Links 2018/10/23

"Controlling for a number of demographic and relationship characteristics, we find evidence that marriage duration is inversely associated with spending on the engagement ring and wedding ceremony." Link.

"80000 hours", which has spent years researching how to do the most good for the world by career choice, now has an official-ish summary of what they've converged on. Link. I was surprised that "earning to give", i.e. make a lot of money and give it to the best charities, has fallen in their rankings over time. This largely seems to be because they are prioritizing existential risk / improving the future over global poverty as the most important cause now. In questions of improving the future, the scarcest resource is not funding, but the number of good people working on it. With global poverty, the scarcest resource is probably still money. In particular, I found it interesting that one of their top recommendations is "being a China specialist".

An interesting point in why sexual abuse often seems rare to men and common to women: "Most men are not abusers, yet very large numbers of women have been abused. So if a man is an abuser, there is a good chance he has abused a fair number of women. That means many well-meaning men experience sexual abuse as a relatively rare phenomenon. They haven't done it, and most of their male friends haven't either. At the same time, most women have abuse, rape or #MeToo stories" Link.

And linked off the above link... WHO estimates that 1 in 20 deaths worldwide in 2016 was alcohol-related... Link.

Since around 1990, poor countries have been catching up with rich countries. "Looking at the 43 countries the World Bank classified as 'low income' in 1990, 65 percent have grown faster than the high-income average... The same is true for 82 percent of the 62 middle-income countries" ... "Neo-liberalism has been incredibly successful, essentially delivering on all of its promises of economic growth, declines in poverty, and peace." Link.

"Among refugees that entered the U.S. at ages 18-45, we follow respondents' outcomes over a 20-year period... (they) have much lower levels of education and poorer language skills than natives and outcomes are initially poor with low employment, high welfare use and low earnings. Outcomes improve considerably as refugees age. After 6 years in the country, these refugees work at higher rates than natives... (they) pay $21,000 more in taxes than they receive in benefits over their first 20 years in the U.S." Link. The American dream y'all.

Trump's Deputy Attorney General "discussed recruiting cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office". Link.

Links 2018/10/22

The flu killed 80,000 Americans last year. Can you imagine the drastic measures people would demand if, say, terrorism killed that many people? Get a flu shot! Link.

"Preference for realistic art predicts support for Brexit". Link. The correlation holds for myself; I don't get Brexit and I don't get why someone would prefer realistic art. If you want to capture literal reality, just take a picture. Art should be at least somewhat abstract/surreal!

"Virtually all poverty reduction comes from economic growth and migration". Link.

The (weak) individual mandate of the ACA was supposed to be an essential cost control to counteract guaranteed coverage of pre-existing conditions in the individual health insurance market. The GOP repealed that this year, and then recently New Jersey passed a law reinstating it in their state, providing a good natural experiment to see what effect it has on costs. And the data is in from the New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance. They claim that insurers initially had planned to hike costs by an average of 12.6%, and after reworking the numbers due to the state bringing the mandate back, the average rate hike dropped to 5.8%. IMO it should be common sense that we can improve health insurance by: 1. reinstating a stronger mandate, 2. phasing out the tax deductions for employer-provided insurance, and 3. move that money into subsidies for the individual market.

A couple of years ago, a GOP congressional candidate assaulted a reporter during the election. He even plead guilty. He still won the election. Now at a rally, the "law-and-order president" is praising him for that assault. Link.

Perhaps you should not read economics editorials in The Wall Street Journal. "(Max Boot) got a meeting with Robert Bartley, editor of The Wall Street Journal editorial page... To Boot's surprise, Bartley offered him a job as economics editorialist. The prospect 'horrified' him... because he 'had never taken a class in the subject and had no interest in it.' Boot later learned that Bartley sought out conservatives unfamiliar with economics for such jobs. 'He did not want to hire an economist because most professional economists disdained supply-side economics'". Link.

Links 2018/10/14

"15% of all (human) experience has been experienced by people who are alive right now" and "28% of the entirety of human experience has happened since (the current oldest living person's) birth. Link. Although humans have been around for a long time, there weren't very many until recently!

The CIA considered making a fake gay sex tape of Saddam Hussein to undermine him before the Iraq War. Link.

80% of Americans are opposed to using gene editing to increase intelligence. Just don't prohibit the other 20%! Link.

Scroll to the bottom of this article to see the legal document written up for a 5 year old immigrant to sign away her rights after being separated from her grandmother. I feel safer already.

"average minimum wage increase of $0.50 reduces the probability that men and women return to prison within 1 year by 2.8%... These reductions in returns to incarcerations are observed for the potentially revenue generating crime categories of property and drug crimes; prison reentry for violent crimes are unchanged, supporting our framing that minimum wages affect crime that serves as a source of income." Link.

Links 2018/10/09

• "In a randomized, double-blind clinical trial—the gold standard of trials—a combination of ibuprofen (Advil) and acetaminophen (Tylenol) was just as effective at treating patients with acute pain in an extremity as three other pain-killer combinations containing opioids." Considering that "an estimated 91 people die each day" from opioids... this seems really worth following up on. Link.
• There is a lot of evidence that making prostitution illegal significantly increases rape. Link. When people ask themselves whether it should be legal, I really wish "should there be less rape" would be considered with as a much importance as "how do I personally feel about prostitution"?
• The number of detained immigrant children increases, and they are largely being moved from foster homes to a tent city in Texas. Link. Part of the cause for the increase is that detained children are not being picked up by their parents as much, because now ICE essentially uses undocumented children as bait for their undocumented parents. Link. I feel safer already.
• After continual anti-NAFTA talk, Trump finally announced he ended it and signed a new trade deal... which basically NAFTA with a new name. Link.
• Many state education rankings seem... not good. It is common for them to include spending as part of how states are measured. The more you spend, the higher you are ranked. So these are not a good way to check whether marginal state spending on education is worthwhile!
  "As recently as 2011, Education Week placed Florida fifth in the nation. Then the publication altered its methodology to put more weight on raw expenditures. Despite high test scores, the state dropped to 29th place—not because teaching effectiveness fell, but because the state supposedly spent too little!"
  Also, "According to U.S. News and World Report, Texas, which ranks 33rd, is far surpassed in educational quality by Iowa, which ranks eighth... But when we disaggregate student performance scores by racial categories... the rankings change dramatically... White students do better in Texas than in Iowa. Black students do better in Texas. Hispanic students do better in Texas. Asian students do better in Texas. Given these facts, it is absurd for U.S. News to rank Iowa higher than Texas in terms of educational performance. And this example is no fluke. Many other state comparisons similarly reverse if you account for student heterogeneity."
  Link.

Links 2018/10/05

• A GMO cotton developed my Monsanto has led to a drastic reduction in the need and use of pesticides. Surely the average environmentalist will be thrilled, right?
• Data from campuses and police compared to timing of college football games show a significant increase in rapes on the days of home games. "For away games, the effects are only statistically significant where we can verify that the game was televised." Link. Perhaps we should increase alcohol taxes?
• Rodrigo Duterte, the President of the Philippines: "My only sin is extrajudicial killings".
• American farmers are losing money due to our trade war with China, so we're doing a $12 billion bailout. This is best summarized by Senator Brian Schatz: "We are borrowing money from China to pay our farmers to not sell their crops to China".
• Stephen Miller pushed for a total ban on Chinese students attending American universities, partly because it would "hurt elite universities whose staff and students have been highly critical of Mr Trump". He was not successful.