The Engram

The Cumulative Power of Small Effects

2009-05-28T22:55:00.000-07:00

Caplan posted a link to this paper on the "Power of Personality" by Roberts et al. It includes some valuable passages on the history of psychometry:

... Walter Mischel(1968) argued that personality traits had limited utility in predicting behavior because their correlational upper limit appeared to be about .30. Subsequently, this .30 value became derided as the ‘‘personality coefficient.’’ Two conclusions were inferred from this argument. First, personality traits have little predictive validity. Second, if personality traits do not predict much, then other factors, such as the situation, must be responsible for the vast amounts of variance that are left unaccounted for. The idea that personality traits are the validity weaklings of the predictive panoply has been reiterated in unmitigated form to this day (e.g., Bandura, 1999; Lewis, 2001;Paul, 2004; Ross & Nisbett, 1991). In fact, this position is so widely accepted that personality psychologists often apologize for correlations in the range of .20 to .30 (e.g., Bornstein, 1999).
Should personality psychologists be apologetic for their modest validity coefficients? Apparently not, according to Meyer and his colleagues (Meyer et al., 2001), who did psychological science a service by tabling the effect sizes for a wide variety of psychological investigations and placing them side-by-side with comparable effect sizes from medicine and everyday life. These investigators made several important points. First, the modal effect size on a correlational scale for psychology as a whole is between .10 and .40, including that seen in experimental investigations (see also Hemphill, 2003). It appears that the .30 barrier applies to most phenomena in psychology and not just to those in the realm of personality psychology. Second, the very largest effects for any variables in psychology are in the .50 to .60 range, and these are quite rare (e.g., the effect of increasing age on declining speed of information processing in adults). Third, effect sizes for assessment measures and therapeutic interventions in psychology are similar to those found in medicine. It is sobering to see that the effect sizes for many medical interventions—like consuming aspirin to treat heart disease or using chemotherapy to treat breast cancer—translate into correlations of .02 or .03. Taken together, the data presented by Meyer and colleagues make clear that our standards for effect sizes need to be established in light of what is typical for psychology and for other fields concerned with human functioning.

The paper goes on to make an important point about the cumulative power of small effects:

... Moreover, when attempting to predict these critical life outcomes, even relatively small effects can be important because of their pragmatic effects and because of their cumulative effects across a person’s life (Abelson, 1985; Funder, 2004; Rosenthal, 1990).In terms of practicality, the À.03 association between taking aspirin and reducing heart attacks provides an excellent example. In one study, this surprisingly small association resulted in 85 fewer heart attacks among the patients of 10,845 physicians (Rosenthal, 2000).

I have heard effect sizes around the 0.2 level from reseach in psychology and sociology dismissed by engineers as "useless". Medical practitioners are not so cavalier. An effect size at the 0.05 level in the field of finance would be a powerful money making machine.

China, America, and Abortion

2009-05-28T22:28:00.000-07:00

China is the country of the One Child Policy, a policy that has been in place for a generation. From that, you might expect that Chinese people are more positively disposed toward abortion than Americans are. Au contraire. The World Values Survey asked people in America and China to report their opinion of abortion on a 10 point scale, with 1 as "Always Justified" and 10 as "Never Justified". The American distribution of replies has three humps at 5, 1, and 10 (in that order): the middle and the two extremes. Replies in China, on the other hand, lump overwhelmingly at one end: "Never Justified".

The Emergence of China in the Global Economy

2009-05-25T00:05:00.000-07:00

In mid 2004 Lester Thurow gave a talk on the emergence of China in the global economy. He raises a number of important points. Half way through the talk, he dissects the growth numbers. China has a bottom up reporting system and a top down promotion system. Administrators advance in the ranks by posting good numbers. This is a recipe for over reporting. Unsurprisingly there is a mismatch between the amount of economic activity reported to Beijing and the amount measured through electricity use. The rule of thumb is that an increase in GDP of 1% requires an increase in electricity use of 2%. Japan is the most efficient. It can squeeze a 1% increase in GDP from a 1.7% increase in electricity, but that is only because, since the energy shortage of the 70's, Japan has systematically shut down industries, such as the production of aluminium, that require a lot of electricity. The amount of electrical use in China suggests a rate of growth of about 4% to 6%, rather than the 8% to 10% that gets reported. 4% is a very healthy growth rate. Most finance ministers would kill for a number like that, but the difference between 5% and 10% is significant if you project those numbers over 50 years.

This brings us to why press freedoms are so restricted in China when compared to the Hong Kong or Taiwan. The Party's legitimacy is based on performance. If the numbers don't look good, the Party is in trouble. With a free press comes greater third party review. That's a threat. It follows that we will see little movement in the direction of greater press freedoms until the Party can find a different way to sustain its legitimacy. China is a big country. The Party could use geography to their advantage. Chinese now can not move freely. A system of internal passports restricts the movement of people from one place to the next. Relaxation of those restrictions would allow people to move away from administrators they see as less legitimate toward ones they see as more.

China vs. United States: Economy

2009-05-24T04:37:00.000-07:00

Source: Mint.com

China vs. United States: People

2009-05-24T04:33:00.001-07:00

Source: Mint.com

China vs. United States: Geography

2009-05-24T04:29:00.000-07:00

Source: Mint.com

China vs. United States: Military

2009-05-24T04:26:00.001-07:00

Source: Mint.com

Eurozone GDP

2009-05-23T20:11:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal has an interactive map of Eurozone GDP performance by quarter. Countries such as Cyprus, Greece, and Malta have fared the best. Previous high flyers such as Ireland and Luxembourg have fared the worst. Slovokia experienced a stomach-churning 11% decline in the first quarter. Caplan has written about how bad times beget bad policy. Let's hope he's wrong.

Source: WSJ

Happy Women by Ideal Family Size

2009-05-23T18:29:00.000-07:00

The GSS asks the question:

All in all, what do you think is the ideal number of  children for a family to have? Please just write a number in the box below.

