Drugs: Teen Marijuana Use Continues to Rise

Marijuana use by 8th, 10th and 12th grade students increased in 2010, with more American teenagers now using marijuana than cigarettes for the second year in a row, according to numbers released today by the National Institute of Drug Abuse and the University of Michigan as part of the annual Monitoring the Future survey. In 2010, 21.4 percent of high school seniors used marijuana in the last 30 days, while 19.2 had used cigarettes.

It's really no surprise that more American teenagers are using marijuana and continue to say it's easy to get. Our government has spent decades refusing to regulate marijuana in order to keep it out of the hands of drug dealers who aren't required to check customer ID and have no qualms about selling marijuana to young people, said Rob Kampia, executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project. The continued decline in teen tobacco use is proof that sensible regulations, coupled with honest, and science-based public education can be effective in keeping substances away from young people.

For more, see Teen Marijuana Use Continues to Rise by Mike Meno, December 14, 2010 at MPP Blog. Thank you, Andrew Sullivan.

Religion: Why Religion Makes People Happier

Religious people are more satisfied with their lives than nonbelievers, but a new study finds it's not a relationship with God that makes the devout happy. Instead, the satisfaction boost may come from closer ties to earthly neighbors.

According to a study published today (Dec. 7) in the journal American Sociological Review, religious people gain life satisfaction thanks to social networks they build by attending religious services.

"We think it has something to do with the fact that you meet a group of close friends on a regular basis, together as a group, and participate in certain activities that are meaningful to the group," Lim said. "At the same time, they share a certain social identity, a sense of belonging to a moral faith community. The sense of belonging seems to be the key to the relationship between church attendance and life satisfaction."

While a higher number of secular close friendships were also associated with life satisfaction, church friendships seem to involve something that lifts satisfaction even more, Lim said.

For more, see Why Religion Makes People Happier (Hint: Not God) by Stephanie Pappas, December 7, 2010 at Live Science.

Society: Outstanding, Superlinear Cities

Bigger cities are more intense by nature: richer, more productive, more creative and more dangerous. Indeed, Bettencourt and his colleagues have shown, doubling the population of a city gives a 15 percent premium on each of these factors. Since New York City is the most populous city in the United States, New Yorkers should make more money, for example, than other Americans on average. To be exceptional, New Yorkers would need to be raking in even more than the princely sums you'd expect.

Turns out they're not. In an article this month in PLoS ONE, Bettencourt and his team created a way to measure how exceptional cities are by comparing their characteristics with what mathematics would predict for their size. The team then ranked the exceptionality of 300 U.S. cities based on personal incomes, gross metropolitan product (GMP), number of patents and number of violent crimes. On income, the New York metropolitan area came out a measly 85th place, just 3.8 percent above what one would predict for its size. On GMP, it ranked 167th, and on patents, it ranked 178th. The only exceptional number was for crime, which was surprisingly low: 267th out of 300, a whopping 22 percent below the typical rate for its size.

San Francisco, on the other hand, is rich, productive, creative and moderately safe for its size. By the team's rankings, the San Francisco metropolitan area comes out 12th for personal income, 19th for patents, 27th for GMP and 131st for violent crime.

To identify what's special about a place, you have to separate out the factors that are really just about its size, Bettencourt says. Then you can disentangle the general effects of urbanization from the specific character of a town.

Ideas, the team believes, are the real driver of economic activity and creativity, and when people are in closer contact — as they are in big cities — they tend to share those ideas more. A magazine designer in New York, for example, is much more likely than one in Huntsville, Ala., to bump into someone who knows about new design software or a clever layout trick. As a result, twice as many people are more than twice as productive — a phenomenon known as superlinear scaling, since the increase is faster than a linear equation would predict. That's the origin of the 15 percent premium on per capita income, patents and GMP that Bettencourt and his colleagues have documented in cities around the world. Similarly, crime increases superlinearly as people share bad ideas.

For more, see Outstanding, Superlinear Cities by Julie Rehmeyer, December 6, 2010 at ScienceNews.

Mind: Social Science Palooza

From a column of snippets about the mind ...

Female mammals tend to avoid close male relatives during moments of peak fertility in order to avoid inbreeding. For the journal Psychological Science, Debra Lieberman, Elizabeth Pillsworth and Martie Haselton tracked young women's cellphone calls. They found that these women had fewer and shorter calls with their fathers during peak fertility days, but not with female relatives.

And ...

