In our “A Burger A Day” podcast (which generated a lot of debate), we debated the nutritious merits of the McDouble. At least one Canadian finds that McDonald’s is a cheap and easy way to fill up. As Dan Fumano writes in The Province, Colin Pither tackled the challenging “Grouse Grind” climb 15 times in one day:
At the crack of noon on Friday, ten hours after Colin Pither finished his 15th consecutive Grouse Grind and tied the record for climbs in a single day, he rose from bed and began his greasy road to recovery.
“I’m pretty destroyed. But I’ve eaten like 20 burgers, so I’m a little better now,” he said.
By Pither’s calculations, he burned about 11,000 calories yesterday as he hiked almost 50 kilometres up and down the mountain. The average daily caloric intake required for a male his age is between 2,500 and 3,000.
So it’s understandable he’s a bit hungry.
You can see in the photo what Pither’s caloric intake of choice was.
Smoking is one of our favorite topics on this blog — from the ethics of not hiring smokers to the use of commitment devices to quit. A new NBER paper (gated) by Kerry Anne McGeary looks at smoking in marriages. It finds that one spouse quitting causes the other to quit, through bargaining:
Previous research studying the correlation in smoking behavior between spouses has discounted the role of bargaining or learning. Using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), which contains information on smoking cessation and spouse’s preferences, this paper presents an essential investigation of the importance of spousal bargaining or learning on the decision to cease smoking. We find, regardless of gender, when one member of [a] couple ceases smoking this induces the other member to cease smoking through bargaining. Further, we find females demonstrate either altruistic behavior toward a spouse, who has suffered a health shock, or learning from their spouse’s health shock.
1. Drew Brees criticized for not tipping enough for takeout. (HT: Steve Schwinger)
2. The People’s Daily Online Public Opinion Monitoring Center: where the Chinese government collects data on Chinese public opinion.
3. The women of the “Opt-Out Revolution” are ready to lean in.
4. In South Korea, where 93 percent of students graduate from high school, “rock star” teachers earn millions.5. Is Boeing buying back old 747s to drive demand for new ones?
In our hour-long podcast “The Suicide Paradox,” we explored some of the facts and myths about suicide. A new Harvard study highlights another interesting fact: coffee drinkers have a lower risk of suicide. From Time:
According to a study performed by the Harvard School of Public Health and published this month in The World Journal of Biological Psychiatry, people who drink two to four cups of java each day are less likely to commit suicide than those who don’t drink coffee, drink decaf, or drink fewer than two cups each day. The study followed over 200,000 people for at least 16 years. And it’s not just a weak link: the researchers found that the suicide risk was cut by around 50 percent for caffeine fiends.
The study doesn’t establish causation, but lead researcher Michel Lucas confirmed in a statement that it’s definitely caffeine, which previous research indicates may act as a mild antidepressant, that’s driving the results. “Unlike previous investigations, we were able to assess association of consumption of caffeinated and non-caffeinated beverages, and we identify caffeine as the most likely candidate of any putative protective effect of coffee,” he says.
We’ve blogged before about America’s rising obesity rate and how to fight it, but the battle may have just gotten a little easier. A new report from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) shows obesity rates dropping for low-income preschool children in 19 states between 2008 and 2011. From the Wall Street Journal:
The obesity analysis, by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, was based on data from 11.6 million children age 2 to 4. The survey group included children eligible for federally funded programs of maternal and child health and nutrition, such as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, known as the WIC program.
The decline was greatest in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where the obesity rate in such children fell to 11% in 2011 from 13.6% in 2008. Drops of more than one percentage point were also seen in Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Missouri, and South Dakota.
Thomas Frieden, director of the CDC, called the results a “bright spot” and a “tipping point.”
“For the first time in a generation, we’re seeing it go in the right direction in 2- to 4-year-olds,” he said on a conference call with reporters, calling the changes “small but statistically significant.” He was quick to add, “We’re very, very far from being out of the woods.”
Of the 43 states measured, obesity rates for preschool children rose in 3 states and remained the same same in 21 states.
