The NYTimes Magazine teaches you about the farm bill, agricultural subsidies, and obesity:

The reason the least healthful calories in the supermarket are the cheapest is that those are the ones the farm bill encourages farmers to grow.

Via Tyler Cowen

Categories: America, Business and Economics, Food, Incentive Centered Design
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“There was not anybody that I can remember that was black,” she said. “The white people have theirs, and the black people have theirs. It’s nothing racial at all.”

Not a joke, a school in rural Georgia is holding their first integrated prom this year, and that quote above is from a real live student.

Via the Volokh Conspiracy.

Categories: America, Education
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Visualizing economics has a graph of where the top .01% gets their income, excluding capital gains. Looking at the time-series data, there’s a pretty clear story that dividend income has gotten much less important while wage income has grown significantly in importance.

What this means is that the richest of the rich are now earning their money through wages (whether as CEOs, lawyers, or bankers), rather than just collecting bank interest. It says something huge about wealth distribution. There will always be a top .01%, but would we rather the top .01% be filled with those who make their money by working for it and getting paid for it, or by sitting on their couch and letting the bank interest on their billions finance their luxury? I’m especially curious about the left-wing response, as the left is generally more concerned with issues of income equity.

Excluding capital gains does change the data some, as many of the capital-intensive wealthy are seeing income through more active capital (investments) rather than interest.

Categories: America, Business and Economics, Politics
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There may be some among us who can imagine 20 days in captivity; perhaps a fraction of those can imagine a full year deprived of liberty and most human contact. But 20 years? Downey and Fecteau have consistently sought to downplay their period of imprisonment; and neither has done what arguably too many former CIA officers do these days with far less justification: write a book. Downey has said that such a book would contain “500 blank pages,” and Fecteau says the whole experience could be summed up by the word “boring.”

This story of two CIA agents held prisoner in China for two decades is anything but boring.

Categories: America
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Slate has announced a guide to political futures markets for the 2008 US Presidential Election. Political futures generally predict outcomes better than polls for a number of reason. Slate is going to track the big prediction markets along the big races and report along.

For a snapshot, the Iowa Electronic Market, the Big Daddy of prediction markets, shows Clinton and Obama neck and neck for the Dems, and the Field Candidate (anyone but McCain, Romney, and Guiliani) taking the republicans. Guiliani leads among those candidates with their own futures. The dems are also predicted to win by a slim margin.

Also, I haven’t investigated the differences between contracts in the markets, but the wide price differences between the Iowa Electronic Market and Intrade seem like an arbitrage opportunity for those who can trade in both.

Categories: America, Information Markets, Politics, Polling, Social Software, Technology
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A discussion of Millenials in the Christian Science Monitor:

But Twenge and others are wildly mistaken about the Millennial generation – those born since the early 1980s. No matter what teens say on surveys, there is scant evidence that they act more selfishly. In fact, the trends in youth behavior support the opposite conclusion – that Millennials have much greater regard for one another, their parents, and the community than Generation Xers or baby boomers had at the same phase of life.

Some notes:

• This is an important lesson about surveys and revealed preferences. Survey questions only work if you have reason to believe people will respond honestly (why questions about race don’t work) and the questions you’re asking actually measure what you want (which is much more frequent). The crime data shows how people are actually behaving, not how they answer silly questions about their personality.
• Why are there always sky-is-falling predictions about the next generation, especially when in general, things keep getting better? Cut the kids some slack, as much as you try to say that you were different, you were just like them when you were young.
• More specifically, whats with the boomers and trying to put all the negative attributes of their generation (selfishness, antipathy towards parents, sex and drug use) onto the newest generation, despite the fact that all the evidence says Millenials are totally unlike the boomers (similar to how boomers weren’t like their parents).

Categories: America, Community, Polling
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From the dumbest column I’ve ever read in Slate (which I normally read before anything else):

Suppose the national defense of the United States were relegated to the private sector. Instead of the publicly funded Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, the country would be defended by private militias funded mainly by insurance companies. In the event of foreign attack on U.S. soil, the militias would defend those citizens in the affected areas who’d paid defense insurance premiums through their places of work (or, if self-employed, as individuals).

