Daily Media Diet

From  Journal of Experimental Criminology : Using National Incidence Based Reporting System data and city-reported data from Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, we calculated the difference in assault rates on the Monday immediately following daylight saving time (DST) as compared to the Monday a week later using a Poisson quasi-maximum likelihood estimator model. The same analyses were performed to examine effects of the return to standard time in the fall. We employed several falsification checks. There were 2.9% fewer (95% CI: –4.2%, −1.6%, p < 0.0001) assaults immediately following DST, when we lose an hour, as compared to a week later. In contrast, there was a 2.8% rise in assaults immediately following the return to standard time, when an hour is gained, as compared to a week later (95% CI: 1.5%, 4.2%, p < 0.0001). Multiple falsification analyses suggest the spring findings to be robust, while the evidence to support the fall findings is weaker. This...

From  University of Virginia Working Paper : This paper studies how collecting offender DNA profiles affects offenders’ later recidivism and likelihood of getting caught by exploiting a large expansion of Denmark’s DNA database. We find that DNA profiling increases detection probability and reduces recidivism within the following year by as much as 43%. We estimate the elasticity of criminal behavior with respect to the probability of detection to be -1.7, implying that a 1% higher detection probability reduces crime by almost 2%. We also find that DNA profiling changes non-criminal behavior: profiled offenders are more likely to engage in a stable relationship, and live with their children. From Iris Murdoch : Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. From  Iris Murdoch : I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time. From  Iris Murdoch : Of course reading and thinking are impor...

From  NBER Working Paper : We introduce a novel use of genetic data for studying social influences on behavior: Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), we deploy the distribution of genotypes in a given grade within a school to instrument the influence of peer smoking on an individual’s own smoking behavior. We argue that this design alleviates many problems inherent to estimating peer effects. Using this approach, we find the relationship between peer smoking and individual smoking to be larger than that estimated by prior studies. Further, we explore the reduced form relationship between peer genotypes and ego smoking and find that the impact of peers’ genetic risk for smoking on ego’s smoking behavior is at least half as large as the effect of individual’s own genotype and sex, and 30% the effect of age. Moreover, peer influence on smoking appears heterogeneous by race: although whites and non-whites are equally susceptible t...

From The New York Times (Robert Coover on "What books are on your nightstand?"): “The Blue Guitar,” by John Banville, “The Accidental Mind,” by David J. Linden, “4 3 2 1,” by Paul Auster, several issues of Dædalus (currently reading the “Russia Beyond Putin” and “The Changing Rules of War” issues, but there are others in the stack) and “Zero K,” by Don DeLillo. Just finished Richard Powers’s brilliant “Orfeo.” Masterpiece. From The Guardian (Salman Rushdie on "The book I am currently reading"): I recently visited the old mansion where Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks was set, that great house with the words “Dominus providebit” inscribed over the front door, and was immediately inspired to download the novel on to my iPad and plunge in. The pleasure of re-reading Buddenbrooks was so deep that I resolved to embark on a year of re-readings, which is why I now find myself about halfway through the first book of Don Quixote, in the terrific Edith Grossman translation....

From  Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization : This paper utilizes a high frequency dataset on taxi rides in New York City to investigate how emotions due to sporting event outcomes affect passengers’ tipping behavior. I formulate and empirically test a reference-dependent preferences framework of tipping behavior. The results indicate that the tipping amounts are driven by deviations from expectations much more so than wins and losses, with the most salient effects found under unexpected close wins. However, there is no support for loss aversion. The findings suggest that loss averse behavior may be subdued in the presence of social norms while surprises can result in freedom on the upside of tipping. From  Management Science : The majority of extant studies involving status argue that status enters into choice and evaluation because people personally believe that status serves as a signal of quality. However, this mechanism seems less plausible in cases when c...

From Harper's : Britain’s link to Europe was severed 450,000 years ago and its textile heritage was being destroyed by moths. From The Economist : Nearly half of young American employees say they would be more loyal if their boss took a public position on a social issue. From The Economist : Investments that considered environmental, social and governance factors accounted for $13.3trn of assets under management in 2012; that sum was $22.9trn in 2016. Over a fifth of the funds under professional management in America fall into this category, up from a ninth in 2012. From  Nature Human Behaviour : Women are known to have stronger prosocial preferences than men, but it remains an open question as to how these behavioural differences arise from differences in brain functioning. Here, we provide a neurobiological account for the hypothesized gender difference. In a pharmacological study and an independent neuroimaging study, we tested the hypothesis that the neural reward...