A recent one-day strike by fast-food workers has called attention to the low wages in the industry. James Surowiecki offers one reason that the issue’s visibility has increased recently:
Still, the reason this has become a big political issue is not that the jobs have changed; it’s that the people doing the jobs have. Historically, low-wage work tended to be done either by the young or by women looking for part-time jobs to supplement family income. As the historian Bethany Moreton has shown, Walmart in its early days sought explicitly to hire underemployed married women. Fast-food workforces, meanwhile, were dominated by teen-agers. Now, though, plenty of family breadwinners are stuck in these jobs. That’s because, over the past three decades, the U.S. economy has done a poor job of creating good middle-class jobs; five of the six fastest-growing job categories today pay less than the median wage. That’s why, as a recent study by the economists John Schmitt and Janelle Jones has shown, low-wage workers are older and better educated than ever. More important, more of them are relying on their paychecks not for pin money or to pay for Friday-night dates but, rather, to support families. Forty years ago, there was no expectation that fast-food or discount-retail jobs would provide a living wage, because these were not jobs that, in the main, adult heads of household did. Today, low-wage workers provide forty-six per cent of their family’s income. It is that change which is driving the demand for higher pay.
Given that reality, Surowiecki writes, raising the minimum wage by a few bucks a hour won’t fix the problem. His prescription: more truly middle-class jobs and an expansion of the social safety net. “Fast-food jobs in Germany and the Netherlands,” he writes, “aren’t much better-paid than in the U.S., but a stronger safety net makes workers much better off.”
Sarah Halzack, writing for The Washington Post, explores how LinkedIn is changing job-searching and recruiting:
As LinkedIn has exploded — perhaps because it has exploded — there has been a major shift in the way employers find new workers. Gone are the days of “post and pray,” a recruiter’s adage for the practice of advertising a job opening and then idly hoping that good candidates swim up to the bait.
Now the process of talent acquisition is something of a hunt.
“We’re really at a point now where all of your employees are vulnerable to being poached. Every single one,” said Josh Bersin, principal and founder of talent consulting firm Bersin by Deloitte.
The change is happening rapidly: A 2013 study by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 77 percent of employers are using social networks to recruit, a sharp increase from the 56 percent who reported doing so in 2011. And among the recruiters using social tools, 94 percent said they are using LinkedIn.
Recruiter Chris Scalia told Halzack that the type of candidates he sees on LinkedIn is also changing. “LinkedIn was always known for where you would go to find that really critical, challenging hire,” Scalia said. “It was never really where you would go for a PC technician or something at the lower end of the career mobility scale. Now I see both. It is completely flooded.”
(HT: The Big Picture)
In our podcast about spite, called “What Do Medieval Nuns and Bo Jackson Have in Common?,” we talked to Benedikt Herrmann about his research on anti-social behavior. Sociologists Kyle Irwin and Christine Horne are also investigating why spiteful behavior occurs. In a recent experiment, they found that social norms drove players to punish too-cooperative members of the lab game. From Ars Technica:
Irwin and Horne found that strong social norms encouraged punishment of the cooperative player: the more similar the first four pre-programmed donations were, the higher the punishments tended to be for the overly generous deviant. When there is a clear “right way” to behave, the researchers suggest, people respond more strongly to behaviors that don’t fit the norm.
However, the strength of social norms didn’t affect the punishments of the stingy deviant. Players tended to punish this individual equally under both conditions. The researchers suggest that no matter how high or low conformity is among group members, people always see stinginess as a punishable offense.
We’ve blogged in the past about how easy it is to create false memories for people. Now scientists at MIT say they’ve succeeded in creating false memories in mice. From The New York Times:
In the research reported Thursday, Dr. Tonegawa’s team first put mice in one environment and let them get used to it and remember it. They identified and chemically labeled the cells in the animals’ brains where that memory was being formed. The mice were not shocked in that environment.
A day later, in a completely different environment, the researchers delivered an electric shock to the mice at the same time that they stimulated the previously identified brain cells to trigger the earlier memory.
New York City’s “stop-and-frisk” policy has been the subject of major debates and several lawsuits in recent months. A new paper (gated) by Stephanie A. Wiley and Finn-Aage Esbensen analyzes the relationship between “police contact” and future attitudes and actual criminal acts among children and teens:
Current police policies are based on assumptions that proactive policing strategies will not only deter crime but will also improve police–community relations. Deterrence theorists argue that general and specific deterrence can be achieved through such policing strategies. Labeling proponents, however, maintain that juveniles stopped and/or arrested by the police, rather than be deterred, will actually engage in more delinquency as a result of this contact. Research to date has provided mixed evidence. The current study seeks to inform this debate by examining the effect of being stopped or arrested on subsequent delinquent behavior and attitudes. Relying on three waves of data from a multisite sample of youth, we use propensity score matching to control for preexisting differences among youth who have and have not experienced police contact. Our findings reveal that being stopped or arrested not only increases future delinquency but also amplifies deviant attitudes.
