Monthly Archives: June 2012

Student loan debt “hype”?

Is student loan debt just hype? Two economists say yes (via Ideas Market):

As the Fed study showed, 43% of student borrowers have less than $10,000 in debt, and 72% have less than $25,000. And the College Board shows that, in 2009-10, 56% of those graduating with a B.A. from a public college took out a loan. The average debt of these borrowers, after adjusting for inflation, was $22,000.

Is $22,000 too much debt? Paid off over ten years, monthly payments would be $217 at an interest rate of 3.4% (the current subsidized rate) or $253 (if the rate goes up to 6.8% in July, as scheduled).

Under the graduated payment plan, the initial payment would be $140. Another policy option would be to allow students to pay this debt over 20 years instead of 10, thereby cutting the monthly bill to just $126 ($168 if rates go up).

By way of comparison, Fed data show that the average new car loan is $27,000. This corresponds to a minimum monthly payment of $500 (assuming an excellent credit score, which few students have).

Meanwhile the NYT has a post about student loan horror stories–but from those who borrowed from private organizations.

Randomly assigning health insurance in Oregon

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Count me among those who didn’t know realize there was a debate about this, but apparently people have been arguing about whether Medicaid does any good for people. As described in a recent New York Times article, the state of Oregon held a lottery where they randomly assigned Medicaid coverage to 10,000 out of the 90,000 who applied. See also this post at the Monkey Cage.

I like this description of the design from the New York Times:

By assigning coverage randomly, Oregon gave researchers more confidence that they had teased out the true effects of insurance, and had not been fooled by other differences between the insured and the uninsured.

The Times apparently decided the study was not good enough to stand on its own, and decided to interview “17 insured and uninsured participants.” At least we know the treatment was random there, though!

Misc

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‘Science isn’t stagnant’

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“The attitude was Apollo solved most of these questions and now it’s time to invest in other planetary bodies,” said Chip Shearer, a senior research scientist at the University of New Mexico. “But in science, things aren’t stagnant, and we’re always looking for how to improve a model based on new observations and when to throw one model out because it doesn’t explain enough.”

From an article in today’s Boston Globe.

I’m waiting for the op-eds slamming government funding of the space program (what’s left of it anyway) for supporting “research that is amenable to statistical analyses and models even though everyone knows the clean equations mask messy realities that contrived data sets and assumptions don’t, and can’t, capture.”

How much does it cost to run for Congress?

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Chris Cillizza writes on WashingtonPost.com yesterday:

It costs a lot of money to run for office. But how much exactly?

A great infographic from Good magazine — with data from the good people at Maplight — helps answer that question.

According to their calculations, in the two years prior to taking office the average Senator raised $6.4 million ($8,700 a day!) while the average House Member raised $1.2 million ($1,700 a day).

So this magazine says it is 6.4 million for the Senate, and 1.2 million for the House. Note that these must be challengers, not incumbents, because it says “prior to taking office.”

Now let’s compare these figures to the paper by Stephen Ansolabehere, Erik Snowberg, and James Snyder from 2005, published in the journal Public Opinion Quarterly (and available for free online here).

According to Table 1, Senate challengers spent an average of $864,813, and House challengers spent an average of $149,902. That’s much less than the magazine’s numbers, but note we are now talking about expenditures versus money raised. I suppose one explanation for the difference could be that challengers keep the rest for future campaigns.

In keeping with the goal of the paper, Ansolabehere, Snowberg and Snyder also find that the average spending by Senate candidates as reported in the news media was $12.7 million; for House candidates it was about $1.2 million.

Another fun thing about that paper: they surveyed the public and found that the public generally overestimated the amount of money raised:

To gauge the degree of misperception, we conducted a national survey of 1000 adults and asked how much money they thought the typical U. S. House incumbent raised for reelection. The average estimate among survey respondent was that House incumbents spend $5.8 million to win reelection. In reality, the average U. S. House incumbent raises and spends approximately $780,000.

To the extent that the paper and the magazine report disagree with one another, I (obviously) would believe the paper. If you read the infographic linked to in Cillizza’s post, you’ll see that it is produced by the campaign finance reform advocacy group RootStrikers (Lawrence Lessig’s group I believe) and are asking people to sign an “anti-corruption” petition; they don’t tell you how they got their numbers or what the data sources is. In contrast, the academic paper documents where the data come from (the Federal Election Commission) and explains any decisions made about, for example, how to classify different types of donation.

Stand your ground laws and homicide rates

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Via Christopher Shea, this paper claims to show that “castle doctrine” laws actually increase murder rates. Abstract:

Since Florida adopted the first castle doctrine law in 2005, more than 20 other states have passed similar self-defense laws that justify the use of deadly force in a wider set of circumstances. Elements of these laws include removing the duty to retreat in places outside of one’s home, adding a presumption of reasonable belief of imminent harm necessitating a lethal response, and removing civil liability for those acting under the law. This paper examines whether aiding self-defense in this way deters crime or, alternatively, escalates violence. To do so, we apply a difference-in-differences research design by exploiting the within-state variation in law adoption. We find no evidence of deterrence; burglary, robbery, and aggravated assault are unaffected by the laws. On the other hand, we find that murder and non-negligent manslaughter are increased by 7 to 9 percent. This could represent either increased use of lethal force in self-defense situations, or the escalation of violence in otherwise non-lethal situations. Regardless, the results indicate that a primary consequence of strengthening self-defense law is increased homicide.

Unfortunately I can’t find an ungated copy anywhere on the web.

Fun Study

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This is from 2008, so probably widely cross-posted before my time. But I just came across it (last paragraph at the link).

Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people’s abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation. We tested this hypothesis by giving naïve adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of four types of explanation, according to a 2 (good explanation vs. bad explanation) × 2 (without neuroscience vs. with neuroscience) design. Crucially, the neuroscience information was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation, as confirmed by the expert subjects. Subjects in all three groups judged good explanations as more satisfying than bad ones. But subjects in the two nonexpert groups additionally judged that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without. The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on nonexperts’ judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.

Abstract from here. And why not, here’s the key graph:

Postmodernism as the alternative to social science?

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Indeed, if you think about it for a bit, Lane’s apparent belief that there’s no way to establish reliable truths about politics and society is a radically postmodern one.

Henry Farrell on the Washington Post columnist Charles Lane’s call to stop supporting social science research with federal dollars.

Food deserts dessert

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At his blog, Andrew Gelman relays some concerns a correspondent has with the recent research in the New York Times on food deserts.

The concern boils down to whether the studies claiming there are no food deserts are classifying grocery stores correctly. The correspondent claims that the coding scheme lumps in convenience stores with grocery stores. Two commenters (1, 2) argue this objection is faulty: that the coding rules make sense.

Well…at least now we’re arguing about the right things! And using data as the basis for argument. (Though note a lot of the commenters at the post seem to be relying on personal anecdotes.)