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It’s all rather sickening. As Eli Rabett said, “Roger Bate’s existence is a strong argument against the existence of a just God”.
links for 2008-05-28
28-May-08
links for 2008-05-26
26-May-08
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“Kids don’t get themselves into college, for the most part, and thank god. If that were the case, no one would go. The environment around kids, and especially the parents, gets kids into college.”
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Contra Megan McArdle, investment in pre-school programmes like Head Start make very good sense in value for money terms.
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The best sentence I read today: “Facebook represents the commercialization of conversation, not the amateurization of collaborative content production”.
links for 2008-05-23
23-May-08
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Because some people need to be told: “Congestion pricing is an excellent solution to many problems, but it is best pursued alongside a policy of transit and densification, and not as an alternative to those strategies.”
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There’s nothing ‘meritocratic’ about the results of a failing education system.
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Janet Currie finds strong evidence of links between parental socioeconomic status and child health, and between child health and labour market outcomes, suggesting health plays a role in the intergenerational transmission of economic status
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Good question. Beshears et al identify five factors that drive a wedge between revealed and normative (’actual’) preferences.
links for 2008-05-21
21-May-08
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Lane Kenworthy points out that differing inflation rates for goods consumed by the poor and the rich do not diminish the importance of income inequality.
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Quality of care in the NHS increased significantly between 1997 and 2003, bringing the UK ahead of the US in terms of reducing preventable deaths a good bit closer to the likes of France and Germany.
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Philippe says yes
links for 2008-05-20
20-May-08
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Relative poverty is up but absolute poverty is down. So an improvement, but probably not as much as there should have been.
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“when left to their own devices, neighborhoods will act selfishly, ignoring social costs imposed on others”
links for 2008-05-19
19-May-08
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Why it’s a bad idea to trust free-marketeers when they say they want vouchers in education.
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The Cato Institute stops pretending to care about whether poor people can afford a decent education for their children. But did anyone ever believe that?
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I am shocked -shocked!- to learn that Tim Worstall is ignorant of basic economics.
Less crime? Thank the regulators
14-May-08
Every American should be eternally grateful to environmentalist campaigners and government regulators for their successful efforts in the 1970s, despite fierce opposition by industry, to phase out the use of lead in petrol and house paint [1]. This single policy change is definitely responsible for a significant overall increase in IQ and educational attainment, and very probably responsible for a significant fall in violent crime when for the first time in decades a generation of children grew up without exposure to lead and the increase in hyperactivity, aggression and brain damage it causes. Here’s a recent research summary from the NBER:
The Impact of Childhood Lead Exposure on Adult Crime
A large portion of the decline in the U.S. violent crime rate between 1992 and 2002 may be attributable to reductions in gasoline lead exposure.Exposure to lead in childhood has been associated with increases in aggression, decreases in impulse control, and decreases in IQ. In Environmental Policy as Social Policy? The Impact of Childhood Lead Exposure on Crime (NBER Working Paper No.13097), Jessica Wolpaw Reyes tests the hypothesis that higher childhood lead exposure is associated with adult criminality. Her estimates suggest not only that childhood lead exposure may lead to higher violent crime rates, but that a large portion of the decline in the U.S. violent crime rate between 1992 and 2002 may be attributable to reductions in gasoline lead exposure.
In the late 1970s, lead was phased out of gasoline under the Clean Air Act. Sizeable reductions in childhood blood lead levels followed: according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 1976-80 and 1998-2002 average blood lead levels in children aged 1 to 5 decreased from 15.0 to 1.9 micrograms per decileter. The EPA specifically targeted reductions of grams of lead per gallon, and imposed this regulation on petroleum companies, not states. Reyes takes advantage of the resulting state-level variation in the phaseout to identify a link between childhood lead exposure and adult crime. Joining measures of lead exposure from 1955 to 1990 with crime rates twenty years later (from 1985 to 2002), Reyes concludes that lead exposure may have been an important factor in the rise and fall of violent crime over the last thirty years. The net social value of the lead phaseout and the associated crime reductions is large, she writes: the cost of removing the lead from gasoline is ‘approximately twenty times smaller than the full value (including quality of life) of the crime reductions’.
In her state-by-state analysis, Reyes controls for other possible determinants of crime rates, including the unemployment rate and per capita income, the number of prisoners and police, gun laws, beer consumption, welfare generosity, the teen pregnancy rate, the population age distribution, and the effective abortion rate. The results suggest that a 10 percent increase in the grams of lead per gallon of gasoline leads to a 7.9 percent increase in violent crime. These results are subjected to a number of sensitivity tests, with particular attention paid to the importance of certain states, the possibility of a non-linear relationship, and the role of alternate lead measures.
Lead exposure does not appear to affect the murder rate though, a result the author finds ‘not entirely surprising’ given that her analysis omitted the effects of gangs and crack and that it is possible that only substantial exposure to lead would lead to an extreme outcome like murder. Nor does lead exposure appear to affect non-violent property crime. Putting the pieces together, the data suggest that when violent crime rose 83 percent from 1972 to 1992, increases in lead exposure could have been responsible for anywhere from a 28 to 91 percent increase. The growth of prisons is estimated to have produced a 35 percent decrease in violent crime, while a 24 to 87 percent increase remains unexplained.