The answers range from 0 to 7. I truncated the graph to 4 because the answers for 5 through 7 attract extremely low N-sizes, which produces flakey results. The most popular answer is 2, but we can see a clear pattern of greater happiness among women who view larger famlies as ideal. The marginal return in happiness for each additional child above 2 is small. The women who think 0 children is the ideal are the least likely to report being very happy and the most likely to report being none too happy.

Source: GSS

Declining Female Happiness

2009-05-23T05:45:00.000-07:00

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness

Betsey Stevenson, Justin Wolfers
NBER Working Paper No. 14969
Issued in May 2009

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging -- one with higher subjective well-being for men.

Source: NBER

An ungated copy can be found [here]

Declining Female Happiness: The Graphs

2009-05-23T05:05:00.000-07:00

The first graph comes from the paper by Stevenson and Wolfers. The second one comes from the GSS. They both display the same data.

Lluís Domènech i Montaner

2009-05-22T02:02:00.000-07:00

Tyler was tweaking Gaudi and offered Lluís Domènech i Montaner as an alternate.

Yummy.

Red Vote, Blue Vote

2009-05-20T23:20:00.001-07:00

[click to enlarge]

If we look at regions that relate to Red States and Blue States, the relationship matches up with the stereotypes we often find in pop culture (which is disproportionately produced in Blue States.) If you look at the state level data, the relationship weakens, as the averages of Red States and Blue States converge. At the level of individual voters, the relationship both disappears and re-emerges. The average Kerry voter scored no different than the average Bush voter (6.48 vs. 6.49 -- Bush voters were microscopically ahead.) But the variation among Kerry voters was greater than the variation among Bush voters (a standard deviation of 1.97 for Kerry vs. a standard deviation of 1.79 for Bush.) The Kerry distribution had fat tails. At the top end, there were more high scoring Democrats than Republicans. Blacks filled out the ranks at the bottom of the Democratic distribution.

IQ by Region

2009-05-20T07:10:00.000-07:00

WORDSUM is a proxy for IQ in the General Social Survey. Like IQ tests, few do very well at it. Few do very poor at it. Most are somewhere in between. We can sort the results of the WORDSUM quiz by region. The results are much like you would expext from what you see on prime time TV and at the movies. Brains are over represented in the Northeast and West Coast. Folkwise cowboys roam the Moutain West. The Southern regions show an over representation at the other end of the scale. This pattern does not disappear if you look at whites alone, although the magnitude of the brain scarcity in the South declines.

Nonsense Multiplied is Still Nonsense.

2009-05-19T00:57:00.000-07:00

Students of rhetorical fallacy learn about the argumentum ad populum. Democracies are often practitoners of it. Sometimes it is important to take a step back and remember that opinion polls are often an aggregation of error, not the stenography of truth. In 1993, the NORC asked Americans five questions about science. The results ranged from bad to worse. About a quarter did not believe that antibiotics kill bacteria or do not kill viruses. About a third believed that humans make all radioactivity. More than half believed that astrology has some scientific basis, that humans did not develop from some earlier sort of animal, and that all man made chemicals cause cancer in sufficient quantity.

20 countries took the test, which included these questions in additon to seven others. 13 other countires scored worse.

Happy People Are Less Likely to Feel Sad

2009-05-19T00:37:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it's just good to know that the GSS is not just random nonsense.

Democrats More Likely Than Republicans to Blame "The Jews"

2009-05-18T17:06:00.000-07:00

The Boston Review reports the data:

Interestingly, Democrats were especially prone to blaming Jews: while 32 percent of Democrats accorded at least moderate blame, only 18.4 percent of Republicans did so (a statistically significant difference). This difference is somewhat surprising given the presumed higher degree of racial tolerance among liberals and the fact that Jews are a central part of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition. Are Democrats simply more likely to “blame everything” thus casting doubt on whether the anti-Jewish attitudes are real? Not at all. We also asked how much “individuals who took out loans and mortgages they could not afford” were to blame on the same five-point scale. In this case, Democrats were less likely than Republicans to assign moderate or greater blame.

The story does not give us a link to the original study with the raw data (a search through Google Scholar using the authors' names yeilds nothing), does not tell us how jews responded, nor does it tell us how people assesed the blame of other ethnic or religious groups. Nevertheless, it is striking that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to blame "the Jews" for the financial crisis -- by a wide margin.

The General Social Survey asked respondents to asses their feelings toward jews using a thermometer from 0 to 100. We can sort those assesments by party identification.

The middle column reports the responses of Independents. The left wing of three columns reflect the opinions of people who lean Democratic. The right wing of three columns reflect the opinions people who lean Republican. We can see that "50" was the most popular response by a plurality among all of the catagories of political identification. Republicans, however, were more likely to report warmer feelings toward jews (greter than 50.) Democratic respondents were more likely to report colder feelings (less than 50.)

The two lines of evidence point in the same direction.

One might say this is just a reflection of black anti-semitism. Blacks identify with the Democratic Party at a rate of around 80%. But if you exclude blacks from the mix, the results are still largely the same. Republicans are still more likely to report warm feelings. Democrats are still more likely to report cold ones.

Source: Boston Review

Source: GSS

Headless or Heartless

2009-05-17T03:57:00.000-07:00

We've heard the quote before--often attributed to Churchill--, "If a man is not a socialist at the age of 20, he proves he has no heart. If a man remains a socialist at the age of 30, he proves he has no head." Substitute "liberal" for "socialist" and the data confirm a trend: people grow more conservative as they grow older. According to a very large data set compiled by the NORC during more than three decades, people are more likely to call themselves "slightly conservative", "conservative", or "extremely conservative" than they are to call themselves "slightly liberal", "liberal", or "extremely liberal". It is only among the youngest age cohort, from 18-30, that the reverse is true.

In 1990 the average American was 32.9 years old. As of 2007, the Census Bureau reported that the average American was 36.6 old -- well past the inflection point at which the balance of opinion flips from liberal to conservative.

