Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

Megan McArdle:

It's hard to think about the Federal Budget in terms we can understand. A moderately successful American will, over the course of a forty year career, earn several million dollars. But we don't even see all that money all at once. Numbers a million times bigger than our total lifetime earnings literally boggle the imagination.

One enterprising videoblogger, however, has undertaken to illustrate the impact of Obama's recently announced $100 million in budget cuts:

Gendered Job Losses

Catherine Rampell:

We’ve written a few times about how job losses during this recession have been disproportionately male. Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress (a liberal think tank), pointed me toward a piece she just wrote with updated numbers on this trend.

It also includes an interactive graphic that shows where women’s and men’s jobs have been lost or gained, broken down by industry. Here’s a snapshot of the chart:

While both sexes have experienced a net job loss since the recession began, in almost every sector that hemorrhaged jobs, most of the jobs lost belonged to men. And in two out of the three sectors that netted payroll gains, the vast majority of new positions went to women.

On thing about this chart puzzles me: Why did men on net lose jobs in the government, while women gained so many? I assume this reflects a difference in the kinds of jobs that were lost and gained (e.g., outdoor jobs cleaning town sidewalks or somesuch, versus indoor jobs teaching first-graders). It’s unclear from just these numbers, though.

Good question.

The Daily Dozen

1. The Swine Flu: How scared should you be? "It’s deadly serious; so even if the current threat fades, the world needs to be better armed."
2. Justice Souter to retire. More thoughts here and here.
3. The 50 best American adventures, by National Geographic.
4. Sending cell phones into the cloud. "New technology offloads processing from a mobile device to its cloud-based doppelganger."
5. Parrots join humans on the dance floor.
6. The weirdest netbook name ever?
7. Does the U.S. need an auto industry?
   
8. A pie chart of the current job market.
   
9. Torture and civilization. An argument about why torture is bad.
   
10. Over half of reporting Kindle owners are 50 or older.
11. A guide for the super-busy on how to live life to the fullest.
    
12. The Secrets of Financial Freedom: An interview with the millionaire next door.
    

That's a Dog?

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The Daily Dozen

1. Creating graphs using Google searches. If Google ever gets this perfected, it could be a tremendous boon to journalists and researchers. I'd love to see this tied into the General Social Survey data.
   
2. Choice blindness. You don't always know what you want or why you act.
   
3. A visualization of where your power comes from.
   
4. Four tips for better wildlife photography.
5. Over the last two quarters, the economy shrunk at its fastest pace in more than 50 years.
6. Government help hurts. John Stossel with a critique of the "credit card holders 'bill of rights.'"
   
7. Being frugal with your wellbeing.
   
8. What economics can teach us about controlling swine flu.
   
9. 35,000,000 Flickr photos mapped.
10. "Phoenix has achieved the unwelcome distinction of becoming the first major American city where home prices have fallen in half since the market peaked in the middle of the decade, according to data released Tuesday."
11. Sex-typed personality traits develop differently in girls and boys.
12. Do you want to live forever? More than 50% said "no" in seven countries, including the US and China.
    

... and then...

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US Human Development Indicies

Is the US one nation or a group of three (or more)?

I was struck by this table of Human Development Index values for different groups in the US. It looks like three different countries when broken out this way! There is one group clustered at 7.5 (Asians), another around 5.5 (Whites) and another around 3.5 to 4 (Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans).

The indices are computed by this project, using US government data. See here for more, including a nice visualization with results by state, district, etc. Can the life expectancy of Native American and Latino women really be higher than for White women? Latino males also seem to have longer life expectancy than White males.

More on life expectancies of different regional and ethnic groups in the US here. (The researchers define 8 different Americas by race and geography or class.)

Taxes

(New Math)

One Economist's Perspective on the Law and Economics Movement

Tyler Cowen:

Market-oriented economists tend to be libertarian and it is rare that they have much respect for the U.S. Constitution beyond the pragmatic level. The common view is that while a constitution may be better than the alternatives, it is political incentives which really matter. James M. Buchanan’s program for a “constitutional economics” never quite took off and insofar as it did it has led to the analytic deconstruction of constitutions rather than their glorification. It isn’t hard to find libertarian economists who take “reductionist” views of constitutions and trumpet them loudly.

