Andrew Webber

It seems so:

A new study has found that dementia rates among people 65 and older in England and Wales have plummeted by 25 percent over the past two decades, to 6.2 percent from 8.3 percent, the strongest evidence yet of a trend some experts had hoped would materialize.

Another recent study, conducted in Denmark, found that people in their 90s who were given a standard test of mental ability in 2010 scored substantially better than people who reached their 90s a decade earlier. Nearly one-quarter of those assessed in 2010 scored at the highest level, a rate twice that of those tested in 1998. The percentage severely impaired fell to 17 percent from 22 percent.

From Gina Kolata, there is more here.

We exploit the occurrence of postpartum depression (PPD), which has a random component according to the medical community, to estimate causal effects of a salient form of mental illness on couples' relationship status. We estimate single-equation models as well as bivariate probit models that address the endogeneity of PPD. We find that this relatively prevalent mental illness reduces the probability the couples are married (by 22-24%) as well the probability that they are living together (married or cohabiting) (by 24-26%) three years after the birth of the child. Models stratified by relationship status at the time of the birth indicate that PPD makes it more likely that unions dissolve (particularly among baseline cohabitors) and less likely that unions are formed (particularly among baseline non-cohabitors). The findings contribute to the literature on the effects of mental illness on relationships and to the broader literature on socioeconomic status and health.

In this paper we investigate whether sellers treat consumers differently on the basis of how well-informed consumers appear to be. We implement a large-scale field experiment in which callers request price quotes from automotive repair shops. We show that sellers alter their initial price quotes depending on whether consumers appear to be well-informed, uninformed, or poorly informed about market prices. We find that repair shops quote higher prices to callers who cite a higher expected price. We find that women are quoted higher prices than men when callers signal that they are uninformed about market prices. However, gender differences disappear when callers mention an expected price for the repair. Finally, we find that repair shops are more likely to offer a price concession if asked to do so by a woman than a man.

This paper examines the effects of upgrading product quality standards on product and professional labor-market equilibriums when both markets are regulated. The Japanese government revised the Building Standards Act in June 2007, requiring a stricter review process for admitting the plans of large-scale buildings. This regulatory change increased the wage of certified architects in Tokyo by 30% but did not increase their total hours worked because of an inelastic labor supply. The stricter quality standards created a quasi-rent for certified architects and owners of condominiums at a cost to consumers. Evidence suggests that the stricter quality standards increased the transaction price of used condominiums by 15% in the Tokyo metropolitan area.

Recent years have witnessed a growing proportion of female general practitioners (GPs) worldwide. Because female GPs tend to work fewer hours than male GPs, this continuing trend may accelerate the shortage of GPs. This paper investigates the gender difference in the wage elasticity of Australian GPs by maximum likelihood estimation of labour supply and wage equations. Quantitative information regarding the labour supply responses of GPs is vital in designing eective policies. The results show salient gender difference. An increase in hourly wage increases the labour supply of male GPs and reduces the labour supply of female GPs, resulting in an enlarged gender dierence in labour supply. The results also suggest that family factors still remain a key driving force of the reduced labour supply of Australian female GPs.

We conducted a survey and a randomized natural experiment with the same subjects to investigate the effect of information about calorie intake on fast food choices. This combined approach allows us to maximize both internal and external research validity and test consistency of findings. We find that providing information about calories in a survey context for fast food menus has a moderate effect on calorie consumption, decreasing on average by 2.96 percent the amount of calories of the selected food choices. However, the same nutritional information had no significant impact on actual purchases in the restaurant context. Among the possible menus, the salad menu (the healthiest menu) was the most preferred option by those respondents who received nutritional information in the survey context; whereas in the restaurant, the most popular choice for the same group of people was the “Double bacon burger option” (the least healthy option). Finally, we find that the average calorie content of participants’ actual purchases increases significantly (0.17%) with the number of days elapsed between the day when the survey took place (and information was provided) and the actual purchase day at the restaurant. These results show large discrepancies between stated preferences and actual market behavior. These findings may be justified by the existence of projection bias and subjects acting under rational ignorance.

