The anti-boomer story
The anti-boomer story goes like this: There was upon a time a happy, functional western civilization. Then came one generation who voted for a lot of welfare increases. The same…
Explaining global variation in internet speed
I saw this on Twitter earlier today: The narrative seemed right, so at first I retweeted. But then I looked closer at the map and realized it couldn't be right.…
The value of intelligence
There are many studies that report correlations between intelligence -- however measured -- and economic outcomes, mainly (self-reported) income. This is however somewhat abstract since correlations are unitless. They don't…
The practical utility of selection for hiring
Over at SlateStarCodex AstralCodexTen commenter Himaldr asked me: >"because strength of the correlation has a linear relationship with the expected return of using it for selection (hiring) purposes."< Can you…
Fiscal impact of immigrants by country of origin, and the immigration debate
There is a lot of debate about immigration. While it is relatively easy to find crime rates by various immigrants by country of origin, these don't directly tell you whether…
Money and crime: the relationship that wasn’t
There must be 10,000s of studies and news articles reporting findings that wealth or income is negatively related to crime. In other words, poverty causes crime. The popular theory being…
If cities are bad, why do people move there?
This is a natural follow-up to my prior post about fertility, and how cities (or population density in some sense) cause fertility to decline. In fact, cities seem to be…
Fertility questions: the role of population density?
There is a worldwide decline in fertility: The COVID-19 years seem to have been particularly bad on some countries. The poster child for future problems is South Korea: Even Reuters…
New study out: Income and Education Disparities Track Genetic Ancestry
We just published a new study in OpenPsych: Hu, M., Kirkegaard, E. O. W., & Fuerst, J. (2023). Income and Education Disparities Track Genetic Ancestry. OpenPsych, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.26775/OP.2023.09.11 Structural racism…
GDP problems, but what solutions?
Suppose you want to measure how well a country is doing. If you're an economist you will be immediately reaching for your trusted variant of the GDP per capita metric.…