The conservative wing of the law and economics movement, in contrast, often canonizes constitutions. Many law and economics scholars build their reputations from studying, interpreting, or defending the U.S. Constitution. You don’t get to higher political or judicial office by treating a constitution in purely economic terms.

Read the whole thing.

The Daily Dozen

1. 'Father of Fractals' takes on the stock market. Benoit Mandelbrot is world-famous for making mathematical sense of irregular shapes--clouds that are not round, mountains that are not cones, coastlines that are not smooth, and now, stock markets that are not as simple as previously thought.
2. The game theory of Arlen Specter.
3. Peering into North Korea.
   
4. Life in a bubble. Hundreds of insect species spend much of their time underwater, where food may be more plentiful. MIT mathematicians have now figured out exactly how those insects breathe underwater using a thin layer of air on their bodies.
5. Tom Bihn introduces the Tri-Star carry-on travel bag. This could be a good bag for people like me who like to travel carry-on only. It's a bit smaller than the bag I typically carry. More thoughts on it here and here.
   
6. Five expectations to avoid before volunteering abroad.
   
7. Can you pirate piracy?
   
8. Ricardo Reis talks to Russ Roberts about Keynes, macroeconomics, and monetary policy.
   
9. Tynan's top ten cruise tips.
   
10. Seven open orgtheory problems.
    
11. Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok have a new macroeconomics textbook coming out. Here is the affiliated blog. Read sample chapters here and here. I read the chapter on The Wealth of Nations and Economic Worth and it looks like a good book.
12. Is the recession good for female lawyers?
    

Tell me again ...

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End the University as We Know It?

Uh-oh:

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans)...

And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations...

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

Read the whole thing.

(HT Arnold Kling)

How Ideas Trump Economic Crises: A Surprising Lesson From 1929

GMU Professor Alex Tabarrok speaks at TED about the power of economic growth and the spread of ideas:

The "dismal science" truly shines in this optimistic talk, as economist Alex Tabarrok argues free trade and globalization are shaping our once-divided world into a community of idea-sharing more healthy, happy and prosperous than anyone's predictions.

The Daily Dozen

1. More atheists shout it from the rooftops?
2. Geography as destiny?
3. 9 lists to keep updated, and keep handy.
   
4. Wall Street's Identity Crisis: "Some on Wall Street think of themselves as the fighter jocks of American capitalism. Justin Fox thinks they’re more like bumper car drivers, “spending more time tangling with each other than doing anything useful.” Either way, now that the market has tanked and the public has turned on bankers, many on the Street find themselves switching to Plan B."
5. Mac shipments the lowest they've been in 1.5 years.
6. A new e-paper competitor.
   
7. A shortage of doctors: "One often hears how the U.S. is not graduating enough doctors, and that those who do become physicians feel obliged to go into specialties to pay off their massive student loan debt. I have yet to see in any of these articles one simple reform proposed: abolish the requirement of an undergraduate degree before attending medical school, and turn medical school into a five or six-year post-high school program instead. This would eliminate two or three years of debt, and, perhaps even more important, the opportunity costs of two or three years of college."
8. It's time for a netbook with a butterfly keyboard.
9. Kindle tip: How to change line spacing.
   
10. Track the swine flu on Google Maps.
    
11. The Netbook Effect: "Laptops over $1,000 are basically dead."
12. Three products for people who carry too much stuff on the plane. One of these would have come in handy when I was making all those international trips.
    

OO! A PEANUT!!!

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Putting Together Your Dissertation

(PhD Comics)

The Daily Dozen

1. Visiting every country on Earth by age 35? I think this guy is my new hero.
2. Law school reactions to 2010 US News Rankings.
3. The real cost of a Kindle is $309, not $185?
4. Legal Theory Lexicon: Utilitarianism.
5. In China, who needs Match.com? "The company encourages future homeowners to date its sales girls and promises a wedding present of RMB 60,000 to any couple that ends up getting married."
6. Shooting photos with longer focal lengths.
   
7. Read the news, GMU is #1!
8. Yes, looks do matter. "Snap judgments about people are crucial to the way we function, they say — even when those judgments are very wrong."
9. Business education - more or less?
10. The definitive collection of Moleskine hacks, tips, and resources. Plus, 13 things to do with a Moleskine notebook.
    
11. The new swine flu: this is not a joke.
12. With a Kindle, can you tell it's Proust?
    

What the broccoli doesn’t realize

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