Funny t-shirt for your child

From a t-shirt shop in the St. Lawrence market in Toronto

Meaningless statistic increases

Someday perhaps someone will explain to me why anyone should pay attention to life expectancy numbers based on synthetic cohort assumptions. Under the synthetic cohort assumption, it is assumed that the mortality behavior of people born today can be well approximated by the mortality behavior of people who are old today. This is ludicrous. It ignores all technical change in health care as well as the major behavioral changes that we know exist across cohorts due to, for example, changes in BMI and in smoking. How can these numbers do other than mislead?

Living together

Hard to imagine, but a new UM study finds important gender differences in perceptions of the costs and benefits of living together. Key bits from the summary in UM Today:

Overall, three key reasons for living together emerged: wanting to spend more time with one's partner, wanting to share life's financial burdens, and wanting to test compatibility. But the way men and women talked about these three broad reasons was very different.

Women volunteered "love" as a reason to live together three times as often as men did, while men cited "sex" as a reason to live together four times as often as women did.

Both men and women saw cohabitation as a temporary state in which to gauge compatibility, but major gender differences emerged in the underlying goals of living together. Women saw it as a transitional arrangement preceding marriage, while men tended to see it as a convenient, low-risk way to see if a relationship had longer-term potential, using terms like "test drive" to describe the arrangement.

But the strongest gender differences emerged in the perceived disadvantages of cohabitation. Women believed that living together meant less commitment and legitimacy than marriage, while men saw the greatest disadvantage as a limitation on their freedom.

Who would have thought? But it is still very useful to quantify, and to show the importance of gender differences relative to other subgroups.

The full text of the article can be found here; it may be gated.

Who says people get boring when they get older?

Racquel Welch condemns the birth control pill ....

Saith Raquel:

'Seriously, folks, if an ageing sex symbol like me starts waving the red flag of caution over how low moral standards have plummeted, you know it's gotta be pretty bad.'

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

No enumeration without remuneration

The sad story of payroll disaster at the Census Bureau. I wonder if Bob Groves regrets leaving ISR?

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Pro-natalist policies and the downard sloping demand curve for babies

Denmark seems to have found a pro-natalist policy that actually works: fully subsidized IVF.

The latest figures from the country’s fertility databases show that 8 percent of children are born with help from fertility treatment or about 5000 a year. By comparison, 3.5 percent of Norwegian and 2 percent of English children are born as a result of the treatment.

Lone Schmidt, a fertility researcher at University of Copenhagen, said Denmark topped the European rates because of the many fertility clinics here. The clinics are also more accessible, with short waiting lists and have a high quality of treatment, she said.

‘Its got nothing to do with Danes having lower fertility than those in other countries,” Schmidt told Berlingske Tidende, adding it was free for Danish people to receive treatment, unlike in many other countries.

It would be interesting to see a comparison of fully subsidized IVF with some of the other tax and transfer based pro-natalist policies on a $ per baby basis. I suspect that the additional babies induced by IVF also end up in families with higher levels of education and income, which has implications for the social cost-benefit calculation.

That's a free paper idea, folks. Please send me a draft when it is done!

Hat tip: Lars Skipper