonathan Tjarks over at Policymic.com. It’s a rather depressing look at how the odds are similarly stacked against law school grads and college football players. After opening with a nice reference to Sudhir Venkatesh‘s study of the economics of crack from Chapter 3 of Freakonomics, Tjarks’ piece boils down to the following analysis:

Admittance into a top-14 law school, like a scholarship from a top-10 college football program, is the culmination of a lifetime of striving. Of the over 100,000 high school seniors who play football, fewer than 3,000 sign Division I letters of intent. Similarly, the top 25% in Harvard Law’s 2009 class had an average GPA of 3.95 and a LSAT score of 175, which puts them in the 99th percentile of the over 100,000 test takers each year.
Yet, despite overcoming nearly impossible odds, each group still has the toughest test of their lives ahead of them — each other. NFL teams rarely draft players not at the top of the depth chart, even at powerhouses like Texas or Oklahoma. And even at Harvard or Columbia Law, “Big Law” firms — those with the coveted $160,000 starting salaries — don’t reach too far below the median class rank when selecting first-year associate.


Massive Teacher Cheating Scandal Erupts in Atlanta

An investigation into Atlanta’s public school system has uncovered evidence that teachers and principals have been secretly erasing and correcting answers on students’ tests for as long as a decade. A state investigation found that 178 educators at 44 of the district’s 56 schools engaged in cheating. The report is a huge blow to an urban school district that for years was hailed as one of the country’s most successful due to increased student performance.
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Superintendent Beverly Hall and her top aides ignored, buried, destroyed or altered complaints about misconduct, claimed ignorance of wrongdoing and accused naysayers of failing to believe in poor children’s ability to learn.
For years — as long as a decade — this was how the Atlanta school district produced gains on state curriculum tests. The scores soared so dramatically they brought national acclaim to Hall and the district, according to an investigative report released Tuesday by Gov. Nathan Deal.
In the report, the governor’s special investigators describe an enterprise where unethical — and potentially illegal — behavior pierced every level of the bureaucracy, allowing district staff to reap praise and sometimes bonuses by misleading the children, parents and community they served.
The report accuses top district officials of wrongdoing that could lead to criminal charges in some cases.


Maybe Our Tastes Don't Calcify As We Age?

I had an interesting exchange recently while interviewing Tim Westergren, co-founder of the (just-public) internet radio company Pandora for our Freakonomics Radio hour called “The Folly of Prediction.” (We argue in the show that Pandora represents a narrow but worthy example of our ability to predict the future — unlike most realms, like politics, the economy, and so on.)

DUBNER: You know, there’s a neat body of research that shows that people’s tastes in the kind of stuff they consume — whether it’s food, or music, or art, and so on — tend to get fairly frozen in time by the time you hit your mid-thirties or so. Do you know anything about that — about the speed and variance at which people adopt new musical tastes, or are at least willing to experiment, versus their ages?
WESTERGREN: You know, it’s funny, someone said to me a long time ago when I embarked on this, “Why are you doing this? People don’t want new music. I look at my friends and they have the same CD’s they’ve had for 20 years — what problem are you trying to solve?” And I think the truth is the reason that people’s music tastes atrophy is not because they don’t long for discovery. It’s because the don’t have time anymore, and what are they going to do? I know there’s actually a biologist who literally studied this, a fellow at Stanford who studied this, because it seemed like such a strong correlation, but it’s basically when you get busy. When you have a job and you have a family you don’t have time to do anymore. But if you look up behavior on Pandora, the level of enthusiasm, and intensity, and discovery that’s happening is just as rich for folks in their seventies and eighties as it is for, you know, teenagers.


How Is This Economic Recovery Unlike the Rest?

A recent study by a team of economists at Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies argues that the current economic recovery is the worst since World War II for worker pay and job growth — but the best for corporate profits. The headline:

Over this six-quarter period [from Q2 of 2009 to Q4 of 2010], corporate profits captured 88% of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1% of the growth in real national income.

That’s right. Of the $528 billion in real national income gained between the second quarter of 2009 and the fourth quarter of 2010, pre-tax corporate profits accounted for $464 billion, while wages rose by just $7 billion.


Our Daily Bleg: Looking for the Best Online News

A reader named Chuck Amos writes:

My bleg is for a list of reliable, unbiased, and intelligent news sources that present general information in a readable and user-friendly way.
This seems like a very simple problem to solve, but my efforts over the years have been unsatisfactory. Sites like CNN.com are presented reasonably well, but the actual “news” is way too fluffy. Sites like Huffington Post are so miserable to look at that I’m not willing to sift through the train-wreck presentation and look for articles that might be interesting. Sites like Salon.com are willing to dig deeper than many of the mainstream news sites, but the politics are biased and therefore fail the test of what I seek.
To make my search more difficult, I don’t care about video (I have limited time, and I’d rather spend 20 seconds skimming/reading a written article than 90 seconds watching a newscast), and the amount of garbage that comes across Twitter feeds makes that outlet of limited use to me.
I’ve had reasonably good experiences with the Economist, Christian Science Monitor, and Guardian sites, but none of them leaves me completely satisfied.
My perfect news site would simply be a list of headlines that link to well-written, well-researched articles on a broad variety of topics. Sort of like an AP feed, but with articles that contain more than 2 poorly written paragraphs.
Can anyone point me in the right direction?