Kicking Back With Conan

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

What Did You Think Would Happen?

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

PANTS ON THE GROUND! PANTS ON THE GROUND!

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Lenonomics

Via TribLive

U.S. Versus Europe: No Winner

National Journal:

Which has the superior economic model, the United States or Europe? The question keeps coming up and never gets resolved. It is having another go-round at the moment, with the adversaries lining up as usual. Conservatives say that Europe’s social-democratic model is bound for the landfill of history. Progressives defend the model, even if they usually stop short of recommending it outright.

As a British import, allow me to join in. My answer, to cut to the chase — one picks up these expressions — is that neither model is objectively better. You can guess which I prefer, because like many other Europeans I have chosen to live in the United States. But the European approach is perfectly viable, and I can see why many Americans might like it. (For some reason, not many seem to move to Europe. The traffic seems to be mainly in the other direction. A mystery.) To be sure, each side has things to teach the other.

The surprising thing is just how persistent U.S. economic leadership, based on its supposedly inferior model, has proved.

In the newest turn of this discussion, Jim Manzi of the Manhattan Institute and Ross Douthat of The New York Times point to Europe’s slower economic growth. Jonathan Chait of The New Republic and The Times‘s Paul Krugman reply that this is a statistical illusion: The U.S. is growing faster only because its population is rising faster, not because its living standards are improving any more quickly.

Then Greg Mankiw of Harvard (who was chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers) and Mark Perry of the University of Michigan piped up, saying that the level of living standards in United States is still a lot higher. Moreover, as Manzi said, population matters if you are comparing relative economic power. Europe’s stagnant or diminishing populations are a harbinger of decline. Switzerland is rich but small. The United States is not content to be Switzerland.

In what follows, bear in mind that “Europe” is a dangerous generalization, whichever side in this discussion you intend to take. It is not one country, but many. You cannot even say exactly how many, because the region is a fluctuating idea that depends on your notions of geography and the period under consideration. Within Europe — as within the United States — there are rich areas and poor areas; places that are growing and places in decline. And within Europe, political borders still matter a lot. Forms of government and economic arrangements — levels of taxation and public spending, the role of trade unions, the scope of economic regulation — all vary.

With that caveat in mind, put growth rates and population to one side for the moment and consider living standards and productivity. As Mankiw says, living standards in the United States are much higher on average than in Europe, as measured by per capita income. On the other hand, productivity is not. This is the most interesting and surprising point of comparison.

As Mankiw notes, average income in the U.S. is around $47,000. Adjusting for purchasing power, in Britain and Germany it is around $36,000; in France, $34,000; in Italy, $31,000. Overall, U.S. living standards are more than one-third higher than in Europe…

Read it all.

TV’s Unintended Consequences

Seed:

Humans are made to move. Even just a century ago, few people spent their entire workday just sitting at a desk. Passive entertainment, too, is a relatively new innovation. Televisions have been widespread for barely 60 years. Radios, for less than a century. Books, for perhaps half a millennium. Sure, music and theater have existed for longer than that, but attending a live performance still involved trudging to the amphitheater or town square, sitting or standing on uncomfortable benches, and then making the same journey back home. And more people were likely to participate in making the music or plays when they couldn’t be recorded and electromagnetically transmitted through the air. Out of the hundreds of thousands of years Homo sapiens has existed, we’ve been intensely physically active for all but a few of them.

So clearly moving around is an important part of being human. When we don’t move our muscles quickly atrophy, and life-sapping deposits of fat build up around our vital organs. When we lose physical fitness we live shorter, disease-ridden lives.

To address this problem, many people living a modern lifestyle have adopted a routine much like my own. I get up at 6 a.m., often in the darkness, don my running gear and my MP3 player, and head outside for a 40-minute run. I hope my daily exercise routine, along with a few physical chores and perhaps a pickup soccer game on the weekend, will counteract the long hours I spend sitting in front of a computer screen during the day, or the television at night.

Travis Saunders, a PhD student at the University of Ottawa who studies the impact of sedentary lifestyles, questions whether a little exercise can make up for hours of inactivity. He refers to a study led by G.F. Dunton of the University of Southern California and published in October in the International Journal of Obesity. The researchers conducted a phone survey of 10,000 Americans who ranged from normal weight to obese. As you might expect, people who engaged in a lot of physical activity tended to weigh less than those who did not.

But when the researchers considered how much time these individuals spent watching TV and movies, a different pattern emerged. No matter how much TV they watched, if they didn’t exercise, they had high BMIs (body mass index—a measure of obesity). But even among people who exercised more than an hour a day, those watching more than an hour of TV per day had significantly higher BMIs than those who did not. In fact, for respondents who watched more than an hour of TV, whether or not they exercised no longer predicted BMI.

Does this mean that watching TV and movies makes you overweight, regardless of how much exercise you get? Not necessarily—this is just a correlation, not a controlled experiment. It could be that some other factor is responsible. It might be that people with higher BMIs just like TV more. Or that they are eating and drinking more while they watch TV, compared to other activities…

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Newest Ship In The Fleet

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.

Milestones

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This cartoon was originally published at Town Hall.