Jim Yong Kim, President Obama‘s nominee for World Bank president, is a man of many talents, including his ability to rap (at the two-minute mark):
This comes from reader Alex Entz:
I wrote a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic pentameter about economics for an English class of mine at Northwestern this past quarter and, spurred on by the rash of “Fed Valentines,” thought I’d take a decidedly Austrian approach. Now that the class is done, I figured that I should pass it along to some people who, unlike my English professor, would perhaps appreciate its economic aspects more than its rhythmic and metrical aspects.
New research indicates that alcohol, which many a moody poet has indulged in, may actually increase creativity. Psychologists Andrew F. Jarosz, Gregory J.H. Colflesh, and Jennifer Wiley recruited 40 males, got half of them a little tipsy on vodka, and then subjected them to the “Remote Associates Test,” which tests insightful thinking. Their results, as summarized by the BPS Research Digest, were surprisingly good:
If you’re wondering what our cash-free future may look like — what will it do, e.g., to panhandling? — consider a trip to Sweden. The Associated Press reports on that country’s progress towards phasing out hard currency:
“In most Swedish cities, public buses don’t accept cash; tickets are prepaid or purchased with a cell phone text message.
1. Is Tide detergent theft on the rise? (HT: Caleb Baucom)
2. Hot dog data.
3. The average car spends 97 percent of its life parked. (HT: Globe and Mail)
4. The Hunger Games economy.
5. Hard-drinking flies and mice: both consume more alcohol when rejected by females.
This is a guest post from Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Check out Pielke‘s blogs for more on the perils of predicting and “false positive science.”
Sports provide a powerful laboratory for social science research. In fact, they can often be a better place for research than real laboratories because sports provide a controlled setting in which people make frequent, real decisions, allowing for the collection of copious amounts of data. For instance, last summer, Daniel Hamermesh and colleagues used a database of more than 3.5 million pitches thrown in major league baseball games from 2004-2008 to identify biases in umpire, batter, and pitcher decision making. Similarly, Devin Pope and Maurice Schweitzer from the Wharton School used a dataset of 2.5 million putts by PGA golfers over five years to demonstrate loss aversion – golfers made more of the same-length putts when putting for par or worse than for birdie or better. Such studies tell us something about how we behave and make decisions in settings outside of sports as well.
Greece is on its second bailout, with the possibility of a third bailout looming. The Guardian reports on a man in Greece who received groceries and tax services this month without spending a euro:
In return for his expert labour [as an electrician], Mavridis received a number of Local Alternative Units (known as tems in Greek) in his online network account. In return for the eggs, olive oil, tax advice and the rest, he transferred tems into other people’s accounts.
A new study by Ariela Schachter, Rachel Tolbert Kimbro, and Bridget K. Gorman found that strong English skills and native language skills are associated with better health for immigrants. Using language as an indicator of adaptiveness to a new country, the researchers set out to investigate the “healthy immigrant effect”:
The “healthy immigrant effect”—whereby immigrants initially appear healthier than the native-born, although with time in the U.S. their health status declines—continues to puzzle scholars. Acculturation, or the process by which immigrants adapt to a host country, is a primary explanation of this phenomenon.
Dan Johnson, an economist at Colorado College, has been predicting Olympic medal counts for years with a model that uses metrics like population count, income per capita, and home-country advantage. In the past six Olympics, his model has a correlation of 93 percent between predictions and actual medal counts, and 85 percent for gold medals.
For the Games in London this summer, Johnson predicts that the U.S. Will be the top medal winner, followed by China, Russia, then Britain — the same order they finished in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
This is a guest post by Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, who is the China Business Editor of The Economist and author of the just-published book Need, Speed, and Greed: How the New Rules of Innovation Can Transform Businesses, Propel Nations to Greatness, and Tame the World’s Most Wicked Problems
The Rise of the Prize
By Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran
Could the incentive prize be the most powerful and yet most underutilized tool we have to tame the wicked problems of the twenty-first century?
Prizes in themselves are nothing new, of course. The Longitude Prize — a purse of up to £20,000 — was offered by the British Parliament in 1714 for the discovery of a practical means for ships to determine their longitude. This was an enormous problem on the high seas, as the inability to work out longitude on the sailboats of the age often led to costly and deadly errors in navigation. The greatest minds of the British scientific academy wrestled with this problem, but could not crack it.
In honor of International Women’s Day, Foreign Policy has a roundup of five surprisingly good places to be a woman. The Philippines, Spain, South Africa/Lesotho, Latvia, and Cuba all make their list. While it may be hard to believe that women fare well in the very same country that hosted a “Blonde Weekend” back in 2009, Latvian women are excelling . . .