Source: GSS

Source: Census Bureau

The China Model

2009-05-16T03:15:00.000-07:00

Look at Singapore. Look at Hong Kong. Look at Taiwan. You will get a sense of where China will be 30+ years from now (assuming a constant -- and explosive -- 8% growth rate, the mainland will be where Hong Kong is today in 36 years) . The rise of China will be one of the biggest themes of the 21st Century. To get a good sense of where China is going, it is important to get a clear picture of where China is today. Glasshouse Forum recently hosted a debate on the nature of the China model of development. The conclusion seems to be the sociological equivalent of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. China is change. To the extent we know the direction and speed of China, its precise model is hard to pin down. To the extent we have a clear picture of the model, we loose sight of how things were done yesterday and how they will be done tomorrow. If you look at China over the last 50 years, the Chinese Way will differ from the Way you see if you look at only the last 30. The Way you see over the last 30 years (since Deng) will differ from the Way of the last 20 years -- or 10.

The discussion raised some important points on how the government in China gains and sustains legitimacy. In the West, this takes the form of elections. In China, this takes the form of "performance legitimacy". Goals are set in Beijing or the provincial capitals and the rise or fall of administrators depends on achieving those goals. Opinion polls were mentioned in the discussion as a substitute for elections. Legitimacy is easy when the economy is booming. The true test comes during hard times. Times have been very good for very long. But China, with the Party at its helm, was also able to weather the Asian Crisis of '97.

Wang Shaoguang urged, borrowing from Seymour Martin Lipset, that a government is legitimate if there is no workably better alternative, pointing to Russia to illustrate his point. Democracy may be feasible, in this way of thinking, but it is not necessarily better. You can imagine governments better than the one in Beijing, but they are not necessarily feasible. But what about Taiwan? Taipei is now home to a democracy that has at least two passionately opposed political parties who have peacefully ceded power to each other at least once. Democracy works there in a way that would be recognized in the West -- even under conditions of extreme stress (the subsequently peaceful transition of 2004 occurred even after mutual recriminations of assassination and conspiracy.) Prosperity in Taiwan is higher than on the mainland by a full order of magnitude times two and is therefore arguably "better" on a performance basis.

There seems to be a reluctance to embrace Fukuyama's End of History -- that liberal democracy is inevitable. There seems to be a resistance to radical transformation. Given the history of China in the 20th Century, this in understandable. China's road to capitalism was a marginal one, not shock therapy in the Eastern European mould. Production in excess of the Plan was sold on the open market at a profit until private production dwarfed and consumed the public sector. The Party could use geography to their advantage. China is a big country. Allowing greater geographic mobility would be in keeping with a trend of marginal improvements that could shore up any slack in legitimacy. People unhappy with the performance of administrators in their city or province could pack up their bags and move to the greener pastures, voting with their feet rather than by ballot box.

Source: Glasshouse Forum

Wolfram Alpha - Google Trends

2009-05-15T04:40:00.000-07:00

Wolfram Alpha is due to be unveiled on Friday, May 15 at 7:00pm Central Time. (Today!) Google Trends reports that "Worlfam Alpha" as a search phrase is picking up. There was an initial spike in interest in March. Interest fell, and is back again here on the eve of the unveiling. Strangely, Google trends also reports that the search phrase is most popular in Romania, Germany, and Ireland (in that order.)

Busting the Moon Hoax Conspiracy Theory

2009-05-13T23:24:00.001-07:00

According to a poll done by Gallup in early 2001, 6% of Americans (about 1 in every 16) believe that the Moon landing was a hoax. I recalling being asked by a co-worker if I thought men had actually been to the Moon after Fox aired it’s TV special. It's the sort of question that can catch you off guard. My immediate response was, "I had an uncle who was involved with the space program. Either we went to the Moon, or he was a liar. I tend to believe the former, rather than the latter." I also suggested that doubters could use a telescope to see the remains of the Apollo mission. Mythbusters did an episode on the Moon Hoax conspiracy theory, in which they dissects and refuted some of the more common arguments that conspiracy theorists use to make their case: the photographs that would supposedly require more than one source of light; the shadows that don’t align; the flag that supposedly flaps in a breeze; the footage of space walks that could have been made by over cranking the film; that the crispness of the boot prints requires moisture.

The result? Shadows that don’t align can be accounted for by the contour of the landscape alone. Photographs that supposedly could only be made with multiple sources of light can be made with only one. After being jostled, a flag in a vacuum will actually flap more than one in air. Video at normal speed of a man walking in a space suit on a Vomit Commet matches the footage from the Apollo mission better than anything that over cranking can produce. And the rough surface of Moon dirt creates crisp boot prints under a condition of a vacuum. The episode ends with Adam and Jamie going to a telescope and shining a laser at reflectors that were left on the surface of the Moon by the Apollo mission.

Source: Gallup Organization

Source: Mythbusters

The UK Over Time

2009-05-13T20:56:00.000-07:00

While looking for a time series graph of unmployment in Britian, I stumbled over this paper from House of Commons Library published in 1999. It's a collection of 100 year time series graphs for a wide variety of economic and social tends. Here are a few of the dozens of graphs from the paper.

Source: House of Commons Library

IQ and Epilepsy Drugs

2009-04-21T19:39:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has an article about how valproate, an anti-epilepsy drug, reduces the IQs of children with mothers who took the drug during pregnancy.

Pregnant women who took a popular epilepsy drug, also widely used to treat migraines, pain and psychiatric disorders, had children whose I.Q. scores were significantly lower than those whose mothers took a different antiseizure medication, a new study has found.

[...]

Three-year-olds whose mothers had taken valproate during pregnancy had I.Q. scores that were nine points lower on average than children whose mothers had taken a different antiseizure medication, lamotrigine. The I.Q. scores of toddlers whose mothers took valproate were also lower than scores of children whose mothers took two other antiseizure medications, phenytoin and carbamazepine.

[...]

Cognitive assessments were conducted in 258 2- and 3-year-olds born to 252 mothers, of whom 53 had taken valproate.

Over all, children’s I.Q. scores were strongly related to mothers’ I.Q. scores, except among the children of mothers treated with valproate, the study found.

