Progress Daily

Women constitute only about 1/5 of US engineers, 1/3 of chemists, and 1/4 of computer and math professionals.

Joshua Rosenbloom surveyed hundreds of professionals in information technology, a career in which women are significantly underrepresented (”Why are there so few women in Information Technology?”; pdf file here). He also surveyed hundreds in comparable careers more evenly balanced between men and women.

The lower numbers of women in IT careers weren’t explained by work-family pressures, since computer careers made no greater time demands than those in the control group. Ability wasn’t the reason, since the women in both groups had substantial math backgrounds.

Using a standard personality-inventory test, Rosenbloom found that men and women who enjoyed the manipulation of tools or machines were more likely to choose IT careers - and it was mostly men who scored high in this area. Meanwhile, people who enjoyed working with others were less likely to choose IT careers. And, on this, women scored higher, on average.

The researchers calculated that preference accounted for about two-thirds of the gender imbalance in the IT field.

According to Susan Pinker  (in The Sexual Paradox), the countries that offer women the most financial stability and legal protections in job choice, have the greatest gender split in careers. For example, in countries with less economic opportunity, like the Philippines, Thailand, and Russia, the number of women in physics is about 30%, versus 5% in Canada, Japan, and Germany.

“The freedom to say ‘no’,” by Elaine McArdle

If you take Wikipedia as a unit — every page, edit, talk page, & line of code, in every language — that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought (according to Clay Shirkyon & Martin Wattenberg).

Television-watching represents about two hundred billion hours, in the US alone, every year. That’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year. Americans spend 100 million hours every weekend just watching the ads.

Imagine that people replace only 1% of the their TV time with the production & sharing of online content. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

“Gin, Television, and Social Surplus,” by Clay Shirkyon

Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson analyzed all the major post-war happiness studies data (.pdf file here), including new data from the Gallup World Poll, which contains detailed data on subjective well-being for 132 countries in 2006. Contrary to previous researchers using less complete date, they found that: 1) Rich people are happier than poor people. 2) Richer countries are happier than poorer countries. 3) As countries get richer, they tend to get happier.

The following chart takes the average levels of satisfaction reported on the Gallup Poll’s 0-10 scale, and plots it against G.D.P. per capita (note the log scale):

The correlation between average levels of happiness and average incomes is very high — greater than 0.8.

The relationship between happiness and log income appears nearly linear. Thus, a 10% rise in income in a rich country like the USA appears to increase happiness by about as much as a 10% rise in income in Burundi — in fact, the slope appears to get steeper above $15K!

A 10% rise in income in Burundi requires one-sixtieth as much income as a 10% rise in income in the USA. Thus, even if the slope is three times as steep for rich countries as poor countries (as Wolfers & Stevenson estimate), this still means than an extra $100 has about a twenty-times-greater effect on happiness in Burundi.

“The Economics of Happiness, Part 1 & Part 2,” by Justin Wolfers

Robert J. Barro and Rachel M. McCleary (”Religion and Economic Growth Across Countries” & “Religion and Political Economy in an International Panel“) researched the relationship between religion and development.

Their cross-country analysis shows that per capita gdp has a significantly negative effect on religion, both in terms of beliefs and participation. This tendency is gradual as countries grow richer. A steady pattern of secularization has only applied to a few countries, such as Britain, France, and Germany.

For a given level of religious participation, increases in core religious beliefs — notably belief in hell, heaven, and an afterlife — tend to increase economic growth. In contrast, for given religious beliefs, increases in church attendance tend to reduce economic growth. In other words, the main growth effect is a positive response to an increase in believing relative to belonging (attending).

A certain amount of participation in religious activities is positive, in that people acquire useful beliefs. But if people spend too much time in religious activities, there is a negative effect on economic growth.

Religious participation is correlated with a lower probability of substance abuse, juvenile delinquency (Michael J. Donahue and Peter L. Benson, “Religion and the Well-Being of Adolescents“),  and depression (”Immigrant Generation, Assimilation and Adolescent Psychological Well-being“), and positive attitudes toward marriage and having children (Elaine Marchena and Linda J. Waite, “Re-assessing Family Goals and Attitudes in Late Adolescence”).

Overall, urbanization has a negative effect on religiosity, particularly in terms of participation.

