Deforestation

I had previously wondered here about the source for Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth claim that 30 percent of CO2 was from forest burning. I'm reading this claim here by Nicholas Stern on Voxeu although the number is lower (probably because the base is greenhouse gases and not C02).
... there should be a coherent, integrated international programme to combat deforestation, which contributes 15-20% of greenhouse gas emissions...
Unfortunately, there is no source for this either although he notes this as a way to decrease GHG. Gore did not target this in his book which I had thought was a a large source of GHG.

Why do little girls like pink?

I had wondered if girls liked pink because of some innate characteristic (perhaps some genetic predisposition to pink) or whether because they were being marketed pink stuff. Peggy Orenstein has a partial answer:
When colors were first introduced to the nursery in the early part of the 20th century, pink was considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, was thought to be dainty. Why or when that switched is not clear, but as late as the 1930s a significant percentage of adults in one national survey held to that split. Perhaps that’s why so many early Disney heroines — Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Wendy, Alice-in-Wonderland — are swathed in varying shades of azure. .... It wasn’t until the mid-1980s, when amplifying age and sex differences became a key strategy of children’s marketing (recall the emergence of “ ’tween”), that pink became seemingly innate to girls, part of what defined them as female, at least for the first few years. That was also the time that the first of the generation raised during the unisex phase of feminism — ah, hither Marlo! — became parents. “The kids who grew up in the 1970s wanted sharp definitions for their own kids,” Paoletti told me. “I can understand that, because the unisex thing denied everything — you couldn’t be this, you couldn’t be that, you had to be a neutral nothing.”
From: The New York Times Magazine article What's Wrong With Cinderella

Gas Pricing Update

I had noted here here and here that gas prices seemed out of whack at two adjacent gas stations. Over the past few weeks, the prices of regular gas did indeed converge: from 3.19 vs 3.16 to 3.21 vs 3.23 and today 3.25 vs 3.25. It took a lot longer than a model of oligopolistic pricing would have predicted.

I'm starting to keep an eye on two gas stations down the road that have the same owner - a Shell and a Sunoco. The price of regular gas at the Sunoco was 3.19 and at the Shell was 3.26.

Perhaps I have it all wrong and the model I should be thinking of is a product differentiation with different pricing strategies to segment the market. But then again, perhaps gas is gas any where and everywhere.

Anecdotes versus data

Here is another example where anecdotes can be more important than data:
In my view, the September 2007 bank run experienced by the British mortgage lender Northern Rock settles this debate once and for all – deposit insurance is essential to financial stability.
This is from Steve Cecchetti's Subprime Series, part 2: Deposit insurance and the lender of last resort

Measuring respect

Marginal Revolution had an interesting question: Why don't American kids respect their parents more? The usual suspects abound and I'm sympathetic to the bad parents and liberal/PC environment (e.g. no spanking) reasons but I thought I'd advance something else a little more off the beaten track. Americans are less trusting of governments and authority (compared to Europeans, for instance). Hence they teach their children to question authority more often. Questioning of authority can also be equated with lack of respect. In any case, can we actually measure respect (and what is respect) or is the question posed merely an impression?

Inequality doesn't matter

In a review of Paul Krugman's book Conscience of a Liberal, Herb Gintis says:
... no one cares about inequality. People care about injustice, unfairness, poverty, sexual predators, family values, gay marriage, terrorism, and many other problems of everyday life. People don't care about Gini distributions and other abstractions.
If this is true then there is a lot of irrelevant research on income inequality. Or perhaps,
1) Inequality is correlated with a sense of injustice. When does inequality proxy for injustice or to put it simply, how unequal do income distributions have to get before there is a sense of injustice. Or does inequality as a result of being a robber baron (e.g. corruption) become a proxy for injustice as in some countries.
People hated the Robber Barons because they were robbers and barons, not because they were rich. Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates do not send the Pinkerton men out to protect their ill-gotten gains; nor to the other super-rich.
2) The statement at the beginning of the blog would then also point to why some results show that inequality is not always correlated with crime and other social problems.
3) What about inequality and financial deepening? There are models that show that inequality is a necessary component of growth in so far as the rich save and invest and hence redirect their wealth toward growth as a whole.

Is tradition an impediment to experimentation?

This Thanksgiving was the first time we tried grilling a turkey and it turned out well. I wondered whether tradition could some times be an impediment to experimentation, and experimentation I am also suggesting is something good because it could lead to new discoveries. Tradition is an excuse to resist trying something new -- "We've always done it this way", for instance.

One area that is ripe for experimentation is our insurance. We currently hold all our insurance policies (life, auto and home) with one insurer. Should we experiment by switching? I realize that the costs of switching could be onerous which is why I've resisted any attempts to do any research at all into this.

I experiment with household help services, in particular, plumbing companies. I do find that costs vary a great deal (and some of these experiments were quite costly!) even for similar jobs but I have resisted settling on one plumbing company at this time. Perhaps it is time to stop experimenting on this.

The teachers at our kids school are constantly experimenting -- e.g. changing the schedule so that some classes are longer (but fewer times per week), instructional materials, integrating IT, etc. Sometimes it can be frustrating to see all this change every year -- it seems like after teaching for such a long time they should know by now what works. But perhaps I should stop harping and applaud them for their constant efforts at learning how to do things better and experimenting.