Monthly Archives: June 2011

Causal effects of growing up with same-sex parents

The only way to measure the effects of a nontraditional upbringing is to wait until a large enough cohort gets old enough, so only in the past few years has there been data on whether children raised by same-sex parents were measurably different from those raised by heterosexual parents.

That’s an excerpt from an excerpt of a recent (June 16) blog post on the “Motherlode” blog on the New York Times web site. The post deals with whether kids raised by same-sex couples turn out any better or worse (as opponents of same-sex marriage apparently claim) than those raised by heterosexual couples.

It’s also wrong–that is, it’s not the case that the “only way” to tell this is from a longitudinal study. That type of study is neither necessary nor sufficient.

I’m not so interested in the substance of this question–in fact proponents may be doing themselves a disservice by focusing on this, because it’s such a silly question. But I found the summary of the data interesting. All of it suggests there are either no effects or positive ones, perhaps because same-sex couples are more likely to plan having children. Most of it’s correlational except for this, which I liked.

And, also for the first time, a control group of heterosexual families was used. The University of Virginia and George Washington University researchers studied preschoolers who were adopted at birth by 27 lesbian couples, 29 gay male couples and 50 heterosexual couples. (Yet another groundbreaking aspect to this study was the number of gay men who were included. To date, most of the research has been on lesbian mothers.)

What did they find? That it’s the quality of the parenting that creates a psychologically healthy child, not the sexual orientation of the parents.

Health insurance and getting an appointment (ii)

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“U.S. Plans Stealth Survey on Access to Doctors,” reports the New York Times on June 26, 2011. That’s odd, I think–haven’t they read this other study?

Anyway, apparently they were interested in seeing if people on government funded health plans are less likely to get appointment than those with private insurance. What I thought was really odd was how much details they spilled to the press about the protocol. There didn’t seem to be any way that doctors offices couldn’t prepare themselves for these “mystery shoppers.”

But then today: “Primary care access survey canceled,” reports the Times (via the Boston Globe).

Any sign that the study was canceled because of the reservations I mention above? Sadly no. The Times reports:

Administration officials concluded that the survey could be more of a political liability than it was worth. Doctors and many Republican lawmakers criticized the project

Climate change roundup / is global warming causing extreme weather?

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I don’t think I’ve posted on this topic before, but I traditionally have followed reporting on the latest “climate studies”, for lack of a better phrase. Here are a few recent ones.

“World still warming up, researchers warn” (AP via Boston Globe, June 29, 2011)

“Study reveals long-term rise in sea level” (AP via Boston Globe, June 21, 2011)

“Scientists See More Deadly Weather, but Dispute the Cause” (New York Times, June 15, 2011)

There are two main causal questions: (1) is global warming caused by humans, and (2) is global warming causing more extreme weather. There are also some other questions of inference: (3) what do most scientists think? (4) And how do we infer that global warming is occurring?

I see lots of reports like those above, but don’t think they really speak to these questions. There is a lot reporting on studies on rising sea level, warmest year on record, etc. So the general message from the media is global warming is occurring. But rarely do they delve into causes or what most scientists think, which seem like the two most important questions.

Of course, these are just impressions and I’m interested if anyone has looked at media coverage of this systematically.

Forecasting the effects of the health care reform bill

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“Health Law in a Swirl of Forecasts,” reads the headline of this June 21 New York Times article.

The hook is a study by the firm McKinsey claiming that the effect of the law will be that people will lose their employer-provided health insurance. Apparently the White House and others complained that McKinsey wasn’t being transparent about their methodology, and it was revealed that they reached this conclusion simply from polling a sample of business owners. Also in the story are brief mentions of several other studies of this topic.

It’s nice that for once people are asking questions about methodology–and that as a result, the news media mentions it. But in the end, it’s your guess is as good as mine, as this quote from an American Enterprise Scholar indicates:

He said the many variables in the law made predictions difficult. “Whatever you assume, is what you get out of it,” he said.

Why are the states in such debt? What will get them out of it?

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I’ve been looking at polls on the deficit in recent weeks. One thing I’ve noticed is that pollsters have asked people what they think about the deficit (and also stimulus) periodically for years. This makes me wonder how much the current “crisis” is blown out of proportion, if it has come up periodically and we’re still here.

So with that caveat aside, two articles in the New York Times this week on the states’ fiscal troubles caught my eye. Regardless of how much of a problem there is, these events are interesting in the sort of distributional questions they raise. That is, once we all agree there is a problem, who will pay for it?

That seems to depend heavily on who gets blamed for the problem. This article in the June 23 edition talks about a new panel being set up to determine the causes:

Americans who have wondered whether Illinois, California and other troubled states are slouching toward the fate of Greece may get their answer in the coming months.

