Fast Food

Fast food doesn't make you fat, its the quantity of food you eat that makes you fat. And according to this post:

Matsa and Anderson next looked at data on individual eating habits from a survey conducted between 1994 and 1996. When eating out, people reported consuming about 35 percent more calories on average than when they ate at home. But importantly, respondents reduced their caloric intake at home on days they ate out (that's not to say that people were watching their weight, since respondents who reported consuming more at home also tended to eat more when going out). Overall, eating out increased daily caloric intake by only 24 calories. The results for urban and suburban consumers were similar.

Fast food can only be blamed for increasing caloric intake at most 24 calories at day. Since 140 calories extra a day will increase your steady state weight by about 10 lbs, at most this means 1.5 lbs.

Time to look elsewhere for a scapegoat. How about the mirror?

No Pole Tax

While I was away the Texas Pole Tax was defeated. From Vice Squad:

Remember Texas's "pole tax," the $5 per customer fee applied to strip clubs in January? Turns out that a state judge has ruled the tax to be a violation of the First Amendment. The Attorney General intends to devote more public funds to appealing the ruling, while other supporters of the tax are investigating reforms to the legislation that would help it pass constitutional muster. (Incidentally, I haven't read the court opinion, but I am surprised that a case decided on free speech grounds also seems to hinge (if the published reports are correct) on the earmarking of the revenues from the tax.)

Euro Churches

Having just come back from Europe I can attest to the grand churches. You would hardly believe they are a more secular society than we are except for the fact that many of the churches are merely tourist attractions now. However they are quite a sight to see, and marginal revolution provides us with an economic argument for their opulence:

Why did they build expensive medieval churches?

Bryan Caplan asks (the rest of the post is interesting on other matters):

Seeing a bunch of French cathedrals makes me even more skeptical of the claim (made by Larry Iannaccone and others) that people weren't more religious in earlier centuries. If people weren't far more religious in the Middle Ages, why did they pour such a high fraction of their surplus wealth into century-long religious architectural projects? You could say "It was primarily rulers, not donors, who allocated the funds," but that just pushes the question back a step. Were rulers vastly more religious than the masses? That's hard to believe. Were rulers trying to impress the masses by building churches? Well, why would churches impress the masses unless they were highly religious?

His answer:

Religious architecture and art were to medieval feudalism what advertising and commercialism are to modern capitalism: A rather effective way to build support for the status quo using aesthetics instead of argument. My claim, in short, is that Notre Dame played the same role during the Middle Ages that fashion magazines play today. Notre Dame was not an argument for feudalism, and Elle is not an argument for capitalism. But both are powerful ways to make regular people buy into the system.

I would add that churches were a form of fiscal policy and the associated spending was a way to hand out goodies to political allies. (This is especially important if the finished project takes decades or centuries to materialize.) In a time of political decentralization it wasn't easy to construct or maintain a long distance road. So you had to put a lot of expense in one easy-to-guard place and in a politically correct way. Churches were the obvious choice. Churches may have been an efficient means to store wealth for other reasons as well. If someone is going to plunder you on the run, they can wreck a church but they can't dissemble and carry away its value very easily.

Robin Hanson might argue that beautiful churches also signaled the status of the elites who built them.

Becoming a Super Stripper

While I was in Europe I got behind on some interesting posts. Freakonomics and others pointed me to this one:

Let’s face it. Stripping is hard work. There’s judgment from outside the club. Competition inside the club. And, you’re an independent contractor. There’s having to make nice when you don’t feel like making nice. There’s the pressure to hustle. Pressure not to hustle. There’s the standing in 8″ heels all night. And above all, the ever-present challenge of making bank. That’s where Star Light’s Exotic Dancer, M.B.A. comes in! Spend the day with us, and we’ll share tips on sales (because stripping is sales), organizing your finances, and managing the day-to-day stress of stripping. Find your path to being a SuperStripper. What’s a SuperStripper? She’s an amazing woman who uses stripping as an avenue to create financial freedom and the future she wants! Someone who doesn’t let the job define her.

There is no doubt that more money can be made if dancers use proper techniques. In fact many of them are budding neuroscientists. The link between sex, money and risk is well established. And once the money is made, properly managing it is of the utmost importance since their careers are often very short.

Random Sampling

Here is an excellent post from Marginal Revolution on the perils of random sampling. Even when you think you've done it, you might have missed something.

The Wisdom of Whores

As a teenager Elizabeth Pisani discovered that she liked sneaking into the "girlie bars" of Hong Kong and talking to the hookers and the johns. Ordinarily one wouldn't expect such peculiar hobbies to pay off in a dazzling career. But beginning in the mid 1980s, people who were comfortable talking to hookers, rent boys, trannies, warias and junkies (all Pisani's terms) especially in the hot spots of Asia and Africa became scouts and spies in the war against AIDS. Information provided by these epidemiologists in the streets about where AIDS hid and how it spread has been critical to the war.

The Wisdom of Whores is Pisani's vivid account of what she has learned and why AIDS is still being fought ineffectively. I'll say more on this in the future. Here, however, is one bit relevant to the title:

We'd just finished our first survey of HIV, syphilis and risky sex among waria in Jakarta...I had the impression from the qualitative research...that waria were turning dozens of tricks a week, but the study showed they averaged only three. And since that figure came from 250 waria selected at random as the manual requires, it was certainly more accurate than the qualitative research...

