Progress Daily

In a 2004 study by Drew Westen partisan Democrats and Republicans were presented with threatening information about Bush and Kerry, while researchers watched what their brains did in response.

Subjects were first presented a slide showing something good about the subject’s candidate, then the next slide presented the candidate contradicting himself. The subjects were then asked to consider whether or not there was a contradiction.

The brain regions that are active during reasoning tasks were mostly inactive. What turned on instead were circuits involved in emotion, particularly distress, and emotional regulation.

“Emotion Trumps Logic in the Voting Booth,” by Terrence McNally

Women — especially in the developed world — are getting married and having kids later than ever before. According to the UN’s World Fertility Report, the worldwide median age of marriage for women is up two years, from 21 in the 1970s to 23 today. In the developed countries, the rise has been from 22 to 26.

In 1960, 70% of American 25-year-old women were married with children. In 2000, only 25% were. In 1970, just 7% of all American 30- to 34-year-olds were unmarried. Today, the number is 22%. In today’s Hungary, 30% of women in their early thirties are single, compared with 6% of their mothers’ generation at the same age. In South Korea, 40% of 30-year-olds are single, compared with 14% only 20 years ago.

Between 1960 and 2000, the percentages of 20-, 25-, and 30-year-olds enrolled in school more than doubled in the US, and enrollment in higher education doubled throughout Europe. The majority of college students are female in the US, UK, France, Germany, Norway, and Australia, and the gender gap is quickly narrowing in more traditional countries like China, Japan, and South Korea. In Denmark, Finland, and France, over 1/2 of all women between 20 and 24 are in school.

In the UK, close to 1/3 of 30-year-old college-educated women are unmarried. In Spain, women now constitute 54% of college students, up from 26% in 1970, and the average age of first birth has risen to nearly 30, which may be a world record.

In the US, the proportion of unmarried 20-somethings living with their parents has declined steadily over the last 100 years, despite rising rents and real estate prices.

A 2005 report from MasterCard finds that women take 4 out of every 10 trips in the Asia-Pacific region — up from 1 in 10 back in the mid-’70s.

Canadian single women are buying homes at twice the rate of single men. The National Association of Realtors reports that in the US last year, single women made up 22% of the real-estate market, compared with only 9% for single men. The median age for first-time female buyers: 32.

Between 1994 and 2004, the number of Japanese women between 25 and 29 who were unmarried soared from 40% to 54%. The number of 30- to 34-year-old females who were unmarried rose from 14% to 27%.

A majority of Japanese single women between 25 and 54 say that they’d be just as happy never to marry.

Under European Communist rule, women tended to marry and have kids early. In the late ’80s, the mean age of first birth in East Germany, for instance, was 25, while the West German average was 28. Tying the knot was the only way to gain independence from parents, since married couples could get an apartment, while singles could not. Furthermore, access to modern contraception, which the state proved either unable or unwilling to produce at affordable prices, was limited. Marriages frequently began as the result of unplanned pregnancies.

Many towns in what used to be East Germany now face a lack of women, as women who excelled in school have moved west for jobs. In some towns, the ratio is just 40 women to 100 men. Women constitute the majority of both high school and college graduates in Poland.

Save Albania, no European country stood at or above replacement levels (2.1 children) in 2000. Three-quarters of Europeans now live in countries with fertility rates below 1.5, and even that number is inflated by a disproportionately high fertility rate among Muslim immigrants. Oddly, the most Catholic European countries — Italy, Spain, and Poland — have the lowest fertility rates, under 1.3. In Japan, fertility rates are about 1.3. Hong Kong, at 0.98 has broken the barrier of one child per woman.

With fewer children, the labor force shrinks, and so do tax receipts. Europe today has 35 pensioners for every 100 workers. By 2050, those 100 may be responsible for 75 pensioners.

By large margins, surveys suggest, US women want to marry and have kids. US fertility rates are lower than replacement level among college-educated women, but are still higher than those of most rich countries (including Sweden and France).

Young women in Vietnam have begun putting off marriage and fertility rates have fallen from 3.8 children in 1998 to 2.1 in 2006.

Fertility rates have dropped below replacement level in several of India’s major cities.