Last week, in honor of our “Dilbert Index” podcast about workplace morale, we asked readers to submit photos of their office spaces. Here’s what’s inside some of your cubicles: [slideshow auto=”on” thumbs=”on”]
New research suggests that people “cyberloaf” (i.e. websurf instead of working) more when they are tired. Some people may find this surprising. (We do not.) If nothing else, this is another argument against Daylight Savings Time. As the BPS Research Digest explains:
The investigators recognised an event that affects everyone’s sleep: when the clocks go forward for Daylight Saving Time. Prior evidence suggests we lose on average 40 minutes of sleep per night following the switch, as our body rhythms struggle to adjust.
We’ve blogged before about gender inequality and the persistent male/female wage gap. A new working paper by Jennifer Hunt, Jean-Philippe Garant, Hannah Herman, and David J. Munroe highlights another arena where women are lagging: commercialized patents. Only 7.5 percent of regular patent and 5.5 percent of commercial patent holders are female. The authors explored various explanations for the gap:
Using the National Survey of College Graduates 2003, we find only 7% of the gap is accounted for by women’s lower probability of holding any science or engineering degree, because women with such a degree are scarcely more likely to patent than women without.
A fair trial is harder to come by than you might think. A few years ago, we wrote about a paper (ungated version here) by Shamena Anwar, Patrick Bayer, and Randi Hjalmarsson which found that “all-white juries acquit whites more often and are less favorable to black versus white defendants when compared to juries with at least one black member.”
Now, a new working paper by the same trio has more bad news.
A new paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology finds that elementary school teachers worldwide might want to start encouraging students to put on their “thinking coats” instead of “thinking caps.”
Researchers Hajo Adam and Adam D. Galinsky found that “wearing a white lab coat — a piece of clothing associated with care and attentiveness — improved performance on tests requiring close and sustained attention.”
A new paper by Raúl López-Pérez and Eli Spiegelman investigates “truth preferences” — i.e., preferences for being honest versus lying. Their goal was to study whether economics students lie more as a result of their education. Or do liars self-select? From the paper:
Does studying economics give people “maximizing” habits of thought, and thus cause them to behave more in line with its own predictions, or do people already inclined towards such behavior tend to self-select into economics?
A computer test structured with a slight incentive to lie was administered to 258 students at The Autonomous University of Madrid. The screen showed two colors, and participants were paid 14 euros for declaring blue and 15 euros for declaring green to another person, regardless of the actual color shown on screen. So what happened? According to the authors, the business and economics (“B&E”) majors gamed the system.
Over at Bloomberg View, Ed Glaeser argues that the shift in government aid from cash payments to in-kind transfers like food stamps is a mistake:
We should ask for two things from any redistribution system. It should do as much as possible for society, especially the poor. It should do as little as possible to encourage permanent poverty. And, whenever possible, it should help poor Americans find a path toward self-sustaining prosperity.
Research indicates that women are generally more risk-averse than men, and this risk-aversion is often cited as a partial explanation for the shortage of women in high-level corporate positions. A new essay by Alison Booth, Lina Cardona Sosa, and Patrick Nolen suggests that single-sex education may change women’s risk preferences. In a recent paper, the researchers conducted a controlled experiment:
[W]e designed a controlled experiment using all incoming first year economics and business students at a British university. The subjects were asked to make choices over real-stakes lotteries at two distinct dates – the first week of term and the eighth week of term…
Prior to the start of the academic year, students were randomly assigned to classes. Our ‘nurturing’ environment is the experimental peer-group or class to which students were randomly assigned by the timetabling office. The class groups were of three different types – all female, all male, or mixed gender.
A new working paper from Uri Gneezy, John List, and Michael K. Price looks at discrimination via a variety of field experiments and more than 3,000 individual transactions:
In certain markets, the observed discrimination is not bigotry or animus-based, but consistent with the notion of profit-maximization, or Pigou’s (1920) “third-degree price discrimination”: in their pursuit of the most profitable transactions, marketers use observable characteristics to make statistical inference about reservation values of market agents. In others, the discrimination is more in line with Becker’s (1957) taste based theory of discrimination, or animus.
Interestingly, the nature of discrimination is less driven by particulars of the market or institutions, rather the nature of the disparate behavior is driven by whether the object of discrimination is a choice of the individual or is uncontrollable.
A fascinating Boston Globe article by Britt Peterson reviews the research on the far-reaching psychological effects of wealth. “Rich people have a harder time connecting with others, showing less empathy to the extent of dehumanizing those who are different from them,” writes Peterson. “They are less charitable and generous. They are less likely to help someone in trouble.” Even more depressing: These traits are “developed,” not “inherited.”