From  Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin : Decades of research indicate that individuals adhere to existing states ("status quo bias") and value them more ("endowment effect"). The present work is the first to investigate status quo preference within the context of trade-offs in mate choice. Across seven studies (total N = 1,567), participants indicated whether they would prefer remaining with a current partner possessing a particular set of traits (e.g., high trustworthiness, low attractiveness) or switching to an alternative partner possessing opposite traits. Preference for a given trait was highest when the individual representing the status quo (one's romantic partner or an interaction partner) possessed that trait. Concerns about hurting the partner, ambiguity avoidance, and biased construal of the partner and the alternative predicted status quo preference and disapproval of the current partner by network members eliminated this effect. These fi...

From Harper's : The lives of French men and women who were fetuses when their fathers died in WWI were 2.4 years shorter on average. From Harper's : A dead Nazi fighter pilot was found in possession of food stamps and three unused condoms. From The Economist : Employees, many of them in the big, Democrat-leaning metropolitan areas where large companies are often based, increasingly demand that their firms take positions on issues ranging from gay rights to climate change. From The New York Times : Over the course of each year, people have many kinds of interactions and experience many kinds of mistreatment. But there is something unique about positive or negative touch. Emotional touch alters the heart and soul in ways that are mostly unconscious. It can take a lifetime of analysis to get even a glimpse of understanding. From The New York Times : Over the past 100 years or so, advanced thinkers across the West have worked to take the shame out of sex, surely a...

From The New York Times : The famous Grant Study investigated a set of men who had gone to Harvard in the 1940s. The men who grew up in loving homes earned 50 percent more over the course of their careers than those from loveless ones. They suffered from far less chronic illness and much lower rates of dementia in old age. A loving home was the best predictor of life outcomes. From The New York Times : Christie Kim of N.Y.U. surveyed the research literature on victims of child sexual abuse. The victims experience higher levels of anxiety throughout their lifetimes. They report higher levels of depression across the decades and higher levels of self-blame. They are more than twice as likely to experience sexual victimization again. From Harper's : Scientists created a menstrual cycle and anorexia nervosa in dishes and, on a transparent spinach leaf, grew the beating cells of a human heart. From Harper's : An analytic psychologist diagnosed Pinocchio with autism, an...

From  The Guardian  (Kamila Shamsie on "My comfort read"): I dip in and out of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion whenever in need of comfort or solace. They’re old, known friends now, and like the best friends they can still surprise you in lovely ways. From The Economist : One analysis of 11 rich countries estimates that the average mother spent 54 minutes a day caring for children in 1965 but 104 minutes in 2012. Men do less than women, but far more than men in the past: their child-caring time has jumped from 16 minutes a day to 59. From The Economist : Married couples engage in a demanding four-handed juggling act that prepares their offspring for success at school, university and the most demanding jobs. Their children marry well, and the cycle begins again. From Harper's : The kea became the first nonmammalian to demonstrate infectious laughter. From The New York Times : It turns out that empathetic physical contact i...

From The Guardian (Kamila Shamsie on "The book I wish I’d written"): At the moment it’s Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone. From The Guardian  (Kamila Shamsie on "The book that influenced me"): Midnight’s Children made me see, aged 15 in Karachi, that there was a place in English language fiction for the kind of world I was growing up in. From The Economist : In America, another analysis shows that black children under two on average receive one hour a day less attention from parents than white children. The explanation seems to be more poverty among blacks. From Harper's : A sea turtle named Piggy Bank died following surgery that recovered 915 coins from her stomach. From The New York Times : In 1945, the Austrian physician René Spitz investigated an orphanage that took extra care to make sure its infants were not infected with disease. The children received first-class nutrition and medical care, but they were barely touched, to minimize their...

