Tyler Cowen has nerves of steel

With no apparent sign of fear or hesitation, he links to the following WSJ article:

Do Girls Speed More Than Boys?
Survey Says Girls Drive More Aggressively; Insurers Up Rates
By JOSEPH B. WHITE and ANJALI ATHAVALEY

Some big auto insurers are raising the rates they charge to cover teenage girls, reflecting the crumbling of conventional wisdom that young women are more responsible behind the wheel.

In a survey of teenage drivers, Allstate Insurance Co. found that 48% of girls said they are likely to drive 10 miles per hour over the speed limit. By comparison, 36% of the boys admitted to speeding. Of the girls, 16% characterized their own driving as aggressive, up from 9% in 2005. And just over half of the girls said they are likely to drive while talking on a phone or texting, compared to 38% of the boys..

The results were "a surprise to many people," says Meghann Dowd of the Allstate Foundation, an independent charitable organization funded by Allstate which sponsored the survey.

While teens fessed up about their own bad behavior, they also said their friends drive even worse. The study found that 65% of the respondents, male and female, said they are confident in their own driving skills, but 77% said they had felt unsafe when another teen was driving. Only 23% of teens agree that most teens are good drivers. This suggests teens recognize in their friends the dubious and dangerous behavior they won't admit to indulging in themselves.

The data was gleaned from online interviews with 1,063 teens across the country. It was conducted in May 2009 for the Allstate Foundation by the TRU division of TNS Custom Research Inc., a Chicago-based youth research and marketing firm. (For highlights of the study, see www.allstate.com/foundation/teen-driving/Shifting-Teen-Attitudes.aspx).

The survey relies on what teens report about themselves, and Allstate Foundation spokeswoman Meghann Dowd says that means the results could be affected by how forthcoming individuals are when answering the survey questions.

(read the rest here)

I don't know how he does it. I started to sweat when I hit the second paragraph and it just got worse from there. I'm not ashamed to admit that I get nervous around studies that:

1. assume that teenage boys and teenage girls are equally likely to tell the truth about their illegal driving habits;

2. assume that teenage boys and teenage girls are equally likely to be aware of their illegal driving habits;

3. have a spokesperson who talks about individuals not being forthcoming but doesn't mention the possibility that this effect might be more prevalent for one gender;

4. don't cross-check their findings against highly correlated hard data like highway patrol citation records;

5. contain at any point any variation of the phrase 'online interview.'

I have to sit down now. I'm getting dizzy...

Things I've learned -- 60s pulp edition

One of the pleasures of popular art is the glimpse it provides into the attitudes of the times. Sometimes this pleasure comes from the naivete of earlier times. More often, though, the experience is just the opposite -- you discover that the attitudes of previous generations were complex, surprisingly modern and often at odds with the conventional view of the era.

I recently read a couple of pulp novels from the Sixties that fell into the second category. One was The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep by Lawrence Block (discussed here). The other was The Ambushers, the sixth book in the Matt Helm series by Donald Hamilton.

Matt Helm was a counter espionage agent specializing in wet work, closer to a John LeCarre hero than to James Bond. The books were well reviewed (Anthony Boucher, writing, I believe, in the New York Times, said "Donald Hamilton has brought to the spy novel the authentic hard realism of Dashiell Hammett; and his stories are as compelling, and probably as close to the sordid truth of espionage, as any now being told."), they were extremely popular and they were sturdy enough to survive a god-awful series of in-name-only adaptations starring Dean Martin.

If you picked up a copy of the Ambushers in 1963 and turned to the first page, you'd find the narrator slipping into a Latin American country carrying a rifle with a high powered scope. The rebel leader he has been sent to kill may have had it coming, but it's not obvious that target was any worse than the leader the U.S. supported (later in the story, Helm is glad to hear that the latter has also been assassinated though his superiors most certainly are not).

The Russians in the Ambushers are sometimes enemies and sometimes allies, depending on the circumstances. The American agents generally hold the high moral ground but it's a distinction that can be rather thin and the protagonist has learned not to dwell on it too much. Everyone's hands are dirty.

As in many stories of the period, the threat nuclear war here comes not from either of the superpowers but from a third party. In this case, a Nazi war criminal who, not surprisingly, would like to see Russia and America destroy each other.

You will often hear the attitudes implicit in this story associated with the late Sixties and early Seventies, usually attributed to the escalation of the war and and the rise of a politicized youth culture, but this was 1963. It was early in the war and even the oldest of the boomers were still in high school.

If you surveyed the pop culture of the time you would find other evidence that a radical shift in the way we looked at the cold war took place in the late Fifties and early Sixties. Nuclear war was no longer likely to be depicted as a Pearl Harbor-style attack but rather as either a horrible mistake (Failsafe -- novel 1962, film 1964) or the work of a madman (Red Alert -- 1958/Strangelove* -- 1963) or the terrorist scheme of a third party (too numerous to mention). Anti-communist agents could be as morally compromised as the enemy (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold -- 1963). A sympathetic Russian was so acceptable that by 1964, you could have a loyal and openly communist Russian agent as a co-star in a popular spy show (albeit a Russian played by the Scottish David McCallum).

