econlife - Jaywalking and the Tradeoff Between Order and Openness by Elaine Schwartz

Our story starts at 11 pm and a green traffic light. Except for one pedestrian, the streets are empty. There are no cars, no other people.

In Berlin, the individual crosses the street when the light turns red. In Boston, no one waits. Explaining the different behaviors, a psychologist from the University of Maryland says one culture is tight and the other is loose.

Where are we going? To how tight and loose social norms affect behavior.

Tight and Loose Social Norms

At home you could be someone who likes order. You load the dishwasher with the forks next to each other, the knives, next and then the spoons. But your mate does not.

On a national level, the parallel could be the Japanese World Cup fans who did some clean-up after the game because their culture tends to be more orderly. Their Brazilian hosts did not.

According to psychologist Michele Gelfand, our rules about rules vary. In a tighter culture, there are more rules and people are expected to observe them. Meanwhile, looser cultures not only have fewer rules but the boundaries are more ambiguous. Essentially we are looking at the power of social norms.

Dr. Gelfand suggests that national threats generate stronger social norms. The list could include invasions, natural disasters, diseases–wherever survival required coordinated behavior. Meanwhile, the countries or even communities that faced fewer existential challenges had less of a need for societal coordination. If you imagine a continuum, then Japan, Germany, Singapore, and South Korea are among the countries on the tight end while the other pole includes New Zealand, Greece, the Netherlands, and Brazil.

In the United States, states vary. On that scale, Dr. Gelfand says the tighter cultures are located in the South and some parts of the Midwest. They include Mississippi, South and North Carolina, Kentucky, and Louisiana. Meanwhile, some of the states that “veer looser” are New York, California, Oregon, Maine, and Massachusetts.

Our Bottom Line: Tradeoffs

As economists, we can focus on the tradeoff between order and openness. We can look at our investing habits, at corporate merger cultures, and even at our political preferences. Tighter cultures tend to have less obesity, less debt, and less alcoholism. Even pets are skinnier in Germany (I wonder if Dr. Gelfand has those stats.). Meanwhile, looser cultures have more creativity and tolerate differences. Explaining the response to COVID-19, Dr. Gelfand believes that tighter cultures have had more success containing the spread of the virus.

So perhaps we can say that late night behavior at a traffic signal could provide a clue about the strategies for fighting a pandemic.

My sources and more: Yesterday, this Hidden Brain podcast on tight and loose cultures made a long walk seem much shorter. From there, I looked at this Science article to see how 33 countries varied. But if you read just one article, do look at Dr. Gelfand’s comments on the spread of the coronavirus in the Boston Globe. Finally though, you could have some fun (as did I) taking her tight/loose quiz to quantify your own mindset.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

econlife - What We Did Right During the 1918-1919 Pandemic by Elaine Schwartz

Approximately 550,000 individuals in the U.S., and 40 million, worldwide, died because of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic. At the time there were no antivirals nor any effective vaccines. But they did have non-pharmaceutical interventions.

Where are we going? To the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions during the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic.

Pandemic Policy

In 2007, several researchers looked at the impact of the non-pharmaceutical interventions used by 43 cities in the U.S. Their goal was to see which pandemic policy was most effective.

They cited three main interventions:

• Closing schools.
• Isolating individuals who were infected. Quarantining people who had contact with those victims.
• Banning public gatherings that included saloons and entertainment venues. (Parades were okay. )

Cities also had to decide when to start the intervention and how long to sustain it. For the 43 cities that were studied, all selected at least one intervention:

You can see the decisions that were made:

To evaluate the results, the researchers compared response times and duration of the interventions to death rates. Essentially they found that the longer the response time, the higher the death rate. The red arrow was added to the graph by Marginal Revolution’s Alex Tabarrok:

Among the 43 cities that were studied, Pittsburgh fared most poorly. It imposed a public gathering ban initially but waited 20 days after that to close its schools. Then they rescinded the public gathering ban. New York City, by contrast, had an early and a sustained use of its interventions. The city rigidly enforced isolation and quarantine rules. They also implemented staggered business hours. In the researchers’ ranking, New York was #15 of 43 cities.

Below, you can compare St. Louis, New York City, Denver, and Pittsburgh. The black bars indicate the interventions:

Discussing their conclusions, researchers emphasize that the impact of the interventions varied among the 43 cities. Still they believed that earlier, sustained, and layered interventions resulted in a reduced death rate, a delay in its peak, and lower peak mortality. They suggested that non-pharmaceutical solutions do work.

Our Bottom Line: Tradeoffs

As economists, we can look at pandemic policy tradeoffs.

An opportunity cost chart is a handy way to focus on the tradeoffs required by a decision. It names the opportunity cost–the sacrificed alternative–and the benefits of each alternative. It reminds us that looking back, we cannot name the consequences of the choices. To make a wise decision, we can only identify the current tradeoffs.

