Is Marriage good for you?

Contemporary studies, for instance, have shown that married people are less likely to get pneumonia, have surgery, develop cancer or have heart attacks. A group of Swedish researchers has found that being married or cohabiting at midlife is associated with a lower risk for dementia. A study of two dozen causes of death in the Netherlands found that in virtually every category, ranging from violent deaths like homicide and car accidents to certain forms of cancer, the unmarried were at far higher risk than the married. For many years, studies like these have influenced both politics and policy, fueling national marriage-promotion efforts, like the Healthy Marriage Initiative of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. From 2006 to 2010, the program received $150 million annually to spend on projects like “divorce reduction” efforts and often cited the health benefits of marrying and staying married.

-Is Marriage Good for Your Health?

The Survey- The Mop Wars

A review of effectiveness of mops from NYT;

Casabella Swivel-It Roller Mop / Eclipse / O Cedar Microfiber Cloth Mop /Smart Mop /Swiffer Sweeper / Method Home’s Omop /Lanier

For Feedback: So what is your favorite mop and why?

If you’ve ever had a child, we want to know about your experience.

Please help Betsey and Wolfers by doing the survey.

Elinor Ostrum in South Asia

In the south Asian context, the key contribution by Elinor Ostrom, along with other scholars (Shivakoti and Ostrom 2002) has been to provide effective empirical understanding of the performance of different types of irrigation institutional arrangements, along with a theoretical understanding of how these systems work. She demonstrated the importance of involving farmer-users in the design and management of irrigation systems for successful local resource management policies in Nepal. Work in Asia had amply demonstrated that large, centralised and essentially top-down government management systems tended to underperform, with lower rates of return on investment than systems where incentives to engineers were aligned to those of local farmer-users with their active participation (Wade 1982; Lam 1995; Ostrom 2002). Several Indian scholars have been inspired by Ostrom’s work to study issues of collective action and governance of common property resources, and to search for alternative frameworks for understanding how best to manage such resources which are often vital to the very existence of rural livelihoods in India. A large body of literature exists in India on the contributions of common property resources or CPRs as they are commonly labelled. The National Sample Survey too devoted a special round (54th round) to the de jure and de facto existence and contributions of CPRs in India, particularly in terms of their provisioning services such as fuel-wood, fodder and non-timber forest products from forests. Her work and that following hers in south Asia and elsewhere has found that institutions for collective action can emerge in rural societies characterised by inequality, prior history and poor implementation of centrally determined legal structures. Village society was often able to accept some amount of inequality, overlook prior history and agree on common norms of behaviour to solve the problems of the commons.


Several scholars from south Asia benefited from visiting the “Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis”, which Ostrom established in 1973, along with her husband Vincent, a political scientist at the Indiana University Bloomington. Over time, the Workshop has turned out to be an extraordinary forum for productive deliberations from evolving associations of students and professors thereby producing a wealth of theory, empirical studies and experiments at the interface of political economy, social anthropology, economics, political science, and policy studies thereby further enriching the interdisciplinary discourse of collective action. Quite a few of the research students of Ostrom have visited Indian institutes (Institute of Economic Growth (IEG) in Delhi, being one of the prominent ones) and have worked with Indian scholars, thereby resulting in further exchanges. Ostrom herself has visited academic institutions in India a few times, the most recent visit being at the IEG in October 2008, providing the researchers the intellectual space to discuss and debate design issues in moving from models of governance of local to global commons.

Source: EPW

Related:


Elinor Ostrom and the Future of Economics
Vincent and Elinor Ostrom and public ownership of natural resources

Podcast: Elinor Ostrom Checks In
A Case Study for Elinor Ostrom's 2009 Nobel Speech?

The Significance of Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel

Books vs Articles: The Flaying of Elinor Ostrom;

Her important book that was key to her prize, Governing the Commons, 1990, has been riduculed because presumably unlike an article in the AER, it did not go through a "peer review" process

Elinor Ostrom on the Market, the State, and the Third Sector

The Ostrom Nobel


An institutional economics prize
Ostrom and Williamson get the Riksbank

What this Nobel prize means
Rethinking Institutional Analysis: Interviews with Vincent and Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom and the well-governed commons

Elinor Ostrom - Nobel Laureate 2009
Ostrom on institutions: complex solutions can spontaneously emerge

Reality bites
Congratulations to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson;

Congratulations go out to Elinor Ostrom, co-author of The Samaritan’s Dilemma: The Political Economy of Development Aid (OUP, 2005) and Oliver Williamson, author of The Mechanisms of Governance (OUP, 1999), Organization Theory: From Chester Barnard to the Present and Beyond, 2nd Edition (OUP, 1995), and The Nature of the Firm: Origins, Evolution, and Development (OUP, 1993).

See the world like Elinor Ostrom

To see the world more like Elinor Ostrom is to be guided less by ideology and more by the contours of the situation — to use the right institutional tool for the job. “[N]ational governments,” Ostrom tells us, “are too small to govern the global commons and too big to handle smaller scale problems.”

