Adam Chandler, The
Atlantic: Why Do Americans Move So Much More Than Europeans? Decades of data, including a more recent Gallup
study, characterizes the United States as one of the most geographically mobile
countries in the world. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the
average person in the United States moves residences more than 11 times in his
or her lifetime. According to a survey conducted by the real-estate company
Re/Max earlier this year, that figure across 16 European countries is roughly
four. More than half of interstate migrants said they moved for
employment-related reasons. Workers in the U.S. now “put in almost 25 percent
more hours than Europeans” in a given year. Fatih Karahan and Darius Li at the
New York Fed are the latest to note that U.S. workers are moving around less than before. Karahan
and Li put much stock in the effects of an aging workforce, to which
they attribute “at least half” of the decline in interstate migration.
Caroline M. Hoxby, NBER: The Dramatic Economics of the U.S. Market for Higher Education. I show the productivity of institutions across this
market. Strikingly, among institutions that experience strong market forces,
the productivity of a dollar of educational resources is fairly similar, even
if the schools serve students with substantially different CR. On the other
hand, among institutions that experience weak market forces, productivity is
lower and more dispersed. These facts suggest that market forces are needed to keep schools productive
and to allocate resources across schools in a way that assures that the
marginal return to additional resources at different institutions is roughly
comparable.
Richard Susskind,
Daniel Susskind, Harvard Business Review: Robots Will Replace Doctors, Lawyers,
and Other Professionals. Most mainstream
professionals — doctors, lawyers, accountants, and so on — believe they will
emerge largely unscathed. During our consulting work and at conferences, we
regularly hear practitioners concede that routine work can be taken on by
machines, but they maintain that human experts will always be needed for the
tricky stuff that calls for judgment, creativity, and empathy. Our research and
analysis challenges the idea that these professionals will be spared. We expect that within decades
the traditional professions will be dismantled, leaving most, but not all,
professionals to be replaced by less-expert people, new types of experts, and
high-performing systems.
Hansen, Bertel
Teilfeldt et al, Epidemiology: The consequences of daylight savings time
transitions on the incidence rate of unipolar depressive episodes. Daylight savings time (DST) transitions affect
approximately 1.6 billion people worldwide. Prior studies have documented
associations between DST transitions and adverse health outcomes. Using time
series intervention analysis of nationwide data from the Danish Psychiatric
Central Research Register from 1995 to 2012 we compared the observed trend in
the incidence rate of hospital contacts for unipolar depressive episodes after
the transitions to and from summer time to the predicted trend in the incidence
rate. The analyses were
based on 185.419 hospital contacts for unipolar depression and showed that the
transition from summer time to standard time led to an 11 percent increase (95%
CI: 7, 15%) in the incidence rate of hospital contacts for unipolar depressive
episodes that dissipated over approximately 10 weeks.
Austin C. Smith,
American Economic Journal: Applied Economics: Spring Forward at Your Own Risk:
Daylight Saving Time and Fatal Vehicle Crashes. Daylight Saving Time (DST) impacts over 1.5 billion people, yet many
of its impacts on practicing populations remain uncertain. Exploiting the
discrete nature of DST transitions and a 2007 policy change, I estimate the
impact of DST on fatal automobile crashes. My results imply that from 2002–2011 the transition
into DST caused over 30 deaths at a social cost of $275 million annually.
Employing four tests to decompose the aggregate effect into an ambient light or
sleep mechanism, I find that shifting ambient light only reallocates fatalities
within a day, while sleep deprivation caused by the spring transition increases
risk.
Havranek, Tomas,
Herman, Dominik, Irsova, Zuzana, MPRA: Does Daylight Saving Save Energy? A
Meta-Analysis. The original
rationale for adopting daylight saving time (DST) was energy savings. Modern
research studies, however, question the magnitude and even direction of the
effect of DST on energy consumption. Representing the first meta-analysis in this literature, we collect 162
estimates from 44 studies and find that the mean reported estimate indicates
modest energy savings: 0.34% during the days when DST applies. Energy
savings are larger for countries farther away from the equator, while
subtropical regions consume more energy because of DST.
Jochen Bittner,
NYT: What Do Trump and Marx Have in Common? We have a word in German, “Wutbürger,” which means “angry citizen”. Wutbürgers
lie at both ends of the political spectrum. A Wutbürger rages against a new
train station and tilts against wind turbines. Many British Wutbürgers voted
for Brexit. French Wutbürgers will vote for Marine Le Pen’s National Front.
Perhaps the most powerful Wutbürger of them all is Donald J. Trump. Which
raises the question: How was anger hijacked? Karl Marx was a Wutbürger. The
upper class has gained much more from the internationalization of trade and
finances than the working class has, often in obscene ways. We live in a world, the liberal
British historian Timothy Garton Ash noted lately, “which would have Marx
rubbing his hands with Schadenfreude.” In Germany a recent poll showed that
only 14 percent of the citizens trusted the politicians.
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