I've long believed that economic statistics dramatically mismeasure actual well-being, understating real gains in the standard of living. (Examples here, here, and here.) For understandable reasons, government statisticians put a premium on consistency over time. But the economy has an annoying habit of changing.
Dan Drezner has a bunch of recent posts on the problem of "dark matter" in measuring how well the economy is doing.
In the new issue of Cato Unbound, Theodore Dalrymple considers the question, with some insights into how stasis feeds more stasis. Replies will follow from Charles Kupchan, Timothy B. Smith, and Anne Applebaum.
What exactly is it that Europeans fear, given that their decline has been accompanied by an unprecedented increase in absolute material well-being? An open economy holds out more threat to them than promise: they believe that the outside world will bring them not trade and wealth, but unemployment and a loss of comfort. They therefore are inclined to retire into their shell and succumb to protectionist temptation, both internally with regard to the job market, and externally with regard to other nations. And the more those other nations advance relative to themselves, the more necessary does protection seem to them. A vicious circle is thus set up.
This is the third issue of Cato Unbound, edited by the very smart Brink Lindsey and Will Wilkinson. The previous issue featured a provocative, multifaceted essay by Jaron Lanier about the "Anti-goras" and "Semi-goras" that typify Internet commerce and the fundamentally cultural nature of the Net. If it were easy to summarize, it wouldn't be so valuable to read. If, like me, you missed it a month ago, check it out now.
Cato Unbound's format is an interesting experiment with fostering serious thought in a web-based publication and a refreshing alternative to the snarky quick bites so common in print and online. I look forward to reading more.
I suspect this WaPost article was planted by FDA employees looking for a bigger budget, but it raises an interesting issue: Why is it taking so long to approve generic drugs? Marc Kaufman reports that the current backlog, more than 800 applications, is an all-time high. Unfortunately, he doesn't explain what the approval process entails--How much testing does a generic require anyway?--or what it's supposed to achieve.
According to this LAT report by Seema Mehta, kids aren't learning penmanship anymore:
Educators say the days of primary school students hunched over desks and painstakingly copying rows of cursive letters are waning. There are many culprits: computers, a rejection of repetitive drills as a teaching tool, and government testing that determines a school's worth based on core subjects such as reading and math.
"Handwriting and cursive have been pushed aside," said Joe Mueller, principal of Litel Elementary School in Chino Hills. "When you have a student struggling and you have to pick an area to focus on, reading versus penmanship, reading [will prevail]. The plate is full."
Unfortunately, you can't always type, and test-taking in particular often requires legible writing.
But penmanship remains crucial to a student's success, [Vanderbilt professor Steve] Graham said. A prime example is the SAT's new timed essay section, which must be handwritten.
Though SAT graders are instructed not to let legibility influence how essays are scored, at least 10 studies have concluded that that's impossible, Graham said. A 1992 study of graders who had been so trained found that neatly written essays received the equivalent of a 2.5-point benefit on a 100-point scale. Among untrained graders, the advantage grew to more than four points.
The last time Professor Postrel was grading exams, I actually "translated" one particularly illegible one into writing he could read, saving an hour or so of grading time--and a lot of aggravation. Instead of cursive, however, why not teach kids to print neatly, ideally as precisely as architects?
A new site for obsessed authors and their loved ones. (Thanks to reader Jeremy Bencken.)
My response to this nonsense is to wonder why Muslims don't grow up. If your co-religionists are going to take political stands, and blow up innocent people in the name of Islam, political cartoonists are going to occasionally take satirical swipes at your religion. Those swipes may not be nuanced, but they're what you can expect when you live in a free society, where you, too, can hold views others find offensive. If you don't like it, move to Saudi Arabia. Or just try to peacefully convert people to Islam. As Fred Barnes points out, the current cover of Rolling Stone is offensive to (hypersensitive, paranoid, publicity-seeking) Christians, but they aren't threatening anyone with physical violence. (Here's an article on that.)
All of which is really just a lead-in to a plug for Jonathan Rauch's excellent book Kindly Inquisitors.
The Fox News report from which the image above is taken is here.
Reader Eric Akawie writes in response to the item below:
I think another, somewhat unconscious motive behind Scrapbooking is the deprecation of the physical status of photographs. I remember as a child, photographs were absolutely sacred — we never threw away or cut up a photo, no matter how bad it was. But now, with photos printed at home, and so cheap individually, throwing photographs away is not a big deal (although I always feel a pang and sense my mother's disapproving glare.)
Scrapbooking returns that sense of specialness to the photos included, and with the amount of work (and money!) that goes into an individual page, acts as a bulwark against the photos being discarded during some cleaning/purging/simplifying binge.
The scrapbooking phenomenon reminds me of an observation made by Rose Wilder Lane in The Woman's Day Book of American Needlework
Stephanie McCrummen of the WaPost reports on a hobby I was utterly unaware of until I moved to Dallas: the creation of elaborately decorated scrapbooks by suburban moms documenting their family's life.
With devotion, and, some say, obsession, they have fueled the thriving, $2.5 billion scrapbooking industry, an ever-expanding, ever-more-elaborate supply of photo-safe minutiae: corner lacing punches and circle cutters, rickrack and paisley paper and brads eyelets and packages of thematic word stickers -- on love, on vacation, on childhood -- the better to frame a life.
What's driving the phenomenon? One theory is that it creates an excuse for sociability while allowing time for personal enjoyment. I suspect that scrapbookers find their hobby a deeply satisfying source of "flow"
Robbie Blinkoff, principal anthropologist with Context-Based Research Group, a company that studies consumer behavior for such clients as the Campbell Soup Co., spent a while observing the scrapbooker. He concluded that what Ballard described as "going out and coming in" was at the root of the phenomenon and others such as the iPod. Blinkoff calls the underlying trend "alone, together."
"It makes me feel part of a larger community, but it also grows my sense of self," he said. "That's what scrapbooking does, especially for moms, who have no time to be creative these days."
And yet, among their thousands and thousands of photos, women tend to include very few, if any, photos of themselves, often because they don't like to be photographed or are reluctant to relinquish control of how their descendants will view their lives in 100 years.
In the buildup to Oscar, Steve Kurtz has posted his "Film Year In Review--2005," which is much smarter and more fun than the Oscars.
Like Steve, I'm sorry that theater attendance is down. I like to see movies in a dark room with other people. Of course, I don't like it when those other people talk or bring their squirmy, loudmouth kids. And I do think movies are pricing themselves out of the market, forgetting that they have competition for your entertainment dollar.
I didn't see that many movies in 2005, but I second his recommendations of Downfall, which was absolutely riveting, and Layercake. And, like him, I had fun at Mr. and Mrs. Smith, even though I understand the critics' objections.
Quite a few readers have written to ask about the answer to the bat-and-ball question in my NYT column. Here's the relevant equation: $1.05-0.05=$1.00.
Interestingly, when Shane Frederick asks a different version of the question, substituting a difference of 13 cents for a bagel and banana totaling 37 cents, many fewer people get the answer wrong--because it's not intuitive.