Self-control consumes glucose in the brain. For an article in the journal Aggressive Behavior, Nathan DeWall, Timothy Deckman, Matthew Gaillot and Brad Bushman found that research subjects who consumed a glucose beverage behaved less aggressively than subjects who drank a placebo beverage. They found an indirect relationship between diabetes (a disorder marked by poor glucose toleration) and low self-control. States with high diabetes rates also had high crime rates. Countries with a different condition that leads to low glucose levels had higher killing rates, both during wartime and during peacetime.

For more, see Social Science Palooza by David Brooks, December 6, 2010 at The New York Times.

Law: Campaign Cash Mirrors a High Court's Rulings

Thirty-nine states elect judges, and 30 states are holding elections for seats on their highest courts this year. Spending in these races is skyrocketing, with some judges raising $2 million or more for a single campaign. As the amounts rise, questions about whether money is polluting the independence of the judiciary are being fiercely debated across the nation. And nowhere is the battle for judicial seats more ferocious than in Ohio.

An examination of the Ohio Supreme Court by The New York Times found that its justices routinely sat on cases after receiving campaign contributions from the parties involved or from groups that filed supporting briefs. On average, they voted in favor of contributors 70 percent of the time. Justice O'Donnell voted for his contributors 91 percent of the time, the highest rate of any justice on the court.

In the 12 years that were studied, the justices almost never disqualified themselves from hearing their contributors' cases. In the 215 cases with the most direct potential conflicts of interest, justices recused themselves just 9 times.

Three recent cases, two in Illinois and one in West Virginia, have put the complaints in sharp focus. Elected justices there recently refused to disqualify themselves from hearing suits in which tens or hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake. The defendants were insurance, tobacco and coal companies whose supporters had spent millions of dollars to help elect the justices.

After a series of big-money judicial contests around the nation, the balance of power in several state high courts has tipped in recent years in favor of corporations and insurance companies.

For much more, see Campaign Cash Mirrors a High Court's Rulings by Adam Liptak and Janet Roberts, October 1, 2006 at The New York Times.

Taxes: Who Needs a Tax Cut?

More on income inequality ...

The [following] chart shows the change in the various groups' pretax income since 1980. A household that has been at the 99.99th percentile of the distribution over this period — that is, making more money than 9,998 out of 10,000 other households and less money than one out of 10,000 — has more than quadrupled its pretax income. Today, this household is making $9.1 million. Income for a household at the median has risen only 13 percent since 1980. Today, it is making about $50,000. [Emphasis added].

And what about tax rates? They have aggravated the trends in pretax incomes. Not only have affluent households received the largest pretax raises, but they've also benefited from a much larger cut in their tax rates.

The following shows the total federal tax rate for different groups (including the income tax, the payroll tax, the estate tax and investment taxes).

For more, see Who Needs a Tax Cut? by David Leonhardt, December 3, 2010 at Economix Blog, New York Times.

Education: Western Nations React to Poor Education Results

This includes an unusual concept: Learn from another country.

A respected international survey that found teenagers in Shanghai to be the best-educated in the world has prompted officials elsewhere across the globe to question their own educational systems, and even led the British education minister to promise an overhaul in student testing.

In Britain, where results showed students falling behind peers in Estonia and Slovenia, Education Minister Michael Gove promised to overhaul the examination system to make it tougher, using tests from China and South Korea as benchmarks. Britain will explicitly borrow from these education tiger nations, Mr. Gove said.

The survey also showed Finland and South Korea far ahead of the United States in reading comprehension, mathematics and science, ...

The report also included a finding that in every country surveyed, girls read better than boys — a gap that has widened since 2000. Also included was a finding that the best school systems are the most equitable — where students do well regardless of social background.

For more, see Western Nations React to Poor Education Results by D.D. Guttenplan, December 8, 2010 at The New York Times.

Economics: Efficiencies of Types of Fiscal Stimulation

According to a recent Congressional Budget Office report on the impact of the Recovery Act, tax cuts had among the smallest ripple effects of all the act's major stimulus components. Purchases of goods and services by the federal government and transfer payments to state and local governments for infrastructure projects, on the other hand, appeared to produce a bigger bang for the buck.

A chart from the report showing these various output multiplier effects of each piece of the Recovery Act is below. A higher output multiplier generally translates to greater job growth.

For more, see Just How Stimulating Is the New Tax Cut-Jobless Benefit Deal? by Catherine Rampell, December 7, 2010 at Economix Blog, New York Times.

Mind: Confederate Flag Activates Racist Mindset

The Confederate flag, which continues to fly on buildings throughout the American South 150 years after the Civil War, is a potent symbol. But of what? Cultural heritage, answer many Southern whites. Lingering racism, insist many blacks.