The BPS Research Digest elaborates:
The key finding is that with participants matched for propensity, those who had contact with the police at time two (compared with those who didn’t) said at time three that they’d feel less guilt if they committed various offences from theft to violence; they expressed more agreement with various “neutralisation” scenarios (e.g. it’s OK to lie to keep yourself out of trouble); they were more committed to their deviant peers (e.g. they planned to continue hanging out with friends who’d been arrested); and finally, they said they’d engaged in more offending behaviour, from skipping classes to taking drugs or being violent. This pattern of results differed little whether police contact involved being arrested or merely being stopped.
We’ve blogged before about the potential of 3D food printers, but at the moment such printers seem out of reach for the average consumer. Perhaps not for long — a new paper by B.T. Wittbrodt, A.G. Glover, J. Laureto, G.C. Anzalone, D. Oppliger, J.L. Irwin, and J.M. Pearce conducts a cost-benefit analysis of 3D printers for the average household:
This study reports on the life-cycle economic analysis (LCEA) of RepRap technology for an average U.S. household. A new low-cost RepRap is described and the costs of materials and time to construct it are quantified. The economic costs of a selection of twenty open-source printable designs (representing less than 0.04% of those available), are typical of products that a household might purchase, are quantified for print time, energy, and filament consumption and compared to low and high Internet market prices for similar products without shipping costs. The results show that even making the extremely conservative assumption that the household would only use the printer to make the selected twenty products a year the avoided purchase cost savings would range from about $300 to $2,000/year. Assuming the 25 hours of necessary printing for the selected products is evenly distributed throughout the year these savings provide a simple payback time for the RepRap in 4 months to 2 years and provide an ROI between>200% and >40%. As both upgrades and the components that are most likely to wear out in the RepRap can be printed and thus the lifetime of the distributing manufacturing can be substantially increased the unavoidable conclusion from this study is that the RepRap is an economically attractive investment for the average U.S. household already. It appears clear that as RepRaps improve in reliability, continue to decline in cost and both the number and assumed utility of open-source designs continues growing exponentially, open-source 3-D printers will become a mass-market mechatronic device.
(HT: Marginal Revolution)
Our recent podcast about tipping mentioned a San Diego restaurant, the Linkery, that adopted a strict no-tipping policy. The Linkery has since closed its doors, but owner Jay Porter (who was featured in the podcast) has been writing about the effects of a no-tipping policy. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2 of his blog posts. A summary of his takeaways:
1) Due to poorly cohering laws in many Western U.S. states, using a service charge has typically been the only legal way for a restaurant business to balance wages between servers, bartenders, cooks and dishwashers. That’s why restaurants like Chez Panisse instituted such a [service charge] policy.. Subsequent court decisions in the Western U.S. have opened up the possibility that other arrangements are legal, but the service charge is still the safest model.
2) Because tips cannot legally, in most cases, be controlled by the employer, they are typically distributed (or not distributed, as the case may be) according to a social compact between the employees. That social compact is either unenforced or enforced through social means, like ostracization. In either event, the systems for both acquiring and distributing tips are easily gamed by members of the compact who are intent on doing so.
1. They said it would never happen: Israel’s ultra-orthodox lose many of their exemptions.
2. Health-care economics: how the American Medical Association prices medical procedures.
3. The most popular page on Wikipedia in 2012: Facebook. (HT: Eric M. Jones)
4. Everyone knows that the French work fewer hours — but judging by their GDP per capita, they are very productive.
Quartz reports that a Japanese P.R. company is paying women to wear advertising stickers on their thighs:
Advertising on women’s skin appears to be much more cost-effective than forking out exorbitant sums for public billboard space. In 2012, the overall expenditure on ‘outdoor’ advertising in Japan was ¥299.5 billion ($2.99 billion) (pdf). The going rate on each thigh, according to the company, is $121 per day. The 3,000 Japanese women who signed up to participate will slap stickers on their thighs in exchange for that sum. The campaigns, which began rolling out earlier this year, so far have included plugs for the movie Ted and the band Green Day.
The agency has a few requirements for its walking billboards: they must be over 18, have at least 20 friends on social networking sites, and must post pictures of themselves wearing the sticker in two different geographic locations. The agency also “recommends” that the women wear miniskirts and long socks to draw attention to the ads. “It’s an absolutely perfect place to put an advertisement, as this is what guys are eager to look at and girls are eager to expose,” Hidenori Atsumi, the agency’s CEO, told ITN.