Richard Ravitch, who won an emergency appointment as New York’s lieutenant governor during the 2009 budget impasse, announced a high-level new project Thursday to untangle the finances of the states and shine a light on their hidden debts.

“Whereas there is enormous public attention to the federal deficit, the problems of the states are very serious and nowhere near very well understood,” he said in an interview. “People have to understand this, and address it with the same degree of gravitas as the federal deficit problem.”

It will be interesting to see what they find. But I wonder whether any social scientists, especially economists, have already looked at this?

The second article is from the same day, but on the Times’ City Room blog and deals specifically with the situation in New Jersey and how no one seems to know how much money will actually be saved by a recently adopted plan to cut the deficit.

The remarkably imprecise estimates of cost savings from these health proposals, and the last-minute maneuvering, are nearly as baffling as the politics. Pressed to put a number this week on likely savings, Gov. Chris Christie’s treasury officials retreated into bureaucratic mumbles.

A union official is quoted as saying the numbers aren’t so important as the imagery.

“It doesn’t really seem be about a number of dollars — it’s more ‘we’re forcing employees to pay 22 percent on average’ for coverage,” says Robert Master, C.W.A.’s political director. “They are looking for optics.”

Medicaid and Getting an Appointment

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Sixty-six percent of those who mentioned Medicaid-CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) were denied appointments, compared with 11 percent who said they had private insurance, according to an article being published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

From an article in today’s New York Times. For once I have no objections.

Does student debt boost self esteem?

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The suggestion that higher debt leads to higher self-esteem is probably incorrect. Remember, this study is correlational, so we can’t draw causal conclusions. If one were tempted to draw a causal conclusion, a more plausible one might be that higher self-esteem leads students to take on more debt. After all, people with high self-esteem probably think that they will succeed and can therefore afford to take on debt in the short term. As they age and discover that success is elusive, the connection between self-esteem and debt may start to fray.

This commenter knows what’s up. Original article here.

Does educational background affect legislator behavior?

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Jeffrey J. Selingo, The Chronicle’s editor, said his staff had set out to look at the educational background of state legislators after hearing complaints from college administrators that they were losing state aid and scholarship money because legislators had never been to college themselves and did not understand higher education.

In fact, Mr. Selingo said, state legislators tended to be far more educated than their constituents, though even in statehouses with an abundance of college degrees, “that doesn’t necessarily translate into higher support for higher institutions.”

From a June 12 story in the New York Times, describing a survey that found that 25% of state legislators are not college graduates (the comparable figure for Congress is 6% lacking a four-year degree, and 72% of the adult population in the US).

The Chronicle were apparently looking for downsides. Are there any upsides? Work by political scientist Nicholas Carnes suggests that the class skew in the federal legislature has negative consequences for poorer constituents. (Unfortunately I can’t track down a copy of his paper.)

What caused the financial crisis? (ii)

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(See this earlier post.) Yale economist Robert Shiller authored a piece in the New York Times “Economic View” column the other day on the role of housing in the financial crisis. The piece begins with a criticism of “news accounts” of how the crisis began:

THE origins of the current economic crisis can be traced to a particular kind of social epidemic: a speculative bubble that generated pervasive optimism and complacency. That epidemic has run its course. But we are now living with the malaise it caused.

News accounts of the economic crisis rarely put it in these terms. They tend to focus on distinct short-term developments or on the roles of prominent people like Federal Reserve governors, members of Congress or Wall Street financiers. These stories grab attention and may be supported by some of the economic statistics that the government and private institutions collect.

But the economic situation is primarily driven by hard-to-quantify sociological factors that play out over many years.

So is Shiller absolving anyone of responsibility for the crisis? He writes:

During the bubble, the sense of rising wealth and high expectations gave people a good reason to spend and a greater willingness to plunge into investment, too. Government policy makers breathed in the same optimism, which no doubt encouraged them to be lax on regulatory restraint.

For what it’s worth, I find this alternative explanation more persuasive. I also find it more practical: what are we supposed to do with the Shiller thesis? The key idea there is that people are uniformly “irrational”, and I’m not sure what more you do after that. Talking about the incentives of firms and regulators somehow seems more tractable.

Bullying and domestic violence / telemedecine and Hepatitis care

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BOTTOM LINE: Boys who are bullies are more likely as adults to be violent toward partners.

CAUTIONS: The study was based on self-reporting. It relied on participants’ interpretation of bullying and what they could recall from their childhood.

WHERE TO FIND IT: Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, online June 6

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BOTTOM LINE: Connecting rural primary care doctors to specialists through regular conferences improved care for underserved hepatitis C patients.

CAUTIONS: The study included no control group of patients treated in rural settings. The lead author received grants from Vertex Pharamaceuticals of Cambridge, which is preparing to market a new hepatitis C drug.

WHERE TO FIND IT: New England Journal of Medicine, June 9

From the June 13 Boston Globe (lifestyle section).