Browsing PBH By Articles

Where Does Obesity Come From?

The Article: Where Does Obesity Come From? by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic.

The Text: A new article by John Cawley in NBER Reporter, “The Economics of Obesity,” poses an interesting question right at the top. Why study obesity like an economic problem, anyway?

There are two broad answers. The first is simply methodological. Understanding the causes and consequences of obesity is hard because scientists like randomized experiments—e.g.: give one group drug X, give another group a placebo, and observe the difference. But this is almost impossible to do with weight. It’s unethical to randomly make participants obese just to watch what happens to them. So, it’s useful to study compare data and try to find out how income and obesity are actually related. Essentially: To study weight like an economist.

The second answer is that obesity is an economic problem, plain and simple. Obese Americans costs the U.S. $190 billion in annual medical costs attributable to their weight—or 20 percent of national health-care spending, according to Cawley’s research. That’s a shockingly high figure, and it implies that unpacking the relationship between income and obesity could save America even more money and anxiety than many researchers estimate.

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Why The United States Is Still Racist

The Article: America is still a deeply racist country by Chris Arnade in The Guardian.

The Text: A week after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, I walked into my old hometown bar in central Florida to hear, “Well if a nigger can be president, then I can have another drink. Give me a whiskey straight up.”

Only one day in the town and I thought, “Damn the south.”

I had returned home to bury my father, who had spent much of the 1950s and ’60s fighting for civil rights in the south. Consequently, my childhood was defined by race. It was why our car was shot at, why threats were made to burn our house down, why some neighbors forbid me to play on their lawn, why I was taunted at school as a “nigger lover”.

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What Pope Francis Can Teach The GOP

The Article: What Pope Francis Can Teach The GOP by Sally Kohn in The Daily Beast.

The Text: When the Catholic Church eclipses the Republican Party on social policy, it’s time to start looking skyward for frogs. Yesterday, when the Vatican released the pope’s latest statement offering a softer tone toward the gay community than pontiffs in the past, it suggested that the Catholic Church may have figured out what the Republican Party hasn’t yet grasped—that the fading of the institution’s flock can only truly be addressed by reversing some of the fading norms driving the flock from the fold.

And so you have, just to pick one example, failed Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli saying about gay rights, “I cannot support something that I believe brings nothing but self-destruction, not only physically but of their soul.” Versus Pope Francis saying, “If someone is gay and seeks the Lord with good will, who am I to judge?”

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Here’s How The Internet “Creates Jobs”

The Article: Click farms are the new sweatshops by Lydia Depillis in The Washington Post.

The Text: Early in 2012, the world started to learn about the “like” market: Web sites that would juice your apparent popularity on various social media platforms by delivering bundled likes and followers, at the rate about $75 for 1,000. Brands, bands, and even the U.S. State Department spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to contract with one of the many companies that have sprung up to serve the demand, employing real humans for pennies a click.

On Sunday, the Associated Press reported on just how big of a business it’s become, complete with third-world outsourcing:

Dhaka, Bangladesh, a city of 7 million in South Asia, is an international hub for click farms.

The CEO of Dhaka-based social media promotion firm Unique IT World said he has paid workers to manually click on clients’ social media pages, making it harder for Facebook, Google and others to catch them. “Those accounts are not fake, they were genuine,” Shaiful Islam said.

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How Much Tuition-Free Public College Would Cost The Government

The Article: Here’s Exactly How Much the Government Would Have to Spend to Make Public College Tuition-Free by Jordan Weissmann in The Atlantic.

The Text: A mere $62.6 billion dollars!

According to new Department of Education data, that’s how much tuition public colleges collected from undergraduates in 2012 across the entire United States. And I’m not being facetious with the word mere, either. The New America Foundation says that the federal government spent a whole $69 billion in 2013 on its hodgepodge of financial aid programs, such as Pell Grants for low-income students, tax breaks, work study funding. And that doesn’t even include loans.

If we were we scrapping our current system and starting from scratch, Washington could make public college tuition free with the money it sets aside its scattershot attempts to make college affordable today.

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