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.

Bagels, Yogurt, and Granola

I have never made Bagels, Yogurt, or Granola. Thanks to this article I just may have to try. I made butter last night which was also quite exciting so I may as well keep going with this type of cooking.

Supreme court

I have decided that I agree with the Supreme Court every time it tells the government it can't do something, and disagree with it every time it tells the government it can do something. So I guess I should be happy about this case restricting the right of police to search cars. If they actually uphold school strip searches for drugs based on hearsay than they lose all the points they earned for that case though.

Predicting Performance

Malcolm Gladwell had an interesting article from a few months back that is about predicting performance of quarterbacks, and teachers. Essentially the take home message was that in a great many professions you simply can't predict in advance who will be good at the job. That leads to interesting predictions about how we should bring people into the field.

"Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year's worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half's worth of material. That difference amounts to a year's worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a "bad" school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You'd have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you'd get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers."

"Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress—have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master's degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom. Test scores, graduate degrees, and certifications—as much as they appear related to teaching prowess—turn out to be about as useful in predicting success as having a quarterback throw footballs into a bunch of garbage cans."


"In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn't be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don't track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before."

"Similarly, all quarterbacks drafted into the pros are required to take an I.Q. test—the Wonderlic Personnel Test. The theory behind the test is that the pro game is so much more cognitively demanding than the college game that high intelligence should be a good predictor of success. But when the economists David Berri and Rob Simmons analyzed the scores—which are routinely leaked to the press—they found that Wonderlic scores are all but useless as predictors. Of the five quarterbacks taken in round one of the 1999 draft, Donovan McNabb, the only one of the five with a shot at the Hall of Fame, had the lowest Wonderlic score. And who else had I.Q. scores in the same range as McNabb? Dan Marino and Terry Bradshaw, two of the greatest quarterbacks ever to play the game."