We consider the link between poverty and subjective well-being, and focus in particular on the role of time. We use panel data on 42,500 individuals living in Germany from 1992 to 2010 to uncover four empirical relationships. First, life satisfaction falls with both the incidence and intensity of contemporaneous poverty. There is no evidence of adaptation within a poverty spell: poverty starts bad and stays bad in terms of subjective well-being. Third, poverty scars: those who have been poor in the past report lower life satisfaction today, even when out of poverty. Last, the order of poverty spells matters: for a given number of poverty spells, satisfaction is lower when the spells are concatenated: poverty persistence reduces well-being. These effects differ by population subgroups.

Across six field and laboratory experiments, participants given a concretely-framed prosocial goal (e.g., making someone smile, increasing recycling) felt happier after performing a goal-directed act of kindness than did those who were assigned a functionally similar, but more abstractly-framed, prosocial goal (e.g., making someone happy, saving the environment). This effect was driven by differences in the size of the gap between participants' expectations and reality: Compared to those assigned to pursue an abstractly-framed prosocial goal, those assigned to pursue a concretely-framed goal perceived that the actual outcome of their goal-directed efforts more accurately matched their expectations, causing them to experience a greater boost in personal happiness. Further, participants were unable to predict this effect, believing that pursuing abstractly-framed prosocial goals would have either an equal or greater positive impact on their own happiness.

In this paper we extend the research on happiness and spatial theory of voting by exploring whether strategic and sincere voting affect subjective well-being. We conduct the analysis with data on a large sample of individuals over 50 elections in 16 OECD countries. The results of the analysis show the existence of a negative effect of strategic voting on subjective well-being. In addition, the likelihood of being satisfied decreases when individuals vote strategically for a political party that wins the electoral race. Furthermore, when we analyse separately left-wing and right-wing voters, we find that the described effect holds for left-wing voters but no for right-wing voters. We discuss this evidence in the light of expressive voting theory (Hilman, 2010) and lack of empathy with future selves (Kahneman and Thaler, 1991). Our results are robust to different measures of strategic voting and subjective well-being.

This paper attempts to establish empirically whether natives' job satisfaction is adversely affected by having minority co-worker(s). The paper uses nationally representative linked employer-employee data and eight different facets of job satisfaction. Measuring minority co-worker status at the workplace- and occupation-level and employing alternative econometric estimators; the paper finds that on average natives' experience a reduction in job satisfaction due to having minority co-worker(s). The effect found is larger if the co-worker-ship is at the occupation-level.

We compare the effect of anonymous social network ratings (Yelp.com) and peer group recommendations on restaurant demand. We conduct a two stage choice experiment and combine it with online social network reviews from Yelp.com and find that peers have a stronger impact on restaurant demand than anonymous reviewers.

McDonald’s is to close its business in Iceland because the country’s financial crisis has made it too expensive to operate its franchise.

The fast food giant said its three outlets in the country would shut – and that it had no plans to return.

Besides the economy, McDonald’s blamed the “unique operational complexity” of doing business in an isolated nation with a population of just 300,000.

Iceland’s first McDonald’s restaurant opened in 1993.

Here is more.  Most of all, it is more expensive to import inputs (oddly, the story does not mention capital controls).  The restaurants will be reconfigured and in their new identity they will source Icelandic products much more.

Here is a brief update on the economy of Iceland, including a discussion of Iceland’s significant fiscal consolidation.  By the way, the country has seen two years running on negative growth in health spending.

Here is an article on how much immigrants are starting to contribute to the economy of Iceland.  I bought a mineral water from a “Cafe Haiti” in Reykjavik and I believe it was not there the last time I visited, nineteen years ago.

I enjoyed the new Samsung ad for Iceland.

A labrador dog named Bazz wears a suit that his owner and beekeeper Josh Kennett designed for him in the town of Tintinara, South Australia. Mr Kennett designed and made the suit for Bazz while he was training the Labrador to sniff out the bee disease American foulbrood, a bacterial disease that attacks larvae and pupae, so that he could approach the bee hives without being stung.