Newly published research provides evidence supporting the latter view. It suggests exposure to the flag evokes anti-black sentiments among whites, regardless of their stated beliefs on racial issues.

Specifically, white students at a large state-supported Southern university who were exposed to images of the still-ubiquitous battle flag judged a fictional black character more harshly. They expressed less willingness to vote for presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008.

For much more, see Confederate Flag Activates Racist Mindset by Tom Jacobs, November 29, 2010 at Miller-McCune.

Diversion: Chinese Vending Machine Sells Live Hairy Crabs

Never a part of the world to let common sense stand in the way of a good vending machine, China has now invented a machine that, for the equivalent of a couple of dollars, pops out a live crab.

Grab one for a snack on the train!

A demonstration is at 1:00 into the first video in Video: Chinese Vending Machine Sells Live Hairy Crabs by Paul Adams, October 21, 2010 at Popular Science.

Taxes: Job Creation Is Little Affected by Upper Class Tax Cuts

Politifact fact checks ...

[The National Association of Manufacturers] said that "manufacturers strongly support extending the 2001 and 2003 tax rates for all taxpayers. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, fully extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts would add between 600,000 and 1.4 million jobs in 2011 and between 900,000 and 2.7 million jobs in 2012."

NAM is accurately quoting the numbers on the Republican alternative but conveniently leaving out the detail that the Democratic alternative is nearly as good at creating jobs. It also ignores the CBO's conclusion that extending the tax breaks for upper-income Americans offers diminishing returns. On balance, we rate the statement Half True.

For more, see National Association of Manufacturers Cites CBO Support for Job Creation Powers of Full Bush Tax Cut Extension by Louis Jacobson, December 3, 2010 at PolitiFact.

Education: Teacher Ratings Get New Look, Pushed by Bill Gates

Now Bill Gates, who in recent years has turned his attention and considerable fortune to improving American education, is investing $335 million through his foundation to overhaul the personnel departments of several big school systems. A big chunk of that money is financing research by dozens of social scientists and thousands of teachers to develop a better system for evaluating classroom instruction.

The effort will have enormous consequences for the movement to hold schools and educators more accountable for student achievement.

The Gates research is by no means the first effort of its kind. Economists have already developed a statistical method called value-added modeling that calculates how much teachers help their students learn, based on changes in test scores from year to year. The method allows districts to rank teachers from best to worst.

Value-added modeling is used in hundreds of districts. But teachers complain that boiling down all they do into a single statistic offers an incomplete picture; they want more measures of their performance taken into account.

The Gates research uses value added as a starting point, but aims to develop other measures that can not only rate teachers but also help educators understand why one is more successful than another.

For the story, see Teacher Ratings Get New Look, Pushed by a Rich Watcher by Sam Dillon, December 3, 2010 at The New York Times.

Economics: Fed Papers Show Breadth of Emergency Measures

A reminder ...

The Federal Reserve released documents Wednesday showing that its efforts to help stabilize the markets at the height of the financial crisis reached far beyond Wall Street and deep into the economy.

The crisis in the market for commercial paper, for example, the lifeblood of daily business, was more extensive and lasted longer than was previously known.

Even bedrock corporations like Caterpillar, General Electric, Harley Davidson, McDonald's, Verizon and Toyota relied on a Fed program that supported the market for commercial paper — the short-term i.o.u.'s that corporations rely upon to make payroll and pay their suppliers. During the worst moments of the crisis, in the fall of 2008, even creditworthy corporate borrowers found this source of financing had dried up, and had to turn to the Fed for help.

The documents show that during the financial crisis, the central bank extended nearly $9 trillion in short-term loans — an amount that is more than half of the national economic output of the United States — to financial institutions under a program called the Primary Dealer Credit Facility. [Emphasis added].

The Fed ... emphasized that most of the programs closed earlier this year and that taxpayers did not incur losses.

For more, see Fed Papers Show Breadth of Emergency Measures by Sewell Chan and JO Craven Mcginty, December 1, 2010 at The New York Times.

Science: Bacteria Stir Debate About 'Shadow Biosphere'

All life on Earth - from microbes to elephants and us - requires the element phosphorus as one of its six components.

But now researchers have discovered a bacterium that appears to have replaced that life-enabling phosphorus with its toxic cousin arsenic, raising new and provocative questions about the origins and nature of life.

All life as we know it contains six essential elements - carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus - that have qualities that make them seemingly ideal for their tasks. A form of phosphorus, for instance, is near perfect for building the framework for the DNA molecule, and another form is crucial to the transfer of energy within cells.

