« How to read fast | Main | Legistorm Storm »
NYT -- The Year in Ideas
As usual, I read through the entirety of this survey.
Here is one good bit on how people can be too far-sighted and not party enough.
Here is the hidden fee economy; here is an earlier MR take on the same.
Read this on shipping containers.
I liked this article: "“It’s not that we enjoy disliking people,” Bosson, a social psychologist at the University of South Florida, says. “It’s that we enjoy meeting people who dislike the same people.”"
Posted by Tyler Cowen on December 12, 2006 at 07:01 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
The trick to this is how you define partying. I regret not spending another month backpacking around Europe more than I regret not attending another months of college party in the US. Quality of parties matters, too.
Posted by: DK at Dec 12, 2006 7:28:57 AM
Then sucessful people reflect back on a particular time that they worked hard, might they be inclinded to downplay the roll that marginal hard work had in getting them to a particular place in life? Whereas people who partied would remember how fun that particular activity was?
Posted by: OneEyedMan at Dec 12, 2006 9:36:31 AM
There's a real problem with selection bias: did they survey anyone with cirrhosis or in prison for drunk driving?
Posted by: Ted at Dec 12, 2006 10:19:50 AM
One item not mentioned by the Times piece on shipping containers is the effect of reduced crime on some smaller manufacturers. When I worked for the Port of Seattle in the 1980s, the old marketing guys who remembered the pre-container era remarked on how much cheaper it was to ship whiskey in containers. Longshoremen would routinely pry open a crate of whiskey and steal a bottle. But there are diseconomies of scale in theft. One bottle is easy to hide in a big pocket, but it is hard to walk off with a whole crate unnoticed. So big manufacturers had a cost advantage. Ship one case of 12 and longshoreman could easily steal 8% of your shipment. Ship 1000 cases and the theft rate drops by a factor of 1000.
Posted by: William Sjostrom at Dec 12, 2006 10:38:53 AM
I'm suspicious of the Hyperopia argument. The problem with the survey is that it asks people with an approzimately equal amount of success - they are all students at Columbia University. The study might be different had they asked a completely random sample of the population at large. That isn't saying the partying didn't come at a large cost - perhaps some of those who partied could have gotten scholarships/gone to better schools - but that they were still relatively succesful seems to skew the survey.
Posted by: agent00yak at Dec 12, 2006 12:19:29 PM
Tyler,
I agree with the main argument in the shipping container story, but it's a stretch to say that transportation has become "a footnote". There are other studies available, but I have one from PricewaterhouseCoopers stored on my pc "Cutting your transportation costs", in it PwC says that transportation costs, in a sample survey, ran from 0.27% to 12.57% expressed as a percentage of the firm's revenue. Hardly a footnote. Oh, and I think labour rate arbitrage has more to do with Macy's ability to source from Malaysia than it does the lowered transportation costs.
Cheers,
David Rotor
Posted by: David Rotor at Dec 12, 2006 2:32:49 PM
The NYT actually featured one of my ideas this year - psychological neoteny.
This was of course quite an ego-boost; but the interesting thing, from my perspective, was that I publish dozens of ideas of all kinds per year (it's what I do) and I would never have predicted that this would be the one that made it big. I did nothing to push this - indeed the article (which was a short editorial in the journal I edit) was picked-up off PubMed by Discovery News before it even reached print.
Over the years, several other theories I thought were sure-fire media-fodder, and tried hard to promote, have sunk without trace.
Is media success purely random, or just that authors have no idea of the quality/ interest of their own work?
Posted by: Bruce G Charlton at Dec 12, 2006 2:32:51 PM
“It’s not that we enjoy disliking people,” Bosson, a social psychologist at the University of South Florida, says. “It’s that we enjoy meeting people who dislike the same people.”
Reason for skepticism:
The two people just met, and also just met the person whom they were criticizing/praising. Perhaps criticism sounds more honest and like it offers more real information about the critic than praise, since the praise could just be being honest. Therefore, if you know that they share your criticism, you have a higher probability that they really share your belief. However, if you're told that they made the same positive statements as you, then either your original comment could have been a polite fiction, the comment by the second person could be a polite fiction, or both. Either way there's more uncertainty, and you might not like as much someone who would make a polite fiction if you were being honestly positive, or vice versa.
Posted by: John Thacker at Dec 12, 2006 11:54:18 PM
You single out some of the good ones, but what about the bad ones?
Cohabitation Is Bad for Women's Health
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10section1B.t-1.html
The study notes that women who start cohabiting with men gain weight and posit that this is because women pick up some of the bad eating habits of their partners. My first thought about the data was that the women have less of an incentive to try to limit their eating, now that they were cohabiting. I.e. the weight gain was not from more pressure to eat badly but from less pressure to stay thin.
-Kevin
Posted by: Kevin Postlewaite at Dec 13, 2006 12:36:42 PM