At age 3, children exposed to valproate in utero had a mean I.Q. of 92, compared with 101 for children exposed to lamotrigine, 99 for those exposed to phenytoin, and 98 for those exposed to carbamazepine, the study found.

A nine point reduction is a large effect -- three fifths of a standard deviation. Perhaps valproate could be used on mice to help unravel the neuro-anatomy of IQ. Dose some pregnant mice with valproate. Dose others with a placebo. Compare the cognitive function of the resulting offspring. If the offspring of the mice dosed with valproate display cognitive deficits (reduced ability to learn a maze, for example), then compare the brains of the experimental mice with the control mice to see what brian structure is missing or has been degraded.

Source: New York Times

Economic Freedom

2009-04-21T17:44:00.001-07:00

James Gwartney has been compiling a cross country list of economic freedom for around thirty years now -- enough data to come to some robust conclusions. Countries that are more economically free are more prosperous. The correlation is causative. Compare Argentina with Chile. Under Peron, Argentina went from a first world country to a third world country. Under Pinochet, Chile went from third world to first. Compare West Germany with East Germany, South Korea with North Korea, Hong Kong with China, America with Canada. And so on and so forth. Time and again, history has thrown us the next best thing to controlled experiments. The conclusion is monotonous in its regularity. Freedom produces prosperity.

Gwartney’s index includes five clusters of components: size of government, legal structure, free trade, sound money, and credit-labor-and- business regulation. In his presentation at Cato, Gwartney reports that legal structure -- respect for property rights and enforcement of contracts by independent courts -- is the component most strongly related to prosperity.

Three cheers for the rule of law.

Source: Economic Freedom of the World

Genes and Politics

2009-04-21T17:18:00.000-07:00

Poland's Kaczynski brothers.

City Journal has an article by James Q. Wilson about DNA and political outlook. There is evidence that genes rather than experiences account for a sizable chunk of the differences in political outlook.

Three political science professors—John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John Hibbing—have studied political attitudes among a large number of twins in America and Australia. They measured the attitudes with something called the Wilson-Patterson Scale (I am not the Wilson after whom it was named), which asks whether a respondent agrees or disagrees with 28 words or phrases, such as “death penalty,” “school prayer,” “pacifism,” or “gay rights.” They then compared the similarity of the responses among identical twins with the similarity among fraternal twins. They found that, for all 28 taken together, the identical twins did indeed agree with each other more often than the fraternal ones did—and that genes accounted for about 40 percent of the difference between the two groups. On the other hand, the answers these people gave to the words “Democrat” or “Republican” had a very weak genetic basis. In politics, genes help us understand fundamental attitudes—that is, whether we are liberal or conservative—but do not explain what party we choose to join.

In addition, there is evidence that genes explain much of the reason why some vote and others don't.

Genes also influence how frequently we vote. Voting has always puzzled scholars: How is it rational to wait in line on a cold November afternoon when there is almost no chance that your ballot will make any difference? Apparently, people who vote often feel a strong sense of civic duty or like to express themselves. But who are these people? James Fowler, Laura Baker, and Christopher Dawes studied political participation in Los Angeles by comparing voting among identical and fraternal twins. Their conclusion: among registered voters, genetic factors explain about 60 percent of the difference between those who vote and those who do not.

Source: City Journal

Genetic Variation in Political Participation

2009-04-21T16:21:00.001-07:00

American Political Science Review (2008), 102:233-248 Cambridge University Press

doi:10.1017/S0003055408080209

Research Article

Genetic Variation in Political Participation

JAMES H. FOWLER, LAURA A. BAKER and CHRISTOPHER T. DAWES

^a1University of California, San Diego

^a2University of Southern California

^a3University of California, San Diego

Abstract

The decision to vote has puzzled scholars for decades. Theoretical models predict little or no variation in participation in large population elections and empirical models have typically accounted for only a relatively small portion of individual-level variance in turnout behavior. However, these models have not considered the hypothesis that part of the variation in voting behavior can be attributed to genetic effects. Matching public voter turnout records in Los Angeles to a twin registry, we study the heritability of political behavior in monozygotic and dizygotic twins. The results show that a significant proportion of the variation in voting turnout can be accounted for by genes. We also replicate these results with data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and show that they extend to a broad class of acts of political participation. These are the first findings to suggest that humans exhibit genetic variation in their tendency to participate in political activities.

Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?

2009-04-21T16:19:00.000-07:00

American Political Science Review (2005), 99:2:153-167 American Political Science Association

ARTICLES

Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmited?

JOHN R. ALFORD, CAROLYN L. FUNK and JOHN R. HIBBING
^a1 Rice University
^a2 Virginia Commonwealth University
^a3 University of Nebraska

Abstract

We test the possibility that political attitudes and behaviors are the result of both environmental and genetic factors. Employing standard methodological approaches in behavioral genetics—specifically, comparisons of the differential correlations of the attitudes of monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins—we analyze data drawn from a large sample of twins in the United States, supplemented with findings from twins in Australia. The results indicate that genetics plays an important role in shaping political attitudes and ideologies but a more modest role in forming party identification; as such, they call for finer distinctions in theorizing about the sources of political attitudes. We conclude by urging political scientists to incorporate genetic influences, specifically interactions between genetic heritability and social environment, into models of political attitude formation.

AP Econ Quiz

2009-04-19T17:06:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has a quiz with questions drawn from past AP Economics tests.

Most of the “correct” answers presuppose a Keynesian framework.

Source: New York Times

Genes or Experience: Experienced Opinion

2009-04-16T10:11:00.000-07:00

People with more experience are more likely to believe that genes are more important than experiences in determining personality.

Genes or Experience: Popular and Educated Opinion

2009-04-16T09:41:00.000-07:00

1-in-4 Americans believe that it is genes rather than experiences that are the biggest determiner of personality.

Does that change with years of schooling? Not as much as I expected.

We can safely ignore the results of the respondents who had less than 8 years of schooling. The sample sizes are too small. (There were only 12 respondents in the "7 years of schooling" camp. The other, shorter lengths of schooling had even fewer). Above that, the ratio largely moves in a range from 1-in-5 to a little over 1-in-4. The outliers can be found at the ends of the range of education. People with only high school education are more likely to believe in genes. People with post-graduate education, less so. People with 19 years were the least likely to believe in the power of genes. Tenured radicals. Retirement looms.

