August 20, 2008
Category: Words and Writing
This is funny.
Andrew Sullivan has a discussion going on whether the use of semicolons is (ahem) gay. It references an article in the Boston Globe documenting a variety of semicolon-haters.
But here is the best comment from Bryan Appleyard:
Lately, with considerable effort, I have begin to use them with some frequency; they seem to come almost naturally at last. Yet I still fear Kurt Vonnegut's description of them as 'transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing' as well as the charge that real men neither eat quiche nor use semi-colons. In the end, however, the semi-colon is like death; we must all face it alone. (Emphasis mine.)
My experience with semicolons started in high school. I had this teacher who said that the length of an English sentence should be about 20 words for proper writing. Since my classmates and I had trouble writing flowing, Johnsonian prose, we all started squishing (sometimes unrelated) sentences together to make them longer. The result was barely coherent. If I remember correctly, my teacher specifically prohibited sentences like the following:
"Gatsby represents the optimism for self-improvement in the American character; in the end, he kills someone with a car."
I don't think the experience gave me a bad impression of semicolons, though. I still use them. (My friends joke that sometimes I will even use them while text messaging.) But I like to keep them for sentences where the thought is closing but not quite closed. I never thought of them as effeminate, just unwieldy in most situations.
Using semicolons is like deciding whether to take a sword and a gun to duel. Sure, a sword will do the job, but you weren't planning on getting that close. And you will look like a jackass flourishing your tool while a perfectly adequate substitute sits in your belt.
Posted by Jake Young at 4:27 PM • 4 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Obesity and Heart Disease
The fit-fat fight -- whether someone can be obese but still healthy -- has reignited (if it ever really stopped) with an article in the Archives of Internal Medicine that was reported in the NYTimes.
Wildman et al. used data from the NHANES study and looked at the relationship between Body Mass Index (BMI) and whether the individuals had a variety of other indicators of cardiovascular risk -- mostly blood tests that indicate poor cardiometabolic physiology like high cholesterol or high blood pressure. What they found was that large numbers of obese individuals (BMI > 30) had few indicators of cardiovascular risk and large numbers of normal weight individuals (BMI < 25) had indicators suggesting that they are at high risk. The study found that levels of physical activity formed an independent risk factor for cardiovascular risk -- i.e. whether you were obese or not, high physical activity was correlated with lower risk. These findings suggest that it is possible -- with respect to cardiovascular health -- to be healthy and obese.
Basically, the conclusion forwarded in the Times coverage is that it may not matter whether you are obese, just so long as you are physically active.
The reality, I think, is a bit more complicated.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 3:46 PM • 3 Comments • View blog reactions
August 19, 2008
Category: Alcohol
I have talked a little before about alternative strategies to lowering college alcohol abuse -- alternative meaning as opposed to outright bans like the 21 drinking age.
Now a set of college presidents are circulating something called the Amethyst Initiative whose goal is to lower the drinking age back from 21 to 18. (For those of you who don't remember the drinking age was raised from 18 to 21 under the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984 by tying raising the age to receipt of highway funding from the federal government. This act was championed by then Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Dole. Incidentally, yes, I know that the law has various loopholes for supervised drinking in private and drinking for religious ceremonies. What we are talking about here is limits on college students going to a liquor store and buying beer.)
The Amethyst Initiative is being opposed by Mothers Against Drunk Driving on the grounds that it will likely increase traffic fatalities.
The big question here is whether you think that the minimum drinking age is effective at reducing mortality and whether it facilitates the culture of binge drinking on American college campuses. I think the answer to that question is mixed.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 7:42 PM • 23 Comments • View blog reactions
August 18, 2008
Category: Medicine
The University of Georgia has started doing health screens to check their football players for possible arrhythmias or heart abnormalities:
Makiri Pugh is not your typical college freshman. At age 18, he knows more than most young adults about the structure and health of his heart, and it's not because he's sick.
