Assorted links – August 2019

Toddlers Don’t Have to Go to School

 Last fall, Harvard researchers published findings in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that in states with a Sept. 1 cutoff for kindergarten enrollment, children who were born in August were 30% more likely to be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder than their peers who were born in September and were thus nearly one year older when starting school. This was particularly true for boys.

…the benefits of early schooling remain unclear. Some studies show positive results for low-income children, but often those results don’t last. For children with advantages, the upside is negligible.

Why You Never Hear Anyone Say “That Wasn’t Real Capitalism”

 [F]ree-marketeers are consistent to the point of being bores. If there is an economic model that we already praised forty years ago, there is a high chance that we are still praising it today, and if there is an economic model that we are praising today, there is a high chance that we were already praising it forty years ago. It’s the exact opposite of … socialist utopia-hopping…

Socialists are novelty-seekers. They have to be because socialist experiments never age well. It is very easy to become a socialist. But if you want to remain one for long, you need the ability to quietly drop, and selectively forget socialist experiments when they turn sour, and quickly move on to the next one. You need to be able to quickly un-pin your hopes from the latest failed experiment, and pin them on the next one instead.

Why Service Is Lousy in High-Tax States

In most polls, infrastructure—roads, bridges and airports—ranks high among the basics that citizens and businesses expect government to provide. This should be an area in which rich, high-tax states vastly outperform their peers, but the opposite is true. In CNBC’s annual ranking of the best and worst states for business, seven high-tax states were among those ranked lowest in infrastructure quality—Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island.

Even more startling, Texas ranked as having the best infrastructure. Also scoring high were Tennessee, which has the third-lowest tax burden as a share of state personal income, and Florida, ranked fourth-lowest in taxes. There seems an almost inverse relationship between the resources that state governments take in and quality of infrastructure.

U.S. Counties Vary by Their Degree of Partisan Prejudice

In general, the most politically intolerant Americans, according to the analysis, tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan themselves. This finding aligns in some ways with previous research by the University of Pennsylvania professor Diana Mutz, who has found that white, highly educated people are relatively isolated from political diversity.

Think Republicans are disconnected from reality? It’s even worse among liberals

[H]ighly educated Republicans were no more accurate in their ideas about Democratic opinion than poorly educated Republicans. For Democrats, the education effect was even worse: the more educated a Democrat is, according to the study, the less he or she understands the Republican worldview.

“This effect,” the report says, “is so strong that Democrats without a high school diploma are three times more accurate than those with a postgraduate degree.” And the more politically engaged a person is, the greater the distortion.”

How Progressive Policies Enable Discrimination

[Rent control results in surplus demand for units, so] because landlords recognize there are more willing tenants than there are units available in the market, they can feel free to turn down potential tenants knowing there are plenty more willing tenants lined up waiting for their opportunity to rent one of the scarce available units at such a low price.

Thus, landlords who are disposed to reject tenants based on personal biases can do so with little chance of paying an economic price for doing so. Rent controls lower the price paid for discrimination, making it more likely to occur.

The Democratic Debates Will Alienate Democratic Voters

At this early stage of the Democratic presidential race, the majority of candidates are already way, way out there, and there are plenty of activists and strategists who aim to keep them well beyond anything resembling the center. But the net effect of Dems embracing causes such as the elimination of private health insurance, taxpayer-funded health care for illegal immigrants, a Green New Deal that aims to radically transform the U.S. economy in a few years’ time, and reparations for both African Americans and gay couples may well be to make Donald Trump and Republicans seem less extreme when it comes to their own nutjob positions.

A Dearth of Data Helped Hong Kong Succeed

Sir John Cowperthwaite was Hong Kong’s financial secretary from 1961-71 and is widely credited for the prosperity Hong Kong enjoys today. An ardent free-marketeer, Cowperthwaite believed that government should not try to manage the economy. One salient feature of Cowperthwaite’s policies: His administration didn’t collect any economic data during his tenure. Not even gross domestic product was calculated. When the American economist Milton Friedman asked why, Cowperthwaite replied that once the data were made available, officials would invariably use them to make the case for government intervention in the economy.

Why climate predictions are so difficult

“Our computers do not even predict with certainty whether the glaciers in the Alps will increase or decrease,” explains Stevens.

The difficulties he and his fellow researchers face can be summed up in one word: clouds. The mountains of water vapor slowly moving across the sky are the bane of all climate researchers.

First of all, it is the enormous diversity of its manifestations that makes clouds so unpredictable. Each of these types of clouds has a different effect on the climate. And above all: they have a strong effect.

Key Greenland glacier growing again after shrinking for years, NASA study shows

“That was kind of a surprise. We kind of got used to a runaway system,” said Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland ice and climate scientist Jason Box. “The good news is that it’s a reminder that it’s not necessarily going that fast. But it is going.”

Box, who wasn’t part of the study, said Jakobshavn is “arguably the most important Greenland glacier because it discharges the most ice in the northern hemisphere. For all of Greenland, it is king.”

Hydroelectric dams produce 2,000 times as much energy per job as solar in Washington

In 2017, hydroelectric generation employed 2,460 people in Washington state. Solar electricity, by way of comparison, employed more than double that amount, 5,627 people. Hydro, however, generated 71 percent of Washington’s electricity. Solar produced less than one-tenth of one percent.

Each person working at a dam in Washington generated nearly 2,000 times as much electricity as those installing solar panels.

Despite ‘Car-Free’ Hype, Millennials Drive a Lot

Controlling for factors like marriage and living in city, it finds that Americans born between 1980 and 1984 are just as likely to own cars compared to, say, their parents’ cohort. What’s more, when driving habits are measured in terms of vehicle-miles traveled, some Millennials really are the worst.