Progress Daily

Malthus’s doom-predicting “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” was published in 1798, when the Earth was home to some 980 million human beings. The global population today is about 6.5 billion, a sevenfold increase. By and large, human beings today are healthier, wealthier, safer, cleaner, better fed, and more productive.

Since 1950, the world’s population has grown by more than 150%. Yet food prices (in real terms) have plunged 75%. Over the past generation, chronic undernourishment in poor countries has been fallen from 37% to 17%, while in the US, staples such as potatoes and flour have dropped in price (relative to income) by more than 80%.

Before industrialization, children died before reaching their first birthday at a rate exceeding 200 per 1,000 live births, or more than 1 in 5. “In the United States as late as 1900 infant mortality was about 160; but by 2004 it had declined to 6.6.” In China, infant mortality has fallen from 195 to below 30 in the past 50 years.

From 31 years in 1900, life expectancy rose to 66.8 worldwide in 2003.

We are more likely to be disease-free today than our forebears were a century ago. And the onset of chronic illness has been delayed — by 8 years for cancer, 9 years for heart diseases, and 11 years for respiratory diseases.

“A world full of good news,” Jeff Jacoby’s review of Indur Goklany’s The Improving State of the World

A study by Michael French looked at 2002 data from a survey of U.S. households representing more than 31,000 adults.

The survey contained questions about alcohol consumption, health behaviors and chronic health conditions. Moderate drinking was defined as 4 to 14 drinks a week for men and 4 to 7 drinks a week for women.

The male participants who reported moderate drinking were 1.3 times more likely to report above-average health, compared with those who were lifetime abstainers and former light drinkers. The moderate drinking women were more than twice as likely as abstainers to report above-average health.

“Moderate Drinking May Boost Your Health,” by Krisha McCoy

Dr. Neil Binkley investigated the vitamin D status of people 93 people living in Hawaii.

Despite abundant sun exposure (a mean of approximately 11 hours per week of total body skin exposure with no sunscreen used), 51% of these individuals were found to have low vitamin D levels.

“This implies that the common clinical recommendation to allow sun exposure to the hands and face for 15 minutes may not ensure vitamin D sufficiency.”

“Adequate sun exposure no guard against low vitamin D,” by Will Boggs, MD

According to the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World 2005 Annual Report (1.96MB .pdf file here — 255KB .pdf file of Executive Summary here), primarily written by James Gwartney and Robert Lawson, and Erik Gartzke:

Economic freedom is about 50 times more effective than democracy in diminishing violent conflict.

The impact of economic freedom on whether states fight or have a military dispute is highly significant (at the 1% level) while democracy is not a statistically significant predictor of conflict.

Nations with a low score for economic freedom (below 2 out of 10) are 14 times more prone to conflict than states with a high score (over eight).

The overall pattern of results does not shift when additional variables, such as membership in the EU, nuclear capability, and regional factors, are added.

“Is Economic Freedom the Key to Peace?,” Political Calculations

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no television at all for children under the age of 2, and for older children, one to two hours a day of educational programming at most. Studies have linked greater amounts of TV viewing to attention deficit disorder, violent behavior, obesity, poor performance in school and on standardized tests, etc. (Kids watch an average of around four hours of TV a day.)

However, most of these studies simplistically compare kids who watch TV and kids who don’t, when kids in those 2 groups live in very different environments. (Kids who watch little or no TV, as a group are from much wealthier families.)

A study (”Does Television Rot Your Brain? New Evidence from the Coleman Study“) by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro analyzed the impact of the arrival of TV in various US cities, some of which had TV by 1940, while others didn’t get it until the early ’50s. (Children with TVs watched TV for close to 4 hours a day by 1950.)

For example, children born in 1947 who grew up in Denver, where the first TV broadcasting began in 1952, had not watched much TV until the age of 5. But a child born the same year in Seattle could watch from the age of 1.

Also, Denver kids who were in sixth grade in 1965 had spent their whole lives with TV, while their 12th-grade counterparts hadn’t.

Gentzkow and Shapiro got 1965 test-score data for almost 300,000 kids. After controlling for socioeconomic status, there were no significant test-score differences between kids who lived in cities that got TV earlier as opposed to later, or between kids of pre- and post-TV-age cohorts. Nor did the kids differ significantly in the amount of homework they did, dropout rates, or the wages they eventually made. If anything, the data revealed a small positive uptick in test scores for kids who got to watch more television when they were young. For kids living in households in which English was a second language, or with a mother who had less than a high-school education, the study found that TV had a more sizable positive impact on test scores in reading and general knowledge.

“The Benefits of Bozo,” by Austan Goolsbee

The largest contributor to happiness is the genetically determined set point (or set range). According to KM Sheldon, Sonja Lyubomirsky and David Schkade (Pursuing Happiness, 2003),”The set point likely reflects immutable interpersonal, temperamental and affective personality traits, such as extraversion, arousability and negative affectivity, that are rooted in neurobiology,… are highly heritable… and change little over the lifespan.”

Current estimates suggest that this genetically determined set range accounts for around 50% of an individual’s happiness.

In general, married, well paid, secure, healthy and religious believers are more likely to report themselves as being happy.

Ed Diener and Shigehiro Oishi (Money and Happiness, 2000) surveyed 7167 students across 41 countries. Those who valued love more than money reported far higher life satisfaction scores than those who seemed to be money focused.

The correlations between such variables as money, job security, marriage, etc. and happiness are relatively small. Sheldon et al argue that in total all circumstances account for only around 10% of the variations in people’s happiness.