Pugh, of Charlotte, North Carolina, was recruited to play football for the University of Georgia Bulldogs, ranked No. 1 in pre-season polls.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 2:54 PM • 2 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Psychology
There is a fascinating review in Nature Reviews Neuroscience this month about the cognitive science of magic tricks -- authored by both scientists and practicing magicians (sadly behind a subscription wall). The article attempts to list and describe in neuroscientific terms the techniques that magicians use to trick their audiences. The authors break down these into "visual illusions (after-images), optical illusions ('smoke and mirrors'), cognitive illusions (inattentional blindness), special effects (explosions, fake gunshots, et cetera), and secret devices and mechanical artifacts (gimmicks)." The use of visual illusions to study perception is certainly nothing new, but the emphasis on cognitive illusions -- illusions that trick higher order perceptions like attention and judgment -- is novel.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 11:14 AM • 1 Comments • View blog reactions
August 14, 2008
Category: Medicine
I was distressed to hear that Bernie Mac died last Saturday of pneumonia at the age of 50. I always thought he was pretty funny, and I was a big fan of the Ocean's Eleven movies where he played a prominent part. I also raised an eyebrow when I heard that he was only 50 because 50-year-olds do not typically die of pneumonia unless they are in some way immunosuppressed -- either from medications or from some condition like HIV.
Even though it wasn't the immediate cause of his death, Mac fought a poorly understood disease called sarcoidosis which may explain why he would be particularly susceptible to lung infections. Sarcoidosis is not something that most people have heard of, so I thought I would spend a little bit talking about it.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 5:57 PM • 17 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Haha, a funny
One of my students in LSE's summer school microeconomics class sent me this video. At least I know something's sinking in when I talk about things happening on the margin...
Read on »
Posted by Kara Contreary at 7:03 AM • 2 Comments • View blog reactions
August 12, 2008
Category: Technology
Engineers at Penn State have developed a new method of running a refrigerator that doesn't require a compressor. Rather, it changes the level of organization in a solid to change the temperature. This change in entropy results in heat-transfer.
Conventional cooling systems -- refrigerators or air conditioners -- rely on the properties of gases to cool and most systems use the change in density of gases at changing pressures to cool. The coolants commonly used are either harmful to people or the environment. Freon, one of the fluorochlorocarbons banned because of the damage it did to the ozone layer, was the most commonly used refrigerant. Now, a variety of coolants is available. Nevertheless, all have problems and require energy-eating compressors and lots of heating coils.
Zhang's approach uses the change form disorganized to organized that occurs in some polarpolymers when placed in an electric field. The natural state of these materials is disorganized with the various molecules randomly positioned. When electricity is applied, the molecules become highly ordered and the material gives off heat and becomes colder. When the electricity is turned off, the material reverts to its disordered state and absorbs heat.
The researchers report a change in temperature for the material of about 22.6 degrees Fahrenheit, in today's (Aug. 8) issue of Science. Repeated randomizing and ordering of the material combined with an appropriate heat exchanger could provide a wide range of heating and cooling temperatures.
"These polymers are flexible and can be used for heating and cooling, so there may be many different possible applications," said Zhang, also a faculty member of Penn State's Materials Research Institute.
Aside from the issue of environmental contamination from some coolants, this technology looks like it would be really helpful in making smaller cooling elements. While the actual temperature where these experiments were performed was around 160 degrees F (70 degrees C) -- a little high to use in a refrigerator, the researchers indicate that there are many different types of these polymers. Some may be functional at lower temperatures.
Interesting stuff. The actual paper is here.
Hat-tip: Slashdot
Posted by Jake Young at 10:23 AM • 4 Comments • View blog reactions
August 11, 2008
Category: Funding
Michael S. Teitelbaum has an editorial in Science about scientific funding that echoes a point that I have been making for a while: the issue with scientific funding is as much about volatility (bigs ups and downs) as it is total funding.
For NIH, more research funding does produce increased research output, as intended. Yet, because the system as currently structured employs graduate and postdoctoral research assistants to do much of the laboratory work, increased research funding also produces (after a multiyear lag) additional Ph.D.-level applicants for NIH grants. No effective mechanisms are in place to align these increased numbers with expanding career opportunities.
In theory, the resulting chilly job markets for recent biomedical Ph.D.'s should generate negative feedback that would tend toward more stable equilibria. In a closed system, and one with full information available to prospective graduate students, some fraction of undergraduates who might otherwise consider becoming Ph.D. students and postdocs would correctly perceive the difficult career paths and would pursue other options.