(HT: Marginal Revolution)
The New York Fed recently released an interesting set of maps and charts on school financing in New York and New Jersey that demonstrate the effect of national fiscal policy on public-school students. Their findings:
School funding and school expenditures increased steadily through the 2000s, but have slowed in the past year or two. Federal funding swelled during the federal stimulus period, but has since begun to ebb. Recent patterns in state and local funding show signs of slowing down. While instructional expenditures remained on trend (or suffered only slightly) during the recession, there is evidence of sharper cuts in recent years. In spite of these broad patterns, there are considerable variations across states and districts.
A new paper by Federico Varese and Paolo Campana looks at police-intercepted phone data on the Italian and Russian mafia to study how criminals cooperate. In “Cooperation in Criminal Organizations: Kinship and Violence as Credible Commitments” (abstract; PDF), they find that sharing information on violent acts increased cooperation. Varese writes to us in an email: “The idea is that criminals might trust each other more after they have shared compromising information on themselves and especially have used violence together, an insight from Thomas Schelling that we test and found to be correct.”
The abstract:
The paper argues that kinship ties and sharing information on violent acts can be interpreted as forms of ‘hostage-taking’ likely to increase cooperation among co-offenders. The paper tests this hypothesis among members of two criminal groups, a Camorra clan based just outside Naples, and a Russian Mafia group that moved to Romein the mid-1990s. The data consist of the transcripts of phone intercepts conducted on both groups by the Italian police over several months. After turning the data into a series of network matrices, we use Multivariate Quadratic Assignment Procedure to test the hypothesis. We conclude that the likelihood of cooperation is higher among members who have shared information about violent acts. Violence has a stronger effect than kinship in predicting tie formation and thus cooperation. When non-kinship-based mechanisms fostering cooperation exist, criminal groups are likely to resort to them.
A new study by Bradley W. Lane, Natalie Messer-Betts, Devin Hartmann, Sanya Carley, Rachel M. Krause, and John D. Graham on why governments promote electric vehicles finds that the environmental benefits of the vehicles have little to do with politicians’ motives for supporting the industry. Perhaps not surprisingly, “Government Promotion of the Electric Car: Risk Management or Industrial Policy?” (gated) finds that the economic benefits of the industry are the primary motivator for most governments. From the press release:
Contrary to common belief, many of the world’s most powerful nations promote the manufacture and sale of electric vehicles primarily for reasons of economic development – notably job creation – not because of their potential to improve the environment through decreased air pollution and oil consumption.
This is among the main findings of a study by researchers at the Indiana University Bloomington School of Public and Environmental (SPEA) and University of Kansas that analyzed policies related to electric vehicles (EVs) in California, China, the European Union, France, Germany, and the United States – political jurisdictions with significant automotive industries and markets for EVs.
“Billions of dollars are being invested despite doubts that some express about the viability of electricity as a propulsion system,” said John D. Graham, SPEA dean and co-author of the study. “The objective of many of these national and sub-national governments is to establish a significant position – or even dominance – in the global marketplace for these emerging, innovative new technologies.”
We’ve blogged before about the obesity epidemic, and whether or not it is a recent phenomenon; John Komlos and Marek Brabec have argued that obesity rates actually began rising in the early 20th century. A new study (abstract; PDF) by Paul von Hippel and Ramzi Nahhas looks at 60 years of data on child obesity and finds that the increase in obesity rates started with children born in the 1970s and 1980s. Von Hippel wrote to us in an email:
Intrigued by the conflicting extrapolation results, Ramzi Nahhas and I decided to look at measurements that were actually taken before 1960. We analyzed the heights and weights of children in the Fels Longitudinal Study, an ongoing study that since the 1930s has measured children from shortly after birth until age 18. Most of the children come from the area near Dayton, Ohio, which is not a mirror of the nation but has an obesity rate that is close to the national average.