"Three a week? Your insane!," snorted [sex worker and waria] Ines....Ines left school at fourteen but she is not stupid, so I explained how, through our probability sampling, we are asking a representative sample of Jakarta's waria. Ines dismissed by lecture with a wave of her manicure and a flick of her locks. "So clever, but so stupid." she sighed.

Ok, so what was the wisdom of the whore? (n.b. Pisani's term!) Bonus points if you can also describe a solution. I am going to have to get this into my econometric notes! Answer in the extension.

She explained, as if to an enthusiastic but slightly dim child, that a waria who is hanging around on a street corner to be interviewed by a research team is a waria who is not with a client. 'You are talking to all the dogs, obviously'.

Not something I learned in the lecture halls of London...but Ines is quite right. Our sample is biased towards the 'dogs,' who get picked up less than the cuter girls. So the study results underestimate the true number of clients per seller...

Ines's comments...prodded us into changing the sampling strategy...now we work with the powers-that-be (the mami, the pimps, the brothel owners) to arrange off-hours time for data collection. The principle....is that you are not cutting into people's work time, so there is less chance of talking only to the remnant sex workers who can't get a client.

Mostly Harmless Econometrics

A new Econometrics book : Mostly Harmless Econometrics.

The core methods in today's econometric toolkit are linear regression for statistical control, instrumental variables methods for the analysis of natural experiments, and differences-in-differences methods that exploit policy changes. In the modern experimentalist paradigm, these techniques answer clear causal questions such as: Do smaller classes increase learning? Do minimum wages reduce employment? Should wife batterers be arrested? How much does education raise earnings? Mostly Harmless Econometrics shows how the basic tools of applied econometrics allow the data to speak.

In addition to econometric essentials, Mostly Harmless Econometrics covers important new extensions--regression-discontinuity designs and quantile regression--as well as how to get standard errors right. Angrist and Pischke explain why fancier techniques are typically unnecessary and even dangerous. The applied econometric methods emphasized in this book are easy to use and relevant for many areas of contemporary social science.

* An irreverent review of econometric essentials
* A focus on tools that applied researchers use most
* Chapters on regression-discontinuity designs, quantile regression and standard errors
* Many empirical examples
* A clear and concise resource with wide applications

Florida Helping Seniors

Florida is contemplating a pole tax to help seniors.

It’s not often that 77-year-old women and strip clubs are mentioned in the same breath, but state Rep. Rick Kriseman made just such a connection.

If passed, Kriseman’s “Personal Needs” bill would levy a $1 surcharge on admission to adult-entertainment clubs and similar businesses. The money would be diverted to the personal-needs allowances of seniors on Medicaid in nursing homes, state-run mental hospitals and developmentally disabled centers.

Kriseman, D-St. Petersburg, said the inspiration for the bill came from a 77-year-old female constituent of his.

“A woman by the name of Cecilia brought this problem to my attention,” Kriseman said via telephone last week from his St. Petersburg office. “Seniors have very little money for when they go on field trips … if they want to get their hair done. And when they go out to eat, they’re going to places like McDonald’s because they can’t afford anything else. That’s not a knock on McDonald’s, but it’s probably not the healthiest food for our seniors to eat.”

Kriseman said seniors on Medicaid currently receive $35 a month for all of their personal needs — toiletries, fast food, movie tickets — a figure that has remained the same for 20 years. Kriseman’s bill would double that allowance to $70 a month.

State Sen. Dave Aronberg, D-Greenacres, said he’d have to study the particulars more closely before passing final judgment, but that it sounds like a good idea on the surface.

“I’m normally not in favor of tax increases, but these difficult budgetary times call for creative solutions, and this is certainly worth discussing,” Aronberg said. “To me, it sounds like a racy Robin Hood — take from the strippers and give to the seniors.”

Kriseman’s original bill would have done just that. A closer look, however, showed that adult-entertainment services were already subject to a sales tax, so he amended the bill from taxing such services as lap dances to attaching a surcharge to admission fees.

“There are additional surcharges on things such as alcohol and cigarettes, and I thought that a $1 surcharge on admission to adult-entertainment clubs was high enough to fund the increase for seniors, yet not so high that club owners were going to argue that it would kill their business,” Kriseman said.

Kriseman’s bill defines adult-entertainment services as “private shower shows; peep shows; nude, semi-nude, or topless waitressing; lap, friction, couch, or table dancing; erotic massages or performance; nude photo sessions; and personal escort services.”

Representatives from Fantasy’s at the Beach in Fort Myers Beach, and Lookers and Escapades Gentlemen’s Club in Fort Myers could not be reached for comment.

Kriseman bristled when asked what he thought about his bill commonly being referred to as the “stripper tax.”

“I don’t care for it at all,” he said. “This is about personal needs and getting our seniors the dignity they deserve. It’s already been 20 years since the last increase, and to make them wait another year, two years or five years wouldn’t be right.”

To become law, Kriseman’s bill must be approved by the House and Senate. The next legislative session runs March 4 to May 2.

“If it doesn’t pass then, it won’t happen this year,” Kriseman said. “If that’s the case, I’ll reintroduce it at a later date.”