The link between parental leave and the gender pay gap | Pew Research Center
19 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in discrimination, gender, human capital, labour supply, occupational choice, population economics Tags: gender wage gap, Parental leave, unintended consequences
Life expectancy has been improving everywhere for a long time and big time
10 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
The Japanese fertility rates have actually been rising since 1995
08 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, population economics
HT: Noah Smith
How Your Face Shapes Your Economic Chances – The Atlantic
23 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in labour economics, personnel economics, population economics, survivor principle Tags: economics of beauty
Attractive CEOs raise their company’s stock price when they first appear on television, according to a working paper by Joseph T. Halford and Hung-Chia Hsu at the University of Wisconsin.
Taller people are richer. In fact, every inch between 5’7” and 6 feet is “worth” about 2 percent more in average annual earnings.
Being better looking than at least 67 percent of your peers is worth about $230,000 over your lifetime.
Having blond hair is worth as much as a year of school—for women.
Being an obese white woman is particularly punishing for your potential lifetime earnings.
via How Your Face Shapes Your Economic Chances – The Atlantic.
The Great Enrichment: Most gripes about income growth are driven by measurement error
23 Dec 2014 1 Comment
Was Moynihan, right? The role of prospective success in assortative mating in family poverty
19 Dec 2014 1 Comment
Men (No Longer) At Work
19 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in human capital, labour economics, labour supply, politics - USA, population economics
by Dish Staff
Binyamin Appelbaum looks into the causes of the decline in America’s male work force:
Working, in America, is in decline. The share of prime-age men — those 25 to 54 years old — who are not working has more than tripled since the late 1960s, to 16 percent. … Many men, in particular, have decided that low-wage work will not improve their lives, in part because deep changes in American society have made it easier for them to live without working. These changes include the availability of federal disability benefits; the decline of marriage, which means fewer men provide for children; and the rise of the Internet, which has reduced the isolation of unemployment. …
The resulting absence of millions of potential workers has serious consequences not just for the men and their families but for the nation as a whole. A smaller work force is likely to…
View original post 372 more words
Japan’s demographic challenge
17 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in labour economics, labour supply, population economics Tags: ageing society, demographics, Japan
As its new parliament comes in, here's a look at Japan's longer-term economic challenges pewrsr.ch/1pjgZx5 http://t.co/StGWEGdNfi—
PewResearch FactTank (@FactTank) December 16, 2014
Global Warming Was Worth It – And if we had to, we’d do it again
13 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in climate change, development economics, environmental economics, global warming, growth disasters, growth miracles, history of economic thought, liberalism, population economics, technological progress Tags: capitalism and freedom, The Great Enrichment, The Great Escape, The Great Fact
Now, my conception (read: European) of progress and a better standard of living would place many advances above composting, organic farming, or even urban chicken coops.
- Higher incomes that allow people to make livings that afford them more than merely survival or avoiding starvation.
- A low poverty rate.
- High quality and diversity of employment opportunities. Rather than the choice of being a farmer or being a blacksmith, the average citizen should have an array of careers to choose from, and the ability to be industrious and take risks for profit.
- The availability of housing. On an average night in the United States, a country with a population of somewhere around 350 million, fewer than one million people are homeless.
- Consistent GDP growth.
- Access to quality health care.
- The availability of quality education. (I suppose we could quibble over the word “quality,” but certainly there is widespread free education availability.)
- High life expectancy. Worldwide life expectancy has more than doubled from 1750 to 2007.
- Low frequency of deadly disease.
- Affordable goods and services.
- Infrastructure that bolsters economic growth.
- Political stability.
- Air conditioning.
- Freedom from slavery, torture and discrimination.
- Freedom of movement, religion and thought.
- The presumption of innocence under the law.
- Equality under the law regardless of gender or race.
- The right to have a family – as large as one can support. Maybe even larger.
- The right to enjoy the fruits of labor without government – or anyone else – stealing it.
There’s much more, of course. If the “sustainability movement” had its way, many of these advances would be degraded.
And since Caradonna offered a few charts highlighting climate change and population growth (a bad thing), I too was assembling a number of graphs that could offer visual examples of the rise of positive developments since the Industrial Revolution. I also soon noticed that all of them looked virtually identical.
So below is what a graph encompassing nearly every one of my bullet points looks like:
Darwin Awards ‘winners’ are overwhelmingly male, analysis reveals
13 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in economics of media and culture, health economics, liberalism, population economics, technological progress Tags: Darwin awards
- Darwin Awards is an annual review of most foolish way people have died
- Nominees improve the gene pool by eliminating themselves from the human race using foolish methods
- Scientists were surprised to discover 90% of award ‘winners’ were male
- Worthy candidates include a terrorist who opened his own letter bomb
- Another man attempted to travel by hitching a shopping trolley to a train
According to “male idiot theory” (MIT) many of the differences in risk seeking behaviour, emergency department admissions, and mortality may be explained by the observation that men are idiots and idiots do stupid things…
In addition, alcohol may play an important part in many of the events leading to a Darwin Award. It is conceivable that the sex difference is attributable to sociobehavioural differences in alcohol use.
Anecdotal data support the hypothesis that alcohol makes men feel “bulletproof” after a few drinks, and it would be naïve to rule this out.
For example, the three men who played a variation on Russian roulette alternately taking shots of alcohol and then stamping on an unexploded Cambodian land mine.
HT: dailymail.co.uk and The Darwin Awards: sex differences in idiotic behaviour | The BMJ.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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