In practice, however, the system is not closed. Given increased research funding, additional graduate students and postdocs can be readily recruited from large potential pools in countries with fewer such opportunities--precisely what took place as the NIH budget was rapidly doubled. Nor is there anything even approximating full information about career prospects available to prospective entrants, whether domestic or foreign.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 6:37 PM • 2 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Sports Doping
A Spanish cyclist, Maria Isabel Moreno, became the first person at the Beijing Olympics to test positive for a banned substance. It's cycling, so no shocker that the banned substance was Epo. No word on whether it is the new type of Epo called CERA that Riccardo Ricco tested positive for in the Tour de France.
Anyway, I wrote a big post on Epo that has all I want to say on the matter.
Posted by Jake Young at 6:01 PM • 1 Comments • View blog reactions
August 7, 2008
Category: Reproduction, Birth Control, and Abortion Politics
Yet another piece of evidence for the futility of abstinence education. Masters et al., publishing in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, show that an adolescent's attitude about sex is a much stronger indicator that they will actually have it than their attitudes about abstinence.
The study followed around 300 teenagers from Seattle over a year after interviewing them about their attitudes about sex and abstinence and their intentions to have sex or abstain. They wanted to know how their initial attitudes and intentions about sex and abstinence interacted over time.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 11:28 AM • 3 Comments • View blog reactions
August 5, 2008
Category: Carnivals
It has been a rough month here at Pure Pedantry.
At one point last week, I think I trained rats for 8 straight hours. (My job in the lab is training rats.) And let me just tell you, that is not particularly interesting. Visualize getting a repetitive stress injury moving around an pissed off animal with a limited attention span but to whom your entire future is chained. Anyway, in order to entertain myself, I have been playing every episode of South Park in order in the background. (Yes, I know...very, very sad.) Sufficeth to say, this has resulted in me having South Park on the brain. Thus, this particular edition of Grand Rounds will be South Park themed.
I would like to thank everyone for this very welcome breather from slowly losing my mind for the good of science. Thank you all for your submissions.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 7:00 AM • 11 Comments • View blog reactions
August 1, 2008
Category: Obesity and Heart Disease
There is an interesting discussion going on at the Becker-Posner blog about obesity abatement. Richard Posner talks about the NY ordinance requiring that calorie counts of food be prominently labeled fast food restaurants:
The significance of the New York City ordinance lies in its requiring that calorie numbers be printed next to the food items on menus and menu boards and in large type. The purpose is less to inform than to frighten. Psychologists have shown (what is anyway pretty obvious) that people respond more to information that is presented to them in a dramatic, memorable form than to information that is presented as an abstraction or is merely remembered rather than being pushed in one's face; that is the theory beyond requiring reckless drivers to watch videotapes of accidents and requiring cigarette ads to contain fearsome threats. It is one thing to know that a Big Mac has a lot of calories, and another thing to have the number emblazoned on the menu board, next to a mouth-watering picture. The warnings--for that is what the display of high calorie numbers amounts to--may create fear of high-calorie foods, not only in fast-food chains but generally. If so, and if as a result there is less obesity, there will be a reduction in medical expense and possibly a gain in happiness if, as one suspects, thin people are on average happier than fat people.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 5:21 PM • 7 Comments • View blog reactions
July 31, 2008
Category: Gender
Sorry for the light blogging everyone. It has been a busy, busy week.
Some of you may have caught Janet Hyde's latest paper looking at data from the No Child Left Behind Act and math performance in the US. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, states are required to test children for a variety of skills on a yearly basis. The paper looked at math performance across grade-level broken down by gender for 10 states from these tests.
Here is the key graph:
The data includes a measure of effect size called Cohen's d (I discussed it here) and a measure called the variance ratio (VR -- which is just the ratio of the variances).