From The Guardian (Jim Crace on "The book that had the greatest influence on my writing"): Roget’s Thesaurus – but it has to be the 1955 Everyman’s edition as that’s the one my father gave me on my 10th birthday. I thought it was an inexplicable present at the time (where was my Meccano?) but it’s been at my side ever since and has given undeserved range and depth to my writing. From The New York Times (Simon Sebag Montefiore on "Tell us about the last great book you read"): I read many wonderful novels though I now find the idea of literary fiction obsolete. Few qualify as “great” in the sense of Tolstoy or Balzac but I just finished one that did: I was dazzled by the brilliance of “The Goldfinch,” by Donna Tartt, a masterpiece of characterization, plot, technical artistry combined with exquisite heartbreaking understanding of loss, love and art. Now that I have finished I regret its pleasures are gone, like a delicious feast — or a vanished love one will n...

From  Labour Economics : This paper estimates the effects of personality traits and IQ on lifetime earnings of the men and women of the Terman study, a high-IQ U.S. sample. Age-by-age earnings profiles allow a study of when personality traits affect earnings most, and for whom the effects are strongest. I document a concave life-cycle pattern in the payoffs to personality traits, with the largest effects between the ages of 40 and 60. An interaction of traits with education reveals that personality matters most for highly educated men. The largest effects are found for Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Agreeableness (negative), where Conscientiousness operates partly through education, which also has significant returns. From  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology : Rationally, people should want to receive information that is costless and relevant for a decision. But people sometimes choose to remain ignorant. The current paper identifies intuitive-deliberativ...

From  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology : Across 6 studies we investigated the development of overconfidence among beginners. In 4 of the studies, participants completed multicue probabilistic learning tasks (e.g., learning to diagnose "zombie diseases" from physical symptoms). Although beginners did not start out overconfident in their judgments, they rapidly surged to a "beginner's bubble" of overconfidence. This bubble was traced to exuberant and error-filled theorizing about how to approach the task formed after just a few learning experiences. Later trials challenged and refined those theories, leading to a temporary leveling off of confidence while performance incrementally improved, although confidence began to rise again after this pause. In 2 additional studies we found a real-world echo of this pattern of overconfidence across the life course. Self-ratings of financial literacy surged among young adults, then leveled off among older respon...

From Harper's : Forensic scientists described the case of a woman who appeared to be the victim of sexual homicide but was instead found to have taken off all her clothes and run around in a forest until she was bitten by insects and died. From Harper's : In the Amazon, a prominent shaman died of snakebite, and two other shamans located a lost tourist by communicating with his soul through a recovered sock, though the man later claimed he was also assisted by generous monkeys. From The New York Times (Niall Ferguson on "And which novelists do you especially enjoy reading?"): Everyone has at least one vice. Mine is reading (and re-reading) 19th-century novels. It’s hard to pick just a couple of favorites but I unreservedly adore Wilkie Collins (e.g., “The Moonstone”) and Theodor Fontane (“Der Stechlin”).  From The Economist : Marriage, it turns out, is still the best place for children From The Economist : According to one recent estimate, the chanc...

From  CEPR Discussion Paper : Creativity is often highly concentrated in time and space, and across different domains. What explains the formation and decay of clusters of creativity? In this paper we match data on thousands of notable individuals born in Europe between the XIth and the XIXth century with historical data on city institutions and population. After documenting several stylized facts, we show that the formation of creative clusters is not preceded by increases in city size. Instead, the emergence of city institutions protecting economic and political freedoms facilitates the attraction and production of creative talent. From Harper's : Business researchers posited that busyness has replaced leisure as a marker of prestige for Americans, constituting “an alternative kind of conspicuous consumption that operates by shifting the focus from the preciousness and scarcity of goods to the preciousness and scarcity of individuals.” From Harper's : Among Germans,...

From The New York Times (Niall Ferguson on "Which historians and biographers do you most admire?"): Amongst those currently writing, Simon Schama stands out as the Dickens of modern historiography: bewilderingly erudite and prolific, passionate in his enthusiasms and armed with the complete contents of the thesaurus. We agree to disagree about politics. I have also hugely admired Anne Applebaum for her trilogy on the Gulag, the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe (“Iron Curtain”) and, most recently, the Ukrainian famine (“Red Famine”). Walter Isaacson has established himself as the great American biographer of our time. “Leonardo da Vinci” is his best book, I think. Whereas the earlier books were pure journalism, he is now showing academic scholars how to write accessibly about subtle and even recondite subject matter. I read quite a number of biographies while researching “The Square and the Tower.” My favorite was probably Michael Ignatieff’s on Isaiah Berlin, which led me...

