Success is relative

From GovTrack.us's automatically generated comments on legislators:

Successful: Sen. Hatch [R-UT], 67 bills enacted since 1987

Absent: Rep. Giffords [D-AZ8], 18% votes missed since 2007

Unsuccessful: Sen. Schumer [D-NY], 89% of 748 bills died since 1987

The more interesting thing is that Sen. Schumer is unsuccessful for passing 11% of 748 bills, or in other words successfully passing about 82 bills. Sen. Hatch was successful for passing 67 bills. I guess success really is relative.

(Also note that Rep. Giffords leads the pack of absentee congresspeople, missing 18% of the votes. Of course, the fact that 89% of her missed votes occurred this year after she was shot point blank by a lunatic, might be a mitigating factor.)

Noam Chomsky is wrong about everything

I hate Noam Chomsky. People at MIT love him because he represents everything they want to be: an irritable, insufferable know-it-all.

The guy thinks he knows everything. He is a more radical Ralph Nader but without the countervailing virtues of courage and grit. Or maybe a more apt description is "left-wing Richard Posner?"

Today I've found the best evidence yet to support that position.

How the hell does Chomsky know any details of the Hauser case?

China is a dump: Patent edition

China produces about 1% of all real patents on new technology despite having 20% of the world's population.

More at Marginal Revolution.

Quote of the Week: Election Edition

The quote of the week for the 2012 election comes from day 1 of the '12 election day, the day after Obama was elected:

[With Obama elected] I won't have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won't have to worry about paying my mortgage. You know? If I help [Obama], he'll help me.

The whole statement is here.

PwC estimates US will be more than twice as rich as China in 2050

That's the headline you should see. But this is what the Guardian reports:

GDP projections from consultancy PwC show how the US, UK and the west will fall far behind the new economic powers like China in GDP by 2050. See what the data says

It's true that China, because of its vastly larger population (more than 4x the size of the U.S. in 2011) will have a larger economy and military than the U.S. But if you ask people what they want in life they don't say ensuring that people with the same passport have lots of money and guns, they usually say happiness (and the assumption here is that money = happiness).

So the statistic everyone cares about is income per capita and PwC estimates the U.S. will have an income of about $85k per head while China will be poorer than the U.S. currently is with about $41k per person. (I'm taking their GDP estimates and dividing by population estimates.)

Gallup World Poll data also suggests that Chinese people will still be significantly less happy than the U.S. is today as Asian's tend to be far less happy than you would expect given their incomes. This may be due to weak religious institutions (religion and purpose lead to life satisfaction), long hours to acquire that income (people hate working), and in the future the negative impact of commuting (the worst part of people's days, and in crowded China commutes will be terrible).

Or was I wrong and most people care about having a big military and A-Rod's income?

Note: I'm not endorsing these estimates. I think they are an exercise in futility and my intuition strongly disagrees with the final numbers. India is projected to be vastly poorer than China, with about half the income per capita, implying China will grow just as fast as China over the next 50 years. I could see China continuing faster growth for a decade but eventually the transition to a modern economy will harmper China's growth while India's infrastructure (ports, roads, electrical grids) will enable it to increase its manufacturing sector. It's education and large English-speaking populace, along with its vastly superior political institutions, suggest it might be ahead of China by 2050. I'd bet on that.

Patent Wars

I didn't like NPR until today, when I read this story about patents.

That's great journalism. That's the best investigative journalism I can remember reading.

Subjective data and health

Freakonomics posts some great statistics from a high-quality study of the impact of Medicaid on people's health and finances.

I'm a big fan of using measure of happiness to evaluate programs. Freakonomics reports the data:

• 10% increase in the probability of screening negative for depression.
• 25% increase in the probability of reporting one’s health as good, very good, or excellent.
• 32% increase in self-reported overall happiness.

I don't know who did the screening for depression, but I take that as solid evidence that Medicaid is doing something very, very valuable. (I don't know what the cost was so I won't weight on of if it was worth it.)

The health and happiness data, though, seem suspect. The study was blind and indeed, Freakonomics reports, most of the impact on health happened immediately after enrollment, before people get any care. It sounds like the effect might not be real. Alas, subjective data has its limits.