The best-armed troops would defend the wealthiest and most hawkish segments of the population, who would have paid the highest premiums.

The premise of the article is that we should nationalize health care because it’s like the military, and look how good a nationalized military is. Wow, lets go through all the ways this is flawed.

1. National Defense is a public good, health care is not. You may think that health care is a right, or something everyone is entitled to, and those are philosophical positions, but health care doesn’t fit the definition of a public good in the economic sense. First of all, it isn’t non-rival, which means that if I consume some health care, you can’t consume that same amount. If I take a pill, or use a X-Ray machine, you can’t take that same pill or use the machine at the same time. In contrast, an army that protects the United States offers the same amount of protection, whether or not you add more people to it. Second, health care is excludable. I can stop you from taking a pill or getting that X-Ray if you don’t pay for it. But with national defense, if you don’t pay your taxes, the army still protects you. There are fundamental characteristics between them that make them different.
2. In general, everyone in the country shares the same risk if the country is attacked. Granted, people in high-risk areas may suffer a greater risk due to terrorism, and that is actually reflected most of the time in higher local tax rates to support police counter-terrorism, or insurance premiums for potential targets. In general, though, if there is a large scale attack against the United States or its allies, the risk to all of us is the same. When it comes to health care, we all have different amounts of risk, and only minimal information about that risk. Well planned insurance lets us pool this risk to reduce the cost to individuals and overcome some of this information problem. Nationalized health care has nothing to do with risk pooling, and it effectively involves the health and low-risk subsidizing the unhealthy and high-risk.
3. National defense is a pretty bad example. There’s definitely consensus on the left, and I think among some people on the right that we spend way too much on national defense. It costs the Defense Department orders of magnitude more to procure technology that is available cheaply in the private sector. Defense technology research involves massive outlays relative to the returns. The military is a sprawling and inefficient bureaucracy with a sprawling and inefficient supplier network supporting it. Do we really want to take our relatively dynamic biomedical research sector and make it part of a government supplier complex? Is this really a way to reduce costs?

I later found that Arnold Kling took a briefer, though probably more economically informed shot at the column as well.

Categories: America, Business and Economics, Distribution, Governance, Incentive Centered Design, Information Economics, Politics
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Just another gem from Sonia’s blog:

I think that’s the thing I like about America most. Here, the sense of community is a lot more cohesive but no one gets a choice in the matter. The men have to be the providers so they have to study engineering or medicine, etc. The women are expected to be housewives so they can’t really work if they want to. And the kids have to study SO HARD, and that too, the subjects their parents want, not necessarily what they want. In the U.S. maybe the individualism is too pronounced at times, but I really appreciate the opportunity to decide who I am and how I function in the world.

There are others there, and I don’t even think she realizes most of them.

Categories: America, Community
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Searching around, my little brother found out that my favorite restaurant in DC may be shutting down:

Though the restaurant has been allowed to go a bit to seed — there’s dirt everywhere, the ceiling is a mess, and the facade’s original plate glass is patched and seamed — its great bones survive unchanged. With not much more than a splash of paint, some elbow grease and a modestly tweaked menu, one of the city’s more artistic restaurateurs could restore the Waffle Shop to its former glory.

DC has a strong waffle culture, but not much in the way of pancakes (I’m yet to find any outside of a chain). Luckily, the Waffle Shop makes waffles good enough that I don’t mind. I introduced my siblings to it during Dworins4Darfur, and now they’re hooked on the place too. If you’re in DC, get over yourself and visit one of the city’s best hole-in-the wall eateries before the last vestige of good breakfast disappears from the city forever.

Categories: America, Ephemera, Food
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A new study from the Steinhardt Social Research Institute says there could be over seven million Jews. Why are there so many different numbers, and why are Jews so hard to count.

One of the biggest reasons is that it’s hard to determine just who is a Jew. People identify as Jewish on religious, ethnic, and cultural grounds, while others identify by birth, and still others were clearly born to Jews but do not personally identify as Jewish. This makes picking out who is Jewish in a survey extremely difficult. You have to ask the right questions, the right ways, and then figure out which answers mean someone is a Jew. Changes in how you define a Jew can cause swings of literally millions of people.