While money may not be the root of all evil, it can make people “insensitive” according to Kathleen Vohs, one of the researchers whose work was profiled in the article. “When people are reminded of money, they get better at pursing their personal goals,” she explains. “On the negative side, they become poor at interpersonal functioning. They’re not all that nice to be around. They’re not openly mean or disagreeable, but they can be insensitive.”
A Foreign Policy article by Tina Rosenberg profiles Patrick Ball, a human rights statistician. Rosenberg describes Ball’s testimony at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic:
“We find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that Yugoslav forces forced people from their homes, forced Albanian Kosovars from their homes, and killed people,” Ball said…
Could the movements of refugees have been random? No, Ball said. He had also plotted killings of Kosovars and found that both phenomena occurred at the same times and in the same places — flight and death, hand in hand. “I remember well the moment of astonishment that I felt when I saw the killing graph for the first time,” Ball replied to Milosevic. “I assumed I had made an error, because the correlation was so close.”
Our recent podcast “The Dilbert Index” looked at offbeat ways to measure employee morale. Damon Beaven, a blog reader we interviewed, noted that a lot of Dilbert comics in cubicles tends to correlate with lower morale. “A lot of Dilbert comics seems to be a passive-aggressive way of an employee complaining,” he observes.
While that observation may not be very scientific, Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Wharton, says that signals from employees can indeed serve as powerful clues for managers.
Americans have a notoriously low savings rate, a problem we explored in a podcast about prize-linked savings plans. In another podcast, “A Mouse in the Salad,” Richard Thaler (author of Nudge
A new NBER paper (ungated version here) by Yale’s James J. Choi and Cade Massey, along with Emily Haisley of Barclays Bank and Jennifer Kurkoski of Google, shows that anchoring very much affects how people save (or don’t save) their money.
In our recent podcast called “The Dilbert Index,” we explored the idea of workplace morale. A recent study by Eric Gilbert, “Phrases That Signal Workplace Hierarchy,” provides an interesting window into who says what within firms, and why. From the abstract:
Hierarchy fundamentally shapes how we act at work. In this paper, we explore the relationship between the words people write in workplace email and the rank of the email’s recipient. Using the Enron corpus as a dataset, we perform a close study of the words and phrases people send to those above them in the corporate hierarchy versus those at the same level or lower.
If you have one of those names that people are always struggling to pronounce, we have some bad news for you.
A new paper (ungated version here) by Simon M. Laham, Peter Koval, and Adam L. Alter finds that an easy name may confer advantages. The authors conducted five studies comparing easy- and hard-to-pronounce names (like Vougiouklakis or Leszczynska, for example): “Studies 1–3 demonstrate that people form more positive impressions of easy-to-pronounce names than of difficult-to-pronounce names.” While the first three studies focused on surnames, a fifth study analyzed both the first and last names of lawyers within law firms and found that “lawyers with more easily pronounceable names occupied superior positions within their firm hierarchy … The effect was independent of firm size, firm ranking, or mean associate salary.”
We’ve blogged before about the limits of willpower, the idea that “willpower itself is inherently limited.” A new essay by Sendhil Mullainathan and Saugato Datta speculates on the role of parents’ willpower limitations, particularly with respect to low-income parents:
Good parenting requires psychic resources. Complex decisions must be made. Sacrifices must be made in the moment. This is hard for anyone, whatever their income: we all have limited reserves of self-control, and attention and other psychic resources. …
In a recent podcast called “Save Me From Myself,” which is about the use of commitment devices, we discussed one such measure that’s intended to protect victims of domestic violence. It featured an interview with Brown economist Anna Aizer, co-author of this paper on the topic. A listener named Jay Turley wrote in:
This episode was very interesting, as usual. But the whole “domestic violence” section really irritated me.
As a male victim of domestic violence from a woman, I found it surprising that people such as yourselves completely bought into and promoted the now-disproved tenet that domestic violence equals male-on-female violence.
Inspired by our podcast “Where Have All the Hitchhikers Gone?,” transportation scholar Alan Pisarksi organized a discussion session on the topic at the recent Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington D.C. Pisarski, who was also featured in our episode, hoped the event would encourage scholars to apply insights from the past to current issues in transportation policy.
Our latest podcast is called “How Biased Is Your Media?” (You can download/subscribe at iTunes or get the RSS feed.)
It includes an interview with University of Chicago economist Matthew Gentzkow, who discusses a study he coauthored with Jesse Shapiro about newspaper bias. They used a sample of 433 newspapers and sorted the phrases favored by Congressional Democrats and Republicans.
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