Source: GSS

Two, Three, Many Neandethal Groups!

2009-04-15T15:52:00.001-07:00

ScienceDaily (Apr. 15, 2009) — The Neanderthals inhabited a vast geographical area extending from Europe to western Asia and the Middle East 30,000 to 100,000 years ago. Now, a group of researchers are questioning whether or not the Neanderthals constituted a homogenous group or separate sub-groups (between which slight differences could be observed).
.
Paleoanthropological studies based on morphological skeletal evidence have offered some support for the existence of three different sub-groups: one in Western Europe, one in southern Europe and another in the Levant.

Researchers Virginie Fabre, Silvana Condemi and Anna Degioanni from the CNRS Laboratory of Anthropology (UMR 6578) at the University of Marseille, France, have given further consideration to the question of diversity of Neanderthals by studying the genetic structure of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and by analyzing the genetic variability, modeling different scenarios. The study was possible thanks to the publication, since 1997, of 15 mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences (the mtDNa is maternally transmitted) that originated from 12 Neanderthals.

The new study confirms the presence of three separate sub-groups and suggests the existence of a fourth group in western Asia. According to the authors, the size of the Neanderthal population was not constant over time and a certain amount of migration occurred among the sub-groups. The variability among the Neanderthal population is interpreted to be an indirect consequence of the particular climatic conditions on their territorial extension during the entire middle Pleistocene time period.

Family: East and West

2009-04-15T07:59:00.001-07:00

Table One

Table Two

We have all heard that that Chinese culture is Confucian culture, and Confucian culture is filial, whereas Western culture, in contrast, is individual. Right?

Not so fast.

The World Values Survey asked respondents in China, Taiwan, Singapore, and America to rate the importance of family on a five point scale from “Very Important” to “Not Important at All”. I used the data sets from these countries from the latter part of the 90’s and/or the early part of the New Century. (Click Table One to enlarge)

Guess what? Nearly everone in America thinks that family is “Very Important” -- 95%. Although “Very Important” is also the most popular answer in China, the level is only 70%.

Why is this?

One interesting pattern that stands out is Singapore, which is predominately Chinese but part of the Anglosphere. Filial concern there is at American levels (i.e., very, very high). In fact, if you look at a wide variety of Anglosphere counties -- Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand -- the levels are all above 90%. (Click Table Two to enlarge).

Anglosphere beliefs are more profilial than Sinosphere ones (except where the two overlap).

Library Beautiful

2009-04-14T08:56:00.001-07:00

Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge, England

Land Reform in China

2009-04-14T07:14:00.000-07:00

Most people in China live in rural areas. Although more and more people are moving to the cities, only 40% live in urban areas. As the countryside goes, so goes the nation. And the countryside is trailing. While both have grown, the growth in wealth over the last 30 years has been faster in the cities than in the countryside. Country folk now earn less than a third of their urban counterparts.

In China, land legislation is Georgist. The State claims to own the land. Framers lease the land from the State under 30 year contracts. Since these leases can be sold, they are worth something, and can, in theory, be used to secure a loan. But there is a problem. Farmers are reluctant to make investments in their land when the land can be seized by the local cadre and redistributed in the interest of equality, a process called “readjustment“. Prosterman estimates that there is about $3 trillion worth of “dead capital” in rural China -- land that is not benefiting from the use of capital improvements such as electric pumps and greenhouses, which could make the land more productive and farmers wealthier.

At the outset of his presentation, Prosterman gives a thumbnail sketch of land reform in China. Few people remember that from 1949 to 1956, before collectivization and the Great Leap Famine, the Party made good on their promise to recognize and enforce the full private ownership of peasant farmers. Perhaps it is time for the Party to return to its roots.

Europe’s Best Kept Secret: Portuguese Drug Decriminalization.

2009-04-13T04:00:00.000-07:00

In late 2001, Portugal decriminalized the possession of all drugs; not just cannabis, but also other street drugs such as heroin, cocaine, LSD and so on and so forth. That was then, this is now. What has happened since? The important point to take away from Glen Greenwald’s recent talk at CATO is what didn’t happen. Predictions of dire consequence did not play out. Opposition to the decriminalization among the various major political factions in Portugal is now virtually non-existent. In fact, the results have been so boring that few outside the country even know of Portugal’s experiment.

An other issue raised (yet not fully developed) in the talk is the extent to which international law (treaty obligations, in this case) obstructs efforts at more localized drug law reform.

Portugal is the dog that didn’t bark. Perhaps our keepers in Washington should take note.

Who Has Contributed More?

2009-04-13T02:05:00.000-07:00

UNESCO keeps a list of World Heritage Sites. The list provides us with a way to determine which populations have contributed more to Civilization while side stepping the accusation of Euro-centric bias. (If the UN is not a sorce for World Opinion™, nothing is.)

Observe that the distribution of natural sites is more evenly distributed among the regions than the cultural ones are. This provides us with a rough baseline for comparing populations and their cultural contributions. People don’t create natural sites. Nature does. The people who live there can not claim credit for having created them. Cultural sites, on the other hand, are man made. People can claim credit.

The regional ranking of world cultural sites is as follows:

Euro-America > Asia-Pacific > Caribo-America > Arabia > Africa.

The West beats the East. The Old World beats the New. Everyone beats Africa.

Why More Girls Than Boys Are Entering College.

2009-04-12T05:28:00.001-07:00

More girls than boys are going to college. Conservatives commentators claim this is due to the feminization of education. Guys either opt out because schools are hostile to them, and/or girls are at an advantage because schools speak their language. But which is cause and which is effect? Are there fewer males because schools are more feminized, or are schools more feminized because there are fewer males? More likely, it’s largely a combination of two other factors: the greater variation of intelligence among males than among females, and falling entry requirements.