Schkade and Daniel Kahneman (”Does living in California make people happy?“) show that whilst “living in California” was an appealing idea for many Americans, it didn’t actually boost long run happiness. That is to say, people living in California were about as happy as other Americans on average. So whilst moving may provide a temporary increase in happiness, it is soon adapted into the perception of the “norm.”

David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald (Money, Sex and Happiness, 2004) find that sexual activity enters strongly into happiness equations.

People are happiest when they achieve their aims, so set yourself goals which stretch you, but are achievable.

“If It Makes You Happy,” by James Montier

According to Jose Lobo, Luis Bettencourt, Dirk Helbing, Geoffrey West, et al. (”Growth, innovation, scaling and the pace of life in cities“), as cities get larger they create more wealth and they are more innovative at a faster rate.

The researchers base their findings on data on the growth of cities in the U.S., Europe and China over the past 150 years. They measured cities consumption of resources (such as water usage) and requirements for infrastructure (roads, transportation, lengths of electrical cable), and then measured the creative output of these areas (patents issued, “super creative jobs” generated, R&D employment, total wages).

As the city grew in population it required less energy (resources) to sustain it in a proportion called sublinear scaling. When they measured creative output (jobs, wealth generated, innovation) as cities grew, the scaling of this output was superlinear, meaning as the city grew its creative output grew faster and faster.

“It isn’t like if you double the size of a city you double its creative output,” Lobo said. “The increase you get in wealth creation is greater than the increase in size of the city.”

That ratio can range from 1.1:1 when measuring the gross domestic product in Germany, to 1.3:1 when measuring private R&D employment in the U.S.

Today a little more than half of the world’s population live in large urban areas. By 2030, it is estimated that two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in urban areas.

Lobo: “Policies should be directed to making large cities more livable not making them smaller.”

“Researchers find ‘large is smart’ when it comes to cities,” PhysOrg.com

Baseball, wine, medical diagnosis, university admissions, and criminal recidivism all represent realms where simple statistical models have outperformed “experts.”

William Grove, et al (”Clinical Versus Mechanical Prediction“) consider 136 studies of simple quant models versus human judgements. The range of studies covered areas as diverse as criminal recidivism to occupational choice, diagnosis of heart attacks to academic performance. Across these studies 64 clearly favoured the model, 64 showed approximately the same result between the model and human judgement, and a mere 8 studies found in favour of human judgements. In all of these 8 the humans had more information than the quant models.

The average specialist in the study got 67% of the cases they were presented with correct. The quant models’ average hit ratio was 73%.

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There is plenty of evidence to suggest that we tend to overweight our own opinions and experiences against statistical evidence. Ilan Yaniv (”Advice taking in decision making“) has an experiment based on general knowledge questions such as: In which year were the Dead Sea scrolls discovered?

Participants are asked to give a point estimate and a 95% confidence interval. Having done this they are then presented with an advisor’s suggested answer, and asked for their final best estimate and rate of estimates. The final answers are more accurate than the initial guesses.

The most logical way of combining your view with that of the advisor is to give equal weight to each answer. However, participants do not do this (their final answers would be even more accurate if they did). Instead they put a 71% weight on their own answer.

“Painting By Numbers,” by James Montier

In 1956, the average teenager’s weekly income/allowance was $10.55, equal to the disposable income of a family in the early 1940s.

About 10% of burials in NYC in 1889 were in potter’s fields. In 1900, 1.75 million children between the ages of 10 and 15 — almost 1/5 of all children in that age cohort — were in the work force. Children provided 1/4 to 1/3 of the incomes for working-class families, which spent more than 90% of their household earnings on food, shelter and clothing. In 1900, Americans spent nearly twice as much on funerals as on medicine, and less than 2% of Americans took vacations.

By the end of the ’50s, the number of Americans enrolled in colleges exceeded the number of US farmers.

A 1962 Gallup poll found that only 10% of mothers hoped their daughters would emulate the choices they had made in their lives.

More than two-thirds of women who turned 18 during the ’50s claimed to have slept with only one man by their 30th birthday. Compared to only 2% of women who reached adulthood during the ’70s.

“Land of Plenty,” George F. Will’s review of Brink Lindsey’s The Age of Abundance

Economists have long argued that international trade can be beneficial for both trading partners.

Part of the reason for the relative success of protectionist arguments has to do with evolution. We have certain tendencies and beliefs that may have been useful in evolutionary times, but they are now counterproductive. This evolved belief easily translates into a fear of loss of jobs.

The human evolutionary environment was approximately “zero sum” — resources and incomes were fixed, and more for one person meant less for another.

If Mexicans are finding jobs in the United States, then it “must” be that American citizens are finding fewer jobs because, in a zero sum world, the number of jobs is fixed. Similarly, if we are importing goods from China, or outsourcing tasks to India, then the Americans who would otherwise make those goods or perform those tasks must be losing jobs.

Among hunter-gatherers, rates of homicide and deaths from inter-band conflict were much higher than in modern times. This high level of conflict has led to strong, evolved, in-group and out-group preferences.

Those individuals who lose from international competition can harness innate beliefs to create obstacles to competition, such as by keeping out products made by foreigners (in the case of tariffs) or keeping out the foreigners themselves (in the case of immigration). Anti-foreigner arguments resonate because they fit into evolved mental compartments.

Understanding economics is like reading, which must be taught, not like speech, which we acquire naturally with no instruction.

“‘Folk’ international economics,” by Paul H. Rubin