Picture: REUTERS (via Pictures of the day: 5 July 2013 - Telegraph)

baby hippo (x)

It’s not just diapers:

Boredom and isolation don’t just belong to teenagers anymore as a report from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police shows that there are now more elderly shoplifters than teenaged ones in Tokyo. This is the first time that this has happened since the police began keeping records about this particular crime.

Statistics show that 3,321 people aged 65 or older were arrested on suspicion of shoplifting in 2012, which accounted for almost a quarter or 24.5% of the total number of arrests. Those aged 19 or below accounted for 23.6% of figures, with 3,195 arrests made. Even though the total number of arrests have declined based on the statistics from 2011, the ratio of elderly people shoplifting is on the rise. While the statistics did not include reasons for shoplifting, the growing isolation of the elderly from society has been cited as a growing problem among that age group.

Here is more, via the excellent Mark Thorson.

Dresden zoo, Germany

Picture: AFP/GETTY IMAGES (via Pictures of the day: 4 July 2013 - Telegraph)

ha ha what a bringdown after yesterday’s, huh

awwww-cute:

Somehow my cat thinks this is comfortable and sits like this from time to time

This is from a new research paper by Menusch Khadjavi and Andreas Lange:

We compare female inmates and students in a simultaneous and a sequential Prisoner’s Dilemma. In the simultaneous Prisoner’s Dilemma, the cooperation rate among inmates exceeds the rate of cooperating students. Relative to the simultaneous dilemma, cooperation among first-movers in the sequential Prisoner’s Dilemma increases for students, but not for inmates. Students and inmates behave identically as second movers. Hence, we find a similar and significant fraction of inmates and students to hold social preferences….

The blog post and link to research is here, hat tip goes to @Noahpinion.

In February, 18-year-old Just Carter was talking about League of Legends on Facebook. "Someone had said something to the effect of 'Oh you're insane, you're crazy, you're messed up in the head,' to which he replied 'Oh yeah, I'm real messed up in the head, I'm going to go shoot up a school full of kids and eat their still, beating hearts,' and the next two lines were lol and jk.," said Carter.
What happened next has been the subject of a recent spate of stories from, among others, the Huffington Post, National Review, the World Socialist Web Site, and NPR. A woman in Canada saw the post and called the police in the Austin area. Carter, who lives a few miles from a school, was arrested, charged with a 3rd degree felony of making terroristic threats, and put under $500,000 bail. He has been in jail since March.

Carter was offered a plea deal of 8 years in prison, which he refused.

According to Carter's father, he has received abuse on multiple occasions while in jail, and has been placed in solitary confinement on suicide watch.

"He's very depressed. He's very scared and he's very concerned that he's not going to get out," Jack Carter, Justin's father, told CNN on Tuesday. "He's pretty much lost all hope."

A petition for Carter's release has gotten over 92,000 signatures.

zooborns:

UPDATE: Baby Gibbon Reaches 2-Month Milestone

A rare Javan Gibbon baby at the Greensboro Science Center celebrated his two-month birthday last week, thanks to the dedicated efforts of staff and volunteers.

See many more photos of the adorable Gibbon’s progress and read about his story at ZooBorns!

Here from Alain Bertaud and the Urbanization Project is another way of thinking not just about the high cost of free parking but also the opportunity cost of streets. In New York City, a place with some of the most valuable real estate in the world, 26.6% of the land is devoted to unpriced streets (and an even larger percentage once we include parking). In Manhattan we go to great expense and effort to make it possible for hundreds of people to use the same 10*10 square feet of land, we build skyscrapers, and yet at the same time similar quantities of land are being taken up by a few people and their cars.

Hat tip: Brandon Fuller.

As a case in point, consider my recent post arguing that Andrew Sullivan is the most influential public intellectual of the last twenty-five years.  Such a claim will raise the status of Sullivan.  While I am happy to see his status raised, that is not my point.  My point is merely that he has been very influential, and in the sense of changing actual real world outcomes, a claim which most other public intellectuals of high status cannot even begin to make.  The comments on the post are mostly weak, especially those comments critical of Sullivan.  Some people are arguing that Sullivan does not in fact deserve higher status.  And that in turn is causing them to misjudge, or fail to judge at all, the claim about his influence.