Assume two normal distributions, two bell shaped curves: blue and green. They both have the same average. One has more variation than the other. At the tails, there are more blues than greens. In the middle, there are more greens than blues. If you bisect the overlapping bell shaped curves at some point above the averages there will be more blues than greens. If you bisect the curves at some point below the averages, there will be more greens than blues.

Think of the different methods of bisecting the distributions as falling entry requirements. Think of the wide-and-low blue distribution as boys, and the narrow-and-tall green distribution as girls. More and more people are entering college. Entry requirements are falling. We have moved from an era when more boys were qualified to an era when more girls are qualified.

Go East, Young Man.

2009-04-12T03:10:00.001-07:00

There are 1.3 billion people in China, 0.3 billion in America. Somehow this led me to assume there are more students of higher education in China than America. Not so. America has more. (At least they did as of 2002.) This is not likely to remain. Enrollment levels have been rising rapidly in China, slowly in America. (Levels actually fell slightly in the late 90s). China will overtake America in number of students at institutions of higher learning, if they haven’t already.

Enrollment levels in China since 1980

Enrollment levels in American since 1980

Source: Nationmaster

Library Beautiful

2009-04-11T03:17:00.001-07:00

Suzzallo Library, Seattle, Washington, USA

English Country House

2009-04-11T02:27:00.001-07:00

A Cartoon History of the Financial Crisis

2009-04-11T02:15:00.000-07:00

Flowing Data is a great site for those of us who can never get enough of the visual display of quantitative information. Here is a video that vividly displays nuts and bolts of the financial crisis.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Health Care Redux

2009-04-10T12:18:00.000-07:00

Most Americans believe that the nation’s health care system is in need of substantial changes. But there is less support for completely rebuilding the health care system than there was in April 1993, during the early stage of the Clinton administration’s unsuccessful effort to revamp health care.

Health care reform failed in 1993. Support for reform is lower now than then.With an eye to the current round of health care reform, I’ll let you finish the syllogism.

Source: Pew

Noam Chomsky: A Rebuttal

2009-04-10T10:27:00.000-07:00

In addition to the monies gleaned from the American War Machine as a professor at MIT, gadfly and self described "parasite" Noam Chomsky has made a tidy sum for himself from a lifetime of assailing Uncle Sam for being one of the largest, if not the greatest, sources of terror in the world today. If we should subscribe to this way of thinking, then the history of the 20th Century would make little sense. Take the regions of the world in the last half of the 20th Century, rank them according to the extent of Uncle Sam’s intervention, by either foreign direct investment or arms and soldiers. Europe would be on top, Africa would be on bottom. Whether you measure the results by GDP per capita or the UN’s Human Development Index, conditions are worst where America has intervened the least, best where Uncle Sam has intervened the most.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same. (With Some Exceptions)

2009-04-10T01:41:00.001-07:00

Wealth in ~1500
Wealth in ~1900

Wealth in ~1960

Wealth in ~1990

Wealth in ~2000

Wealth in ~2015

Here is a series of maps that display the distribution of wealth by country over time. The sizes of the countries on the maps have been adjusted to reflect the percent of world wealth. Thus France is larger than Brazil on the maps, even though, geographically, Brazil is larger.

We can see that Europe has had a good run for the last 500 years. China and India, less so. I don’t trust the numbers for the New World circa 1500. Charles Mann has made the case that the field of pre-Columbian studies has changed dramatically in the last quarter century. I don’t think the reference books in the field of economic history have had a chance to catch up.

Projecting forward to 2015, it looks like the distribution of wealth in the Old World will look more and more like it did back in 1500. The more things change, the more they stay the same. India and Africa are expected to underperform compared to their relative performance 500 years ago. Room for improvement? Cause for optimism?

Worldmapper includes this little statistical gem with its map of wealth in 1900:

In 1900 the world[’s] total [wealth] was US$2 trillion when expressed in 1990 purchasing power parity.

2 trillion dollars! The bailout alone will cost more than that this year, not to mention the price tag on the new and ambitious social programs that Uncle Sam has in store for us. One thing we can say is that the world is a lot wealthier now than it was 100 years ago -- a lot. The relative distribution of wealth reflected in the series of maps overlooks the growth in absolute terms. There is a lot more wealth around that can be safely wasted.

Or can it?

Source: Worldmapper

Rock of Ages

2009-04-10T00:30:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia has a list of verified oldest people.

Among the top 100 verified oldest people:

- Half the population of the world is women, but there are more women than men on the list of verified oldest at a rate of 9 to 1.

- 1 in 20 people on Earth is American, but most on the list of verified oldest come from America.

- About 1 in 8 Americans is black, but among the top 10 verified oldest Americans, four are black.

- About 1 in 3 Americans live in the South, but among the top 10 verified oldest Americans, more than half are from the South.

Note to self: work harder at being a southern, black, American female.

Source: Wikipedia

Borat's Great Grandmother?

2009-04-09T23:06:00.001-07:00

In August of 1997, Jeanne Calment of France died at the age of 122 -- the oldest verified person on record. Mdme. Calment may have a challenger in one Sohan Dosova of Kazakhstan.

Meet Sohan Dosova - the newly found treasure of Kazakhstan. She is 130 years old, at least she is according to her documents. The Soviet passport issued in the early 1980s states that Sohan Dosova was born in the Karaganda region on 27 March 1879.

Wikipedia has a list of verified oldest people.

130 is considerably older than any other contender for the award of Oldest Person. Excluding Sohan Dosova, the top five ages are 122, 120[?], 119, 117, and 117. Notice that the other contenders for Oldest Person are all within two years of the next person on the list. There is a whopping 8 year gap between Dosova and Clement. Likely there was some exaggeration in Dosova’s age. We don’t have her birth certificate, only a passport that dates from the early 1980s. That’s about 25 years ago. If she claims to be 130 now, she would have been claiming an age over 100 then -- something that would have been a feather in her hat even at that time. Even so, she might be a real contender.

