Life Expectancy

I was surprised to learn that Puerto Ricans and Virgin Islanders have longer life expectancies than the US.

Indian Education

Ajay Shah has a discussion on the quality of Indian education.  Makes an interesting contrast to the usual discussions in the US

Why Economists Are Free Marketers

Reading Daniel Kahneman's new book,Thinking, Fast and Slow, still in the early chapters.  He discusses "priming", the idea that by association of ideas exposure to one thing will increase the relevance of others.  For example, if you're given "W--H" and "S--P" to complete after being exposed to words like "dirt" you'll likely say "wash" "soap", while if you were exposed to "hunger" it would be  "soup".  This is imperceptible to the person, part of what he calls System 1, though well-established by experiments.

This would explain the saying: "to the boy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail".  The boy is primed by the hammer to see things as items to be hit. 

It also explains why economists and humanists think so differently: their priming is different.  Economists talk money much of the time; humanists say, with Mr. Dodgson: "The time has come, the Walrus said,To talk of many things:Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax Of cabbages and kings And why the sea is boiling hot And whether pigs have wings."

It's the Simple Things That Count: Like Concrete

  Charles Kenny writes:

Starting in 2000, a program in Mexico's Coahuila state called "Piso Firme" (Firm Floor) offered up to $150 per home in mixed concrete, delivered directly to families who used it to cover their dirt floors. Scholar Paul Gertler evaluated the impact: Kids in houses that moved from all-dirt to all-concrete floors saw parasitic infestation rates drop 78 percent; the number of children who had diarrhea in any given month dropped by half; anemia fell more than four-fifths; and scores on cognitive tests went up by more than a third. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, mothers in newly cemented houses reported less depression and greater life satisfaction.)

 Concrete also works for highways, which improves economies in the third world.

Farmers Market as Intermediary

Jane Black writes in Wednesday's Post about a farmers market which serves as an intermediary between local farmers and their customers.  Organized as a co-op, it sells the farmer's produce for a 10 percent cut of the proceeds, thereby saving the farmers from having to sell and enabling them to continue producing.  It sounds good.  It sounds like the Reston farmers market at the corner of Rte 7 and Baron Cameron back in the 70's, 80's, and 90's.  That was run by a hippie who settled down and made his living by serving as a middleman between farmers and customers.  He got into trouble with the zoning people by going too far a field for some of his products, but it worked for a long while.

Selling cooperatives go way back.  They work, for a while, I think, but eventually something changes.  The person who drove the enterprise gets old or tired, or both; free market forces drive expansion and conversion into something like Whole Foods, or the clientele ages, changes, or moves. 

French Brides Wear Bespoke Dresses

That's one fact in Dirk Beauregarde's piece on French weddings. Been a while since I married my wife, but my impression is that many if not most US brides wear off-the-rack.

That Christmas Tree Tax

Steve Sexton at Freakonomics has a post defending the "Christmas tree tax" of last year.  Needless to say I agree with him.

The Omni-presence of Internal Politics

Read a biography of Gen. O. P. Smith, the commander of the First Marine Division in Korea. Also read the biography of Steve Jobs.  In both cases, as pointed out in the case of Jobs by this Govloop post, 
organizational politics played a big role in the subject's life. In any bureaucracy, military, civilian, private enterprise, what we call "politics" is always present.

The Founding Flip-Flopper

Flip-flopping has a long, if not honored, history.  The blog Boston 1775 moves south to Philadelphia to take note of a Revolutionary era flip-flopper in three posts. New Year's Day 1777, New Year's Day 1778 and the justification from later in 1778, after the Brits had left Philadelphia. 

The last shows that the Reverend Witherspoon had a wicked sense of humor, and provides a justification which our modern day politicians could use as a pattern: "I was neither pro-[insert word of your choice, war, individual mandate, conservative, whatever] nor anti-[insert the opposite word], I was a politician.

Incidentally, I note that the verse from 1777 calls upon God, while the verse from 1778 calls upon the classical gods of Greece and Rome. Probably not significant.

"Liberating Strife"

I rarely thank politicians, particularly Republican politicians.  However Mr. Romney is celebrating American patriotic music, as discussed in this NYTimes piece today, and his interest triggered my interest.

And Mr. Romney does not just recite the lyrics — he annotates them, offering his interpretation of the meaning. “Most of the time when we sing a song, we don’t think much about the words,” he said. “But I’ve begun looking at these words and thinking about them.”
“O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife,” he said, is a reference to the country’s soldiers. (“Any veterans in this room here today?” he asked. “Thank you for your service.”)

The complete verse reads:

O beautiful for heroes prov'd

In liberating strife,

Who more than self their country lov'd,

And mercy more than life

For those interested, Katherine Lee Bates wrote the poem in 1895. From her background and the timing, I assume the verse praises the Union soldiers of the Civil War.  I suspect Mr. Romney wants it to cover the veterans of more recent wars, but that's a stretch. Indeed, Mr. Romney might want to soft-pedal his affection for the song, at least that verse, when he campaigns in South Carolina