How do economic conditions affect the incidence of child abuse? While researchers have found that poverty and child abuse are linked, there’s been no evidence that downturns increase abuse. A new working paper (PDF; abstract) by economists Jason M. Lindo, Jessamyn Schaller, and Benjamin Hansen “addresses this seeming contradiction.” Here’s the abstract, with a key finding in bold:
Using county-level child abuse data spanning 1996 to 2009 from the California Department of Justice, we estimate the extent to which a county’s reported abuse rate diverges from its trend when its economic conditions diverge from trend, controlling for statewide annual shocks. The results of this analysis indicate that overall measures of economic conditions are not strongly related to rates of abuse. However, focusing on overall measures of economic conditions masks strong opposing effects of economic conditions facing males and females: male layoffs increase rates of abuse whereas female layoffs reduce rates of abuse. These results are consistent with a theoretical framework that builds on family-time-use models and emphasizes differential risks of abuse associated with a child’s time spent with different caregivers.
Inspired by our “Parking Is Hell” podcast, an ArchDaily op-ed shows how architects think about the parking problem:
The new car park in Miami is off to a good start, as it is definitively not brutalist, and has been designed and built to higher standards than its 1960s predecessors. It incorporates itself into an already walkable area, making it a success from the start. For this building and indeed any other mixed-use car parks which might be developed in cities worldwide, the lesson to take from the history of this peculiar building typology is that their success is very much dependent on the surrounding urban landscape being suited to accommodate them; much more than other building types, they are sensitive to poor planning.
Increasingly, poor parking arrangements are causing damage to our cities by occupying valuable space and contributing to congestion and pollution. The application of economics that we see in SF Park can mitigate these problems, without substantially changing anything – but wouldn’t it be better to fundamentally change our attitudes to parking, and design better spaces? We have surely learned enough from design’s history to make this a possible, and preferable, path to action.
Amazon has just released its third annual list of the Most Well-Read Cities of America — a ranking based on per-capita “sales data of all book, magazine and newspaper sales in both print and Kindle format.” Here are the top 5:
1. Alexandria, Va.
2. Knoxville, Tenn.
3. Miami, Fla.
In a new blog post, Stephen Wolfram lays out some of the data from Wolfram/Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook project. He looks at average network size; how network size varies with age, gender, and location (among other things); and, our favorite, what people talk about on Facebook at different ages:
People talk less about video games as they get older, and more about politics and the weather. Men typically talk more about sports and technology than women — and, somewhat surprisingly to me, they also talk more about movies, television and music. Women talk more about pets+animals, family+friends, relationships — and, at least after they reach child-bearing years, health. The peak time for anyone to talk about school+university is (not surprisingly) around age 20. People get less interested in talking about “special occasions” (mostly birthdays) through their teens, but gradually gain interest later. And people get progressively more interested in talking about career+money in their 20s. And so on. And so on.
(HT: Justin Wolfers)
Canadian reader Lisa Sansom wrote to us about an interesting price promotion at Starwood hotels:
PAY RATES EQUAL TO YOUR BIRTH YEAR
We’re celebrating the year you were born. With this special offer for two or three night stays, you’ll receive rates equal to your birth year!
- First night: full rate
- Second or third night: rates equal to your birth year! (If you were born in 1948, you’ll receive your 2nd and 3rd nights at $48!)
- Rates for second and third night stays will be confirmed at check-in upon presentation of valid ID.
- Valid for arrivals Thursday – Saturday
1. How well does government work? Economists call for evaluations.
2. UMass Amherst grad student Thomas Herndon finds coding errors in key debt-load paper by Reinhart and Rogoff.
3. Price dives: gold, cupcakes, and chicken wings.
4. Databases that track employee theft.
If you’re a fan of behavioral economics on the radio, check out BBC Radio 4’s new weekly program The Human Zoo. It is hosted by Michael Blastland, a journalist, and Nick Chater, professor of behavioral science at the University of Warwick. Chater is also on the advisory board of the British Government’s Behavioral Insights Team (or “Nudge Unit”), which you heard about in the Freakonomics podcast “The Tax Man Nudgeth.” Human Zoo episodes are accompanied by online experiments.
