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Posts Tagged ‘Children’

Why Economics Falls Down in the Face of Fatherhood

I’ve been a dad now for a little less than two years, and I’m still trying to figure out how it is shaping my approach to economics. I think the answer is: A lot.
I learned economics in my twenties, before I became a dad. You know the drill: We learned hard math and complex models. Forget the Greek letters, they are just complicated ways of exploring the basic idea informing economics—that people are purposeful, analytic decision makers. And this idea just seemed entirely natural to me. I had always believed in the analytic self; I was rational, calculating, and tried to make smart decisions. Of course real people don’t use math, but I figured that we’re still weighing costs and benefits just as our models say. Or at least that was my understanding of the world.
Today, I’m not so sure.


Cracking the F&#%ing Humor Code

Jeff Mosenkis, a freelance producer with Freakonomics Radio, holds a Ph.D. in psychology and comparative human development.
Cracking the F&#%ing Humor Code
By Jeff Mosenkis
Just in time for Father’s Day, imagine rocking your little one to sleep with the lines:

“The windows are dark in the town, child
The whales huddle down in the deep
I’ll read you one very last book if you swear
You’ll go the F–k to sleep.”

The lines are from the new “kids” book Go the F**k to Sleep, by Adam Mansbach, which became a runaway hit after a PDF of the book was circulated online widely. It’s fully illustrated and written like a kids’ bedtime book, except for the exasperated expressions most kids might not quite understand. If you know anybody with kids, you probably got the e-mail (if not, refresh — it’s probably there by now). Months before publication, it shot up to No. 1 on Amazon, prompting its tiny publisher to move up its publication date.
As of this writing, it’s still ranked No. 2 overall on Amazon, and first in both humor and parenting & families sections. The movie rights have been optioned.
It might seem like a long shot that a profanity-laced purported kids book from a niche publisher should be such a runaway hit, but one clue why might come from humor researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder Leeds School of Business.


The Rich vs Poor Debate: Are Kids Normal or Inferior Goods?

Are you likely to have more kids if you are rich or poor? Or to put this in econo-jargon: Are kids normal or inferior goods? (Reminder: When you get rich you buy more of a “normal good,” and less of an “inferior good.” And yes, the language of economics can be a bit cold.)
This is a question that’s central to a debate between Betsey Stevenson and Bryan Caplan. Recall, Bryan is the guy who argues that having kids needn’t be as expensive or time-consuming as we make them. Fair enough. But he then makes the leap to arguing that we should all have more kids. In her response, Betsey noted:

Caplan is entirely focused on the substitution effect: having kids becomes cheaper relative to buying TVs. So he says buy more kids, and fewer TVs. But what about the income effect? As people become richer, they tend to “buy” fewer children, not more. So there’s an offsetting income effect.

In a follow-up, Bryan runs some regressions that he thinks suggest that Betsey is wrong to say that the rich have fewer kids than the poor. It’s a brave person who debates Betsey on the data. And I think he’s tying himself in regression knots, rather than getting at the issue.


The Daughter Test and Why Steve Levitt is Angry About the Online Poker Crackdown

As an economist, Steven Levitt says he has an underdeveloped moral compass. In the past, the University of Chicago professor and Freakonomics co-author has tricked colleagues into drinking cheap wine and opined that drug dealers in Sao Paulo would do a better job keeping communities safe.
But his moral compass went spinning when the U.S. recently cracked down on the top three online poker companies, resulting in 11 indictments. The federal government accused PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and Absolute Poker of running their operations illegally, including paying banks to secretly process transactions.
“I think it makes no sense at all,” Levitt says. “Most things that are made illegal, everyone agrees on: homicide, theft–there’s a general agreement. And then there are these other activities that fall into a gray area. I think poker is so obviously on one side of the gray area relative to legality that it just doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Levitt says he doesn’t usually get riled up over such issues, but then he realized why he got so angry: his daughter.


The Economic Behavior of 12 Year-Olds

Do children behave like adults? Do they make economic decisions the same way we do?
That’s what German economist Martin Kocher has set out to determine. He’s collecting data to measure the utility curves of kids from 7-18 years old, in order to draw some conclusions about children’s attitudes toward risk, time and trust. Playing simple economic games, such as the ultimatum game and various public good games, he measured their risk and time preferences. The experiments were conducted with real money, because “incentivizing kids with money makes it a real decision for them” says Kocher.


It's Hard to Learn if You Can't See the Blackboard

Our most recent podcast is about a pair of economists giving out free eye glasses to kids in China. Between 10 and 15 percent of kids needed glasses; but of those, only two percent had them. Turns out, this is a problem in New York City too.


Kids and Costs: A Guest Post on Twins by Bryan Caplan

Economists usually assume that doubling output more than doubles costs; or as textbooks say, there are increasing marginal costs. So economists naturally expect twins to be more than double the effort, stress, and out-of-pocket cost of a singleton.


