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Assorted links
1. The Euro is disappearing, but not in the way you think.
2. There is a growing backlash against remittances.
3. The top 100 photos from the Hubble Space Telescope, which now has a new lease on life; thanks to Chris F. Masse.
4. New empirical findings on sex, scroll down a bit, I am not talking about the top story on female promiscuity (although you can read that too).
Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 3, 2006 at 04:08 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
I've looked through the study mentioned in #4, and I have one comment:
cultural response bias
I'm not sure to what extent the observed differences reflect differences in behavior vs. differences in willingness to answer. For example, in some countries, the consequences of admitting to premarital sex can be quite severe. I have serious doubts about the researcher's ability to separate these effects. Nothing against their competence; it's just a very difficult problem.
Posted by: madsocialscientist at Nov 3, 2006 4:50:05 PM
The issue on remittances is interesting. It appears that basically they cause the same sort of situation to develop that happens in oil-rich countries: there is a bunch of people who don't improve their human capital but get "free money". This "free money" - amazingly - is mostly spent buying life's necessities, followed by useless consumer crap, and not invested in education or doing business locally. If anything, it's an even worse situation, in that relatively skilled and harder-working people will be encouraged to leave and find work that provides remittances instead of starting local businesses.
One thing that's interesting is how this is different from the situation as described by my wife with respect to China: peasants leave the farm to go work at a sweatshop, save every penny (since, while the pay sucks, they do typically get room and board), and return to their hometown a few years later with the savings. They then buy a house and start a small business in town.
Posted by: Foobarista at Nov 3, 2006 5:13:07 PM
Hmm. I can't read the full article, but with respect to #2, the blurb does not mention my main objection to remittances-as-welfare: They remove the incentive for the home country to improve their local institutions.
Posted by: Brock at Nov 3, 2006 5:28:22 PM
The article on heterosexual sex says "In Cameroon, Haiti, and Kenya, men tend to have multiple partners while women tend only to have one." Perhaps this is true of the *median* number of partners, but how could this be true of the *average* number of partners? Doesn't the average have to be the same?
Posted by: Robin Hanson at Nov 3, 2006 10:52:21 PM
RE: Hanson >Doesn't the average have to be the same?
Yes.
See http://exploringdata.cqu.edu.au/docs/sex_prt2.doc
Posted by: wgd at Nov 4, 2006 11:09:29 AM
Schelling does discuss this, though, in one of his books with the illustration of Christmas cards - cards given have to equal cards received. So, ultimately, the average number of heterosexual partners for men and women have to be the same, if we correctly identify the space of people we're talking about. Maybe the average is not the same if men are sleeping with women outside the age range of the sample. Or if men and women disagree on what constitutes a partner.
Posted by: Jason Voorhees at Nov 4, 2006 1:03:29 PM
Robin Hanson,
You are correct. It always drives me crazy when people write this sort of thing.
That said, it could be true in a way. In a closed world of 1000 men and 1000 women, and each male has had exactly 10 (female) sex partners, then the mean average sex partner number for women has to be exactly 10 partners. But the distribution doesn't have to be naything close to symetrical. You could have 900 women with 1 sex partner each, leaving 100 women to divide up an total of 9100 unaccounted for partnerships, or a mean average of 91 each. While one partner each strikes me as way too low, the general ratio fits in with the stereotyped notion that women who sleep around a lot get labeled sluts while historically men don't get that label.
In other words, women who sleep around tend to sleep around much more than men who sleep around do.
There is also another much simpler explanation. Women lie more often when asked such questions because they were more often raised to believe such behaviour is wrong, while the men may exagerate (upwards) the number of partners they have.
Posted by: happyjuggler0 at Nov 4, 2006 1:30:50 PM
Wasn't there a study posted on MR a while back about men and women having different ways of remembering events? I can't remember anymore what that difference exactly was, but I wonder if it might have relevance for sex studies where men and women mean partners are usually different.
Posted by: Jason Voorhees at Nov 4, 2006 2:22:23 PM
Robin,
It depends on the ratio of males to females in the group.
Posted by: ryan at Nov 4, 2006 9:34:26 PM
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