Planet Money reports on the surprising destination of most U.S. $100 bills:
In fact, as of 2011, roughly two-thirds of all $100 bills were held outside the U.S., according to an estimate by Ruth Judson, an economist at the Fed.
The article explains why the high demand for U.S. currency is a good thing:
As Bruce Bartlett recently pointed out, when foreigners hold U.S. dollars, they are effectively giving the U.S. government an interest-free loan.
More broadly, foreign demand for U.S. currency (and U.S. Treasury bonds) in times of crisis is a sign that people in the rest of the world still see the U.S as the home of one of the safest, most stable economies on the planet.
(HT: The Big Picture)
The Economist takes a look at the software that big companies are using to sort through job applicants. It finds that people who use Chrome and Firefox browsers are better employees, and people with criminal records are suited to work in call centers. One drawback to having a computer sort potential employees is that its algorithms may treat some variables as proxies for race, as discussed in our “How Much Does Your Name Matter?” podcast, in which the Harvard computer scientist Latanya Sweeney found that distinctively black names are more likely to draw ads that offer arrest records.
Maggie Koerth-Baker of BoingBoing interviews Brough Turner, a phone system expert, about why it’s hard to make cell phone calls during an emergency. Turner addresses the mechanics and limitations of cell phone networks and points out that, nostalgia notwithstanding, the pre-cell phone era faced its own technical problems:
Well, say you’d have an earthquake in California. This was for the old Bell system. The national long distance routing has a set of standard, predefined routes and it had network control centers in New Jersey and other places. Things would get overloaded and they would manually intervene by putting access restrictions on new calls coming into the area that was congested. In the 60s, 70s, and 80s they would let through one out of every five call attempts. They were doing that manually and just arbitrarily to reduce congestion.
(HT: The Big Picture)
On the heels of our “Parking Is Hell” podcast, we received an email from Alicia Hickey — a data analyst at ParkatmyHouse.com, a website that matches drivers with homeowners who have unused parking spaces in their driveways or garages. According to Hickey, ParkatmyHouse gets more than 10,000 visits a day and has 15,000 spots worldwide, the majority in the U.K. She explained the pricing model to us:
If you look at parking near, say, Harvard University, a ParkatmyHouse space costs as little as $2/hour or $24/day. One-hour parking at a nearby garage costs $9 for the first hour. Three hours parking at that garage will cost you $24 (the 12-hour rate). That’s $18 more than what the ParkatmyHouse space would cost for that same amount of time. It’s difficult to give the average price of a parking space; it depends on the location and the property owner, but parking with ParkatmyHouse will always be cheaper than parking with a meter or in a commercial car park.
Hickey also told us about a few big success stories:
If you’re still fuming over taxes this year, take a look at Mike Duncan and Jason Novak‘s (slightly biased) cartoon explanation of the history of taxes. The income tax really got its start in 1913:
Congress immediately passes the Revenue Act of 1913, creating the first permanent income tax. No one really notices because the vast majority of incomes are taxed at just 1%. The mustache twirling robber barons get pretty grumpy, though. Then Wilson plunges us into WWI and unleashes the awesome potential of the new income tax. The top end rate jumps to 77% and revenue increases 635%.
(HT: The Big Picture)
1. First-year medical residents made more mistakes when they were required to work fewer hours.
2. Automated education: EdX offers classes online, marks essays and tests.
3. Telemedicine has doctors in Texas treating patients in Antarctica.
4. The history of capitalism is all the rage in history departments.
5. More Nutella thieving: this time it’s not Columbia University students.
We’ve blogged before about witches — mainly with respect to how economic conditions affect witch hunting. Writing for Worldcrunch, Rodrigue Mangwa investigates the practice and explains the economics of witch trials in the Congo:
It should be noted that the witchcraft trials are not free, and are an important source of revenue for the tribal chief. Before the dispute can be brought to the court, each party has to pay a mandatory fee of $200 – the price of a cow – whether they can afford it or not.
The headmaster of a primary school situated in Rubanga, 10 kilometers from the village of Lemera, says the witchcraft trials are just a way to exploit the local poor farmers in order to generate revenue for the tribal chief. “It would be naïve to think this is a real test of witchcraft. The tribal judges, who are pawns of the Mwami, are bribed to hand out false verdicts,” he says.