The Economics and Genetics of Parenting: A Guest Post by Bryan Caplan

Adoption and twin researchers have spent the last forty years measuring the effect of parenting on every major outcome that parents care about. Their findings surprise almost everyone. Health, intelligence, happiness, success, character, values, appreciation – they all run in families. But with a few exceptions, research shows that nature overpowers nurture, especially in the long-run.


Stay-at-Home Mom Knows Best?

More time with Mom can lead to lower high school drop out rates later on, particularly among children whose mothers do not have a lot of education themselves.


Are You Smarter Than an Eighth Grader (From 1895)?

The Salina Journal, a daily newspaper in Salina, Kansas, has published a final exam that was given to local eighth-graders in 1895 (via this friendly website). (“It was taken from the original document on file at the Smoky Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, KS.”)


Bullying at School? Blame the Father

Busy fathers, pay attention: a new study finds that if your kids think you’re not spending enough time with them, they’re more likely to exhibit bullying behavior at school.


Bribery + Vegetables = Success

Does bribing kids work? The debate rages on, although Levitt has done it effectively on at least one occasion. A new study (summarized by the BPS Research Digest) suggests that bribery can work wonders, at least when it comes to vegetables.


The Economics of Tiger Parenting

When my daughter Anna was 7, she told me she desperately wanted a dog. I looked her in the eye and said, “You can have a dog if you publish an article in an academic peer-reviewed journal.” I wasn’t kidding. I really, really didn’t want a dog because I thought it would disrupt our family routine, which included large dollops of what Amy Chua’s controversial new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, refers to as Tiger parenting.


Game Theory and Child-Rearing

A reader named Clark Case, who lives in Aurora, Ohio, and works as a product manager, writes in with a child-rearing observation.


A New Definition of "Young Researcher"

The Royal Society’s science journal Biology Letters has published a most unusual paper: it was researched and written by a group of children aged 8-10. Simply titled Blackawton Bees, it is the product of 25 U.K. students who worked with neuroscientists to collect data on whether bumblebees could be trained to learn which flowers to forage from by using color and pattern cues.


Economics Reading for the Kids

If you’re looking for ways to expose your kids to economics at an early age, Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, director of the Rutgers University Project on Economics and Children, has some suggestions. They are mostly picture books, geared toward children ages five to ten.


Putting Together a "World Baby"

Tamara Audi and Arlene Chang of the Wall Street Journal dissect the global baby industry, which is growing thanks to increasingly restrictive international adoption laws.


The Parent Trap: Addiction

Shankar Vedantam of Slate hypothesizes that people continue to procreate, despite overwhelming evidence that parenting isn’t very fun, for much the same reason that cocaine users can’t quit: they’re addicts.


What Do Pamela Anderson, Britney Spears and Christine O'Donnell Have in Common?

A few weeks back, I revealed myself to be the humorless, politically-correct parent that I am, complaining about the gender roles represented by Lego’s new line of Minifigures. My complaint: Of the sixteen Minifigures, the only two that were women were a Cheerleader and a Nurse. Ever the earnest parent, I hope my daughter can imagine herself creating a life beyond these stereotypical roles.


When That Child in the Street Is an Optical Illusion

Let’s say you live or work in an area where there are a lot of vulnerable pedestrians – kids, maybe – and a lot of cars as well, and that the cars habitually drive too fast for your taste.
What do you do?


Sesame Street, Nigerian Style

hildren in Nigeria will soon have a new TV option. Sesame Square, a local version of Sesame Street voiced and produced by Nigerians (and funded by a grant from USAID), will “focus on the same challenges faced by children in a country where many have to work instead of going to school: AIDS, malaria nets, gender equality – and yams, a staple of Nigerian meals.”


Renting Wombs in India

Slate takes a look at India’s half-billion-dollar-a-year reproductive-tourism industry. “The primary appeal of India is that it is cheap, hardly regulated, and relatively safe,” writes Amana Fontanella-Khan. “Surrogacy can cost up to $100,000 in the United States, while many Indian clinics charge $22,000 or less. Very few questions are asked. Same-sex couples, single parents and even busy women who just don’t have time to give birth are welcomed by doctors.”


Will Your Kids Be Better Off Than You?

Gary Becker and Richard Posner debate a timeless question: Will the next generation be better off than their parents’ generation? Becker’s take: “America has always been optimistic about its future. The decline in such optimism during the past couple of decades is understandable, but highly regrettable. The best way to restore this optimism is to promote faster economic growth. That is feasible with the right policies, but will not happen automatically. Even America has no destiny to be optimistic about the future without important redirection of various public priorities.”


Building Gender Stereotypes

There’s a particular kind of story one reads occasionally, making fun of the worst excesses of political correctness. But this entry is about the other extreme-a toy manufacturer so far in the dark ages that even Don Draper might snicker.


Teen Sex, Binge Drinking, and Obesity

In “Binge Drinking & Sex in High School” (abstract here; PDF here), Jeffrey S. DeSimone argues that “binge drinking significantly increases participation in sex, promiscuity, and the failure to use birth control, albeit by amounts considerably smaller than implied by merely conditioning on exogenous factors.”