History

What a downgrade. https://t.co/1BubQpg0Nf pic.twitter.com/7BRtOqsiNA

— Heidi (@HeidiBriones) February 15, 2025

 

An Insight

It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part, the rest are lost in the multitude.

— Voltaire (@VoltaireQuote) February 12, 2025

Massive happiness premium to marriage

From The Anatomy of Marital Happiness by Sam Peltzman.  

I am usually skeptical of happiness studies owing to definitional inexactness, but this is interesting and suggestive.  From the Abstract:

Since 1972, the General Social Survey has periodically asked whether people are happy with Yes, Maybe or No type answers. Here I use a net "happiness" measure, which is percentage Yes less percentage No with Maybe treated as zero. Average happiness is around +20 on this scale for all respondents from 1972 to the last pre-pandemic survey (2018). However, there is a wide gap of around 30 points between married and unmarried respondents. This "marital premium" is this paper's subject. I describe how this premium varies across and within population groups. These include standard socio demographics (age, sex, race education, income) and more. I find little variety and thereby surface a notable regularity in US socio demography: there is a substantial marital premium for every group and subgroup I analyze, and this premium is usually close to the overall 30-point average. This holds not just for standard characteristics but also for those directly related to marriage like children and sex (and sex preference). I also find a "cohabitation premium", but it is much smaller (10 points) than the marital premium. The analysis is mainly visual, and there is inevitably some interesting variety across seventeen figures, such as a 5-point increase in recent years.

Interesting that the phenomenon is so steady and persistent across so many variables.  Further, it is interesting that there is a cohabitation premium which "is much smaller (10 points) than the marital premium."  This is evidenced in other metrics.  We think of cohabitation and functionally equivalent to marriage but the metrics always reveal rather material shortfalls.  

It is also interesting that the effect size of the marriage premium is so dramatically large.  

Politicians, sociologists, and economists would kill for an effect size of 30 points above the mean.  They are usually lucky to achieve an effect size of zero (most policies fail and many of them are destructive.) 

Brings to mind Donald Kingsbury's observation:

Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.

At a societal level, we began discounting the importance of marriage sometime in the 1960s, when the sexual freedom of the pill, combined with feminism, and a more general desire to remake a freer, more accommodating society led to a range of new norms.  Most of which have turned out to be less desirable than the old norms.

Marriage is clearly a solution to a host of worldly concerns, and clearly there has to be a capacity to escape from wretched marriages, but if you want to raise societal function, productivity, and happiness, then traditional solutions, such as marriage, still have a lot of octane.

Charles Murray pointed out, in his book Coming Apart, that post-1960s, it was the well to do and highly educated who espoused the abandonment of traditions and were also the social group who most closely adhered to those traditions.  And since the 1960s, the tradition-adhering upper income, educated have done very well in terms on virtually socio-econometric measures, while those who abandoned those traditions, including marriage, have done much, much worse.

I see wonderful things

A humpback whale swallowed a 20-year-old man while he was packrafting with his father in Águila Bay, Punta Arenas, Chile, then spat him out a few seconds laterpic.twitter.com/g1HxkfUGR5

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) February 13, 2025

 

Mean distance from employee home to employer worksite rose from 15 miles in 2019 to 26 miles in 2023.

From The New Geography of Labor Markets by Mert Akan, et al.  

The continuing impact of Covid-19 2020 policies.  

From the Abstract:

We use matched employer-employee data to study where Americans live in relation to employer worksites. Mean distance from employee home to employer worksite rose from 15 miles in 2019 to 26 miles in 2023. Twelve percent of employees hired after March 2020 live at least fifty miles from their employers in 2023, triple the pre-pandemic share. Distance from employer rose more for persons in their 30s and 40s, in highly paid employees, and in Finance, Information, and Professional Services. Among persons who stay with the same employer from one year to the next, we find net migration to states with lower top tax rates and areas with cheaper housing. These migration patterns greatly intensify after the pandemic and are much stronger for high earners. Top tax rates fell 5.2 percentage points for high earners who stayed with the same employer but switched states in 2020. Finally, we show that employers treat distant employees as a more flexible margin of adjustment.

Offbeat Humor

Elon Musk changed his name to Harry Bolz on Twitter and now @cnn is covering it as news. Watch this clip. The legacy media is totally dead, they primarily exist now to be mocked online by everyone with a functional brain: pic.twitter.com/er5N5XQ938

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) February 11, 2025

 

Data Talks

A shocking result. Turns out the excuse for doubling the official "cost of carbon" was based on omitting the benefits of carbon dioxide, in terms of increased crop yields, from most of the studies. A retraction is now necessary.

Crop yields increase all the way 5C of warming. https://t.co/um3YOqGx1x

— Matt Ridley (@mattwridley) February 15, 2025

 

Shipwreck, 1815 by Joseph Rebell

Shipwreck, 1815 by Joseph Rebell (Austria/Germany, 1787-1828)

Click to enlarge.

The Sleepers by William H. Davies

The Sleepers

by William H. Davies

As I walked down the waterside

This silent morning, wet and dark;

Before the cocks in farmyards crowed,

Before the dogs began to bark;

Before the hour of five was struck

By old Westminster's mighty clock:

As I walked down the waterside

This morning, in the cold damp air,

I saw a hundred women and men

Huddled in rags and sleeping there:

These people have no work, thought I,

And long before their time they die.

That moment, on the waterside,

A lighted car came at a bound;

I looked inside, and saw a score

Of pale and weary men that frowned;

Each man sat in a huddled heap,

Carried to work while fast asleep.

Ten cars rushed down the waterside

Like lighted coffins in the dark;

With twenty dead men in each car,

That must be brought alive by work:

These people work too hard, thought I,

And long before their time they die.

History

20% of post-Revolution settlers in Nova Scotia were disbanded British regulars. A slim majority were from New Jersey and New York. Vast majority of Southerners who settled in Nova Scotia were born in Germany, Ireland, or Scotland. pic.twitter.com/ywmO7jx2HN

— Nemets (@Peter_Nimitz) February 17, 2025