(HT: Marginal Revolution)
Our recent Freakonomics Radio podcast “100 Ways to Fight Obesity” looked at some of the social costs of America’s increasing rate of obesity. One airline in Samoa is experimenting with defraying some of those costs. It will soon start charging passengers by the kilogram. From The Sydney Morning Herald:
Samoa Air has become the world’s first airline to implement “pay as you weigh” flights, meaning overweight passengers pay more for their seats.
“This is the fairest way of travelling,” chief executive of Samoa Air, Chris Langton, told ABC Radio. “There are no extra fees in terms of excess baggage or anything – it is just a kilo is a kilo is a kilo.”
An Estonian Public Broadcasting news article about the death of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher noted her efforts to help Estonia’s early independent government break with Soviet-era policies. It also included the following:
Of the three, it was Thatcher’s economic policies in particular that were often cited by Mart Laar, the country’s prime minister who came to power after the first post-independence parliamentary elections, as the blueprint for his free-market reforms.
In 2010, Laar told the Freakonomics Radio podcast: “The flat tax I got on my first meeting with Margaret Thatcher, who I admired very much and who was a great admirer of Milton Friedman. I met her first when I had been prime minister I think for some months and so on, and when I told her what I am planning to do, she looked at me with these big eyes and said ‘you are one brave young man.’ And then a little bit introduced me on the realities of the Western world on which I was not very well informed. But I didn’t stop.”
Freakonomics podcast listeners may recall that Laar appeared on one of our earliest podcasts “What Would the World Look Like if Economists Were in Charge?“
We’ve blogged extensively about pay-as-you wish pricing schemes. Springwise reports that a Spanish concert promoter is now experimenting with post-concert pay-as-you-wish pricing:
Spanish promoters Caravana de Emerxencia have recognized this problem and addressed it through their upcoming gig, where attendees can decide the price of the ticket when they leave.
The concert is taking place on April 4 at Sala Capitol in Santiago, northern Spain. Four bands will be playing on the night – Skarallaos, Chotokoeu, Skarnivals and Swingdigentes. At the end of the evening attendees can pay whatever price they think the event deserves.
How do you like this plan? How do you think you would respond?
Kevin Bullis of the MIT Technology Review looks at manufactured sapphire, which is currently used for armor on military vehicles and may be coming soon to an iPhone screen near you:
Sapphire is harder than any other natural material except diamond; by some measures, it’s three times stronger than Gorilla Glass, and it is also about three times more scratch resistant. That’s why Apple uses it now to protect the camera on its iPhone 5. [Eric] Virey says that all major mobile-phone makers are considering using sapphire to replace glass. “I’m convinced that some will start testing the water and release some high-end smartphones using sapphire in 2013,” he says.
(HT: The Big Picture)
Reuven Brenner of The American explores the economic benefits of shortening college to three years:
Assume that after graduation the average salary would be just $20,000 and remain there. With 4 million students finishing one year earlier, this would add $80 billion to the national income during that year. Or at an average annual income of $40,000, it would add $160 billion. Assume now that the additional $80 billion in national income would be compounding at 7 percent over the next 40 years. This would then amount to an additional $1.2 trillion of wealth – for just one generation of 4 million students joining the labor force a year earlier at a $20,000 salary. At $40,000, this would amount to $2.4 trillion by the fortieth year – again, for just one generation of 4 million people joining the labor force a year earlier. The added wealth depends on how rosy one makes the assumptions about salaries or compounding rates. Add 10, 20, or 30 generations, each starting to work a year earlier, and the numbers run into the tens of trillions of dollars.
The indirect impacts may be as significant. One or two years of additional, compounding earnings could do a lot to shore up entitlement programs, with a more positive impact than requiring people 65 and older to stay in the labor force much longer: the magic of resulting compounding would start earlier.
(HT: The Dish)
Writing for Bloomberg, Chris Christoff and Greg Giroux explore the math behind gerrymandering in Michigan with some fascinating examples and graphics. The 14th congressional district, for example, looks pretty weird from high up:
Michigan’s 14th congressional district looks like a jagged letter ’S’ lying on its side.
From Detroit, one of the nation’s most Democratic cities, it meanders to the west, north and east, scooping up the black-majority cities of Southfield and Pontiac while bending sharply to avoid Bloomfield Hills, the affluent suburb where 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was raised.