But once you come up with a definition for who’s Jewish and who isn’t, you’ve still got trouble counting people. That’s because no matter how you define it, there just aren’t that many Jews in the population. Think of a jar with 1000 marbles in it. Of those, somewhere between 975 and 985 are yellow, while the rest are green. The green marbles, between 15 and 25, represent the size of the Jewish population. Now imagine that you have to count them by taking a small sample, say 100 marbles, out of the jar. If the jar were half green and half yellow, this would work pretty well, but with only a small number of green marbles, your sample of 100 could give you one, two, or three, each of which would give you radically different estimate of the number of green marbles in the whole jar. Counting Jews works the same way - the statistical sampling methods used in normal social science break down when trying to reach a very broad but very small group.

Further, Jews are less likely than the population at large to respond to random digit dial phone surveys. In other words, when you try to take the marbles out of the jar and count them, some marbles won’t let you, and the green marbles are less likely to let you. Given the huge swings a few marbles can give you, this makes them even more difficult to count. Because Jews won’t talk to the survey interviewers, we don’t really know how much less likely they are to answer the phone, so we don’t really know how to weight things. We also don’t know the characteristics that make one person more likely to answer than another.

Each of these caveats makes counting Jews extremely difficult, and leads to the controversy around the numbers given by Jewish demographers. So what are the different techniques that are used? Random digit dial surveys, like the massive National Jewish Population Survey use a weighting technique, similar to what political pollsters use, to try and bring the numbers in line with what they know to be true about the population as a whole. These can be controversial, whether for counting Jews or voters, as they start to tinker with the underlying science of public opinion research in ways that not all social scientists or statisticians agree. The NJPS also needs an extremely large sample to cover the whole country, and this means it’s prohibitively expensive to conduct accurately.

Another technique, used by Dr. Ira Sheskin at the University of Miami, takes a collection of community studies and combines them all together to get a national account. Since most Jews live in urban areas, Dr. Sheskin’s community studies, of which he has done many, are more likely to target those numbers where Jews are concentrated. He also over-samples in “core” Jewish areas, increasing his response rate. However, this method has its own shortfalls. For instance, many elderly Jews are “snow birds,” with summer homes in the Midwest or Northeast and winter residences in southern areas like Florida and Arizona, making it likely that they’ll be double counted. The same thing happens with younger Jews who may go to college in one city while claiming residence in another. And finally, it ignores the “long tail” of Jewish communities, smaller cities that still have Jewish populations.

Researchers at Brandeis’s Steinhardt Social Research Institute used a third method. They took publicly available survey data, rather than data specific studies on the Jewish community, and conducted a “meta-analysis,” trying to merge it all together to come up with a good accounting. In other words, instead of taking 100 marbles out of the jar, they found twenty people who had each taken 100 marbles out of the jar for different reasons, and used their counting. Not only does this give them more samples, but it also allowed them to save money for expensive polls with large samples that are required for the other two techniques. Unfortunately, there are a number of risks here. Different studies use different samples, questions, methodology, making it complex to determine how to weight any specific data point, and restricting the available data to what those other studies are interested in. Nevertheless, it provides an innovative, and significantly more cost effective, technique for gathering data not only about how many Jews there are, but information about them as well.

So which of these methods works the best, and how many Jews are there? Because of the problems described above, there’s no way to really know. The best answer is that it’s somewhere between four and eight million, and that whatever number you pick is probably off by a million. And like with most things Jewish, there’s going to be a healthy debate around the issue so that any two Jewish demographers will probably give you three different numbers.

Categories: America, Community, Information Asymmetries, Jewishness, Metrics, Polling
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Googling around I found this Jewish Week article on why Jewish mega-philanthropists aren’t donating to Jewish causes:

Our annual research of mega-gifts — gifts above $1 million — turns up at least 50 people who could match or exceed Stanton’s generosity. Typically, these are wealthy Jewish business leaders who give only relatively modest gifts to Jewish causes.

