What kind of paper is the Financial Times? And how can one tell?

Reading the coverage of Obama’s new missile defense policy in yesterday’s Financial Times turned out to be an unexpectedly eye-opening experience for me. The front page article--Obama under fire for U-turn on missiles, by James Blitz and Daniel Dombey, Financial Times, US edition, September 18, 2009—was unremittingly critical. Two other reports on page 3—US defends missile pull-out, by the aforementioned Mr. Dombey, and Obama’s gambit threatens ties with east Europe, by the aforementioned Mr. Blitz, Charles Clover, and Jan Cienski—were a lot more nuanced. And the lead editorial—New US realism on missiles plan—was actually quite supportive.

The front page article was above the fold, had a two-column headline in large type, occupied columns two through six, and was easily the most prominent report on the page. It begins with the words “Barack Obama’s decision to scrap Bush-era plans for a missile defence shield on Thursday triggered dismay in central Europe and among Republicans on Capitol Hill, amid claims that it amounted to a major security concession to Russia” and then manages to create a mildly apocalyptic overall effect without saying anything that would technically be a lie. “The Polish and Czech governments voiced no immediate concern” we are told. But there is no discussion of the reasons for the Polish and Czech governments’ equanimity. Instead, the report then proceeds to quote politician after politician to conjure up an image of a cynical Obama abandoning Europe to the Putin menace. “This is bad news,” says Mirek Topolanek, a former Czech prime minister. Senator John McCain, calls the new policy “seriously misguided”. “I think this is a near catastrophe for American relations with Eastern European countries and many in NATO,” says John Bolton, a former Bush administration official. All that the readers get are these scary sound bites; the arguments behind the sound bites aren’t presented.

The report does give some space to President Obama and Defense Secretary Gates. But their defense of the new policy is also in sound bites. It is mentioned that “Mr Obama emphasised he was following the unanimous advice of his secretary of defence and the joint chiefs of staff,” but it is not made clear why the military brass supported the new policy unanimously. Obama’s argument that the new policy relies on “technology that is both proven and cost-effective” is mentioned but the foundations of that claim are neither supported nor debunked—they are just ignored. The views of non-combatant third party experts are not presented.

When you present a debate in sound bites, the effect can be asymmetric. The apocalyptic types benefit when their arguments are not laid out (in all their demented glory). The reasonable, cool-headed types lose when their arguments are ignored. The guy with the “end is nigh” placard can often get people’s attention. But when he hands you his ten-page single-spaced manifesto, you finally begin to see him for the nut job he really is. On the other hand, a guy who is on the receiving end of loud and angry denunciations has no hope of escape unless he is allowed to boot up his spreadsheets, bring down the temperature, grind through his cost-benefit analyses, and slowly take down his fiery opponent.

Or, to put it differently, if you let A criticize B and you let B deny the criticism, but you let neither A nor B set out a detailed argument, you actually favor A, the critic. You may think you are being even handed, but you actually aren’t.

What was surprising about the FT’s coverage was how different the page-three reports were—and how different in tone the editorial was—from the page-one report. General James Cartwright, vice-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, and Defense Secretary Gates get more space to explain the military rationale for the new policy. For example: “He [Cartwright] added that the previous European system, focused on 10 long-range missile interceptors in Poland, would have been unable to deal with a barrage of Iranian short and medium-range ballistic missiles. According to recent US intelligence reports, Tehran is making much more progress with such missiles than with longer- range devices.” Notwithstanding several very weasely paragraphs, the editorial is in the end quite forthright: “Whatever view one takes, the plan for installations in central Europe was flawed. Abandoning it makes sense, provided that the US manages the change wisely.”

A disappointing aspect of the coverage was the FT’s unwillingness to point out that the Bush administration’s original proposal to install a missile defense system in eastern Europe was based on a falsehood and that the Russians were right to expose the lie. Here’s an extract from the page-one piece: “The Bush administration had originally proposed the European-based system to counter the perceived threat of Iran developing a nuclear weapon that could be mounted on its increasingly sophisticated missiles … The Czech Republic and Poland saw the bases as a commitment by Washington to increase their security against Russia.” Nobody of sound mind would or could ever believe that Iran was a threat to Poland or the Czech Republic. Yet, the Bush administration was too cowardly to admit that obvious point. The Poles, the Czechs, and everybody else knew that Bush was planning the missile defense system to put pressure on Russia. And yet, Bush brazenly lied that it was all about Iran, and nobody except the Russians would call him on it!

So, what is one to think about the Financial Times’s views on this issue? How wise is it to size up the FT’s thinking by reading the editorial alone? How is one to interpret the tone of the front page report? To what extent should one see an editorial bias in the reporting or, more precisely, in the allocation of prime space to a report that slyly pushed a view that was at variance with the official editorial position?

