A shark attack probably won’t kill you, and other lessons from the science of the beach
Memorial Day serves as the unofficial start of summer for most of
You’d probably survive an encounter with this shark.
(PASCAL GERAGHTY - AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
America, with many trekking out to the beach and soaking up some sun. Here at Wonkblog, we’re taking a different sort of trip: a journey through the science of a visit to the beach. It’s not quite seaside reading, but scientists have learned a decent amount about how we change when we’re close to water. So, without further ado, here are a few of their most choice findings.
1. If you get attacked by a shark, you’ll probably live. It’s a bit terrifying that fatalities from from shark attacks hit a 20-year high in 2011, with 12 people across the world dying from encounters with the animals. American tourists can rest slightly assured though, that all of those shark-related fatalities were outside the United States. And, in general, shark attacks actually aren’t fatal. A 2001 review of 86 cases found that 81 percent of those attacked suffered only minor injuries that required “a simple, primary suture,” the researchers said. Take that, Jaws.
How Americans use energy, in three simple charts
Donald Marron passes along a very handy chart from the Congressional Budget Office looking at what sources of energy the United States relies on — and for what purpose:
Did Obama change the nation’s mind on gay marriage?
Glenn Greenwald asks how, given my skepticism that the president can move public opinion, I explain the change in the polling on gay marriage since President Obama’s comments.
First, it’s not clear there’s been any movement that needs to be explained. The Washington Post/ABC News poll, for instance, showed 52 percent of the country thought gay marriage should be legal in March, before the president’s comments, and 53 percent though it should be legal in May, which was after the president’s comments. Polling from YouGov also showed no change.
Could worker-owned co-ops help jumpstart the economy?
The recession dealt a particularly hard blow to California--one of the worst victims of the housing crisis and the poster child for state budget dysfunction. But tough times have also forced some California towns to find creative ways to get back on their feet. In Richmond, for example, unemployment reached 19 percent at the height of the recession. It’s only dropped three points since then, as businesses everywhere are still nervous about hiring. So, Richmond’s Green Party mayor, Gayle McLaughlin, is trying out a new employment strategy: worker-owned co-ops. Fast Company explains:
Why neither Obama nor Romney wants to talk about Romney’s record
Why are we talking about Bain Capital again?
The answer, it seems, is that the two presidential campaigns want it that way. The Romney campaign wants us talking about Bain Capital LLC because Mitt Romney says his time leading the firm prepared him for the presidency.
“Having been in the private sector for 25 years gives me a perspective on how jobs are created that someone who’s never spent a day in the private sector, like President Obama, simply doesn’t understand,” he told Time. This, the Romney campaign suggests, is the critical contrast between the two candidates. Their candidate learned about job creation at Bain. Barack Obama learned how to quote Saul Alinsky at open mike poetry jams in Chicago.
Reconciliation
— How French theorist Roland Barthes gave us the modern TV recap.
— Can trees deter crime?
— Eurobonds, how do they work?
— Five signs that China might already been in recession.
— Memorial Day longread: revisit Chris Jones’s 2008 moving story about a young soldier’s funeral.
Mitt Romney, Keynesian
Mitt Romney explains Keynesian budgeting:
Halperin: You have a plan, as you said, over a number of years, to reduce spending dramatically. Why not in the first year, if you’re elected — why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you’d like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?
Romney: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course.
Jon Chait comments: “Romney says this as if it’s completely obvious that reducing the deficit in the short term would throw the economy back into recession, even though he and his party have been arguing the opposite case with hysterical fervor.”
U.S. cut its carbon emissions in 2011 — but China erased the gains
Yes, it’s true: Americans are slowly starting to tackle global warming. U.S. carbon emissions dropped 1.7 percent last year, according to the International Energy Agency. But that only went so far. Thanks to China’s fast growth, the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions hit record highs in 2011.
How did the United States managed to restrain its carbon-dioxide? The IEA offers up three reasons for the decline: First, many U.S. power companies have been swapping out coal for somewhat cleaner natural gas, since the latter has become so cheap. That’s helped. The United States also had a mild winter in 2011, which meant less energy was needed for heating. Finally, Americans have been driving less and purchasing more efficient cars of late, which has tempered the country’s oil use. It wasn’t a huge drop. It may prove fleeting. But it was a step toward less carbon.