These forms of phosphorus are well suited for their job because they are especially stable in the presence of water. Arsenic is not, and that fact is one that raises concerns for some researchers familiar with the Mono Lake bugs.

For more, see Bacteria Stir Debate About 'Shadow Biosphere' by Marc Kaufman, December 2, 2010 at The Washington Post.

Economics: TARP Expected to Cost U.S. Only $25 Billion, CBO Says

The Troubled Asset Relief Program, which was widely reviled as a $700 billion bailout for Wall Street titans, is now expected to cost the federal government a mere $25 billion - the equivalent of less than six months of emergency jobless benefits.

The TARP was conceived in the final days of the Bush administration and pushed through a reluctant Congress in less than three weeks. It is widely thought to have helped stabilize a financial sector on the verge of collapse, though it remains hugely unpopular with the public. In the recent midterm elections, numerous lawmakers lost their jobs or failed in bids for new ones because of their support for the program.

For more, see TARP Expected to Cost U.S. Only $25 Billion, CBO Says by Lori Montgomery, November 29, 2010 at The Washington Post.

Diversion: The True Size of Africa

From The True Size of Africa by KAI Krause, October 14, 2010 at Information Is Beautiful.

Economics: Banks Had 40% of All the Profits

[There] could be a fundamental rebalancing of the U.S. economy in which a smaller portion is devoted to finance.

That would be a reversal from the last two decades. From the 1950s through the 1980s, financial firms counted for 10 percent of all profits in the U.S. economy. In the 1990s, that figure rose to 22 percent. By the time of the financial crisis, it had hit 40 percent

For more, see Days of Rapid Growth and Focus on Trading Are over for Banks, Analysts Say by Jia Lynn Yang, November 29, 2010 at The Washington Post.

Mind: To Read Others' Emotions, It Helps to Be Poor

In multiple experiments, people of high socioeconomic status (or people who perceived themselves to be well-off) were worse at judging other people's emotions than those of low socioeconomic status, both when looking at photographs and interacting with real people.

Kraus' earlier research has found that wealthier people are ruder than poorer people in conversations with strangers. They've also found that the poor are more generous with their wealth than the rich. Their greater empathy could be the root of that charity, Kraus said.

[In the third experiment] they asked some of the students to visualize an extraordinarily wealthy individual — someone like Bill Gates, Kraus said.

Next, the students were told to place themselves on the socioeconomic ladder, imagining their wealthy individual at the top. Thinking of the Gates-like figure triggered the students to place themselves lower on the ladder than they otherwise would have. Other students were told to imagine someone completely destitute; those students placed themselves relatively higher on the ladder.

Finally, the 81 students looked at 36 close-up photographs of eyes and judged the emotions portrayed in the pictures. Sure enough, those manipulated into seeing themselves as lower-class scored 6 percent better than those manipulated into perceiving themselves as well-off. [Emphasis added].

For the other experiments, see To Read Others' Emotions, It Helps to Be Poor by Stephanie Pappas, November 16, 2010 at Live Science.

Economics: The Most Socialist States in America

We started from the core definition of socialism as a form of government in which the state owns the means of production and allocates resources to its citizens at its discretion.

...

Since no part of the U.S. can be considered purely socialist, we measured total [government] expenditures as a proportion of total economic output to compare the size of the public sector in each state.

The results ...

10. Rhode Island -- 15.9%
9. Hawaii -- 17.8%
8. Arkansas -- 18.1%
7. Wyoming -- 19.0%
6. Mississippi -- 20.2%
5. New Mexico -- 20.7%
4. Vermont -- 21.0%
3. Alabama -- 27.4%
2. Alaska -- 31.3%
1. West Virginia -- 32.1%

For more, see The Most Socialist States in America by Greg Bocquet, November 26, 2010 at CNBC.

Mind: Money and Happiness

Dismal scientists who look at happiness often contend that, beyond a GDP per capita of just $15,000 (measured at purchasing-power parity), money does not buy happiness. Up to that point the correlation between the two is strong, but thereafter it falls away. If this is true then some heretical conclusions follow: rich America is no happier than poorer Brazil, so what is the point in people who live in rich countries working harder to get ever richer? Politicians should concentrate on maximising the mental health of their voters, rather than the size of their pay checks. But plot the data another way, on a logarithmic scale where each increment represents a 100% increase in income per head, and the relationship between wealth and happiness looks more robust.

From Money and Happiness, November 25, 2010 at The Economist.