From The New York Times : [The] liberal democratic moral order stands for the idea that souls are formed in freedom and not in servility, in expansiveness, not in stagnation. It stands for the idea that our covenantal institutions — like family, faith, tradition and community — orient us toward higher loves and common dreams that we then pursue in the great gymnasium of liberty. From The New York Times : Yes, liberalism sometimes sits in tension with faith, tradition, family and community, which Deneen rightly cherishes. But liberalism is not their murderer. From The Economist : If you insist on a strong relationship and a healthy bank balance before tying the knot, and on piling up even more wealth before starting a family, your chances of having the number of children you want become slimmer. In most rich countries, the more highly qualified the woman, the more likely she is to remain childless. Many childless people are perfectly happy. But others endure expensive medical ...

From The New York Times (Niall Ferguson on "Which fiction and nonfiction writers — playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — inspired you most early in your career? And which writers working today do you most admire?"): I’d have to begin with A. J. P. Taylor, who was the first historian I ever read and who inspired me to believe a) that historical writing should never be dull, but should bristle with irony and paradox, and b) that historical knowledge is a prerequisite for worthwhile commentary on contemporary matters. Another major influence at the early stage was Norman Stone. But it wasn’t just historians who inspired me as I was starting out. As a sixth-former (high school senior), I lapped up Tom Stoppard’s plays, painted a mural inspired by the poetry of Thom Gunn and read compulsively the reviews of punk bands in the New Musical Express. At Oxford, I came under the influence of The Spectator, then edited by Charles Moore, one of the most gifted English journalists ...

From Harper's : An anthropologist examined the ethics of allowing lab monkeys to watch so much TV. From Harper's : Describing American goat cheese requires thirty-nine flavor attributes, including waxy, sweaty, and goaty, whereas describing the odor of antique books in the library of St. Paul’s Cathedral requires twenty-one olfactory attributes, including woody, medicinal, and bread. From The Economist : Academics at Oxford University have shown that although women still do more housework than men, the gap has narrowed everywhere. In 1974 British women cleaned, cooked and laundered for 172 hours a year more than men. By 2005 they were putting in only 74 hours more. In America, the difference between the time married working women and men spent doing housework each day fell from 38 to 28 minutes between 2003-06 and 2011-15. From The New York Times (Niall Ferguson on "Which books do you think capture the current social and political moment in America?"): ...

From The New York Times (Niall Ferguson on "What books are on your nightstand?"): I am a few pages from the end of Tom Holland’s marvelously readable “Rubicon” and about a quarter of the way through Mary Beard’s somewhat more earnest “SPQR.” Those were part of my challenge to myself this year to get better educated about the fall of the Roman Republic. I’m still dipping into Maya Jasanoff’s beautifully written travels in the footsteps of Conrad, “The Dawn Watch.” Newcomers to the nightstand, which were both recommended to me by friends: “China in Ten Words,” by Yu Hua and “Lives Other Than My Own,” by Emmanuel Carrère. From  The New York Times  (Niall Ferguson on "The last great book you read"): Great in the sense of “up there with the Columbia Core”?I would nominate “2084,” by the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal. As a vision of Islamic totalitarianism, it is blood-chilling. But it is also a masterly piece of writing. From The Economist : The marrying clas...

From Harper's : Humans’ ability to make random choices peaks at age twenty-five. From The Economist : In America education and marriage go hand-in-hand, to the extent that marriage rates are now higher among women with PhDs than among women with bachelor’s degrees. From The Economist : At the age of 45, the average university-educated American man has led a fairly straightforward personal life. Fully 88% of such men have married, and three-quarters of those are still married to their first wives. Men who did not finish high school are less likely to have married and, if they have, more likely to have divorced ... From  Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology : Animal experiments and cross-sectional human studies have linked particulate matter (PM) with increased behavioral problems. We conducted a longitudinal study to examine whether the trajectories of delinquent behavior are affected by PM2.5 (PM with aerodynamic diameter ≤ 2.5 μm) exposures before and during adolesce...

From Harper's : Physicists created a liquid with negative mass. From Harper's : The brain simultaneously creates short- and long-term versions of the same memory. From NBER : This paper shows that air quality has a significantly negative effect on the likelihood of individual investors to sit down, log in, and trade in their brokerage accounts controlling for investor-, weather-, traffic-, and market-specific factors. In perspective, a one standard deviation increase in fine particulate matter leads to the same reduction in the probability of logging in and trading as a one standard deviation increase in sunshine. We document this effect for low levels of pollution that are commonly found throughout the developed world. As individual investor trading can be a proxy for everyday cognitively-demanding tasks such as office work, our findings suggest that the negative effects of pollution on white-collar work productivity are much more severe than previously thought. To o...

