Link Banana

Today, in the regularly-provacative Ideas section of the Boston Globe, lurks a piece to warm the hearts of “tax-and-spend liberals” (and will no doubt lead to at least one smug declaration of “That’s what I’ve said for years”). A sampling:

Lindert’s work surveyed a century of data across numerous countries and found that high taxes and social spending did not slow the growth of productivity or GDP. Statistically speaking, Lindert found no relationship between the level of social spending and economic growth. High tax nations like Norway grow rapidly and produce high standards of living. Even the income per hour of work in nations like France and Germany is equal to or even exceeds America’s.

Uncommon Knowledge highlights interesting facts about the Olympics. This one was new to me:

the disruptions in the host city - or at least the perception of disruptions - are actually a major boon to competing locales. In 2002, the year Utah hosted the Winter Olympics, counties with ski resorts in Colorado netted an additional $160 million in retail sales, according to sales-tax data.

This on isn’t surprising, but it’s still interesting:

Male athletes were seen as more composed and intelligent in victory, and less committed in defeat. Female athletes were seen as more courageous in victory, and weaker athletes in defeat. A similar pattern was found [in NBC’s coverage] with regard to nationality. Americans were seen as having more concentration, composure, commitment, and courage in victory, while non-Americans were granted more athletic skill. The authors note that “parallels between long-held racial stereotypes (e.g., blacks being ‘born’ athletes and whites being superior intellectually) may transfer in similar ways within the domain of nationalism.”

I wasn’t aware of the massive unpopularity of semicolons among male literary types; apparently only the effete are supposed to use them.

Ben McIntyre, writing in the Times of London a couple of months later, added to the collection of semicolon snubbers: Kurt Vonnegut called the marks “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” Hemingway and Chandler and Stephen King, said McIntyre, “wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with a semi-colon (though Truman Capote might). Real men, goes the unwritten rule of American punctuation, don’t use semi-colons.”

Shira Springer captures my hesitance to regard any sport as fair and clean, any athlete as above suspicion:

Instead of fully independent investigations, random drug tests, and cleansing of the record books, sports leagues and their stars are offering tightly controlled exercises in disclosure in which league executives, lawyers, and public-relations personnel still carefully dictate what becomes public and when. The seeming glut of available information - test results, reports, and press conferences - functions as part preemptive strike and part smokescreen, distracting fans from the growing concern that they can no longer trust what they see in competition or in record books.

Kevin Lewis offers five interesting tidbits from academic studies I’d not heard of. This one was most interesting to this chronically-unshaven male:

In line with previous research, perceptions of masculinity, dominance, aggression, maturity, and age all increased in proportion to facial hair. However, attractiveness was highest for light-stubble faces and lowest for clean-shaven and fully bearded faces. The authors note that this result could be due to contemporary fashion, the particular age preferences of the (university) women in the study, or stubble signaling a happy middle ground of masculinity.

The Big Picture has a great set about China’s recent “Great Wall 5” drills. Included is the already well-known snap of an armed SWAT team advancing on Segways.

The Boston Globe’s Ideas section recently featured this interesting idea: natural disaster may actually be an economic good for the affected country.

Rebuilding efforts serve as a short-term boost by attracting resources to a country, and the disasters themselves, by destroying old factories and old roads, airports, and bridges, allow new and more efficient public and private infrastructure to be built, forcing the transition to a sleeker, more productive economy in the long term.

“When something is destroyed you don’t necessarily rebuild the same thing that you had. You might use updated technology, you might do things more efficiently. It bumps you up,” says Mark Skidmore, an economics professor at Michigan State University. “Disasters help people think about things differently.”

But there is this cogent counter-argument:

“Over any reasonably relevant period of time, society is not made wealthier by destroying resources,” he adds. If it were, “Beirut should be one of the wealthiest places in the world.”

The Boston Globe ideas section has some interesting details about Americans’ beliefs about heaven and hell. For myself, I’d always thought each necessary for the existence of the other.

The Pew survey, significant for the breadth and depth made possible by its unusually large 35,000-person sample, found that 74 percent of Americans say they think there is a heaven, “where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded,” while just 59 percent think there is a hell, “where people who have led bad lives, and die without being sorry, are eternally punished.”

…there are peculiarly American characteristics to this emerging hell gap: an insistent optimism, perhaps a kind of cultural self-contentedness, and a tolerance born of diversity that makes damning the other more problematic.

… Mormons are the most likely to believe in heaven, but just average in their belief in hell. The biggest believers in hell are evangelical Protestants, African-American Protestants, and Muslims.

The Big Picture has some pictures of a phenomenon I’d never heard of.

Two years ago now, on 28 May 2006, gas company PT Lapindo Brantas exploring for gas in Sidoarjo, in East Java, Indonesia, drilled a borehole. At 5 AM, a secondary stage of drilling began and the drill string went about 9,300 feet down, after which the first small eruption of water, steam and a small amount of gas occurred at a location just southwest of the well. Several other eruptions followed over the next few days. The flow of hot mud has not ceased since.

Fourteen people have been killed and 30,000 people have been evacuated from the area. At least a dozen villages, with more than 10,000 homes have been destroyed while schools, offices and factories have also been wiped out and a major impact on the wider marine and coastal environment is expected.

Inspired by the now-defunct Life magazine, The Boston Globe has introduced a great section of high quality picture-stories on it’s website.

(via Waxy, who points to Kokogiak’s announcement)

A fascinating argument:

Presidential candidates, take note: Long before they made their way into the workings of modern government, the democratic tenets we hold so dear were used to great effect on pirate ships. Checks and balances. Social insurance. Freedom of expression. So Leeson, an economics professor at George Mason University, will argue in his upcoming book, “The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates.”

(via Freakonomics)