Marriage age gap and education

So far as I can tell it is really quite unusual that in our society we are forced to spend a great deal of time with people the exact same age as us. All the time I spent in high school, and most of the time in undergrad and grad school everyone was pretty much the same age as me. This is such a usual situation for modern Americans that it probably does not seem as unusual as it is. Think about how the typical American lived two hundred years ago. Perhaps they spent a couple years in school but that was likely a large school house with students of many ages together. At home children probably spent most of their time playing with siblings or whoever the neighbor kids happened to be then went to work with their parents at a fairly young age.

This huge change in the people we interact with must have fairly large social consequences, but I have trouble coming up with what they are. The only one I can think of that really seems to fit the mold is the age gap in marriage. For many decades now the average gap in age between a husband and his wife has been decreasing. This has typically been attributed to women having increasing incomes, and perhaps this is part of it, but I suspect it is not all of it. Probably six out of ten people I met at Cornell or Fresno State were within three years of my age. There were a few professors, post docs, and undergraduates/high school students I spent time with but for the most part I did not spend much time with these people. So, if I am being forced into social settings with people the same age as me wouldn't I be expected to date within this age range?

Picking out the correlation and causation here would be a nightmare, but I suspect you could look at income gaps between men and women and number of years of formal education in some group in society and determine whether number of years of education is a better predictor of marriage age gap than income inequality between the sexes.

Watermelon Art

Within a month my diet is likely do become at least 30% watermelons. In honor of this I am posting a whole bunch of watermelon photos:

Moving forward

I got the job at Southern California Edison, but can't start until I got everything squared away with Cornell. It was a bit more drama than I had hoped, but I managed to get my thesis approved in its final form yesterday afternoon. From what I can tell from the website I still owe Cornell some unspecified amount of money, and once I pay it I can get a letter stating that I have finished all requirements there. Hopefully then I can move my start date to May 15th, although that does depend on me avoiding bureaucratic snags. If not I start June 8th.

I found a decent apartment building in Pico Rivera that I can move into for $600. Chances are I will take that for at least the next year. If nothing else it is nicer than any apartment I had in Ithaca.

Leaving expensive areas

I ran into another reason for home prices to keep dropping; Although even I am starting to expect bottom to be hit within a year or so as the rate of fall has been quite impressive.

This article pointed out that people have been migrating from expensive areas to cheaper areas for quite some time now. So parts of the country that can freely put up new homes are sucking the population out of areas like San Francisco that have trouble finding room for more homes.

Studies on economic expansion by the Dukakis Center have demonstrated that there is a powerful correlation between extremely high housing costs and slow economic growth. Since 2000, those areas with the very highest housing costs - such as Greater Boston, San Francisco, Honolulu, and the New York metro area - have experienced net domestic outmigration and slower employment growth than regions with more modest housing costs. Indeed, the 10 most expensive metropolitan areas in the country all experienced net out-migration and slower employment growth than average while those areas with somewhat more modest home prices enjoyed the fastest growth in new jobs.

I ran into this video, of this experiment on reddit today. They should have done it side by side with a block of steel being dropped through the tube though. I really wish I had a big magnet, magnetic braking is one of the coolest effects to watch.



a related and possibly more awesome video:

Cancer, glad I left that hornets nest

The New York Times had a good article that points out just how poor we are at treating cancer:

Yet the death rate for cancer, adjusted for the size and age of the population, dropped only 5 percent from 1950 to 2005. In contrast, the death rate for heart disease dropped 64 percent in that time, and for flu and pneumonia, it fell 58 percent.

Want to take bets on what percentage of that drop goes to anti-smoking campaigns? I doubt even much of that 5% drop went to modern medicine. Barring a few types of leukemia, skin cancer, and a couple other types I am not entirely sure I would bother getting treated for cancer. The cost is so high, and the effects so small.

Really it seems to me that our healthcare system as a whole needs to just waste less time treating cancer. Our treatments don't work, and if we put that effort into treating diseases we actually understand we could probably save a lot more lives. I am not of the school of thought that says a cure will never happen, but it certainly hasn't come yet.

Marrying Young

There is an article in the Washington Post that talks about reasons why people should marry young. I suspect both that it will make many people in my age group unhappy, and that it is quite accurate. There is little to be gained by waiting past the age of 20 or 22 to get married. I guess that makes me old.