The answer is 60 million pounds. At least that’s the answer according to the UK Film Council that has started a novel program (an “audit”) to evaluate the value of creative people for their country. The first data point in the analysis was Kate Winslet and the process is now being referred to as the Winslet algorithm.
There is plenty of data to show that babies born in the winter do worse later in life than babies born at other times on a variety of criteria such as being less educated, less intelligent, less paid and so on. Several explanations have been proposed in the past including pesticide levels in water at certain times of the year. But the mystery has continued to persist for a while. Recently researchers Kasey Buckles and Daniel Hungerman of the University of Notre Dame have proposed a rather straightforward explanation for this phenomenon by looking at the relevant data.
You can find plenty of people who will argue both sides and it can be difficult to disentangle the arguments and the data from personal biases. But what is hard to argue is that most of these discussions can get muddy very quickly unless you are well versed in the intricacies of economic data. What would be really nice is a user friendly (preferably animated) visualization of relevant data that tells us what is happening and is likely to happen. If you are looking for that you are in luck my friend.
Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by
Peter L. Bernstein
Given what has been happening in the economy recently, this book (written ten years ago) provides an excellent foundation for understanding how we ended up here. In telling the story of risk, Bernstein focuses on how much people believe the past determines the future. The more we believe we understand the past, the more certain we are of what will happen in the future. Quantifying the past helps enormously in bringing certainty to the future. But risk lurks in the shadows surrounding certainty and underestimating it because of our blind faith in numbers and computers can lead, he says, to disaster. But what makes this book a wonderful read is that it really does tell a story stretching back millennia and is populated with exotic places and interesting characters. For someone interested in this topic it is time well spent.
This question has been asked for millennia and before any research was done there were three possible answers: yes, no, maybe so. After some research was done in the 70's, we had what was called as the Easterlin paradox which seemed to show that money and happiness were not related. More recent research from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania with data from many countries around the globe seems to indicate that people with more money are, in fact, happier.
Does movie violence increase crime? Does Fox News have an impact on voting? Do people pay not to go the gym? Are companies correct in expecting that investors pay less attention to information released on Friday? These and other interesting questions are asked and answered by Stefano DellaVigna, an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. To study movie violence, he and his colleagues looked at actual crime statistics surrounding movie releases, rather than run lab experiments.
Emily Oster is an Assistant Professor of Economics in the University of Chicago. Her research reaches outside the traditional boundaries of economics to larger health and policy questions. Her claim to fame is her disputing the Nobel winner Amartya Sen's contention from two decades ago that there were 100 million "missing" women, quite possibly because of misogynistic attitudes in developing countries.
