Month: March 2012

Yes, according to Hanna Rosin, who sparked a WSJ debate on the sexual revolution:

Young women in their sexual prime—that is, their 20s and early 30s—are generally better off than young men. They are better educated and earn more money on average. What made this possible is the sexual revolution—the ability to have temporary, intimate relationships that don't derail a career. Or to put it more simply, to have sex without getting married.

Along similar lines, a new working paper (pdf) from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the Pill accounted for 10 percent of the narrowing wage gap in the 1980s and 31 percent in the 1990s. So why aren't women happier?

Using 35 years of data from the General Social Survey, two Wharton School economists, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, made the case in 2009 that women's happiness appeared to be declining over time despite their advances in the work force and education. The authors noted that women (and men) showed declining happiness during the years studied. Though they were careful not to draw conclusions from their data, is it not reasonable to think that at least some of that discontent comes from the feeling that the grass is greener elsewhere—a feeling made plausible by the sexual revolution?

David Sessions thinks social conservatives love to talk about happiness but miss the larger picture:

[I]t’s pretty self-evident that women are better off than they were in 1950. You’re free to think it’s better to have a society where women have less choice about what to do with their lives, less ability to support themselves without a man, and less ability to pursue the education and career opportunities they clearly excel at, but you’d be in a fractional minority of even conservative women.

The reason conservatives don’t want to admit this obvious reality in public is what is behind the profound change, the profound improvement, in women’s standing in such a short period of time: the breaking away from traditional ideas about gender roles and sexual morality.

"Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again," – Marilynne Robinson, When I Was A Child, I Read Books.

The number of households with firearms may be down, but gun sales and the publications that glorify them are booming:

Guns and Ammo reaches 575,000. American Rifleman, 1.6 million. As readers flee most magazines, gun publications are flourishing—thanks in part to an increasingly hard-line editorial direction. The 12-year-old NRA title America's 1st Freedom recently saw a single-year growth of 23 percent to a circulation north of 600,000. Since Obama's election, gun-focused magazines have landed on the list of the 25 fastest-growing titles. Visit any supermarket magazine rack in flyover country and a quarter to a third of it will be dedicated to gun magazines.

Despite the abandonment of the gun-control debate, gun sales are booming since Obama took office. Sturm Ruger & Co. recently halted new orders, citing an inability to meet surging sales. The company's stock jumped 7.8 percent. … And instead of smoothing sales, the decrease in violent crime has been used to buttress the more-guns position.

Kiyoshi Ookawa explores the Jigokudani Monkey Park with his camera:

(Photo courtesy of Kiyoshi Ookawa)

Three cheers!

Canada will withdraw the penny from circulation this year, saving taxpayers about C$11 million ($11 million) annually and forcing retailers to round prices to the nearest nickel, the government announced in its budget [Thursday].

Doug Mataconis wonders if we'll ever get with the program:

The situation is actually even nuttier here in the United States, where it costs 2.4 cents to produce each penny, but efforts to eliminate the penny have always died in Congress. The President’s new budget included a proposal to allow the US Mint to study the use alternative metals in coin production in the hope that this would reduce costs, but that’s likely only a short term measure.

A couple months ago, Tim Fernholz examined the groups that don't want to change our coin system, like zinc miners and businesses with a stake in vending machines:

The penny paradox is a dilemma at the heart of democratic government—a engaged, concentrated group of people who benefit from spending can keep it going, even if it’s not in the broad public interest. 

But a glimpse of the Dish's long crusade against the penny here and here.

Nate Silver examines prediction models:

The broader point is that we can get into trouble when we exaggerate how much we know about the future. Although election forecasting is a relatively obscure topic, you’ll see the same mistakes in fields like finance and earthquake prediction in which the stakes are much higher.

In response, John Sides defends forecasting models:

[I]f we look at the models in a different way, they arguably do a good enough job. Say that you just want to know who is going to win the presidential election, not whether this candidate will get 51 percent or 52 percent of the vote. Of the 58 separate predictions that Nate tabulates, 85 percent of them correctly identified the winner — even though most forecasts were made two months or more before the election and even though few of these forecasts actually incorporated trial heat polls from the campaign.

Ed Kilgore makes a distinction between "election determinists" who believe "that factors beyond the framework of actual campaigning, candidates, issues, messages, and events largely control outcomes" and "people who pretty much ignore fundamentals, and treat the character and abilities of candidates and their staffs, the thrust-and-parry of campaigns, the salience of particular issues, and the battle for persuasion of voters, as essentially non-determined phenomena that can only be understood and assessed via close 'insider' inspection." He thinks this divide results in a lot of talking past each other:

There’s certainly room for widely varying perspectives, but we’ll all get along better if we try to show our cards—or if you prefer, our paradigms.

(Photo: Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney addresses supporters as he campaigns during a town hall forum at the American Legion Post 109 on March 21, 2012 in Arbutus, Maryland. By Patrick Smith/Getty Images)

According to Matt Corley:

One school of optimism says that the uninformed errors of individual voters will cancel out through the miracle of aggregation, leading to collective decisions that are rational. Another upbeat suggestion is that uninformed voters can use information shortcuts to make competent voting decisions. University of Michigan political scientist Arthur Lupia, for instance, has found that knowledge of interest group positions can lead poorly informed voters to make similar choices on ballot questions as relatively well-informed voters.