Skyhooks versus Cranes: The Nobel Prize for Elinor Ostrom;

To understand BOTH why we don’t need police officers in some cases AND why police officers don’t follow the rules in other cases, we have to expand models of human preferences to include a contingent taste for punishing others. In reaching this conclusion, she arrived at a point similar to that reached by Avner Greif (whom the Nobel committee correctly cites.)

Princeton’s Dixit Discusses Nobel for Ostrom, Williamson: Audio

For Debate

Corseting female sexuality

The whole article is pitched to support that old tired cliché of sexuality that 'women are complicated, men are simple' and it uses the differences in research findings to suggest women are enigmatic, complex, they don't know what they want, or are torn by competing sexual desires.

What do these enigmatic women want?;

Here, we know the score: Diamond arguing women want intimacy, Meana that they want a real man to take them, and Chivers that women want it all, even if they don’t realize it and contradict themselves.

The irony is that, with such a tangle, the conclusion is foreordained: women will seem enigmatic, inconsistent, and irremediably opaque. As I’ll suggest in this, I think that the conclusion is built into the way the question is being asked. If a similar question were asked about nearly any group, in nearly any domain of complex human behaviour, and then a simple single answer were demanded, the questioner would face nearly identical frustration.

How Germans Love

More here

Econ Talk of the Day- Improved Inflation measures

"The CPI: Proposed Initiatives to Improve the Measurement of Headline Inflation"
Speakers: Michael W. Horrigan, Bureau of Labor Statistics; W. John Layng, Bureau of Labor Statistics
Moderator: Maurine Haver, Haver Analytics
BLS Associate Commissioner Mike Horrigan and BLS Assistant Commissioner for CPI John Layng discuss plans to significantly improve the shelter component of the CPI and to update the geographic samples in which prices for CPI are collected.

Book Recommendation- Gallup speaking for Islam

Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think
By John L. Esposito, Ph.D., and Dalia Mogahed

-Surveyed a sample representing more than 90% of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims- the largest such survey
-Nearly one-quarter of Americans say they would not want a Muslim as a neighbor
-In Saudi Arabia, the majority of men (58%) say they believe women should vote

Believe it or Not

Chinese want their government to control the Internet

Have You Been Bullied at Work?

Bullying in the workplace is surprisingly common. In a survey released last fall, 37 percent of American workers said they had experienced bullying on the job, according to the research firm Zogby International...

The Zogby survey showed that 40 percent of workplace bullies are women.

-When the Bully Sits in the Next Cubicle

First household survey for Haiti

Making poor Haitians count--poverty in rural and urban Haiti based on the first household survey for Haiti

Summary: This paper analyzes poverty in Haiti based on the first Living Conditions Survey of 7,186 households covering the whole country and representative at the regional level. Using a USD1 a day extreme poverty line, the analysis reveals that 49 percent of Haitian households live in absolute poverty. Twenty, 56, and 58 percent of households in metropolitan, urban, and rural areas, respectively, are poor. At the regional level, poverty is especially extensive in the northeastern and northwestern regions. Access to assets such as education and infrastructure services is highly unequal and strongly correlated with poverty. Moreover, children in indigent households attain less education than children in nonpoor households. Controlling for individual and household characteristics, location, and region, living in a rural area does not by itself affect the probability of being poor. But in rural areas female headed households are more likely to experience poverty than male headed households. Domestic migration and education are both key factors that reduce the likelihood of falling into poverty. Employment is essential to improve livelihoods and both the farm and nonfarm sector play a key role.

British Fact of the Day

Nearly half the UK population (45%) don’t know what Magna Carta is according to a ‘You Gov’ poll commissioned by the British Library prior to the launch of its Magna Carta website www.bl.uk/treasures/magnacarta/ Less than one in three people (32%) know that it set written limits on the authority of the monarch...

Responding to the results of the poll, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, Jack Straw MP, said:

"If you asked an American if they had heard of their Bill of Rights, I expect they’d tell you it was a trick question. Such is the enormous iconic value of one of their cornerstone constitutional documents. In contrast, many British people struggle to put their finger on one of our own defining documents, Magna Carta. In Britain we have an innate sense of rights, but they have more existed in hearts and minds and habits than in explicit understanding. The challenge for today is to look for a new expression of our rights, and the responsibilities that go with them, which is relevant for the 21st century. Magna Carta remains an epochal moment in British history, with a resonance that still lasts today. I hope that our proposed new British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities will in time become as deeply engrained in our culture as its equivalent on the other side of the Atlantic."

via Heavy Lifting

The perfect balanced sample in opinion polls

Save a Survey

To Whom It May Concern:

The President’s proposed Fiscal Year 2009 budget eliminates funding for the American Time Use Survey (ATUS). This data source, which became fully operational in 2003, is an annual survey that provides the only available information on how Americans use their time. In the view of many social scientists, it is the most important new data initiative begun by the U.S government in at least 35 years. The size of the ATUS sample was already reduced by 35 percent beginning in 2004. That was truly unfortunate, but elimination of the survey would be a far more serious loss.