You can see from the data that the difference between boys and girls for math performance is statistically insignificant across grade-level. (A Cohen's d less than about .2-.3 is considered basically insignificant.) Hyde's work has always been important in the debate to explain the relative dearth of women in the math and the sciences. Some people -- notably former Harvard President Larry Summers -- attributed that dearth to differences in innate ability in mathematics between men and women. This data would argue against that assertion, and that interpretation of these findings in a variety of publications.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 10:50 AM • 9 Comments • View blog reactions
July 28, 2008
Category: Carnivals
Just a heads up. Next week on August 5th (Tuesday) I will be hosting the illustrious medicine carnival Grand Rounds. (Has it been a year and a half since I did this last? Jeez I have been doing this forever...)
Anyway, here is how you submit. Send an email with your name, your blog, the url to the post, and a sentence description of it to jamesjyoung **at** gmail. The submission deadline is Monday August 4th at 6 pm as I will be writing the carnival that evening.
Haven't decided on a theme for this yet, so just give me your best. I am looking forward to reading all of your posts!
Posted by Jake Young at 2:52 PM • 0 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Sports Doping
Carlos Sastre won the Tour de France yesterday, but the whole race has been marred by incidents of sports doping. First, Riccardo Ricco was caught using a form of Epo called CERA. Now another biker named Dmitriy Fofonov tested positive for a drug called heptaminol.
Heptaminol made me raise an eyebrow, primarily because I had never heard of it before. I am beginning to wonder where these bikers even find this stuff. I kid you not: it took me a while to even find information on it. Most drug databases I checked don't even have an entry for it.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 10:14 AM • 5 Comments • View blog reactions
July 24, 2008
Category: Sports Doping
People have been asking me about Riccardo Ricco, the Italian cyclist who was thrown out of the Tour de France for testing positive for the hormone erythropoietin (Epo), so I want to do a little Q&A about Epo detection and abuse.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 9:56 AM • 5 Comments • View blog reactions
July 22, 2008
Category: Other People's Work
We were discussing game theory and the Dark Knight. Mike at The Quantitative Peace has an excellent post that discusses all the possible iterations:
I think this calls for a new villian in the third movie of the trilogy: The Game Theorist. Much like the riddler, but deadlier and requiring Batman to use mathematics to fight crime.
Encephalon is up at Sharp Brains. My personal favorite: therapy applications of Dungeons and Dragons.
Mercifully, a gas tax holiday is dead in the water -- in this case due to fears of lost jobs due to the diversion of money from the Highway fund.
An 81 year-old man in Britain earned his PhD from Cambridge after an 18 year project. Better late than never.
Read the whole thing.
Posted by Jake Young at 10:56 AM • 2 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Blogging
Have you ever said any of the following?
- 1) That Jake fellah (or other ScienceBlogger) has insightful things to say. By Heaven, I would like to meet him and discuss said insights.
- 2) That Jake fellah (or other ScienceBlogger) is one sexy mama. I am aroused by the possibility of discussing science with him in person.
- 3) That Jake fellah (or other ScienceBlogger) is a big fat jerk. I sure would like to meet him so I can punch him in the snoot.
If the answer is "yes" to any of those statements, you are in luck. SEED magazine will be hosting a ScienceBlogger meetup in New York on August 9th at ~3 in the afternoon. (Location details to follow.) I have been assured of the presence of snacks and swag. Those bloggers located near the NY area will likely attend including yours truly.
What we would like to get some tentative sense of how many people are interested. If you would like to come leave your name (pseudonyms are fine...we just need a count) in the comments. You can also email me at jamesjyoung <> gmail.
Thank you, and I look forward to meeting those of you who can make it.
Posted by Jake Young at 10:47 AM • 1 Comments • View blog reactions
July 21, 2008
Category: Movies
I suspect that many of you got a chance to see The Dark Knight movie this weekend.
Just as an aside, I will say that I thought that the movie was sweet. Definitely the best Batman movie, maybe one of the best superhero movies ever made. Heath Ledger is terrifyingly good throughout. Aaron Eckhart and Christian Bale give excellent performances as well, and Maggie Gyllenhaal is a hell of lot better than Katie Holmes.
Anyway, there is a scene in the movie that got me thinking about game theory, and that is what I want to talk about. Beware, if you haven't seen the film, this discussion includes some big spoilers.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 4:02 PM • 83 Comments • View blog reactions
July 16, 2008
Category: Neuroscience
Temporal discounting is our tendency to want things now rather than later. In order to encourage us to save money, banks have to offer us a reward in the form of an interest rate. In order to delay gratification, we have to be convinced that the reward in the future is going to be sufficiently large to compensate us for going without right now.