It’s tempting to write these people off as uncommitted Jews, but it would be wrong.

If Jewish causes want to receive mega-gifts, they have to prove themselves worthy. They have to compete on equal ground with the secular hospitals, symphonies, museums and universities, all of which court and inspire Jewish donors.

The money-paragraph at the end:

Look at it this way: Today’s philanthropists think like investors, because that’s how they got wealthy. They want their money to achieve a return; they want results.

That means Jewish causes need to change the way they run their businesses.  Want to attract investment?  You need a clear definition of what you hope to accomplish, a strategy for accomplishing it, and clear metrics that demonstrate your progress.  Even more importantly, those metrics have to reflect your goals, not your activities.  Non-profits, especially in the Jewish community, need to treat their donors like corporations treat their shareholders, and start to demonstrate real, measurable results.

Categories: America, Community, Governance, Jewishness, Metrics, Philanthropy, Strategy
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Turner Broadcasting and their ad agency are paying the city of Boston $2 million after law enforcement there confused a glowing Mooninite advertising the new AquaTeen Hunger Force movie with a terrorist threat.  Half will be “goodwill” funds given to the agencies for training and equipment.  Does this mean they just got a million dollars for their screw up?  Will they use this to prevent a similar embarrassment?  Doesn’t this provide an incentive for police departments to overreact, forcing a settlement with corporations who will then pay up to prevent a PR disaster?  After all, none of the departments in 9 other cities, who figured out that a glowing Moon Man isn’t a bomb, got any free money.
The companies can’t say what I’m going to: Boston law enforcement overreacted and behaved in a bumbling and incompetent manner.  The more we are willing to kowtow to our fears of terrorism, the more effective it becomes as a tactic.

Categories: America, Entertainment Media, Governance, Incentive Centered Design, Law, Marketing, Television
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Rosner’s domain interviewed Jewish demography expert Dr. Ira Sheskin:

Where the lowering of the numbers will have an impact is on small Jewish communities. A Jewish community of 10,000 which now supports, say, 3 synagogues, a JCC, a kosher butcher, and several Jewish agencies and organizations, may very well lose some of this infrastructure if, say 20 years from now, the population is down to 5,000. So the impact of the lowering of the Jewish population will be at the local level more than at the national level.

Many resources in the Jewish community are being applied now by Jewish Federations and Foundations throughout the country to assure the Jewish future. Sheldon Adelson just started a foundation which will provide $200-$250 million per year in grants to Jewish communities. The challenge is to devise programs and services that will provide a quality of life within Jewish communities that will keep people wanting to be Jewish.

Dr. Sheskin also addresses intermarriage later on, though he tacks differently than i would. For those interested in Jewish demographics, most research studies are available for free online from the Jewish Databank. There, you can find the summary reports of most community and national studies, as well as the raw data for many of them, including the National Jewish Population Survey.

Categories: America, Community, Jewishness, Metrics, Philanthropy, Polling
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It also raises several questions. Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?

Certainly, if we look at nothing but our enemies’ objectives, it is hard to see any indication of an overreaction. The people who attacked us in 2001 are indeed hate-filled fanatics who would like nothing better than to destroy this country. But desire is not the same thing as capacity, and although Islamist extremists can certainly do huge amounts of harm around the world, it is quite different to suggest that they can threaten the existence of the United States.

Historian David Bell asks “Was 9/11 Reall That Bad?“   It’s only Monday, but I’m going to call this as the must-read for the week.

Categories: America, Governance, Politics
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Nevertheless, a small band of economists from universities, research institutions and the government are clearly expressing the blasphemy that many Americans could be saving less than they are being told to by the financial services industry — and spending more — while they are younger. The negative savings rate, they say, is wildly distorted.

According to them, the financial industry, with its ostensibly objective online calculators, overstates how much money someone will need in retirement. Some, in fact, contend that financial firms have a pointed interest in persuading people to save much more than they need because the companies earn fees on managing that
money.

From the NYTimes, via Marginal Revolution.

Categories: America, Business and Economics, Information Asymmetries
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