Month: March 2012

One day, I’ll have time to read again

I originally thought this paper was about survey fatigue, which even I, a vocal advocate of filling out surveys, experience a lot lately. But it’s about search fatigue, probably capitalizing on how a wealth of options results in decisions not quite reflecting optimal.

Consumer search is not only costly but also tiring. We characterize the intertemporal effects that search fatigue has on oligopoly prices, product proliferation, and the provision of consumer assistance (i.e., advice). These effects vary based on whether search is all-or-nothing or sequential in nature, whether learning takes place, and whether consumers exhibit brand loyalty. We perform welfare analysis and highlight the novel empirical implications that our analysis generates.

Maybe one day I’ll have time to read it. That and the million other papers on my list. May?

Carlin, Ian Bruce and Florian Ederer. “Search Fatigue.” NBER Working Paper No. 17895. March, 2012.

What’s in more than 99%?

Contrary to what it may seem from the title, I am not going to enter the OWS fray here. Nor am I going to offer a rant on income inequality or corporate profits. There are plenty of people in the twitterverse and blogosphere to give you that. Rather, I am going to toss my hat in the ring of the birth control debate. But again, I’m not really interested in joining the name-calling that has dominated much of this debate. This debate has been so full of vitriol and terrible words and I have no intention of adding to it. I won’t link to them; I won’t even say their names. I am curious, however, about some of the statistics they’ve been using.

When this debate was–for that short period–primarily about Catholics, many news outlets were quoting that 98% of all Catholic women had used contraception in at some point. It rang a little false for me, but the underscoring point seemed consistent with my experience growing up Catholic. American Catholics, as I knew them, were fairly progressive and dedicated to social justice, easing burdens on the poor, and bringing healthy, wanted babies into the world.

You can call me naive or blind, but this is what I knew and saw in my suburban Denver church and even in my mother’s very Irish family back in Ohio.

When the debate shifted to the Blunt amendment and moral exemptions, people started quoting a new statistic that more than 99% of all women, not just Catholics, had used contraception at some point.

This just seemed too high. And the more I thought about it, the more unlikely the Catholic stat seemed as well. So, I went looking, and asked for help on twitter, and eventually came across this Guttmacher report summarizing a Vital Health Statistics paper on contraception use in America.

It’s a fascinating read, you know, if you’re interested in that stuff, and does appear to be the source for the >99% stat. Only, it doesn’t really say what I think many have suggested it does. Methods of contraception include vasectomy, withdrawal, and natural family planning, among others. While these are all clearly ways of attempting to control one’s fertility–which is partially how the debate has been and I think should be framed–they are not that closely related to birth control pills or IUDs or even condom use, as I think the >99% statistic suggests.

It’s important to say that more than 99% of all women who have ever had sex made some sort of conscious effort to control their fertility. But I think it’s disingenuous to suggest, using the same statistic, that all those women sought medical care to do the same. The point is that women should be given the information and tools to make their own decisions regarding their fertility and their bodies. Those decisions are between a woman and her doctor, and hopefully to some extent her partner.

And while it is true that more than 99% of women in America aged 15-44 who have had sex have used a form of contraception, they’re not all using the kind we’re debating about: hormonal or non-hormonal forms that require a doctor’s prescription. How we define and present numbers is important to the credibility of a cause.

**Update: Because @randomsubu asked (and was responsible for helping me find the Guttmacher report), I dug a little deeper into the original Vital Health Statistics report. In fact, 82.3% of women interviewed aged 15-44 who had ever had sex had used the Pill at some point in their lives. 93% had used condoms, more than 22% had tried Depo shots, 10% had tried the patch, and only 7.4% had an IUD (down from 18.4% 30 years ago–which is pretty interesting in and of itself).

A totally different country

A New York Times article yesterday details the growth of craft brewing around the US, but particularly in Denver. I, naturally, loved this article, but my favorite line in it has nothing to do with beer. The article quotes a craft brewer, who enjoys working for himself despite the long hours, and

who opened the Strange Brewing Company in 2010 in an old medical marijuana growing warehouse.

Colorado has a lot of quirky laws about alcohol. And it also has some quirky laws about marijuana. But what is so telling about this quote is that the medical marijuana growers moved on. In my limited experience with the industry (I know a guy who owns a medical marijuana store), the industry is growing like gangbusters. These growers probably went and got a bigger place.

But regardless, the nonchalance with which it’s included is priceless.

H/t @price_laborecon

Women in publishing

These charts on female writers, book reviewers, and editorial staff have been floating around the internet for a few days now. The quick take-away is that women are far underrepresented in the major publications that promote and review literary works, non-fiction, and poetry. Mother Jones was quick to point out that the gender make-up of their staff and contributors is much more equal.

The comments are also worth reading. As of my last reading, there was really only one comment that seems to be trolling and the rest are genuinely reflective and thoughtful. One theme that is continually repeated is that in order to judge these numbers, we must look at the number of submissions. If women are not submitting at the same levels of men, then clearly their books will be reviewed less frequently. And while this doesn’t touch why there are more men on editorial staffs, it does start to get at some of these differences.

The author of the blog post goes into this in more detail on another page, and so some of what I’ll say here may seem to be merely echoing, but going back to submissions is not sufficient to determine the source of the imbalance. Once we have submission numbers, the question becomes, why do submission numbers look like this? My guess is that yes, female submission numbers are lower. But merely knowing that this kind of imbalance in submission exists does not preclude discrimination. If women writers know about the imbalance in the final product, it might scare some of them away from submitting in the first place. In this case, we might see that the quality of women’s submissions would be much greater than that of men, on average. Quality, I’d argue, should be more important than quantity in determining the outcome of publication or not.

Reading it also reminded me of @katinalynn‘s rant on long fiction the other day. In reference to recent long books by Bolano, Franzen, and Murakami, she notes “All three of these books received great acclaim before they ever hit bookshelves, in no small part due to each author’s past success.” Success in publishing (and in most fields, actually) is incredibly dependent on what you can show that you’ve already done. This New Yorker story on the plagiarism of Q.R. Markham quotes literary types as being more accepting of his work, or in awe of it, because he had published a poem in an Best American Anthology Poetry. One good publication and you’re much more likely to get the next.

This is partly a signalling issue. If someone gives us a signal that they are good, and someone else has no signal, we assign lower levels of risk to the one with the signal. Someone else has essentially done the work of evaluating this person for us, so we do less to actually evaluate them on merit. Whether we intend to or not. Thus, success becomes entrenched and one good turn leads to another.