Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 423
November 22, 2012
Claims about nursing homes
From Neil Emery:
Nursing homes are chronically understaffed in times of economic prosperity. But, when the job market tightens, a one percent increase in unemployment sees full time employment in nursing facilities rise three times as fast. After a recession, when the economy picks back up and jobs become available again, low skilled workers abandon nursing homes jobs’ low pay and even fewer accolades for better prospects. The shift of workers in and out of nursing jobs drives the swings in the national death rate and underscores the importance of these under-appreciated jobs.
A look at the relationship between economic downturns and health outcomes in the United States reveals a complex picture: harm from lost insurance and increased anxiety but better care for the elderly. These two trends coexist because, while harm concentrates in working age people, retirees reap the majority of the benefit.
I do not know if these claims are true, but see the post for a discussion of the evidence.
Assorted links
1. We’re faking a marathon, and a new and different method for liberating books.
2. Acemoglu and Robinson respond to Sachs. And on Twitter there has been excellent back and forth, including Sachs and Blattman and ViewfromtheCave, among others, presented here, a worthwhile debate for Thanksgiving especially.
3. Still lacking the right to vote, the langur nonetheless made an unannounced appearance at a political rally.
4. One view of why the 1950s were so strong economically.
5. How easy is it to simulate the brain?
6. Some simple reasons why Catalonian independence is a bad idea.
My favorite films of 2012
Hollywood continues to collapse into mediocre tent pole franchises, but overall it has been a splendid year for movies. Here were some of my favorites, noting that I count by “the year I saw them” and especially for foreign films this will not correspond so well to “the year of release”:
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (boring for most people, big screen only I suspect)
The Raid: Redemption (better Indonesian martial arts you will not see)
Your Sister’s Sister (Straussian)
Circo, Mexican circus movie
Samsara (makes sense on a big screen only, I suspect)
Day Night Day Night (from five years ago, but a real stunner, underrated and a wonderful study of Nudge of top of everything else)
November 21, 2012
Sentences to ponder
Stunningly, the postponement of marriage and parenting — the factors that shrink the birth rate — is the very best predictor of a person’s politics in the United States, over even income and education levels, a Belgian demographer named Ron Lesthaeghe has discovered. Larger family size in America correlates to early marriage and childbirth, lower women’s employment, and opposition to gay rights — all social factors that lead voters to see red.
That is Lauren Sandler. Here is more, hat tip to Steve Sailer (and David Brooks). And as Robin Hanson would say, “politics isn’t about policy.”
More on Online Education
At Cato Unbound I respond to some of the critics of my article Why Online Education Works. Here is one bit:
We do need more studies of offline, online, and blended education models, but the evidence that we do have is supportive of the online model. In 2009, The Department of Education conducted a meta-analysis and review of online learning studies and found:
Students in online conditions performed modestly better, on average, than those learning the same material through traditional face-to-face instruction.
Instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage relative to purely face-to-face instruction than did purely online instruction.
Effect sizes were larger for studies in which the online instruction was collaborative or instructor-directed than in those studies where online learners worked independently.
The effectiveness of online learning approaches appears quite broad across different content and learner types. Online learning appeared to be an effective option for both undergraduates (mean effect of +0.30, p < .001) and for graduate students and professionals (+0.10, p < .05) in a wide range of academic and professional studies.
Discrimination against shorter people, as reported by Andrew Solomon
One recent study observed that adults with achondroplasia have “lower self-esteem, less education, lower annual incomes, and are less likely to have a spouse.” The income statistic bears witness to institutional discrimination against LPs; the study found that while three-quarters of the dwarfs’ family members, presumably demographically similar to them in most regards, made more than $50,000 per year, less than a third of the dwarfs made that amount.
That is from Andrew Solomon’s new book, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity.
I pre-ordered this book eagerly, but overall I am having difficulty with it. Too many sections throw too much at the proverbial wall and fail to sort out truth from fallacy. I am not sure what is supposed to be insight and what is supposed to be a recording of different views. I would have liked a more direct confrontation with the issue of parental narcissism. This is still a good review of the book. I longed for a page of Ross Douthat or Michael Bérubé.
The book, however, supplies excellent data for anyone wishing to study the utter hypocrisy of current understandings of diversity.
One Amazon reviewer raised a good question:
As a special ed teacher, my question is, does it make sense to include murderers in the same category with deaf people, dwarves, and people with physical disabilities? Perhaps he has a justification for it, in that parents might be disappointed and heartbroken in all these cases. But right off the bat that seems wrong to me, categorically different, moral deviance v. physical or intellectual.
Solomon is a very smart guy. But overall this book leaves one with a sense of being tired of the value of the individual, written by an author overwhelmed by what comes across as, despite Solomon’s quest for nobility, a rogue’s gallery of misfits, baroque style, and without the writing itself coming to terms with the book’s own underlying emotional tenor. Is it unfair to read this as still being, ultimately, a book about depression?
This book may interest many of you, and its publication can be seen as an event of sorts, but I can’t quite bring myself to recommend it.
Ghana “fact” of the day
Two years ago Ghana’s statistical service announced it was revising its GDP estimates upwards by over 60%, suggesting that in the previous estimates about US$13bn worth’s of economic activity had been missed. As a result, Ghana was suddenly upgraded from a low to lower-middle-income country. In response, Todd Moss, the development scholar and blogger at the Center of Global Development in Washington DC, exclaimed: “Boy, we really don’t know anything!”
Here is more, by Morten Jerven. Here is another good paragraph from that article:
Let us be conservative and assume that the GDP in Nigeria merely doubles following the revision. This alone will mean that the GDP for the whole region increases by more than 15%. The value of the increase amounts to nothing less than 40 economies roughly the size of Malawi’s. The knowledge that currently there are 40 “Malawis” unaccounted for in the Nigerian economy should raise a few eyebrows.
I have just pre-ordered his forthcoming book Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It.
November 20, 2012
Assorted links
1. Some of this is actually true.
2. Is Catalonia coming to its senses?
3. Joel Slemrod roast (the academic discourse of the future).
4. Things younger than Oscar Niemeyer [Coisas mais novas que Oscar Niemeyer].
5. Why are the Knicks doing better?
6. The Kolmogorov complexity of the dates of various holidays.
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