“The New Girl Order,” by Kay S. Hymowitz

A massive new study by Robert Putnam, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has found that found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings. The greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings.

The results of his new study come from a survey Putnam directed among residents in 41 US communities. Residents were sorted into the 4 principal categories used by the US Census: black, white, Hispanic, and Asian. They were asked how much they trusted their neighbors and those of each racial category, and questioned about a long list of civic attitudes and practices, including their views on local government, their involvement in community projects, and their friendships.

More diverse communities tend to be larger, have greater income ranges, higher crime rates, and more mobility among their residents — all factors that could depress social capital independent of any impact ethnic diversity might have. But even after statistically taking these factors into account, the connection remains strong: those in more diverse communities tend to “distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”

Levels of trust were not only lower between groups in more diverse settings, but even among members of the same group.

In a recent study, Edward Glaeser and Alberto Alesina demonstrated that roughly half the difference in social welfare spending between the US and Europe — Europe spends far more — can be attributed to the greater ethnic diversity of the US population.

Matthew Kahn and Dora Costa reviewed 15 recent studies in a 2003 paper, all of which linked diversity with lower levels of social capital. Greater ethnic diversity was linked, for example, to lower school funding, census response rates, and trust in others. Kahn and Costa’s own research documented higher desertion rates in the Civil War among Union Army soldiers serving in companies whose soldiers varied more by age, occupation, and birthplace.

“The Downside of Diversity,” by Michael Jonas

The largest-ever global study of abortion (”Abortion: Worldwide Levels and Trends“) has found that restricting abortions has little effect on the number of pregnancies terminated. Rather, it drives women to seek illegal, often unsafe backstreet abortions leading to an estimated 67,000 deaths a year. A further 5m women require hospital treatment as a result of botched procedures.

In Africa and Asia, where abortion is generally either illegal or restricted, the abortion rate in 2003 was 29 per 1,000 women aged 15-44. This is almost identical to the rate in Europe — 28 — where legal abortions are widely available. Latin America, which has some of the world’s most restrictive abortion laws, is the region with the highest abortion rate (31), while western Europe, which has some of the most liberal laws, has the lowest (12).

A woman’s likelihood of having an abortion is similar whether she lives in a rich country (26 per 1,000) or a poor or middle-income one (29).

The same point can be made by looking at those countries which have changed their laws. Between 1995 and 2005, 17 nations liberalised abortion legislation, while three tightened restrictions. The number of induced abortions nevertheless declined from nearly 46m in 1995 to 42m in 2003, resulting in a fall in the worldwide abortion rate from 35 to 29. The most dramatic drop — from 90 to 44 — was in former communist Eastern Europe, where abortion is generally legal, safe and cheap. This coincided with a big increase in contraceptive use.

According to a report published this month by Population Action International women in poor countries are 250 times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than women in rich ones.

A woman in Africa has a one in 16 chance of dying in pregnancy or childbirth, compared with one in 3,800 for a woman in the rich world.

“Safe, legal and falling,” The Economist

From the Stone Age to 1800, there was no gain in average living conditions. Now incomes rise steadily.

The average Briton in 1788 ate only as many calories a day as hunter-gatherers (2,300). And the British diet was more monotonous. Life expectancy was only slightly above that of hunter-gatherers (38 years). Height is a good guide to nutrition and health: men in England averaged 5ft 6in, the same as males in the Stone Age. Men then worked 60 hours a week. Compared to hunter-gatherers’ 35 hours.

Englishmen who were economically successful, from the Middle Ages to 1800, left 4 or 5 surviving children at their deaths. In contrast, landless labourers left fewer than 2 children.

Preindustrial England was thus a world of constant downward mobility. Given the static nature of the preindustrial economy, the superabundant children of the rich had to, on average, move down the social hierarchy to find work. Attributes that ensured later economic dynamism – hard work, ingenuity, innovativeness, education – were thus spread throughout the population.

From 1200 to 1800 interest rates fell, murder rates declined, work hours increased, the taste for violence declined, and numeracy and literacy spread to even the lower reaches of society.