(HT: The Big Picture)
1. Do customs and postal service discriminate against “atheist” parcels?
2. Now there are wristbands to monitor whether doctors are washing their hands. (HT: R.E. Riker)
3. Dan Ariely is offering a free online course: “A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior.” Sign up here.
4. Dan Pallotta argues that non-profits should be run like real companies.
5. A new study of English literature finds that the use of mood words is steadily decreasing.
Restaurants that take reservations risk misallocating resources if a customer doesn’t show up. So is there a good way to place an appropriate cost on no-shows? Philly.com reports on one restaurant owner’s tactic and its drawbacks:
The owner of L.A. restaurant Red Medicine went to social media to Tweet the full names of no-shows Saturday.
Eater L.A. has an interview with Red Medicine owner Noah Ellis, who said he tweeted the names out of frustration.
“Either restaurants are forced to overbook and make the guests (that actually showed up) wait, or they do what we do, turn away guests for some prime-time slots because they’re booked, and then have empty tables,” he said.
Weighing in on the matter was Consumerist, which posits that the tactic may backfire, as some patrons may balk at making a reservation there, even if they intend to keep it.
The weather — its effects on the environment, behavior, sports, and society — has long been of interest to Freakonomics. Now a new working paper from Warren Anderson, Noel D. Johnson, and Mark Koyama explores the effects of cold growing seasons on discrimination against Jewish communities between 1100 and 1800:
What factors caused the persecution of minorities in medieval and early modern Europe? We build a model that predicts that minority communities were more likely to be expropriated in the wake of negative income shocks. We then use panel data consisting of 785 city-level expulsions of Jews from 933 European cities between 1100 and 1800 to test the implications of the model. We use the variation in city-level temperature to test whether expulsions were associated with colder growing seasons. We find that a one standard deviation decrease in average growing season temperature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was associated with a one to two percentage point increase in the likelihood that a Jewish community would be expelled. Drawing on our model and on additional historical evidence we argue that the rise of state capacity was one reason why this relationship between negative income shocks and expulsions weakened after 1600.
Tyler Cowen, who appears in these parts pretty regularly, writes in a Times column about the egalitarian core of the economics profession:
Economic analysis is itself value-free, but in practice it encourages a cosmopolitan interest in natural equality. Many economic models, of course, assume that all individuals are motivated by rational self-interest or some variant thereof; even the so-called behavioral theories tweak only the fringes of a basically common, rational understanding of people. The crucial implication is this: If you treat all individuals as fundamentally the same in your theoretical constructs, it would be odd to insist that the law should suddenly start treating them differently.
Cowen concludes by exploring a modern-day application of this putatively egalitarian core:
A distressingly large portion of the debate in many countries analyzes the effects of higher immigration on domestic citizens alone and seeks to restrict immigration to protect a national culture or existing economic interests. The obvious but too-often-underemphasized reality is that immigration is a significant gain for most people who move to a new country.
A working paper (abstract; PDF) from economists Michael Baker and Kevin Milligan advances another possible explanation for the lagging academic performance of boys — preschool boys, at least. Here’s the abstract:
We study differences in the time parents spend with boys and girls at preschool ages in Canada, the UK and the US. We refine previous evidence that fathers commit more time to boys, showing this greater commitment emerges with age and is not present for very young children. We next examine differences in specific parental teaching activities such as reading and the use of number and letters. We find the parents commit more of this time to girls, starting at ages as young as 9 months. We explore possible explanations of this greater commitment to girls including explicit parental preference and boy-girl differences in costs of these time inputs. Finally, we offer evidence that these differences in time inputs are important: in each country the boy-girl difference in inputs can account for a non-trivial proportion of the boy-girl difference in preschool reading and math scores.
The authors’ results also indicate that the time differences are not due to parents’ gender preferences, but may be related to the opportunity cost of the mother’s time. “Given that time spent reading with children (primarily boys) increases after the introduction of a new child care subsidy, the parental time inputs we study may not be easily substituted by non-parental care,” they write. “Instead, this finding is consistent with a story in which boys are less rewarding to teach, and parents are more willing to persevere with boys once they are not responsible for their care throughout the day.”