From The Economist : NatCen Social Research, an independent institute, has been surveying Britons’ attitudes to sex and marriage since the early 1980s. In almost every respect, it finds that people are becoming more liberal. In 2016, for example, 75% of Britons declared that premarital sex was not wrong at all, up from 42% in 1983. With each passing survey, fewer people say that couples who want children ought to marry first. But there is an important exception to this easy-going rule. All Britons, especially young ones, now take a more critical view of affairs. Marriage seems ever less necessary but also ever more inviolate. From The Economist : In the first quarter of 2017, 65% of top professional adults in Britain were married, according to the Labour Force Survey. For people in routine jobs the proportion was 44%, and for the unemployed and those who had never worked 40%. Among women with young children the social divide is even sharper. The Marriage Foundation, a charity, ca...

From  Journal of Health Economics : This paper presents a new stylized fact about the relationship between income and childhood vaccination. It shows vaccination rates first rise but then fall as income increases. This pattern is observed in WHO country-level panel data, and in US county-level panel and individual-level repeated cross-section data. This data pattern suggests that both low and high-income parents are less likely to follow the standard vaccination schedule, and that such behavior is reflected in the vaccination rate at the population level. From The Guardian (Sally Rooney on The Aeneid): In anticipation of Emily Wilson’s much-discussed translation of Homer’s Odyssey – the first ever English version by a female translator – I’ve been rereading Sarah Ruden’s magnificent translation of Virgil’s The Aeneid. As a reader with next to no knowledge of classical mythology, I approached The Aeneid just as I would a contemporary poem or novel – and, despite my ignorance, ...

From  Contemporary Economic Policy : Recent research shows increasing inequality in mortality among middle-aged and older adults. But this is only part of the story. Inequality in mortality among young people has fallen dramatically in the United States converging to almost Canadian rates. Increases in public health insurance for U.S. children, beginning in the late 1980s, are likely to have contributed. From The Guardian (Sally Rooney on Gavin Corbett’s The Giving Light): Gavin Corbett’s new book of photography, The Giving Light, is, of course, a beautiful object in itself, with its little metallic gold sun beaming out lovingly from the front cover. But Corbett, best known as a novelist, also brings a novelist’s eye to his photographs, which are somehow both entirely mundane and wholly remarkable. A stripe of sunlight lines a brick wall. A face glows silently through a bus window. Familiar things come to the surface of our attention in this volume, making us look again. The...

From The Economist : These days China and South Korea have divorce rates above the European and OECD averages. From The Economist : In Chile divorce was almost impossible until 2004 and is still not easy. Probably not coincidentally, Chile has the highest proportion of births outside marriage among the 35 members of the OECD. From Harper's : An online survey found that U.S. airline passengers are willing to pay an extra $15 and wait an extra fifteen minutes to avoid discriminatory airport screenings. From The New York Times (Daniel Mendelsohn on "Do you have a favorite book about writing or about literary criticism?"): I have a favorite book of literary criticism, which is Edmund Wilson’s “Axel’s Castle.” I think most of us who are professional critics are shadowed by the secret fear that time will prove us wrong — the virtues of our enthusiasms will prove to be ephemeral, or the things we panned will turn out to be classics. What’s so remarkable to me abou...

From SSRN : Based on detailed police accident reports for Tippecanoe County, Indiana, and using the introduction of the augmented reality game Pokémon GO as a natural experiment, we document a disproportionate increase in vehicular crashes and associated vehicular damage, personal injuries, and fatalities in the vicinity of locations, called PokéStops, where users can play the game while driving. The results are robust to using points of play, called Gyms, that cannot be used to play the game while driving as a placebo. We estimate the total incremental county-wide cost of users playing Pokémon GO while driving, including the value of the two incremental human lives lost, to be in the range of $5.2 million to $25.5 million over only the 148 days following the introduction of the game. Extrapolation of these estimates to nation-wide levels yields a total ranging from $2.0 billion to $7.3 billion for the same period. From PNAS : We study how exposure to extreme temperatures in earl...