From 1992 to 2002, violent crime dropped 34 percent. Reyes estimates that declining lead exposure was responsible for a 56 percent decrease in this time period, legalized abortion for another 29 percent decrease, while other factors combined to produce a 23 percent decrease. The remaining 74 percent increase, a sustained rise of about 3 to 5 percent annually, remains unexplained.
The author concludes that lead’s effect on violent crime may be ‘just the tip of the iceberg. Increases in impulsivity, aggression, and ADHD can affect many other behaviors such as substance abuse, suicide, teenage pregnancy, poor academic performance, poor labor market performance, and divorce,’ suggesting that environmental policy can have far reaching effects on social outcomes.
An ungated version of the paper is here. This is the kind of result Tyler Cowen should be telling his readers to ’shout from the rooftops’, and the kind of result anyone who thinks there are inherent racial differences in IQ really needs to take to heart. It’s also, of course, just about the clearest example you can possibly have of intervention by government regulators to correct a market failure bringing about a huge improvement in human welfare. Not that you expect they’ll get much thanks for it.
Other lead links:
- Lead Poisoning - presentation by Jerome A. Paulson. Good overview of the subject including the impact on cognition and mental health.
- NY Times article on the Reyes research
- Data illustrating the astonishing fall in lead poisoning in the US between the 70s and 90s
[1] The same goes for every other country that phased out lead, we just have better research for the US. See here for evidence on the link between lead and international crime trends.
links for 2008-05-14
14-May-08
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People often seem keen to forget the U.N. is a member-driven body, and “the U.N.-bashers who want to blame the organization for “inaction” on these points are the last in line for proposals to give the U.N. more money, and more institutional capacity.”
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Quiggin and Lambert on the anti-Rachel Carson nutters.
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Compares countries by the impact of their policies on development in Africa. Sweden is first, followed by Ireland (boosted by its contribution to UN peacekeeping) and the UK. Japan is a miserable last.
links for 2008-05-13
13-May-08
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“Two days of mini-civil war were sufficient to drown the city in garbage …” Rami Zurayk’s blog might be the best source around for the simmering conflict in Lebanon.
links for 2008-05-08
08-May-08
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Ryan Avent finds it odd: “The sense is that the city owes local property owners absolute deference, yet that local property owners needn’t concern themselves with how their decisions affect the city.”
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“The United States has unwittingly created a new global “entitlement” to U.S.-funded AIDS treatment that currently costs about $2 billion per year and could grow to as much as $12 billion a year by 2016″
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A beautiful map of the United States made by showing only its streets - all 28 million of them.
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Interesting research into the experiences of families living in poverty in both deprived and affluent areas.
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Nice: “Our acquisitive, status-hungry genes may wish for a life more grand, more private, more sweepingly elegant and expansively lonely. But scarcity will have relegated us to a life of conviviality and trust.”
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Bob Kuttner says that the Danish model is too specific to Denmark to be exported wholesale, but the ideas in it are simply too good to ignore.
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Set up not to shelter victims of golf-club beatings but to promote education and community development through the medium of football in Sierra Leone.
links for 2008-05-07
07-May-08
links for 2008-05-06
06-May-08
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Not that surprising: over-reward for gains and under-punish for losses and you’re going to get more recklessness, more speculative bubbles and more fraud.
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Why are cities ignored? I suggest: America’s self image is rural or at least suburban, urban problems get tied up with racial issues, and Republicans have managed to keep cities off the agenda as Democrats have the better solutions
links for 2008-05-02
02-May-08
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Shame about the result, but still, whatta guy: “This is my team, my city and Anfield is my pitch.”
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So many Americans are in prison that despite the fact they can’t vote they are distorting the political system by artificially inflating the population and therefore the influence of prison towns.
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“It used to be that poor people lived in cities and the rich lived in the suburbs. Now it’s the reverse”
The next slums
01-May-08
This FT article about the shift of poverty in the US from inner cities to the suburbs is fascinating as a whole, but one part really jumped out at me:
One reason is that suburban housing stock is ageing and losing its appeal, and is therefore more affordable. “The housing is not built to last 60 years,” says Myron Orfield, a former Minnesota state senator. “They don’t age well and don’t gentrify - they are not beautiful old homes.”
This reminds me of Ed Glaeser’s claim that “American housing is the best in the world”. But it’s probably not even as good as what was being built 50 years before. As Christopher Leinberger observes:
This future is not likely to wear well on suburban housing. Many of the inner-city neighborhoods that began their decline in the 1960s consisted of sturdily built, turn-of-the-century row houses, tough enough to withstand being broken up into apartments, and requiring relatively little upkeep. By comparison, modern suburban houses, even high-end McMansions, are cheaply built. Hollow doors and wallboard are less durable than solid-oak doors and lath-and-plaster walls. The plywood floors that lurk under wood veneers or carpeting tend to break up and warp as the glue that holds the wood together dries out; asphalt-shingle roofs typically need replacing after 10 years. Many recently built houses take what structural integrity they have from drywall—their thin wooden frames are too flimsy to hold the houses up.
I doubt this phenomenon is unique to the US. But I’m curious as to why, when the quality of so many other goods has improved over time, the quality of new housing, at least in this one important respect, has apparently declined. Do people just not value durability anymore? Have relative prices of skilled manual labour and quality materials shifted so much? My guess is it’s mostly the latter.
links for 2008-05-01
01-May-08
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Among other things, “Roughly half of all imprisonments, a staggering 60,000 annually, are now attributable to drugs. Inside prison, drugs are openly traded, and users are driven to crime on release to repay dealers.”