“Religion and Economic Development,” by Rachel M. McCleary

The tallest quarter of the US population earns 9-10% more than the shortest quarter, according to two recent studies. Nicola Persico, Andrew Postlewaite and Dan Silverman (”The Effect of Adolescent Experience on Labor Market Outcomes“) think this is because height gives adolescents self-confidence. Anne Case and Christina Paxson (”Stature and Status“), on the other hand, argue that people who grow to their full potential are smarter, on average.

“Feet, dollars and inches,” The Economist

Katherine Kinzler has demonstrated that preverbal infants as young as 5-6 months of age “prefer” their own native speakers. She found that American infants look longer at someone speaking with an American accent than someone with a French accent, and the opposite pattern occurs with French infants. And when two adults simultaneously offer a 10-month-old the same toy, the baby usually reaches for the one being given to them by the native speaker.

In the ancestral past, neighboring communities were often at war with each other, and the most reliable marker of an out-group member wasn’t what they looked like but how they sounded.

“Babies Don’t Like Foreigners,” by Jesse Bering

The single best gauge of economic performance is not growth in GDP, but GDP per person, which is a rough guide to average living standards.

Over the past five years, America’s average annual real GDP growth of 2.9% was much faster than Japan’s 2.1%.

However, America’s population is rising much faster, by 1% a year (thanks to immigration and a higher birth rate); the number of Japanese citizens has been shrinking since 2005. Once you take account of this, Japan’s GDP per head increased at an annual rate of 2.1% in the five years to 2007, slightly faster than America’s 1.9% and much better than Germany’s 1.4%.

Likewise, Spain has been one of the euro area’s star performers in terms of GDP growth, but over the past three years output per person has grown more slowly than in Germany, which, like Japan, has a shrinking population.

One of the supposedly booming BRIC countries, Brazil, has seen its GDP per head increase by only 2.3% per year since 2003, barely any faster than Japan’s. Russia, by contrast, enjoyed annual average growth in GDP per head of 7.4% because the population is falling faster than in any other large country (by 0.5% a year). Indians love to boast that their economy’s growth rate has almost caught up with China’s, but its population is also expanding much faster. Over the past five years, the 10% average increase in China’s income per head dwarfed India’s 6.8% gain.

During the past five years, world GDP has grown by an average of 4.5% a year, its fastest for more than three decades, though not as fast as during the golden age of the 1960s when annual growth exceeded 5%. But the world’s population is now growing at half of its pace in the 1960s, and so world income per head has increased by more over the past five years than during any other period on record.

Zero GDP growth in Japan, where the population is declining, would still leave the average citizen better off. But in America, the average person would be worse off. On this basis, America has been in recession since the fourth quarter of last year when its GDP rose by an annualised 0.6%, implying that real income per head fell by 0.4%.

“Grossly Distorted Picture,” The Economist

According to research by Warren Sanderson et al., (”The coming acceleration of global population ageing“), the mean age of the world population is 30, with 44 years left to live on average. By the end of the century, the mean age is expected to be 45, with 41 years left. So both measures, mean age and average years of life remaining, show aging.

In North America, the average age will go up through the end of the century, (from 37 to nearly 50), but the average years remaining also will go up (from 43 to 48). North America is the only region to show that pattern.

The increase in average age is caused by people living longer, and also fewer babies being born.

As longevity has increased, people have invested more in education (presumably since they’ll have more time to reap the benefits).

The researchers’ model shows an 88% probability that world population growth will end before the end of the century.

“Getting Old, Faster and Faster,” by Julie J. Rehmeyer

As human societies grow richer, people have fewer children. In most species, such an increase in available resources leads in the opposite reproductive direction. What makes the “demographic transition” even more paradoxical is that in less developed times and places, the rich do not have smaller families than the poor.

Most explanations of the demographic transition are social, and none is really satisfactory.

A study by Agnar Helgason, of deCODE Genetics, has recently provided a new explanation: that the mixing-up of people caused by the urbanisation which normally accompanies development is, itself, partly responsible — because it breaks up optimal mating patterns.

Iceland’s records since its founding by a few Vikings are so good that the antecedents of today’s inhabitants (apart from a handful of recent immigrants) are known with precision. Its medical records are also good, and most Icelanders have given genetic samples to deCode.

The study’s principal finding is that the most fecund marriages are between distant cousins. The optimum degree of outbreeding (measured in terms of the number of children and grandchildren produced) lay somewhere between cousins of the third and fourth degrees.