The following framework for a college decision can also be used to understand pandemic policy tradeoffs. Below, you can see that first you identify the alternatives. Then, you name the benefits from each one. The key to remember is that when you choose one alternative, you sacrifice the other alternative and its benefits.

Below, the decision is to attend college. Getting a job is sacrificed as are its benefits:

Similarly, at each stage of preparation for a pandemic, we have to select our tradeoffs based on what we know. Assume for example that we have to choose between closing schools and not closing them. One benefit of closing is optimizing health when and if the pandemic hits. At the same time, a benefit of keeping schools open is minimizing current disruption.

For the 1918-1919 pandemic, the cities that selected the most disruption at the earliest possible time could not have known then that they would be minimizing the number of deaths. Still, they wound up making the wisest tradeoff.


My sources and more: Thanks to Marginal Revolution for alerting me to the 1918-1919 pandemic paper (the source of all pandemic graphs and tables in today’s post).

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

econlife - What We Can Learn From a Trout by Elaine Schwartz

It sounded like a good idea. If your fish population is dropping just spawn more in a hatchery and then deposit them back in their native waters.

The results were not quite what they expected.


The Fish Hatcheries Dilemma

Our story starts in the 1870s when New England’s Atlantic salmon became increasingly sparse. Responding, the Congress established a U.S. Fish Commission and from there we got fish hatcheries. All they had to do was grow fish in tanks and then deposit them in depleted waterways. They thought it was win win. More fish for sport, more to eat, and no need to conserve.

The rest is history.

Having hatched (sorry) a seemingly viable approach, it multiplied. We wound up with hatcheries for fish like shad, bass, and trout. We had hatcheries with rainbow trout from the West, brown trout from Europe, and the brook trout from the East. After their young were born, the Western fish could be transported to the East, the Eastern stock to the West, and the European trout across the U.S.

At first, baggage cars were retrofitted for the trains that moved the fish around the U.S. Once, when a railway bridge collapsed, 300,000 fish (including perch, bass, trout, and lobsters) accidentally found a new home in Nebraska’s Elkhorn River. Today, with trucks and even helicopters, New Hampshire alone stocks ponds and rivers with more than a million trout.

A railroad fish car:

This is where the problems start. When hatchery-raised trout are brought to a natural habitat, they can upset the existing order. They might eat the offspring of the wild fish and compete for the food supply. They also can bring disease. As for their own survival, many die when they are not as healthy as the local fish population. Associating overhead shadows with the food “delivery” they got in a hatchery, the trout swim upward only to be greeted (and eaten) by a bird or animal on the surface. The result is a ripple of consequences affecting the local animals that feed off the local fish. I read one example where the osprey and even the bears had to adjust.

However, offsetting the problems that they present, Outside/In tells us that, “…abundant, easy to catch fish, get people excited about nature, and protecting it.” They quote recreational advocates who say,  “We stock fish because we want people to fall in love with them.” They remind us that for young people to start to experience the joy of fishing, they need the local ponds that have the population. Then, not even caring if they catch a fish, they move onward to more remote locations.

Our Bottom Line: Tradeoffs

So you see we have a dilemma. We have recreation and conservation. We have the fishing advocates who believe more fish make people care about fish. But there also are the habitat concerns.

As economists, we can return to tradeoffs. Indeed, even a trout teaches us that there is no free lunch.

Do enjoy this delightful video:

My sources and more: Listening to the Outside/In podcast yesterday morning, I especially enjoyed my morning walk. If you want more, the story of the railroad fish car and a Fish Commission timeline are possibilities. My choice though is this NY Times article from 2012 for the fish hatcheries debate.

Our featured image is from Outside/In.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

econlife - What Our Time Costs Us by Elaine Schwartz

According to “The Time You Have (In Jelly Beans),” with one jelly bean for each day, 28,835 jelly beans represent all the days in an average life. Then in that life, 8,477 jelly beans show how much we sleep, 3,202 reflect how long we work, and 1,635 indicate the total days we devote to eating and preparing our food.

I do recommend using 2 minutes and 44 seconds (from the 42 million minutes in a typical life) for this jelly bean video:

So yes, we sleep for the equivalent of 8,477 days and work during 3,202 days. Now though, let’s take a closer look at how our our time use differs from the averages.

The Cost of Spending Our Time

In his new book, Spending Time, economist Daniel Hamermesh compares the ways that different groups of people allocate their time. The title is intentional. Just like money, the time we spend has a cost. Using it for one activity means sacrificing it for an alternative. The cost is the sacrifice.

Dr. Hamermesh starts out by telling us that a typical 79-year lifetime has 42 million minutes. From there, he creates a slew of distinctions. Depending, for example, on our affluence, where we live, and our age, we use those 42 million minutes differently. (Dr. Hamermesh did look at gender but so too did we at econlife, here.)