I've wondered if this shift was a reaction the Cuban Missile Crisis. Talking to those who were around at the time, I get the impression that for all the paranoia and anxiety and civil defense drills, the concept of nuclear war was never truly real to most people until 1962.

Good researchers in sociology or political could probably provide a rigorous answer to the question of what exactly drove the shift. I'd be interested in seeing what they came up with and if they need another topic after that, I have a whole shelf Gold Medal paperbacks for them to check out.

(You can watch Dr. Strangelove online here)

Things I've learned -- media critic edition

Felix Salmon has a good, thoughtful take on the Newsweek sale, but before I link to it, I'd like to preface it with a few things I've learned writing about media for the past twenty years. They aren't specifically at Salmon's piece but they are relevant to the larger discussion:

1. Profits from newspapers and broadcasting were obscenely high for so long that anything less now seems like the end of the world;

2. Markets for traditional media are shrinking but the rate of decline is generally overstated by shoddy statistics;

2. Most failures in media are blamed on changes in markets and technology;

3. Most failures in media are caused by unrealistic business plans, poor management, and products that suck;

4. When reading expert opinions on media and business, remember that many of these experts predicted the death of networks in the Eighties and the success of online grocery shopping in the Nineties; these experts have lost none of their self-confidence.

Felix Salmon, on the other hand, is one of those experts whose confidence level is highly correlated to his track record. Check out his very shrewd analysis here.

Scraping by on 200 million

The LA Times recently ran an interesting article on attempts to reign in the costs of big budget movies:

Bruckheimer's next production, "Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides" — his 26th film for Disney in 16 years — dramatically illustrates the new reality.

With the fourth installment of the swashbuckling tale poised to start shooting June 14, Bruckheimer and the filmmakers are scrambling to meet the more constrained budget that Disney is imposing. Although it's still large — north of $200 million — it is at least a third less than the last "Pirates" movie and includes far fewer shooting days and visual effects shots.

Ross said that Bruckheimer, known for spending lavishly, is working within the new constraints. Bruckheimer reassured him of that in Ross' first week as studio chief, Ross said: "He looked at me and said, 'I will work with you to figure out the economics of the movies going forward because I understand what we are all facing.' And I said two words: thank you."

Even before Ross took the studio reins last fall, Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger was mandating that executives ratchet down costs after underperforming movies — including Bruckheimer's expensive family film "G-Force" — triggered two quarterly losses at the studio last year.

It's a well-reported piece but it doesn't address the underlying question of why movie budgets have skyrocketed. Even if you adjust for inflation, 23 of the 25 most expensive films ever made were produced in the past fifteen years, and yet the same period was marked by economic and technical trends that should have made production less, not more expensive.


CGI and digital production

CGI has become so associated with big budgets that it's easy to forget that it is primarily a cost-saving measure. Ray Harryhausen used to tell directors that he could give them anything they wanted if they had the time and the money. That might not have been completely true but for the vast majority of the cases, CGI is used to replace the more expensive techniques of effects men like Harryhausen or to avoid costly reshoots (as in Disney's digital breast reduction of Lindsay Lohan in Herbie). Add to that the cost and time savings of innovations like nonlinear editing and you would expect film-making to get much cheaper.


Weakened unions

Hollywood is still a heavily unionized place but these unions have been steadily losing ground for at least the past quarter century. You would expect some of those losses to translate into lower production costs.


Competition from other states and countries

There have been many attempts to grab some of the business away from Southern California. Most of those attempts were sweetened with so many tax breaks and other incentives that these would-be competitors often lost money on the deals.


Off-Shoring

As a consequence of digital production, a great deal of work can now be done remotely.


Low inflation

Prices in general haven't exactly been shooting up over the past twenty years.


Obviously something caused the surge, but I suspect it has less to do with economic forces and more to do with studio politics.

Times change

A few years ago (more than a few, now that I think about it), a sociology professor told me that, back in the Sixties, Texas Instruments would accept any Ph.D. as qualification to work there, regardless of what area the degree was in. I never had a chance to ask someone from TI about this but I recently came across a kind of confirmation in a crime novel of all places.

The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep, was Lawrence Block's first attempt at a continuing character and, unlike his other series, this and the books that followed are now mainly well-written period pieces of the mid-Sixties. The books are an odd mix of Ambler and Fleming centered around Even Tanner, an eccentric radical-at-large who actively supports every fringe group he can find ranging from left-wing separatists to a society dedicated to returning the House of Stuart to the British Throne.

