SatStats

 

Teaching is a labor-intensive service industry for which it is difficult to increase productivity. Thus, the price of education rises over time, the Baumol effect.

Could online teaching reverse this?

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Instead, plans focused on protecting the most vulnerable but trying to keep society as a whole up and running. What set Sweden apart was that it stuck to that plan, and from a Swedish perspective, it looked like it was the rest of the world that was engaging in a risky, unprecedented experiment.--Johan Norberg, “Sweden during the Pandemic: Pariah or Paragon?,” Cato Policy Analysis, No. 959, August 29, 2023.

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Page 195 of the 1962 Gateway edition of University of Georgia economist David McCord Wright’s 1951 book, Capitalism:

The attitude toward capitalism taken in this book is simply that, as long as most people accept its basic requirements, it is on balance the most workable method of getting continued growth, change, opportunity, and democracy in a relatively peaceful manner. We are not trying to maintain that the system is perfect….

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SatStats

Like many other species, humans contain the proteins (cryptochromes) to detect magnetic fields, but our brains don’t have a way to decode the information.

There's a sci-fi story there.

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Response rates of major economic surveys are falling, making economic data hard to trust.

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China’s total fertility rate declined very little following the implementation of the One Child Policy (OCP) in 1979/1980, but then fell sharply, by more than one-third, during the early 1990s. In this paper, we propose that strengthening bureaucratic incentives under the “One Vote Veto” (OVV) policy, which strictly prohibited career promotion for adherence failure, was necessary for more “effective” implementation of the OCP—and for its delayed impact on fertility. We use provincial variation in OVV implementation to estimate event study regression inputs needed to build actual and counterfactual sequential multi-decrement fertility life tables, finding that the policy explains 46% of China’s total fertility rate decline during the 1990s, driving it below replacement level. Use of intrauterine devices (IUDs, the most prevalent form of modern contraception in China) that was “recommended” by party officials increased by 133% under the policy, a relative increase more than four times as large as the increase in “voluntary” use. Overall, our paper suggests that population policy made a larger contribution to low fertility in China than suggested by past research. More generally, our paper highlights the central role of aligning bureaucratic incentives with public policy objectives, even in a centrally-planned economy like China’s.--a paper

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The common ancestor of vertebrates had four cones in their eyes, but when all mammals went nocturnal, they lost two of the cones. Then some primates, including the ancestor of all humans, re-evolved a third cone. And evolution is still occurring: some women have four cones in their eyes and can see thousands of colors nobody else can.

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The concept of moral decline—people today are less moral than years past and future generations will be less moral than the present one—is a belief that became widespread in 1949 and is now dominant in nearly every country.

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Shipping goods with a value less than $800 in the US (150 EUR in Europe) is import duty-free – something Chinese firms like Temu and Shein have been taking advantage of, accounting for an estimated 30% of such “de-minimis” shipments last year.

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Birds are evolving smaller eyes to adapt to the brightness of cities at night. For two species, the Northern Cardinal and Carolina Wren, the eyes of birds in San Antonio are 5% smaller than their rural counterparts.

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The threshold for identifying as African American is 28% of African DNA

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USCIS data show that the number of O-1A visas awarded in the first year of the revised guidance jumped by almost 30% The number of STEM EB-2 visas after a ‘national interest’ waiver shot up by 55%.

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There’s a strong geographic correlation between several human and animal behaviors, including distances traveled, population density, male parental involvement, age of first reproduction, food hoarding, and even divorce.

A sociologist is shocked. Shocked!

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When women talk to each other, they face each other. But when men talk to each other, they stand at an average angle of 120 degrees. When men face each other while talking, it’s because they’re about to fight.

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The AEA leadership is overwhelmingly drawn from a small group of elite, private research universities—in the sense that its leaders were educated at these universities and, to a lesser degree, employed by them. What is less well-known is that for much of the past 70 years, the AEA leadership has been drawn predominantly from just three universities—Harvard, MIT, and Chicago.

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The presence of women’s tears reduces aggression in men by 43.7%. One does wonder how that study was done.

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87% of companies with revenues above $100m are private.

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Human fingers can detect objects as small as 13 nanometers. If your finger was as large as the Earth, you could sense the size difference between a house and a car.