Income

Faced with time choices, those with more affluence have more alternatives. Here, Dr. Hamermesh selected the top 5% who earn close to $300,000 annually.

Earning more creates the incentive to work more. You would see a professor working six hours more each week than the U.S. average. At 10 hours more, doctors work even longer than is typical and for lawyers, the extra weekly time is three hours.

But, by working longer, there is less time for other activities. It means fewer hours are available for “home production” since preparing a meal and cleaning up afterwards are time intensive while eating take-out or going to a restaurant are not. However, they do require more money. The top 5% also sleep fewer hours, watch TV less than the rest of us, and spend more time on other leisure activities.

From there, Dr. Hamermesh observed a demographic that does not work. In the U.S., non-workers who are quite well-to-do spend fewer hours in front of the TV than those with less. The more affluent who don’t work also sleep less.

Country

People in the U.S. work more than individuals in most other developed countries. German workers on average are on the job eight hours less per week than we are while for the French, it’s six hours less. Perhaps correspondingly, the U.S. labor force takes less vacation time.

Age and Geography

When Dr. Hamerhesh looks at age, he points out that as people age from 60 to beyond age 85, they do less paid work. Then, with the time available, they watch more TV and sleep more. Interestingly, “home production” diminishes with age.

He also compares those of us who live in rural areas to those in the city and suburbs. Here, the people in our biggest cities work longer hours and do less TV watching. The one statistic that stands out for the rural demographic is more home production than the other two groups and less time for other leisure and personal activities.

Our Bottom Line: Opportunity Cost

Putting it all together, we wind up in familiar economic territory. It takes us back to opportunity cost and the elusive free lunch. Time use decisions always require a sacrifice. Called opportunity cost, choosing is refusing the next best alternative. When someone takes you out to lunch, you might have used that same time reading your email. Watching Netflix could mean you did not talk on the phone.

And when you earn more, spending time in the kitchen can become too expensive.

My sources and more: As did I you might enjoy reading (actually skimming and focusing on certain chapters that grabbed me) the Hamermesh book. But, for the short version, this interview conveys what he says. If you are choosing though, this Econtalk podcast has the lowest opportunity cost.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

econlife - How Legos Discovered It’s Not Easy to be Green by Elaine Schwartz

Many of us are happy to use fewer plastic straws. But elsewhere, it’s tougher to cut back.


Bio-Based Plastic Legos

We know what we expect from a Lego. They all match, attach, and detach perfectly. The colors of all the reds, the greens, and the blues are consistent. Falling, they are supposed to remain attached (mine never do) and they should not biodegrade or contain harmful chemicals.

Since plastic makes their precision possible, the goal is a plant-based plastic that creates fewer emissions than petroleum. So far, Lego has successfully made bio-based plastic foliage and dragon wings. However, the corn they tried was too soft for bricks. Wheat had color problems. And they could not achieve the perfect grip.

Below, Lego shows how they could use sugar cane:

Petroleum Products

Right now, petroleum is in an endless list of everyday products. Ranging from aglets to yarn and including tires, mops, aspirin, and crayons, the 6000+ products that contain petroleum are everywhere.

Shoelace aglets are made of petroleum based plastic:

Meanwhile, petroleum based plastics result from natural gas processing and crude oil refining. Then, looking at crude, you can see below how an entire 42 gallon barrel is used:

Our Bottom Line: Tradeoffs

Less petroleum-based plastic could mean a smaller carbon footprint. Although the EIA said it could not calculate how much of the world’s oil is used for plastic, the amount is substantial. But using less is not so easy. As economists, that takes us to tradeoffs.

When more corn is grown for bio-based plastic, we could wind up with more pollution from fertilizers, less to eat, and higher prices. On the production side, we’ve seen from Lego that we await the breakthrough discovery that creates a functional product. And even then, discarding bio-plastic can be tough. Landfill remains a real alternative, it could be recycled, and some might go to an industrial compost site (if we were disciplined enough to set aside our compostable products). One big concern is that like petroleum-based plastic, the plant version also can wind up at sea.

So yes, as Lego has discovered, it’s not so easy to be green.

My sources and more: Like Legos, creative articles, happily, have become more typical at WSJ. From there, this list of petroleum based products was ideal. But to start understanding bio-based plastics, this National Geographic article was helpful as were this Conversation and the EIA.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

econlife - The Unintended Consequences of Plastic Bag Bans by Elaine Schwartz

When I walk with my friend Eli and her dog Dosa, we take our plastic bags. Originally from ShopRite or the local farm stand, the bags were filled with groceries. Now, handy for dog poop, they reside in a bin under my sink until I grab one.