In both preindustrial Japan and China the rich had more children than the poor, but in a more modest way. The samurai in Japan in the Tokugawa era (1603-1868), for example, produced on average little more than one son per father.

In modern affluent societies, the higher income a person has, on average, the less leisure he has. The source of our compulsion to work may lie in our ancestors’ passage through a preindustrial world that rewarded a compulsion to work and accumulate with reproductive success.

“England’s success may be in our genes,” Gregory Clark

In transcranial magnetic stimulation (”TMS”), a coil of wire is placed near the head. Alternating current flowing through the coil induces a magnetic field with a strength of up to 2.5 teslas (one tesla is 20,000 times the strength of the earth’s magnetic field). The field passes harmlessly through the skull and influences the electrical signals passing among neurons in the brain.

Physicians hold the coil close to whichever brain region they are interested in stimulating. In repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), the current is switched on and off from one to 100 times a minute, which creates a series of magnetic impulses. A low frequency will block neural activity, yet higher frequencies will stimulate it. The latter appears to alleviate depression.

Subjects sometimes describe as a slight pull on the scalp. Mild headaches are common side effects. A few patients have had seizures.

Molecular studies by Armand Hausmann suggest that TMS stimulates neuronal factors that are known to aid in cell growth.

When Alvaro Pascual-Leone directed a coil at the language center of his participants, they suddenly could not utter a single word. After 5 half-hour treatment cycles by Peter Eichhammer, some tinnitus sufferers reported a substantial decrease in background noise, which for a few individuals lasted up to 6 months.

In the ultimatum game, 2 players, a proposer and a responder, divide a reward. The responder can either accept the proposer’s division or reject it. If he rejects it, both players receive nothing.

Scores of studies have run the ultimatum game across cultures and ages. Universally, people reject any share lower than 20% — apparently to punish the greed of the proposer.

A study by Björn Wallace, et al (”Heritability of ultimatum game responder behavior“), suggests that the sense of fairness is rooted in genetics.

Wallace played the ultimatum game with twins. He neutralized the effect of upbringing and exposed that of genetics by comparing identical twins (who share all their genes) with fraternal twins (who share half).

Each twin of a pair played the ultimatum game, both as proposer and as responder. In the case of identical twins, there was a striking correlation between the average division that each member of a pair proposed and also between what they were willing to accept. In other words, their senses of what was fair were similar. No such correlations were seen in the behaviour of fraternal twins.

“Patience, fairness and the human condition,” The Economist

If you take any 20-year period, the US stockmarket has always delivered positive real returns.

But Japan’s stockmarket average, the Nikkei 225, peaked at nearly 39,000 in the late ’80s and today it’s only around 17,000.

Elroy Dimson, Paul Marsh, et al, (”Irrational Optimism“) examined the record of 16 stockmarkets that were in continuous operation over the course of the 20th century. (This selection showed survivorship bias by excluding countries like Russia and China, where investors’ holdings were wiped out.) The academics found that only 3 other countries could match the US record of having no 20-year periods with negative real returns.

Japanese, French, German and Spanish investors all suffered instances where they had to wait 50-60 years to earn a positive real return; in Italy and Belgium, the waiting period stretched to 70 years.

“To infinity and beyond,” by Buttonwood

An experiment by Joshua New tested a theory developed by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (”C&T”), with whom he collaborated on the experiment. C&T suggested that some tasks are so important and so universal that you would expect to find specially evolved “modules” to handle them.

(They found evidence to support the existence of such modules in areas of human relations such as the perception of fairness.)

Dr New showed volunteers pairs of photographs. The photos in each pair were identical except that one object had changed its orientation or had been removed altogether, and the volunteers had to work out what had changed.

Changes concerning animals were significantly easier to detect than those concerning cars. 100% of volunteers noticed the movement of an elephant in the African bush. Only 72% noticed the movement of a minivan in a similar piece of bush. And that was despite the fact that the image of the van was somewhat larger in the photograph than the image of the elephant, and that the minivan was red, not grey.

This highly honed ability to notice animal activity (it also applies to small familiar animals, such as pigeons) argues that an animal-monitoring module is innate in the brain.

“More news from the savannah,” The Economist