When economists talk about temporal discounting, they talk about it in terms of what is called the discount rate. The discount rate is the percentage of money that you would have to be offered after a time period to convince you to save. Alternatively it could also be viewed as how much less -- by percentage -- your money is worth to you in say a year than it is right now. The discount rate is related to the interest rate.
In a lot of economic models, temporal discounting is measured in terms of a exponential function. You take the present reward -- money or whatever -- and multiply it by the discount rate raised to the power of the time over which that reward is discounted. We know, however, from behavioral economics and neuroscience that people don't have an exponential discounting function.
Actually, we know that the amount something is worth to you declines precipitously in the near future and declines more slowly into the far future. This makes sense right: the difference between 365 days and 366 days is not psychologically significant whereas now and an hour from now matters a lot. Because of this observation, we say that the discount rate is declining over time and that temporal discounting is a hyperbolic function.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 9:59 AM • 8 Comments • View blog reactions
July 15, 2008
Category: Movies
Happy Sizzle Day!
Today numerous bloggers from ScienceBlogs and elsewhere will be reviewing a new movie Sizzle directed by Randy Olson of Flock of Dodos fame. Sizzle is a documentary/mockumentary/comedy partly about the science of global warming, but more in my opinion about the nature of the global warming debate.
I was fortunate enough to receive a pre-release copy of the film for review, and I can summarize in one sentence what I thought about it: Randy Olson gets it.
By gets it, I mean that he understands that there are two levels to the global warming debate. The first level is a debate among scientists (or people who claim to be scientists) about evidence. It is populated by facts and figures, by Power Point presentations and IPCC panels. The second level is a debate for the conventional wisdom of the public. It is populated by celebrity endorsements and powerful lobbyists, by what you've heard and what your Mom knows for certain.
What this movie illustrates is that the debate has moved past the first level. This is not to suggest that clarifying the science of climate is not important. There are still a lot of things that we don't know that we need to. But the debate about global warming is now in the public. The debate about global warming is now a popular phenomena, and as scientists hoping to influence policy we need to understand and accept that.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 5:04 AM • 2 Comments • View blog reactions
July 9, 2008
Category: Economics
One of the difficult things about economics is that you can't really see an economy develop from scratch. There is no visible State of Nature. All you see is the continuous process.
In that light, here is a very interesting article. R.A. Radford was an economist taken prisoner by the Germans and put in a POW camp. He witnessed the formation of a POW camp economy and wrote about his experiences in an article published in 1945. The economy included as a prominent feature the use of cigarettes as money. From the article:
The permanent camps in Germany saw the highest level of commercial organisation. In addition to the Exchange and Mart notice boards, a shop was organised as a public utility, controlled by representatives of the Senior British Officer. on a no profit basis. People left their surplus clothing, toilet requisites and food there until they were sold at a fixed price in cigarettes. Only sales in cigarettes were accepted-there was no barter- and there was no haggling. For food at least there were standard prices: clothing is less homogeneous and the price was decided around a norm by the seller and the shop manager-in agreement ; shirts would average say 80, ranging from 60 to 120 according to quality and age. Of food, the shop carried small stocks for convenience; the capital was provided by a loan from the bulk store of Red Cross cigarettes and repaid bv a small commission taken on the first transactions. Thus the cigarette attained its fullest currency status, and the market was almost completely unified.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 1:33 PM • 3 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Nutrition
Kenneth Chang, guest-blogging at TeirneyLab, laments the use of the word "organic" in both the contexts of organic chemistry and as a term for natural foods:
Organic derives from Greek, organikos. The original meaning was, logically, something related to an organ of the body. The meaning later generalized to "characteristic of, pertaining to, or derived from living organisms."
Nowadays, the most prevalent meaning of organic is in the supermarket -- natural, without artificial ingredients, grown without chemical fertilizers -- a fuzzy notion codified by 27,000 or so words of federal regulations...
