Via the Demography Matters blog, Russian birthrate seems to have recovered: By 2009, the official TFR had risen to 1.537, 1.417 in urban areas and 1.900 in rural areas. Both urban and rural TFRs rose by about the same amount from 2000 to 2009, about 0.330. Vital statistics for 2010 were just released by the […]

Via Razib, I checked out Clive Finlayson’s The Humans Who Went Extinct. On the human migration to Australia, Finlayson writes: The long-tailed macaque, primate beachcomber par excellence, can teach us another lesson. These monkeys have managed to establish viable populations on a number of remote islands over a wide area of south-east Asia. They even […]

Dale and Krueger have responded to Robin Hanson at his blog, which commented on their most recent paper. I’ve also commented on this paper, here. Most of Dale and Krueger’s comments relate to the stability of estimates that suggest that women earn less after attending high-SAT Colleges. I don’t see particularly compelling evidence here either […]

One of the topics I’ve covered here is the all-important issue of whether your choice in College matters in terms of your future earnings. To recap: the best research in the field until a few days ago suggested that the returns to going to a more selective College were quite large; a result which was […]

The New York Times highlights the issue of hospitals opting not to hire smokers. It’s not clear how many places of employment are really banning smoking (or even how strictly such regulations will be enforced), but certainly there have at least been some high-profile cases (ie, Cleveland Clinic). One question that comes immediately to mind […]

Governments are large or small depending on the level of trust and civic attitudes people have for one another. These attitudes shape peoples’ taste for redistribution and public ownership, and also affect the quality of governance. This position has been advanced by a large literature; most recently in this interesting paper put out by IZA. […]

Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff famously argued that patterns of growth across the Americas can be traced back to historic levels of inequality. Natural factor endowments in certain areas (for instance, Caribbean islands) encouraged rent-seeking extraction over investments in human capital, and led to the political empowerment of rich landowners. These elites, in turn, created […]

Jim Manzi has a good reply up at TAS on our degree of medical knowledge, discussing an Atlantic article I also go into here. While he makes a number of good points, I don’t think he quite addresses some of the issues raised by Robin Hanson and the original Atlantic piece. Manzi defends medicine in […]

Courtesy of Robin Hanson, I see that The Atlantic has an excellent article on medical knowledge: One of the researchers, a biostatistician named Georgia Salanti, fired up a laptop and projector and started to take the group through a study she and a few colleagues were completing that asked this question: were drug companies manipulating […]

As Benjamin Friedman laid out in The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth; a tolerant, accepting society is predicated on running the growth treadmill. Simply being prosperous is not enough — people need to feel that conditions will steadily improve over time, or else populism, xenophobia, and other measures of intolerance go up. So as we enter […]

Razib’s link to the discovery of a new mammal species in Madagascar makes the following point: This species is probably the carnivore with one of the smallest ranges in the world, and likely to be one of the most threatened. The Lac Alaotra wetlands are under considerable pressure, and only urgent conservation work to make […]

The Incidental Economist has an excellent series by Aaron Carroll and Austin Frakt on what makes the US Health system so expensive. Here’s the killer graph: What’s doing a lot of work here is “adjusting for relative wealth.” This phrase pops up a lot on their series, which finds that America spends more on healthcare […]

Mark Palko at the excellent blog Observational Epidemiology has a post arguing that the appeal of Ivy League degrees is primarily peer effects and selection. It’s popular these days to sneer at the Ivys. For instance, this WSJ article argues that State schools have an edge in business recruitment. Still, it’s worth looking at the […]

Razib has an excellent post with information familiar to India-watchers: India is very diverse. In particular, it has a South which does well on levels of human development (and increasingly income as well); while the states in the “BIMARU” North perform abysmally on both economic and human development indicators. These kinds of disparities are frequently […]

File this one under the list of “infrequently-asked questions.” This is an issue I’ve discussed extensively over at TGGP’s blog. Basically, here is the puzzle: Jews are among the most wealthy groups in America, with a median income close to $100,000 a year. Naively, you might expect Israel to be about as wealthy. Isreal is, after […]