If she really is 130, shouldn’t she have great-great-grandchildren, or even great-great-great-grandchildren by now? Assuming generations of 25 years, there should be five generations of Dosovas. The article says her oldest granddaughter is 53. If Sohan had a child at 20 and that child had a daughter at the age of 25, that would make Sohan 98, not 130. A better estimate of her age could be reconstructed by looking at her family tree and working backwards from known and recorded birth dates.

Is there a way to verify a living person’s age directly? Telomeres shorten with each cell division. And the article says she still has one tooth left.

Source: BBC

"Distortionary and Dangerous"

2009-04-06T22:59:00.000-07:00

"If you remember only one thing I say -- this is actually the most important thing to remember -- enlarging a budget deficit is an especially distortionary and dangerous form of taxation."

Why? Because you can’t escape the laws of arithmetic. Because public borrowing is deferred taxation (with interest), and the Devil of Taxation that you know here and now is not as bad as the Devil of Taxation that you don’t know at some point in the uncertain future.

The relevant commentary begins at 9:47

What's the Matter with Kansas?

2009-04-06T22:38:00.001-07:00

The New York Times has a multimedia map of unemployment rates by county. Organized this way, it is easy to see how hard the downturn has hit the West Coast. In contrast, the Flyover States are sitting pretty. “What’s the matter with Kansas?” Full employment, that’s what.

Source: New York Times

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

2009-04-05T23:18:00.000-07:00

(Click images to enlarge)

Source: New York Times

Interiors

2009-04-05T17:41:00.000-07:00

Real estate listings can be a great source of ideas for interior design and decoration.

Polished marble floors, rococo wall sconces, crown moulding.

Raised panel wainscoting, pilaster columns, entablature.

Now that’s the way to fill the vertiginous space created by one of those vaulted ceilings that were ever so common among 80s vintage houses.

Note the use of light and lighting.

When, exactly, did marble counter tops become mandatory? At least we can say that one legacy of the Great Housing Bubble will be an abundance of fabulous kitchens. Every cloud has its marble lining. How much you want to bet that the appliances are brushed steel?

Heads, I Win. Tails, the Taxpayer Loses.

2009-04-05T14:33:00.000-07:00

Joe Stiglitz disects the Geither Plan and finds it lacking.

The government plan in effect involves insuring almost all losses. Since the private investors are spared most losses, then they primarily “value” their potential gains. This is exactly the same as being given an option.

Consider an asset that has a 50-50 chance of being worth either zero or $200 in a year’s time. The average “value” of the asset is $100. Ignoring interest, this is what the asset would sell for in a competitive market. It is what the asset is “worth.” Under the plan by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the government would provide about 92 percent of the money to buy the asset but would stand to receive only 50 percent of any gains, and would absorb almost all of the losses. Some partnership!

Assume that one of the public-private partnerships the Treasury has promised to create is willing to pay $150 for the asset. That’s 50 percent more than its true value, and the bank is more than happy to sell. So the private partner puts up $12, and the government supplies the rest — $12 in “equity” plus $126 in the form of a guaranteed loan.

If, in a year’s time, it turns out that the true value of the asset is zero, the private partner loses the $12, and the government loses $138. If the true value is $200, the government and the private partner split the $74 that’s left over after paying back the $126 loan. In that rosy scenario, the private partner more than triples his $12 investment. But the taxpayer, having risked $138, gains a mere $37.

Even in an imperfect market, one shouldn’t confuse the value of an asset with the value of the upside option on that asset.

Stiglitz concisely diagnoses the problem:

The main problem is not a lack of liquidity. If it were, then a far simpler program would work: just provide the funds without loan guarantees. The real issue is that the banks made bad loans in a bubble and were highly leveraged. They have lost their capital, and this capital has to be replaced.

In a recent podcast of EconTalk, Allan Melzer suggested an alternate approach. Have the banks raise the money they need on the open market while Uncle Sam pledges to match the money raised dollar-for-dollar. If a bank can not raise the money they need, they are insolvent, need to be shut down, and sold off. This way, the taxpayer would only be on the hook if a bank has at least one foot on the ground.

The dead wood needs to be cleared out of the system, not piled on the backs of the taxpayer for years to come.

Getting a Lag Up?

2009-04-04T00:16:00.001-07:00

(Click image to enlarge)

Calculated Risk has a graph that shows the history of unemployment rates for the last fifty years or so.

Sure enough, unemployment is a lagging indicator: the rate never falls until a recovery is underway. The pattern that surprises, however, is how quickly the rates fell in the 60s, 70s, and 80s after the economy turned the corner into recovery. It’s only in the last 20 years (two recessions) that lag has been so long. What changed in the economy around 20 years ago that would account for this growth in the time lag?

Trillions

2009-04-02T18:44:00.000-07:00

Uncle Sam has put the taxpayer on the hook for an amount nearly as large as the economy itself in just under six months.

The U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion, an amount that approaches the value of everything produced in the country last year, to stem the longest recession since the 1930s. New pledges from the Fed, the Treasury Department and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. include $1 trillion for the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to help investors buy distressed loans and other assets from U.S. banks. The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. and 14 times the $899.8 billion of currency in circulation. The nation’s gross domestic product was $14.2 trillion in 2008.

Source: Bloomberg

Am I wrong to feel uneasy about this? If America were a firm with shares trading on a stock exchange, I would have to take a pass. Too risky.

The Wall

2009-04-01T20:07:00.001-07:00

Queendom.com has an real life honest-to-Jupiter IQ test.

Unfortunately the full report is behind a subscription wall.

Grr.

Emotional Genius

2009-03-31T23:37:00.000-07:00

I am an emotional genius.

No, really. I took the test and the results are conclusive. I score better than 99.9% of other people. And the results are not a fluke. I took the test last year at about this time and got the same result.

Two conclusions spring immediately to mind:

1. I am, in fact, an emotional genius.

2. The test is faulty.

It is hard to deny that some people are more adroit at navigating their way through both their own and other people’s emotions. Take two identical twins. One with autism, the other without. Who would deny that the latter is more emotionally intelligent that the former? Nevertheless, the methods of measuring this difference are still in their infancy. I give you my test results as Exhibit A.

Men and Republicans are more Knowledgeable of Current Events than Women and Democrats, Study Finds.