If you can avoid this fallacy consistently, and unpack the positive claim from any and all implications about changes in status, you will think much better and learn much more.  I find also that very smart people are not necessarily more protected against this mode of fallacious reasoning.

Many blogs of course pander to this very fallacy.  Why not be more explicit?  One could put a post up with the person’s name and photo and simply write: “OK people, let’s argue in the comments whether this person deserves a higher or lower status.”  But that would be too explicit, and it would lower the status of the blogger and commentator, so something else is written and the same debate ensues.

Ok, it's no NFL bad lip reading but this fake commentary by a British broadcaster of a baseball game is still pretty hilarious.

He runs in to bowl...Mork and Mindy, that's going for six! No! Caught by the chap in the pajamas with the glove that makes everything easier. And they all scuttle off for a nap.

Tags: baseball   sports   video

The famous Google interview questions? They don’t work. Here’s Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google:

On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.

Instead, what works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up.

Behavioral interviewing also works — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable “meta” information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.

The lasting effects of the Vietnam draft lottery. Men who were more likely to be drafted in the Vietnam war were more antiwar, more liberal, and more Democratic than those who were protected from the draft. Moreover, these attitudes persist into adulthood.

According to Robert Erikson and Laura Stoker, in their paper, "Caught in the Draft: The Effects of Vietnam Draft Lottery Status on Political Attitudes." Abstract here:

The 1969 Vietnam draft lottery assigned numbers to birth dates in order to determine which young men would be called to fight in Vietnam. We exploit this natural experiment to examine how draft vulnerability influenced political attitudes. Data are from the Political Socialization Panel Study, which surveyed high school seniors from the class of 1965 before and after the national draft lottery was instituted. Males holding low lottery numbers became more antiwar, more liberal, and more Democratic in their voting compared to those whose high numbers protected them from the draft. They were also more likely than those with safe numbers to abandon the party identification that they had held as teenagers. Trace effects are found in reinterviews from the 1990s. Draft number effects exceed those for preadult party identification and are not mediated by military service. The results show how profoundly political attitudes can be transformed when public policies directly affect citizens' lives.

Full paper here (PDF warning).

Commentary from John Sides, and James Joyner.

As I was researching yesterday’s post on The Oocyte Cartel I came across an old MR post from 2003 on plans in Canada to restrict the import of American sperm:

The US is a world leader in sperm exports primarily because sperm banks in the U.S. are run on a for-profit basis. As a result, US sperm is reckoned to be of high quality particularly because the US version comes with a background on the vitals of the donor. Denmark also exports a lot of sperm because of high standards and demand for that blond, blue-eyed look.

Exports to Canada have increased in recent years because of a scandal involving poorly screened Canadian sperm. Canadians also import a lot of US eggs. The Canadian government, however, is apparently miffed as a new law is being readied that would forbid donations involving a paid donor. The law would not only make paid donation illegal in Canada it would make it illegal to use any paid-for sperm. Canadian couples seeking fertility options will suffer and who will benefit? I cannot think that this law is anything but spiteful and ridiculous. Is paying for sperm an original sin?

So what happened? In 2004, Canada made it a criminal offense to compensate sperm and egg donors. Loyal readers will not be surprised by the results (as of 2011)

…currently, in the entire country, there are only 35 active sperm donors. Over the last decade, our government has made its donation system so thoroughly unappealing that this ubiquitous fluid is almost impossible to obtain through official channels. There is a single operating sperm bank in all of Canada.

…If 35 national donors is an ugly statistic for the most removed observer, it’s especially devastating for the women and couples who have come to rely on our lone sperm bank in order to have a child.

Ironically, it’s been easier to prevent payments to Canadian donors than it has been to police sperm and egg imports because it is still technically legal to use paid-for sperm just not to buy sperm. As a result, the importation of US sperm has increased:

Patients here obtain more than 90% of semen from the United States, and the federal government appears to turn a blind eye to the fact they buy it from mostly for-profit sperm banks — a criminal offence in this country.

Addendum: Some readers may find all this talk of sex and sperm to be risque but do remember this is a family-friendly blog.

leadinq:

THIS IS THE HAPPIEST GOAT I HAVE EVER SEEN