In more than 240 U.S. municipalities, California, and soon New York, those bags have disappeared. Because of bag bans or bag fees, many fewer people are re-using them.

And that could be the problem.

Plastic Bag Ban Surprises

Through a DCB (disposable carryout bag) fee or a ban, we shop with many fewer lightweight plastic bags. Because paper bags and fabric totes replace them, our plastic waste plunges by millions of pounds.

But there is a problem.

Those paper bags and fabric bags have a substantial carbon footprint–more than what it took to make the DCBs. Just think of how a tree becomes paper. You are eliminating an environmentally benevolent plant, using toxic chemicals, and then doing some hefty processing and transporting. It gets even worse with a tote bag. To have a smaller global warming impact than a DCB,  your cotton bag has to be reused more than 131 times. Then, if those DCBs had become garbage hags at home, you have to use your tote as much as a whopping 393 times to offset a DCB’s global warming potential.

These are the amount of use numbers from a 2006 U.K. study that compared the global warming potential of DCBs (aka HDPEs) to reusable bags:

Furthermore, when there are no DCBs, we need more plastic garbage bags. Using data from California, one researcher reported a surge in demand for four gallon garbage bags while sales of other sizes also increased. The result was a massive consumption shift as we bought 11.5 million more pounds of garbage bags and used 40 million fewer pounds of DCBs.

You can see the pop in garbage bag sales just after the DCB ban:

At this point you could be thinking there’s got to be more and there is. We just have to look beyond the carbon footprint from greenhouse gases. When we consider all of the waste generated by plastic, we could arrive at a new conclusion. As always in economics, we have tradeoff. A ban creates more emissions but less non-biodegradable litter.

So, if you care about non-biodegradable litter, then the DCB ban is for you.

Our Bottom Line: Pigovian Taxes

A bag ban or fee could be called a Pigovian tax. Arthur Pigou developed the idea to cope with negative externalities. Defined as the harm done to an uninvolved third party when, for example, someone plays loud music in a dormitory or pollutes a stream, a negative externality needs an incentive to discourage its use. Dr. Pigou said the solution was a tax. When something becomes more expensive, people do less of it.

On a graph, the higher cost looks like this:

Bag bans and bag fees create a higher price. That price might not be in dollars but they do necessitate some costly inconvenience.

My sources and more: This Planet Money newsletter had all we need to know about the downside of the plastic bag ban. But for more detail, this paper and this U.K. study look more precisely at ban “leakage.” Lastly, the NY Times showed the regulatory side through New York’s new bag fee.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.

econlife - How We Use Our Time by Elaine Schwartz

When we see our lives as a box of jelly beans, 79 years would equal 28,835. So yes, after the first year, we’ve used up 365. Then, setting aside 8,477 jelly beans for sleeping, we still have thousands left for work, preparing our meals, watching TV.

Do take a look at this 2013 jelly bean video to see how we allocate the hours of our lives. It uses data from the annual BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) American Time Use Survey (ATUS):

And here is the most recent survey from June 2018:

Where are we going? To a closer look at our leisure time.

Leisure

Since the 2017 ATUS, Americans increased their leisure time by seven minutes. The reason though is that we are older. And as you might expect, employed men had 33 more leisure minutes than women. As for what we did, it was probably watch TV although grandma and grandpa spent the most time in front of the set. Instead, it appears that computers and playing video games occupy close to an hour each day for 15-24-year-olds but only 13 minutes if you are 35-44 years-old. Sadly, reading is attracting less time among the young.

As the age group that works the least, people over 65 had the most leisure time. Meanwhile, their 35 to 44 year-old children had more than three hours less to watch TV, relax, read, and think:

Our Bottom Line: Opportunity Cost

Time use decisions always require a sacrifice. Called opportunity cost, choosing is refusing the next best alternative. When you eat pizza for lunch, you might have refused a salad. Watching a video could mean you did not talk on the phone. And picking up a penny prevents you from using those seconds for something else.

Similarly, whether it involves the work we could have done or exercising rather than reading, leisure always has a tradeoff. And whatever we did not do would have had benefits that we decided to forego.

Thinking of those tradeoffs, you might want to compare your time use to the averages:

My sources and more: For some extra detail, do take a look at this ATUS summary. Then, if you want even more, this is the entire survey and a blog that provides some additional insight. 

Meanwhile, the WSJ report provides some history.

Ideal for the classroom, econlife.com reflects Elaine Schwartz’s work as a teacher and a writer. As a teacher at the Kent Place School in Summit, NJ, she’s been an Endowed Chair in Economics and chaired the history department. She’s developed curricula, was a featured teacher in the Annenberg/CPB video project “The Economics Classroom,” and has written several books including Econ 101 ½ (Avon Books/Harper Collins). You can get econlife on a daily basis! Head to econlife.