A new working paper (gated) by Yi Qian, Eric Anderson, and Duncan Simester looks at how a factory or outlet store affects a retailer’s regular-priced products. Using 12 years’ worth of data from a U.S. apparel retailer, they found that the factory store contributed positively to the business:
We study how the opening of a factory store impacts a retailer’s demand in its other channels. It is possible that a factory store may damage a retailer’s brand image and lead to substitution away from its higher quality core channels. Alternatively, the opening of a factory store may have positive effects as it may attract new buyers and serve as a form of brand advertising. In this paper, we use a natural experiment that arises from a retailer introducing a factory store in 2002. We analyze data that spans all customers and all channels from 1995 to 2007. This allows for careful pre and post analysis of the factory store opening. We find that the introduction of the factory store led to substantial positive spillovers to the core channels that lasted for multiple years. Customers purchase more items from the higher priced, higher quality channels after the factory store is opened. These positive spillovers represent approximately 17% of all of the incremental sales that result from the factory store opening (the other 83% are contributed by sales in the factory store itself).
What happens when a fight breaks out at a bar? A Penn State sociologist gathered data from nightlife venues in Toronto to find out. From BPS Research Digest:
Michael Parks and his colleagues trained dozens of observers who analyzed 860 aggressive incidents across 503 nights in 87 large clubs and bars in Toronto, Canada. Aggression was defined as anything from a verbal insult or unwanted physical contact to a punch or kick. Incidents were twice as likely to involve one-sided aggression as opposed to mutual aggression. The most common incident involved a man making persistent unwanted overtures or physical contact towards a female. Male on male aggression was the next most frequent category. All-female aggression was rare.
Third parties intervened in almost one third of these situations, and they were more than twice as likely to intervene in a non-aggressive way than to be aggressive themselves. Eighty per cent of third parties who got involved were men. Drunk third parties were more likely to be aggressive. Surprisingly perhaps, the most frequent kind of aggressive incident (male on female) was the least likely to provoke third party involvement. One-sided aggression between men also provoked few interventions. Parks and his team think this is probably because such incidents are judged to be non-serious and unlikely to escalate.
1. Is male fertility declining? Or do we need more data?
2. The internet industry is considering adding over 1,000 new domains, but some are worried about infrastructure effects.
3. Harry Potter novelist J.K. Rowling‘s crime novel hits #1 on the Amazon bestseller list, less than a week after she was revealed as the book’s author.
4. So you want to invest in the (legal) marijuana industry?
5. How long is the average PhD dissertation? Econ lands on the short side. (HT: Eric Jones)
6. The new era of music: how much does Spotify pay its artists? Next to nothing.
The Daily Beast reports that palm surgery is on the rise in Japan:
In Japan, where palm reading remains one of the most popular means of fortune-telling, some people have figured out a way to change their fate. It’s a simple idea: change your palm, change the reading, and change your future. All you need is a competent plastic surgeon with an electric scalpel who has a basic knowledge of palmistry. Or you can draw the lines on your hand with a marker and let him work the magic you want.
Missing a marriage line? That can be fixed. Wedding bells may ring.
Need some good fortune? Add a money-luck line and you might win the lottery or be promoted to vice president in your firm. For the smart shopper—one willing to undergo palm plastic surgery—the future isn’t what it used to be.
The surgery is evidently so popular that clinics don’t need to advertise. In fact, one clinic’s brief advertising campaign resulted in so much demand they found themselves unable to keep up. “Maybe changing your palm won’t change your fate,” says plastic surgeon Takaaki Matsuoka, “but if you have that much determination to try to change it—and are willing to endure a little pain for that chance—maybe you can change your life.”
(HT: Isabel McCann)
A new working paper (abstract; PDF) by Paul Gertler, James Heckman, and several other co-authors examines the impressive long-term effects of a Jamaican program that taught low-income parents better parenting skills. Here’s the abstract:
We find large effects on the earnings of participants from a randomized intervention that gave psychosocial stimulation to stunted Jamaican toddlers living in poverty. The intervention consisted of one-hour weekly visits from community Jamaican health workers over a 2-year period that taught parenting skills and encouraged mothers to interact and play with their children in ways that would develop their children’s cognitive and personality skills. We re-interviewed the study participants 20 years after the intervention. Stimulation increased the average earnings of participants by 42 percent. Treatment group earnings caught up to the earnings of a matched non-stunted comparison group. These findings show that psychosocial stimulation early in childhood in disadvantaged settings can have substantial effects on labor market outcomes and reduce later life inequality.
