Teenage motherhood is well correlated with poor economic outcomes. This of course need not mean that teenage motherhood causes poor economic outcomes; in fact, Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine (of U. Maryland and Wellesley College) argue precisely the opposite: Being on a low economic trajectory causes teenage motherhood, and conditional on that original trajectory, teenage motherhood does little economic harm:
Archive for the 'Empirical Puzzles' Category
Suppose you go around taking extremely close-up black-and-white pictures of randomly chosen natural and unnatural objects (rocks, trees, streams, buildings, etc.). What do they look like?
Well, each one looks like a patch of varying shades of gray, of course. But do some patches arise more than others? If each of your close-ups is, say, three pixels by three pixels, Which would you expect to see more of:
| This? |  |
Or this? |  |
I’ve been a little swamped lately and my daily blogging has fallen off. Until things get back to normal, I think I’ll fill the breach by reprinting a few of my old columns from Slate. Today’s entry is on “Why Jews Don’t Farm”.
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In the 1890s, my Eastern European Jewish ancestors emigrated to an American Jewish farming community in Woodbine, N.J., where the millionaire philanthropist Baron de Hirsch provided land, tools, and training at one of the nation’s first agricultural colleges. But within a generation, the family had settled in Philadelphia where they became accountants, tailors, merchants, and eventually, lawyers and college professors.
De Hirsch had a vision of American Jews achieving economic liberation by working the land. If he’d had a better sense of history, he would have built not an agricultural college but a medical school, because for well over a millennium prior to the settlement of Woodbine, Jews had not been farmers—not in Palestine, not in the Muslim empire, not in Western Europe, not in Eastern Europe, not anywhere in the world.
You have to go back almost 2,000 years to find a time when Jews, like virtually every other identifiable group, were primarily an agricultural people. Around A.D. 200, Jews began to quit the land. By the seventh century, Jews had left their farms in large numbers to become craftsmen, artisans, merchants, and moneylenders—the only group to have given up on agriculture. Jewish participation in farming fell to about 10 percent through most of the world; even in Palestine it was only about 25 percent. Everyone else stayed on the farms.
(Even in the modern state of Israel, where agriculture has been an important component of the economy, it’s been a peculiarly capital-intensive form of agriculture, one that employed well under a quarter of the population at the height of the Kibbutz movement, and less than 3 percent of the population today.)
The obvious question is: Why? Why did Jews and only Jews take up urban occupations, and why did it happen so dramatically throughout the world? Two economic historians—Maristella Botticini (of Boston University and Universitá di Torino) and Zvi Eckstein (of Tel Aviv University and the University of Minnesota)—have recently been giving that question a lot of thought.
Here is how I answered that question in Jamaica:
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(Slightly higher quality video here.)
Edited to add: There were apparently some problems with the video stalling somewhere around the one-hour mark (during the post-talk question period.) I believe this is fixed now.
One of my weaker columns when I wrote for Slate was a highly unsatisfactory stab at why some hotels charge for wireless and others don’t. Today my wife, who had never seen that column, asked me the same question, and I think my off-the-cuff answer was probably better than anything I said in Slate.
So here’s my new stab at this:
Tyler Cowen asks: What variable best predicts your number of sex partners? My answer, which I stand by, was that it’s the same variable that best predicts your number of tennis partners, your number of checkers partners, and your number of visits to Disneyland — namely preferences. But Jason Malloy of Gene Expression steps in with something a little more empirically verifiable. Drawing on data from the respected General Social Survey, he’s correlated number of partners with everything from patriotism to empathy to “ever been punched” (all self-reported), and has invited me to share his results with you. Number of sex partners (also self-reported) is defined as number of partners since your 18th birthday. Jason’s calculations are restricted to heterosexual couplings. A negative number means that that a high response to the variable predicts fewer sex partners and a positive number means that a high response predicts more.
Back in 2003, I reported (here, here and in more detail here) that in disparate cultures around the world, from the U.S. to Kenya and from Mexico to Vietnam, parents of daughters are more likely to get divorced. This phenomenon, discovered by the economists Gordon Dahl and Enrico Moretti, is based on a sample size over 3 million and is therefore surely no coincidence.
After seven years, psychologist Anita Kelly, writing in Psychology Today (which might want to consider changing its name to Psychology Yesterday) has penned a response. She accurately summarizes the original argument:
Dahl and Moretti have summarized attempts to explain their facts as follows: Sons may either improve the quality of married life or worsen the pain of divorce (perhaps by becoming more distraught when the father leaves). Landsburg chooses the former explanation based on the fact that parents, on average, prefer having boys over having girls.
Continue reading ‘Psychology Yesterday: Daughters and Divorce’
