Marginal Revolution

African-American CEOs have baby faces

Media analysts have argued that a major factor in Barack Obama’s political success is his nonthreatening demeanor, to counteract the stereotype of the threatening black man. Researchers wondered if there might be a similar counter-stereotypical pattern for black CEOs, even on a purely visual level. They asked people to rate pictures of CEOs for baby-facedness, warmth, and competence. Relative to white CEOs, black CEOs were rated as more baby-faced - and, consistent with prior research on baby-faced stereotypes, seen as warmer and less competent. For blacks, being baby-faced meant earning more money, the study found, whereas white CEOs earned less money if they were baby-faced. According to the authors, this confirms that blacks need “disarming mechanisms” to be successful in corporate America.

Here is the link, which reports some other interesting (and separate) results.  The core source is Livingston, R. & Pearce, N., “The Teddy-Bear Effect: Does Having a Baby Face Benefit Black Chief Executive Officers?” Psychological Science (October 2009).  Here are some photos and charts.

Assorted links

1. Greg Mankiw's very good column on health insurance and marginal tax rates; Greg adds comment.

2. Somerset Maugham: the perfect traveler?

3. Ten smelly foods from Asia.

4. Slew of Ayn Rand links.

5. The Lehman failure really was at fault; Arnold Kling adds comment.

6. MR is a start-up, as is Modern Principles.

Positive feedback in inequality

Here is a very nice summary of some important trends from Arnold Kling.  Arnold buried the lede on this one so a hat tip to Tim Kane at Growthology.

I think that perhaps the most important trend of the past thirty years is the increased importance of cognitive skills relative to physical labor. Obviously, this has been going on for more than just the past thirty years, but during the past thirty years we saw an acceleration. This has had a number of consequences:

1. It changed the role of women. Their comparative advantage went from housework to market work.

2. This in turn, as Wolfers and Stevenson have pointed out, changed the nature of marriage. Men and women look for complementarity in consumption rather than in production.

3. This in turn leads to more assortive mating, with achievement-oriented men looking for interesting mates rather than for good maids.

4. This in turn leads to greater inequality across households. It also fosters greater inequality among children. The children of two affluent parents are likely to have much better genetic and environmental endowments than the children of two (likely unmarried) low-income parents.

5. Inequality is exacerbated by globalization and technological change. If your comparative advantage is basic physical labor, you have to compete with machines as well is with workers from the Third World.

The net result is an economy that has improved considerably for people with high cognitive skills, but which has improved only somewhat for people with relatively low cognitive skills.

I have a bad feeling about this

Here is the latest on Tysons redevelopment:

Remaking Tysons Corner into the second city of Washington will take a lot more than a new Metro line and a downtown of tightly clustered buildings designed for walking. It will take almost $15 billion in new roads and public transportation.

Even in this age of sticker shock, that's a lot of money for a local project.  You'll recall my earlier prediction that Tysons will get the road widenings but not enough of the other changes needed to make it a walkable downtown; the road widenings will on net make things worse. Call me an apologist for suburbia if you wish, but I sooner view myself as an apologist for public choice theory.  Some parts of the redesign will be more popular than others and we will get a very unbalanced mix of reforms.  This is indeed what I predict:

The numbers also have prompted some proponents of dense development in Tysons to argue that if the county pushes too many costly road improvements and makes room for more cars, the vision could unravel. 

To simply insist that it "should be different," or to charge that I do not spend enough time criticizing interstate highway subsidies, is to miss the public choice point.  Now that the stimulus is up and running, you can see road widenings all over NoVa and they will be finished.  Who will put up the money for the rest of Tysons reform?

For funding, Fairfax officials say, they will look to the Obama administration, which is committed to subsidizing growth projects in urban areas. They hold out little hope from the Virginia Department of Transportation, which this year slashed the county allocation for secondary roads to zero. Given the millions of dollars Northern Virginia has gotten for big projects such as the HOT lanes and new Woodrow Wilson Bridge, "More state funding is pretty much politically doomed," said Kathy Ichter, the county's chief of transportation planning.

Stay tuned...