To support this unusual lifestyle, Tanner supports himself writing theses for anyone with a few hundred to spare (the story behind that career choice would take too long to recount here). Most of his clients are business types looking to build their resumes. As he puts it:

Industry considers a bachelor's degree indispensable, and, by a curious extension, regards master's and doctorates as a way of separating the men from the boys. I don't understand this. Why should a Ph.D. awarded for an extended essay on color symbolism in the poetry of Pushkin have anything to do with a man's competence to develop a sales promotion campaign for a manufacturer of ladies underwear?

It would be nice to have some numbers to back up the anecdotes, but can you imagine anyone today saying, even in a work of fiction, that the way to get ahead in business is to get a doctorate in Russian literature?

(for a point of comparison, check out this post from YoungFemaleScientist)

"Research is a joy"

I tried to shoehorn this quote into a post I'm working on. I couldn't make it fit but I couldn't bring myself to throw it away either. So here it is.

The source is Lawrence Block's early novel, The Thief who Couldn't Sleep. The narrator is (among other things) a professional thesis writer working on a dissertation about Turkish prosecution of Armenians.

It was pleasant work. Research is a joy, especially when one is not burdened by an excessive reverence for the truth. By inventing an occasional source and injecting an occasional spurious footnote, one softens the harsh curves in the royal road of scholarship.

Tyler Cowen hacks Robert Reich's site

How else to explain this passage?

Apple’s supposed sin was to tell software developers that if they want to make apps for iPhones and iPads they have to use Apple programming tools. No more outside tools (like Adobe’s Flash format) that can run on rival devices like Google’s Android phones and RIM’s BlackBerrys.

What’s wrong with that? Apple says it’s necessary to maintain quality. If consumers disagree they can buy platforms elsewhere. Apple was the world’s #3 smartphone supplier in 2009, with 16.2 percent of worldwide market share. RIM was #2, with 18.8 percent. Google isn’t exactly a wallflower. These and other firms are innovating like mad, as are tens of thousands of independent developers. If Apple’s decision reduces the number of future apps that can run on its products, Apple will suffer and presumably change its mind.

There are, of course, economists who believe that the market will find a way to punish anti-competitve practices but Reich certainly isn't one of them. And Apple, though unquestionably innovative, has always aggressively tried to suppress competition dating back to their we-stole-it-first suit against Windows.

Apple's goal isn't to limit the number of apps they can run; it's to limit the number of programmers supplying apps to other platforms. Admittedly, Google and Microsoft are big boys that can take care of themselves, but with the iPad, Apple has one hell of a first mover advantge. When someone manages to come up with a competitive product, they will have to launch it under the most adverse conditions possible.

I agree with Prof. Reich that regulation of big banks is more important, but that doesn't mean that Apple isn't breaking anti-trust laws.

Weekly dose of Judson

NYT's best science writer has a new column up. This time she's looking at the placebo effect.

Are oil companies rational actors?

There are some good pieces out on the economics of oil spills from Jonathan Chait and Ezra Klein, but the best of the bunch is by William Galston:

Second, the oil well now spewing large quantities of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico lacked a remote-control acoustic shutoff switch used by rigs in Norway and Brazil as the last line of defense against underwater spills. There’s a story behind that. As the Journal reports, after a spill in 2000, the MMS issued a safety notice saying that such a back-up device is “an essential component of a deepwater drilling system.” The industry pushed back in 2001, citing alleged doubts about the capacity of this type of system to provide a reliable emergency backup. By 2003, government regulators decided that the matter needed more study after commissioning a report that offered another, more honest reason: “acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly.” I guess that depends on what they’re compared to. The system costs about $500,000 per rig. BP is spending at least $5 million per day battling the spill, the well destroyed by the explosion is valued at $560 million, and estimated damages to fishing, tourism, and the environment already run into the billions.

There’s something else we know, something that suggests an explanation for this sequence of events. After the Bush administration took office, the MMS became a cesspool of corruption and conflicts of interest. In September 2008, Earl Devaney, Interior’s Inspector General, delivered a report to Secretary Dirk Kempthorne that has to be read to be believed. One section, headlined “A Culture of Ethical Failure,” documented the belief among numerous MMS staff that they were “exempt from the rules that govern all other employees of the Federal Government.” They adopted a “private sector approach to essentially everything they did.” This included “opting themselves out of the Ethics in Government Act.” On at least 135 occasions, they accepted gifts and gratuities from oil and gas companies with whom they worked. One of the employees even had a lucrative consulting arrangement with a firm doing business with the government. And in a laconic sentence that speaks volumes, the IG reported: “When confronted by our investigators, none of the employees involved displayed remorse.”

Was leaving out these shut off switches a rational decision? Between direct costs, lawsuits and PR, BP may take a ten figure hit here, but they spent a great deal of money and effort lobbying not to take a measure that, to the casual observer, would seem to have a positive expected value.