2009-03-30T21:48:00.000-07:00

Pew has a news quiz. You can take it and compare your score to the distribution of scores from a representative sample of Americans. Along with 7% of Americans, I correctly answered 10 of 10 questions, placing me above 93% of Americans.

Among other findings of the study:

People with more education know more than people with less education. (Should we be surprised?)

Older people know more than younger people.

And men know more than women.

The poll also found that Republicans know more than Independents and Democrats.

In April of 2007, Pew did a similar poll and found similar results. A closer look at the data reveal that the difference is mainly at the bottom end of the distribution: there are more less informed Democrats than Republicans, which drags the Democratic average down.

Republicans and Democrats are equally likely to be represented in the high- knowledge group. But significantly fewer Republicans (26%) than Democrats (31%) fall into the third of the public that knows the least.

The Future of Film

2009-03-30T19:16:00.001-07:00

Here is a list of the movies with the biggest box office from the last 365 days. Let’s see if we can uncover some patterns that will tell us about movies in the future.

3 were comic book franchises ("Batman", "Iron Man", and "Hulk").

4 were superhero movies ("Batman", "Iron Man", "Hancock", and "Hulk").

3 were animated children’s movies ("Wall-E", "Kung Fu Panda", and "Madagascar").

4 were chick flicks (“Twilight“, “Sex and the City“, “Mamma Mia“, and “Marley and Me“).

9 were franchises (“Batman“, “Iron Man“, “Indiana Jones“, “Madagascar“, “Bond”, “Sex and the City“, “Narnia“, “Hulk“, and “Get Smart“. You could also include “Twilight” because, although it is the first in a series, it is based on a series of books with a proven track record. This would bring the total up to 10 of the top 20 movies being franchises. Half.) Movies cost a lot to make. Backers want to see a return on equity. One way to reduce risk is to support projects with a proven track record. Hence franchises.

It is safe to say that more than two thirds have action elements in their story lines. Movies are for showing, books are for telling. The camera likes action -- and so do audiences.

A little more than half did better overseas than domestically. The exceptions were “Batman” (comic book action), “Iron Man” (comic book action), “Grand Torino” (social commentary) , “Marley and Me” (comedy), “Paul Blart” (slapstick comedy), “Taken” (revenge), “Hulk” (comic book action) and “Get Smart” (slapstick comedy). Box office for “Twilight” was evenly split between foreign and domestic. Among those that did better abroad, “Mamma Mia” (76%), “Bond” (70%), and “Madagascar” (69%) were the top three. Both “Mamma Mia” and “Bond” are based on brands that originated in Europe (the Swedish rock band ABBA in the case of “Mamma Mia“). Sure enough, a closer look at the box office receipts of “Mamma Mia” reveal a big return from Sweden.

Looking back, top-grossing animated movies make most of their money abroad. "Cars" is an exception. So is "Toys 2", but that was a movie from more than 10 years ago -- before foreign distribution became a big part in movie revenues.

All of the comic book action films did better at home than abroad. Looking back at the record of all comic book action films, this appears to be the general pattern. Usually, but not always, comic book action films do better domestically than abroad.

“Twilight” was produced by Summit Entertainment, and was its only top 20 showing -- the only film from Summit that has made over $100 million (so far). Expect to see more in the Twilight series from Summit in the future. Readers at BoxOffice Mojo gave it a solid B average.

"Slumdog Millionaire"’s worldwide take was almost 20 times its production budget -- the highest profit-to-production-cost ratio in the top 20. A Best Picture award from the Academy can do a lot for a small budget picture’s bottom line.

The next biggest p-to-pc ratio was from "Sex and the City", which earned nearly ten times its small $35 million production budget. It is unlikely we have seen the last of Carrie and her friends.

How Much?

2009-03-26T23:04:00.000-07:00

The graph above shows that inflation has been steady and low for the last twenty years, and that consumer prices have been more volatile in the last ten years than in the previous ten. A striking feature of the graph is the recent downward spike in consumer prices.

Looking closer at the data -- disaggregating the totals by category -- we find that the downward spike was due to sharp declines in the prices of transportation and energy. This squares with what I have seen at the gas pump. Before I went to China, the price of a gallon of gas was over $4.00. Now, I often seen prices below $2.00.

Behold, a New World that has so little TB in it!

2009-03-26T22:17:00.001-07:00

While helping a friend edit a paper on tuberculosis, I found this map over at Worldmapper. It vividly displays TB deaths by adjusting the size of a country to fix the number of deaths. One pattern that stands out is the absence of TB in the West. (Australia is in the "North", yet south of the Equator -- "Western", yet in the East. There is little TB in Australia). The disease is now nearly absent from the New World.

The prevalence of TB is positively a function of distance from the Equator and inversely a function of income. The level of TB in Australia is lower then we would expect. The level in Japan, higher. Given the low levels of income in Latin America, and its near proximity to the Equator, TB is less of a problem there then we would expect. Methods for treating TB practiced in Latin America should be copied in other parts of the Third World.

Tax-and-Spend, meet Borrow-and-Spend

2009-03-26T20:01:00.000-07:00

Rasmussen reports that nearly 2 in every 3 Americans think tax cuts help the economy. Only 1 in 8 think they hurt. It is likely that Republicans will keep tax cuts as their issue. This, in turn, should put pressure on Democrats to borrow and spend, rather than tax and spend. (That Democrats will spend is a foregone conclusion. Democrats are at least as likely to spend now that they hold both houses of Congress and the White House under Obama as Republicans were under similar circumstances under Bush. In other words, a dead certainty.)

Thanks to a high propensity to save among Indians and Chinese, the world has been awash in savings lately. This has kept interest rates low without pushing inflation up. Uncle Sam has been free to borrow without paying much of an inflation price in the short term. But as China and India start to draw down their savings to weather the financial crisis, and Uncle Sam gears up his borrowing to over a trillion dollars per year, something has to give. Will we see higher inflation soon? The people pushing the price of gold higher seem to think so. Gold closed at $940 per ounce today, with prices increasing steadily since the election.