How to succeed in academia without really trying
It’s a basic tenet of journalism: Readers pay more attention to the articles that come first, and they’re inclined to think they’re more important everything else. And it turns out that it’s no different when it comes to academic journals. Economist Victor Ginsburgh found that articles that appear first in an academic article are significantly more likely to be cited in other research — two-thirds of the time because they’re simply the first article in the journal, and only one-third of the time “because they are genuinely better quality.”
Liberals to Pelosi: Stop helping the 2 percent!
At first glance, Nancy Pelosi’s call to extend tax breaks to everyone earning under $1 million seems firmly in line with the liberal consensus. “It is unacceptable to hold tax cuts for the middle class hostage to extending multi-billion dollar tax breaks for millionaires,” the House Minority Leader wrote in a letter to John Boehner, demanding an immediate vote for a permanent extension of middle-class tax cuts. But a group of liberal advocates believe she’s giving away too much already.
The reality behind Obama and Bush’s ‘spending binge’
(Ezra Klein/Todd Lindeman)
There’s a confused and confusing debate going on over whether President Obama has presided over a “spending binge,” as Republicans claim, or whether, under Obama, “federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s.”
The key is fiscal year 2009 -- and who you blame for it. By any measure, spending popped that year. If you’re looking at raw dollars, it rose by $535 billion. And “the 2009 fiscal year,” writes Market Watch’s Rex Nutting, “which Republicans count as part of Obama’s legacy, began four months before Obama moved into the White House.”
That’s true: The federal fiscal year stretches, somewhat weirdly, from October to September. So fiscal year 2009 began in October 2008.
Lunch break: Life, in 873 stock photos
The human condition through the eyes of Getty Images:
(h/t Megan Garber)
College tuition is out of control — or is it?
We’ve pointed out before that, since 1978, the cost of a four-year education from a public university has been rising much, much faster than even health care costs. That’s a staggeringly steep rise.
But over at NPR’s Planet Money, Jacob Goldstein notes that these tuition figures can be a tad misleading. The “sticker price” of college has been rising at a frantic rate, true. But we should also consider the “net price” which is what students actually pay after factoring in grants and scholarships*. Those grants and scholarships have also been increasing dramatically. Which means the net price that the average student pays for college has been growing much more slowly:
Prices do not include room and board. Numbers are adjusted for inflation in constant 2011 dollars.
(Lam Thuy Vo / NPR, Source: College Board)
Healthy food is cheaper — at least by weight.
It’s often taken as an article of faith in food policy discussions: Healthy eating is expensive. The Department of Agriculture recently set out to test whether that was actually the case. It compared prices of more than 4,439 food items, everything from sliced ham to canned peaches to potato chips.
The answer? It all hinges on how you measure “price.” Food policy analysts have often looked at cost-per-calorie, pricing out each unit of food energy. By that metric, fruit and vegetables tend to come out incredibly costly: A head of romaine lettuce has nothing, calorie-wise, on a candy bar.
How Washingtonians comfort each other
In a commencement speech at the John Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner reflected on his experience in the financial crisis:
It was a tough few months at the beginning. I remember in those early weeks receiving from a friend a copy of the Teddy Roosevelt quote about “the man in the arena.” You may know the quote. It starts like this. “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by sweat and blood…”
I thought that was a thoughtful gesture from this friend, and then, well, about 10 more people sent me the same quote, and I thought, well…this can’t be good—they must really be worried about me.
Romney wants more federal intervention, not less, on school vouchers
Romney rolled out his education plan on Wednesday. The setting was the vault-like confines of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where Latino businessmen and women applauded his speech attacking teachers unions and federal overreach.
The proposal largely sticks to the conservative script on school reform: it’s not the federal government’s job to hold schools accountable for performance, but that of states and local communities; vouchers will force schools to be more competitive in attracting students. But buried in Romney’s plan is one idea that’s raised the hackles of some conservative education reformers and attracted some plaudits from the other side. He proposes to give vouchers for low-income and special-needs students to attend public, charter, or private schools, and require that states allow them to attend schools outside their own district.