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 1:07 PM • 7 Comments • View blog reactions
July 8, 2008
Category: Economics
At least someone is benefiting from the economic stimulus package:
An unforeseen and surprising beneficiary of the Economic Stimulus Plan, a plan that George Bush contends will "boost our economy and encourage job creation," has surfaced this week. An independent market-research firm, AIMRCo (Adult Internet Market Research Company), has discovered that many websites focused on adult or erotic material have experienced an upswing in sales in the recent weeks since checks have appeared in millions of Americans' mailboxes across the country.
So I guess all porn-mongers should be Keynesians.
When I think of billions of taxpayer dollars subsidizing breast implants and sex toys, it brings a little tear to my eye. God bless America!
Hat-tip: Greg Mankiw and Daniel Drezner
Posted by Jake Young at 12:21 PM • 2 Comments • View blog reactions
July 7, 2008
Category: Gender
I often rant about bad coverage of the psychology of sex differences, so it is always satisfying to see an article that really has their facts straight.
Amanda Schaffer and Emily Bazelon, writing in Slate, have an excellent article reviewing Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain and Susan Pinker's The Sexual Paradox. They take both authors to task for selective use of the literature, using evidence that is dated, and for ignoring the complexity of the subject.
The bottom line from the science should really be this: Some differences between the minds of men and women exist. But in most areas, they are small and dwarfed by the variability within each gender. To be fair, Brizendine and Pinker intermittently acknowledge this point, and they translate complex material for a wide audience, which necessarily involves simplification. They get credit for trying.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 12:50 PM • 0 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Neuroscience
Human beings use stereotyped facial expressions to identify the feelings of others. We can tell what another person is feeling in part because of how their face looks. However, this says very little about why the particular changes in facial musculature are associated with particular feelings. Why do the eyebrows go up when we are afraid instead of down?
To address this issue, Susskind et al., publishing in Nature Neuroscience, looked at the visual and physiological effects of fearful expressions as opposed to expressions of disgust and neutral expressions. They found that when someone looks afraid, their visual field enlarges, their eyes move more rapidly, and their inspiratory rate increases. This suggests that the particular expression of fearfulness is an adaptive.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 12:48 PM • 3 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Haha, a funny
Found in an abstract:
The medial PFC, as well as the ventral tegmental area, also seem to participate in the generation of pelvic thrusting.
Posted by Jake Young at 11:19 AM • 1 Comments • View blog reactions
July 2, 2008
Category: Nature vs. Nuture
Publishing in Science, Gormley et al. compared the benefits of Oklahoma's TPS pre-K program to Head Start. Conclusion: preschool matters in cognitive development.
Early childhood education programs in the United States face enormous challenges. The overwhelming majority of Head Start program participants are poor, and many Head Start children face additional risk factors, such as a single-parent home or a home where English is not the primary language spoken. Pre-K programs targeted to poor or otherwise at-risk children face similar challenges. Even universally available programs, such as Oklahoma's, must cope with the realities of poor families, fragmented families, and immigrant families.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 10:55 AM • 1 Comments • View blog reactions
July 1, 2008
Category: Gender
New York Magazine has an interesting article about fertility in Europe. Most European countries have a huge fertility problem. Since they have gone through the demographic transition, their populations are actually declining. Many do not have the relatively liberal immigration policies of the US -- which would help because immigrants have more children. (I didn't think that I would ever call the US policies liberal.) They are getting in a financial crunch because many have relatively generous social service programs, and you have a dwindling number of workers paying for an increasing number of recipients.
So European countries would be really interested in knowing how you could boost fertility. A study in Italy highlighted one factor: culture and how much housework women were expected to do.
The accepted demographic wisdom had been that as women enter the job market, a society's fertility rate drops. That has been broadly true in the developed world, but more recently, and especially in Europe, the numbers don't bear it out. In fact, something like the opposite has been the case. According to Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania, analysis of recent studies showed that "high fertility was associated with high female labor-force participation . . . and the lowest fertility levels in Europe since the mid-1990s are often found in countries with the lowest female labor-force participation." In other words, working mothers are having more babies than stay-at-home moms.
Read on »
Posted by Jake Young at 1:30 PM • 2 Comments • View blog reactions
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