January 05, 2018

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 about Wilson’s book, which he published in 1931 and which is contemporary with some of the authors he wrote about — Proust, Joyce, Pound, Stein — is that he got everything just right. And right away, too: Within 10 years of the publication of Proust’s “À la recherche du Temps Perdu” he’d completely grasped everything about it that was important and revolutionary.

From Ecological Economics:

We found that the incidence rate of all-sites cancer increases linearly with per capita income, even after controlling for population ageing, improvement in cancer detection, and omitted spatially correlated variables. If higher incidence rates in developed countries were merely due to those factors, and not also to life-styles and environmental degradation, we would have found a flat or even an inverted-U pattern between per capita income and cancer incidence.