Wonkbook: The bad news Brits
Uh-oh: "The eurozone crisis has led to the region’s economy contracting at the fastest pace for almost three years and sent German business confidence tumbling this month."
That's from the Financial Times, which I do not recommend reading this morning if you have a history of medical conditions triggered by stress, panic, or apocalyptic economic news. Elsewhere in the paper, Gillian Tett writes that "banks are increasingly reordering their European exposure along national lines," which means that "while pundits engage in an abstract debate about a possible break-up, fracture has already arrived for many banks’ risk management departments." And David Oakley and Alice Ross report that "some of Europe’s biggest fund managers have confirmed they are dumping euro assets."
Reconciliation
— War-gaming a Greek exit from the euro.
— This defense of Business Insider SMASHES expectations.
— Twenty-five words that simply don’t exist in English.
— The auto industry invented the term “jaywalking” as an insult to shame pedestrians off the streets.
— Ten science concepts that could spawn excellent movie villains.
— It’s possible that New Orleans will soon no longer have a daily newspaper.
Auto sales are propping up the U.S. economy
The U.S. economy, in one chassis.
(Tomohiro Ohsumi - BLOOMBERG)
Over at FT Alphaville, Cardiff Garcia passes along this striking stat from Credit Suisse:
Vehicle purchases by consumers alone accounted for 30% of all the GDP growth in the last two quarters.
Cars are, ahem, driving the recovery. But will it continue? Auto analysts are expecting another record month of car sales in May: TrueCar.com announced today that it was predicting the highest monthly level of vehicle sales since 2007, up 32 percent since this time last year.
What’s striking, though, is that auto sales this year are still expected to be way below the long-term average for the 2000s. (About 14.5 million units vs. 16.6 million.) Unless Americans are planning to give up driving en masse, that suggests there are still a whole lot of vehicles out there that are rapidly aging and eventually need to be replaced.
Sen. Tom Coburn, part 2: Reforming health care
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) is a physician and the author of “The Debt Bomb: A Bold Plan to Stop Washington from Bankrupting America.” This interview, which focuses on America’s health care system, is the second in a two-part series. The first interview, which focuses on debt, was published last week. The transcript is lightly edited for length and clarity.
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., reveals his "Back in Black" plan to reduce the federal deficit.
(J. Scott Applewhite - Associated Press)
EK: To go back to the question of whether Democrats have put forward a plan on entitlements, I agree that Senate Democrats haven’t put forward a budget. But in your book, you say that what President Obama has done and wants to do on Medicare, namely the Independent Payment Advisory Board, is a rationing board. You’re not for it, obviously. But you treat it as a very aggressive proposal. And to them, that’s a plan. They think it’ll work to control costs. And it often seems Republicans say Democrats don’t have a plan on entitlements when what they mean is they don’t like the Democrats’ plan on entitlements.
TC: How well has it worked in England? Barbara Mikulski wrote that section of the bill. She spent time with the head of NICE [National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence] in England. What has been the response of England as you ration away care? Is that how we want to do Medicare? When we know that $100 billion a year isn’t working right? When we know one in three dollars in our health care system doesn’t help anybody get well? Is that the way to do it? From central planning? You’re right. But that’s outside the bond of how the average American expects Medicare to operate. The better way to do it is to create a more efficient system to allocate the resources better without somebody here making a decision about your care. The reason I object to IPAB is you’ve got someone between the patient and the physician, and that can never be in the best interest of the patient.
EK: I think it goes a bit far to compare IPAB to NICE, given the powers it has, but even so, in terms of the cost portion, in terms of them having a plan, Britain’s health care system is among the cheapest in the developed world.
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Ezra Klein is the editor of Wonkblog and a columnist at the Washington Post, as well as a contributor to MSNBC and Bloomberg. His work focuses on domestic and economic policymaking, as well as the political system that’s constantly screwing it up. He really likes graphs, and is on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. E-mail him here.
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Suzy Khimm covers the budget, economic policy, and financial regulatory reform. Before coming to Washington, she was based in Brazil and Southeast Asia, where she wrote for the Economist, Slate, and the Wall Street Journal Asia. Follow her on Twitter here, and email her here.
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