(”Kissing cousins, missing children,” The Economist)

Icelandic women born between 1800 and 1824 who mated with a third cousin had significantly more children and grandchildren (4.0 and 9.2, respectively) than women who hooked up with someone no closer than an eighth cousin (3.3 and 7.3). Those proportions held up among women born more than a century later when couples were, on average, having fewer children.

Despite the general pattern for reproductive success favoring close kinship, couples that were second cousins or more closely related did not have as many children.

With close inbreeding — between first cousins — there is a significant increase in the probability that both partners will share one or more detrimental recessive genes, leading to a 25 percent chance that these genes will be expressed in each pregnancy.

Mating with a relative might reduce a woman’s chance of having a miscarriage caused by immunological incompatibility between a mother and her child. Some individuals have an antigen (a protein that can launch an immune response) on the surface of their red blood cells called a rhesus factor. In some cases — typically during a second pregnancy — when a woman gets pregnant, she and her fetus may have incompatible blood cells, which could trigger the mother’s immune system to treat the fetus as a foreign intruder, causing a miscarriage. This occurrence is less probable if the parents are closely related, because their blood makeup is more likely to match.

It may be that the enhanced reproductive success at the level of third and fourth cousins (who on average would be expected to have inherited 0.8 percent to 0.2 percent of their genes from a common ancestor) represents a point of balance between the competing advantages and disadvantages of inbreeding and outbreeding.

(”When Incest Is Best,” by Nikhil Swaminathan)

Within a few months China will overtake America as the country with the world’s largest number of internet users. For the past three years China has also been the world’s largest exporter of information and communications technology. It already has the same number of mobile-phone users (500m) as the whole of Europe.

According to India’s telecoms regulator, half of all urban dwellers have mobile- or fixed-telephone subscriptions and the number is growing by 8m a month. India produces more engineering graduates than America.

The World Bank’s recently released its Global Economic Prospects. Between the early 1990s and the early 2000s, the index that summarises the technology adoption indicators rose by 160% in poor countries (with incomes per person of less than about $900 a year at current exchange rates) and by 100% in middle-income ones ($900-11,000). The index went up by only 77% in industrialised countries (with average incomes above $11,000). Poor and middle-income nations, the bank concludes, are catching up with the West.

The main channels through which technology is diffused are foreign trade (buying equipment and new ideas directly); foreign investment (having foreign firms bring them to you); and emigrants in the West.

In the past ten years the ratio of poor countries’ imports of high-tech products to their GDPs has risen by more than 50%. The ratio in middle-income countries has increased by over 70%. Capital goods (mainly industrial machinery) often embody new technology, and imports of these have increased faster in middle-income countries than in rich ones.

Emerging economies’ share of global trade in high-tech goods rose by 140% between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s.

Relative to GDP, inflows of foreign direct investment to developing economies have increased sevenfold since the 1980s. In some countries, such as Hungary and Brazil, foreign firms account for half or more of all R&D spending by companies.

Nearly half the ($40 billion-worth of) foreign direct investment in China in 2000 came from Chinese abroad. Remittances have doubled in the past ten years and now account for roughly 2% of developing countries’ GDPs — more than foreign aid.

The World Bank looked at how much time elapsed between the invention of something and its widespread adoption (defined as when 80% of countries that use a technology first report it). For 19th-century technologies the gap was long: 120 years for trains and open-hearth steel furnaces, 100 years for the telephone. For aviation and radio, invented in the early 20th century, the lag was 60 years. But for the PC and CAT scans the gap was around 20 years and for mobile phones just 16.

In the World Bank’s database, there are 28 examples of a new technology reaching 5% of the market in a rich country; of those, 23 went on to achieve over 50%. In other words, if something gets a foothold in a rich country, it usually spreads widely.

In emerging markets this is not necessarily so. The bank has 67 examples of a technology reaching 5% of the market in developing countries — but only six went on to capture half the national market.

Technology use in developing countries is highly concentrated. Almost three-quarters of China’s high-tech trade comes from just four regions on the coast. More than two-thirds of the stock of foreign investment in Russia in 2000 was in Moscow and its surroundings. Whereas half of India’s city-dwellers have telephones, little more than one-twentieth of people in the countryside do.

Rich countries spend 2.3% of GDP on R&D, East Asians 1.4%, and Latin America 0.6%. In East Asia and the West companies spend most of the money and do most of the research. In eastern Europe and Latin America the government is the largest source of finance, and in Latin America universities do the largest share of the work.

“Of internet cafés and power cuts,” The Economist