If you’re the kind of person who cares about “The Folly of Prediction” and The Signal and the Noise, you may want to read Amy Zegart‘s Foreign Policy piece about predictions. Making predictions within the intelligence community, for example, is a different game than betting on basketball:
In March Madness, everyone has access to the same information, at least theoretically. Expertise depends mostly on how geeky you choose to be, and how much time you spend watching ESPN and digging up past stats. In intelligence, however, information is tightly compartmented by classification restrictions, leaving analysts with different pieces of data and serious barriers to sharing it. Imagine scattering NCAA bracket information across 1,000 people, many of whom do not know each other, some of whom have no idea what a bracket is or the value of the information they possess. They’re all told if they share anything with the wrong person, they could be disciplined, fired, even prosecuted. But somehow they have to collectively pick the winner to succeed.
In other spheres, however, predictions just keep getting better. “Smart people are finding clever new ways of generating better data, identifying and unpacking biases, and sharing information unimaginable 20 or even 10 years ago,” writes Zegart.
A TED talk by musician Amanda Palmer explores the concept of pay-as-you-wish funding for artists and performers:
Right at this same time, I’m signing and hugging after a gig, and a guy comes up to me and hands me a $10 bill, and he says, “I’m sorry, I burned your CD from a friend.” “But I read your blog, I know you hate your label. I just want you to have this money.”
And this starts happening all the time. I become the hat after my own gigs, but I have to physically stand there and take the help from people, and unlike the guy in the opening band, I’ve actually had a lot of practice standing there. Thank you.
And this is the moment I decide I’m just going to give away my music for free online whenever possible, so it’s like Metallica over here, Napster, bad; Amanda Palmer over here, and I’m going to encourage torrenting, downloading, sharing, but I’m going to ask for help, because I saw it work on the street. So I fought my way off my label and for my next project with my new band, the Grand Theft Orchestra, I turned to crowdfunding, and I fell into those thousands of connections that I’d made, and I asked my crowd to catch me. And the goal was 100,000 dollars. My fans backed me at nearly 1.2 million, which was the biggest music crowdfunding project to date.
And here‘s a rundown on other performers who’ve explored the pay-as-you-wish strategy.
In the Washington Post, Peter Whoriskey writes about the rising incidence of fraud in research labs:
It may be impossible for anyone from outside to know the extent of the problems in the Nature paper. But the incident comes amid a phenomenon that some call a “retraction epidemic.”
Last year, research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the percentage of scientific articles retracted because of fraud had increased tenfold since 1975.
The same analysis reviewed more than 2,000 retracted biomedical papers and found that 67 percent of the retractions were attributable to misconduct, mainly fraud or suspected fraud.
One of the less-obvious downsides of academic fraud:
The trouble is that a delayed response — or none at all — leaves other scientists to build upon shaky work. [Ferric] Fang said he has talked to researchers who have lost months by relying on results that proved impossible to reproduce.
Moreover, as [Adam] Marcus and [Ivan] Oransky have noted, much of the research is funded by taxpayers. Yet when retractions are done, they are done quietly and “live in obscurity,” meaning taxpayers are unlikely to find out that their money may have been wasted.
1. Al Gore is sued over sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera. (HT: Romenesko)
2. Economic reasons to become a vegetarian, graphs included.
3. The scientists and psychologists of the junk-food business reveal their secrets.
4. Columbia students can’t resist stealing Nutella. (HT: AL)
5. How prevalent was famine cannibalism? (HT: JH)
6. First, traffic mimes in Bogota; now Lucha Libre in Mexico City doing the same.
A Pacific Standard profile of noted social psychologist Joe Henrich has some staggering information about how social scientists conduct their research:
Economists and psychologists, for their part, did an end run around the issue with the convenient assumption that their job was to study the human mind stripped of culture. The human brain is genetically comparable around the globe, it was agreed, so human hardwiring for much behavior, perception, and cognition should be similarly universal. No need, in that case, to look beyond the convenient population of undergraduates for test subjects. A 2008 survey of the top six psychology journals dramatically shows how common that assumption was: more than 96 percent of the subjects tested in psychological studies from 2003 to 2007 were Westerners—with nearly 70 percent from the United States alone. Put another way: 96 percent of human subjects in these studies came from countries that represent only 12 percent of the world’s population.
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