The ATUS provides essential information on how Americans spend their time, including time spent caring for children, cleaning the house, working for pay, and caring for sick adults. Put simply, the ATUS is needed to expand our horizons beyond merely charting where dollars go, to charting where time goes too. Statistics on spending, jobs, incomes, and so on are undeniably important. But anyone who wants to understand the changing lives of American families, to monitor the well-being of the American population, to measure national output, productivity and other outcomes that are essential to sound economic policy-making, or to make informed social policy decisions also needs information on how our population spends its time.

Although the ATUS is a relatively new survey, it has already proven to be an invaluable component of the statistical infrastructure, giving us a unique window on ourselves and our society. Moreover, the power of the ATUS has grown as more years of data have accumulated. Every other advanced nation in the world collects time use data. If the ATUS is eliminated, American businesses, families, policymakers and researchers will lose out on critical information that can improve the quality of our lives.

We urge you to add $6.0 million to the Fiscal Year 2009 BLS budget to collect ATUS data from the full sample originally planned for the survey or, at the least, to allocate the $4.3 million needed to preserve the program in its current form.

Katharine G. Abraham, Suzanne Bianchi,Daniel S. Hamermesh, Alan B. Krueger

via Real Time Economics

Religion in America

Michael Lindsay, assistant director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life at Rice University, echoed that view. “Religion is the single most important factor that drives American belief attitudes and behaviors,” said Mr. Lindsay, who had read the Pew report. “It is a powerful indicator of where America will end up on politics, culture, family life. If you want to understand America, you have to understand religion in America.”

-Americans Change Faiths at Rising Rate, Report Finds

Hepatitis B infection or son preference and gender imbalance

Does Hepatitis B infection or son preference explain the bulk of gender imbalance in China ? : a review of the evidence

Summary: China has a large deficit of females, and public policies have sought to reduce the son preference that is widely believed to cause this. Recently a study has suggested that up to 75 percent of this deficit is attributable to hepatitis B infection, indicating that immunization programs should form the first plank of policy interventions. However, a large medical dataset from Taiwan (China) shows that hepatitis B infection raises women's probability of having a son by only 0.25 percent. And demographic data from China show that the only group of women who have elevated probabilities of bearing a son are those who have already borne daughters. This pattern makes it difficult to see how any biological factor can explain a large part of the imbalance in China's sex ratios at birth -- unless it can be shown that it somehow selectively affects those who have borne girls, or causes them to first bear girls and then boys. The Taiwanese data suggest that this is not the case with hepatitis B, since its impact is unaffected by the sex composition of previous births. The data support the cultural, rather than the biological, explanation for the "missing women."

African-American Votes are Up for Grabs

Assorted on Election

Survey Determines African-American Votes are Up for Grabs in Democratic Party

Results from an opinion survey (pdf) on “Racial Attitudes and the Presidential Nomination,” conducted by Fredrick Harris, professor of Political Science at Columbia University and director of the Center on African American Politics and Society, show that African-American votes are up for grabs for both leading candidates of the Democratic Party and the skin color of the candidate will not automatically translate into African-American votes.

Political Dashboard

Help this person- Translations of Koran

This questionnaire is part of a Ph.D. study conducted at Cairo University, Egypt. Apart from the academic degree, the researcher is planning to pass her recommendations for improving future Qur'an translations, based on respondents' opinions, to some translators who are working on new Qur'an translation projects. Optimistically, the results of this field study, plus the results of the complementary analytical study of a number of the most recent Qur'an translations, are intended to be published in a book by God's grace

I've to say Good Luck

Why Iraq should be an election issue

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.

Three-quarters of these veterans were still in the military at the time of the killing. More than half the killings involved guns, and the rest were stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings. Twenty-five offenders faced murder, manslaughter or homicide charges for fatal car crashes resulting from drunken, reckless or suicidal driving.

About a third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives, among them 2-year-old Krisiauna Calaira Lewis, whose 20-year-old father slammed her against a wall when he was recuperating in Texas from a bombing near Falluja that blew off his foot and shook up his brain.

-Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles

The Poll that went wrong

More assorted on US Elections;



Why Presidential Polls Are Wrong

What was going on with the New Hampshire polls?

Nobody knows anything- Paul Krugman

New Hampshire's Polling Fiasco

What A Night! Interpreting the New Hampshire Primary

How Wrong Were The Polls?

Contra-Wilder Effect

What prediction markets can and cannot do

Why We Got it Wrong

Iowa’s Prescient Pollster

Why polls in New Hampshire were so far off
Number-Crunching the 2008 Election
New Hampshire, from Beijing
Blame Biden

Guest Blog: Who’s to Blame for Inaccurate Election Polls?

Clinton's Historic Surprise by Justin Wolfers

Once More, With Feeling

Prediction Market Industry Association = useless, so far

John Oliver and Andy Zaltzman ponder how the American election can be so long

John Zogby of Zogby International in The Daily Show