Is it possible that, even for huge corporations, the natural distaste for being told what to do is stronger than the desire to maximize utility?

Authorship

I liked today's post by DrugMonkey on authorship. One item that I think is worth considering is that, in complex and multi-author projects, it's actually really hard to allocate credit on a paper by paper basis. That's because credit can't be broken into pieces that precisely fit "First Author", "Senior Author", "Second Author", and "Middle Author".

I have had the good fortune to be involved with some really exceptional co-authors so I can't actually recall a signigicant authorship dispute. But I do think that this highlights the need to rotate people on large projects to do the best to approximate the level of credit that people should get on projects.

But it's not an easy exercise and it gets harder the fewer the number of papers and the more junior the group (as early career researchers are very sensitive to credit allocation when it comes to being evaluated for employment and such things).

"Markets Are Not Magic"

An old post from Mark Thoma that's worth another look.

"Then I came up with a great idea: I could use the fork to spear the food and the spoon to scoop it."

As many others have noted, there is nothing journalists like more than a standard narrative and when reporting on education, there is no narrative more standard than the legend of the good teacher/bad teacher. No matter how complex, every issue can be explained by a disapproving account of an inept instructor or, better yet, a breathless paean to an inspiring educator.

I've mentioned before (here and here), there are some serious issues that need to be addressed (but almost never are) when comparing performance of teachers. Less serious but more annoying is the reporters' wide-eyed amazement at common classroom techniques. Things like putting agendas on the board or calling on students by name without asking for volunteers (see here) or having students keep a journal and relate lessons to their own life (see any article on Erin Gruwell). Things that many or most teachers already do. Things that you're taught in your first education class. Things that have their own damned boxes on the evaluation forms for student teachers.

These techniques are very common and are generally good ideas. They are not, however, great innovations (with a handful of exceptions -- Polya comes to mind) and they will seldom have that big of an impact on a class (again with exceptions like Polya and possibly Saxon). Their absence or presence won't tell you that much and they are certainly nothing new.

"Shape of the earth -- opinions still differ"

I was reminded of Paul Krugman's parody of a New York Times headline when I came to this NYT headline:

"Despite Push, Success at Charter Schools Is Mixed By TRIP GABRIEL"

Followed a few paragraphs later by the money shot:

But for all their support and cultural cachet, the majority of the 5,000 or so charter schools nationwide appear to be no better, and in many cases worse, than local public schools when measured by achievement on standardized tests, according to experts citing years of research. Last year one of the most comprehensive studies, by researchers from Stanford University, found that fewer than one-fifth of charter schools nationally offered a better education than comparable local schools, almost half offered an equivalent education and more than a third, 37 percent, were “significantly worse.”

Although “charter schools have become a rallying cry for education reformers,” the report, by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, warned, “this study reveals in unmistakable terms that, in the aggregate, charter students are not faring as well” as students in traditional schools.

As I mentioned before, there is reason to believe that this research is biased in favor of charter schools.

If you showed me test results for a new cholesterol-controlling drug in which 20% of the subjects had lower LDL levels than when they started taking the drugs, 51% stayed the same and 37% were "significantly worse," I don't think I would describe the results as 'mixed.'

But, of course, I'm not writing for the New York Times.

Bringing a whole new meaning to the term "Primary Investigator"

From Talking Points Memo:

[Virginia AG] Cuccinelli has launched an investigation into one of the climate scientists who was embarrassed by last year's Climate-Gate controversy -- and in doing so, he may be challenging long-held norms about academic freedom.

Last month, reports The Hook of Charlottesville, the AG requested "a sweeping swath of documents" from the University of Virginia, relating to the climate research work -- funded through state grants -- of Michael Mann.

Mann worked at the university from 1999 to 2005, and now runs Penn State's Earth System Science Center. If he were found to have manipulated data, Cuccinelli could seek to have the research money -- plus damages -- returned to the state.

It's not clear that there's much evidence of that, however. The climate-gate emails showed some scientists discussing ways to keep views skeptical of global warming out of peer-reviewed journals, among other things -- but they did not show outright fraud. Nor did they undermine the broad expert consensus that man-made warming is occurring and must be addressed.

Mann's work is currently being investigated by Penn State. In a recent USA Today story, he defended it, saying that though errors might exist, they were not fraudulent.

Undiagnosed diseases

One thought that I have often had about prescription claims databases is that we often can't do anything with missing data. If a patient in such a database has undiagnosed hypertension, for example, it's unclear how to handle it. This is in stark contrast to cohort studies where a missing blood pressure reading is a clear case of missing data and straightforward multiple imputation may do wonders.

So I wonder if Andrew Gelman's idea for count data could be adapted for this purpose?

Or would we be buried by an excessive number of assumptions that might be required to make it work in these settings?