In his new album, rapper Jay-Z expresses skepticism about some of his colleagues’ claims of extraordinary wealth, saying, “The truth in my verses, versus, your metaphors about what your net worth is.” So are your favorite rappers lying about how rich they are? Bloomberg Businessweek straightens out the confusion with a great graphic comparing alleged vs. actual wealth. Here’s a preview: Nicki Minaj is not “mak[ing] a billi like a big goat.” (HT: The Big Picture)
We’ve blogged before about the influence that beauty can have on earnings and career choices. But what about the shape of a face? A new paper in the British Journal of Psychology looks at the faces of U.K. executives. Researchers Shuaa Alrajih and Jamie Ward found that CEOs have greater than average facial width-to-height ratios. The abstract:
The relative proportion of the internal features of a face (the facial width-to-height ratio, FWH) has been shown to be related to individual differences in behavior in males, specifically competitiveness and aggressiveness. In this study, we show that the Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of the leading UK businesses have greater FWHs than age- and sex-matched controls. We demonstrate that perceivers, naive as to the nature of the stimuli, rate the faces of CEOs as higher in dominance or success, and that ratings of dominance or success are themselves correlated with the FWH ratio. We find no association with other inferred traits such as trustworthiness, attraction or aggression. The latter is surprising given previous research demonstrating a link between FWH and ratings of aggression. We speculate that the core association may be between FWH and drive for dominance or power, but this can be interpreted as aggression only in particular circumstances (e.g., when the stimuli are comprised of faces of young, as opposed to middle-aged, men).
Economists Menusch Khadjavi and Andreas Lange recently published a paper on how real prisoners play the Prisoner’s Dilemma game:
We report insights into the behavior of prisoners in dilemma situations that so famously carry their name. We compare female inmates and students in a simultaneous and a sequential Prisoner’s Dilemma. In the simultaneous Prisoner’s Dilemma, the cooperation rate among inmates exceeds the rate of cooperating students. Relative to the simultaneous dilemma, cooperation among first-movers in the sequential Prisoner’s Dilemma increases for students, but not for inmates. Students and inmates behave identically as second movers. Hence, we find a similar and significant fraction of inmates and students to hold social preferences.
(HT: Marginal Revolution)
Guernica recently interviewed “radical geographer” Denis Wood about his work and the power of map (a topic we’ve touched on before). Here’s a particularly interesting excerpt:
But I’ve seen maps that I find completely terrifying. Maps of uranium mining and of various illnesses in the Navajo reservations—they’re just insane. They just make you furious. Bill Bunge’s map—which I still think is one of the great maps, the map of where white commuters in Detroit killed black children while going home from work—that’s a terrifying map, and that’s an amazing map. He knew that. They had to fight to get the data from the city. They had to use political pressure to get the time and the exact location of the accidents that killed these kids. They knew what they were looking for. I didn’t have anything to do with that project, so when I saw the map for the first time, it was like, “Oh my god.” It’s so powerful to see maps like that. That’s the power of maps, or one of the powers of maps: to make graphic—and at some level unarguable—some correlative truth. We all knew that people go to and from work. But to lay the two things together reveals something horrible.
(HT: The Daily Dish)
We’ve discussed before — in blog posts and a podcast — the value of a college degree. Writing for the New York Times Economix blog, Catherine Rampell points out that college degrees are particularly valuable in the U.S. “According to a report released this week by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, across the developed world the average person who has graduated from college (either two-year or four-year) and has any earnings makes about 57 percent more than a counterpart with no more than a high school education,” writes Rampell. “In the United States, the comparable earnings premium is 77 percent.”
Despite the value of a college degree in the U.S., college graduation rates in the U.S. are increasing at a much slower pace than in other rich countries. And, as Rampell points out, it’s not just individuals in the U.S. that benefit from a college degree: “[T]he average return to taxpayers [of tertiary education for the average man] is $230,722 in the United States, versus less than half that, $104,737, across the developed world.”
For more on “The Economics of Higher Education,” see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
Also: Oregon is thinking about letting students pay no college tuition, instead pledging a share of their future earnings. Lest you think this is straight out of Portlandia (like this is), know that Australia runs a similar college-tuition program.
A few years ago, we did a podcast on whether expensive wine tastes better. There is now further evidence that the answer to that question is no — even for elite wine critics. Winemaker Robert Hodgson recently collaborated with the California State Fair wine competition on a little wine-tasting experiment:
Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual “flight” of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.
The first experiment took place in 2005. The last was in Sacramento earlier this month. Hodgson’s findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine.
Our Freakonomics Radio podcast “Women Are Not Men” mentioned that roughly 80 percent of lightning fatalities in the U.S. are men. A new National Weather Service report, summarized by io9, offers further details:
(HT: Eric M. Jones)
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