The front page of a newspaper is a very scarce commodity. It is a safe bet that a large proportion of readers form their views from what they see prominently displayed on the front page; relatively few readers will plough through long articles on the inside pages, especially if they have already read a front-page article on the very same topic. So, when I see a newspaper saying one thing on the inside pages and the editorial pages and conveying a different impression on the front page, I take the front-page “report” to be the true editorial, and I take what’s ostensibly the “editorial” to be mere newsprint, good only for wrapping fish.

Sometimes we can’t say what we really feel when what we feel is too ignobly solipsistic. At such times we embrace subterfuge. The FT is a European paper. It was rattled by what felt like abandonment. Unable to impeach the logic of Obama’s new missile policy, it decided to take the high road on the editorial page and unleash a sneak attack on the front page!

Finally, an odd thing about the FT’s coverage was its unwillingness to address the three hundred-pound gorilla in the room: Why can’t Europe—even today—take care of its own defense?

To sum up, I still don’t know what the FT’s politics are. But I now know enough to discount the editorials when the front page gives me a different vibe.

Starting Salaries of Recent College Grads

The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) has just published its Fall 2009 Salary Survey report on starting salary offers to new college graduates, in this case the Class of 2009 bachelor’s degree graduates. The full report is available only to paying members of NACE. But some of the report's findings are available in this public press release. The table below summarizes the main findings.

disciplines	average starting salary offer ($)	percent change from previous year
petroleum engineering	85,417	13
chemical engineering	65,675	3
computer science	61,467	0.6
electrical engineering	60,509	5
all engineering majors	59,670	4.2
mechanical engineering	59,222	3.9
information sciences and systems	52,886	1.1
management information systems	50,573	-1.8
economics	49,628	-2.8
finance	49,163	2.1
all majors	48,633	-1.2
accounting	48,471	1
business management	44,607	-3.4
marketing	42,260	1.8
political science	40,009	3
history	38,445	1
liberal arts	36,624	-0.3
english	36,604	3.2
psychology	34,573	1.4
sociology	34,290	-3.2
visual and performing arts	34,114	-2.7

For some reason, the press release doesn't say anything about science and math majors. Anyway, although engineering grads are well ahead of the pack -- and deservedly so, IMHO -- I am glad to see that econ majors are doing pretty well.

Benegal on Ray on YouTube

Fans of Satyajit Ray, the film director, will thank a good samaritan, whose YouTube ID is kishor101982, for posting on that Web site, in its entirety, a valuable 1984 documentary on Ray's life and (mostly) work by Shyam Benegal, himself a giant of Indian cinema. To stay within YouTube's stringent 10-minute length limit, kishor101982 has chopped up Benegal's documentary into fourteen clips -- numbered from 0 to 13; we may have a computer programmer here! -- of reasonably high quality.

Luckily, I did not feel that I lost much in having to watch the film clip by clip with an interruption every nine-and-a-half minutes or so. Perhaps the documentary nature of the film had something to do with it; the annoyance factor would probably have been higher for a typical narrative feature film. In any case, one wonders what purpose is served by YouTube's ten-minute length limit if it is possible to get around it the way kishor101982 has. Sure, a ten-minute clip will load faster than a ninety-minute clip, but people who post to YouTube are aware of these trade-offs. So, why not let them make their own choices?

Swiss Miss

Today's Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on the a case that the Internal Revenue Service, America's tax collector, has brought against UBS, the Swiss Bank. See "Behind UBS Case, a Dogged IRS" by Carrick Mollenkamp, Wall Street Journal, July 14, 2009. The IRS is alleging that UBS has been aiding US citizens evade taxes, and it is asking the courts to force UBS to reveal the names of some 52,000 US clients (obviously, because UBS does not want to do so voluntarily). What caught my eye in the report is the following passage:

The IRS investigation has peeled back decades of Swiss secrecy, detailing how UBS recruited clients in Miami and how UBS used a secret email code -- the color orange for euros, green for dollars -- to discuss transactions. An amount of one million was called a "swan."

What sort of organization acts like this? Simple: an outlaw organization. I can easily imagine the Mafia and Al Qaeda communicating in the UBS manner.

And then there's this:

Last week, the Swiss government unexpectedly said it was prepared to take control of UBS data and prohibit UBS from complying with any summons. In a court filing, the Swiss government said it would go so far as to take control of the account information and prohibit UBS from complying with any summons.

What sort of government acts like this? One that knows that providing a haven for outlaws is its main competitive advantage. It is one thing for Afghanistan's government to do nothing about Afghanistan being the supplier of 93 percent of the world's heroin, but to see the country that makes those wonderful cuckoo clocks sink to this level is just sad.

Gender disparity in breastfeeding: new research

This post is on Why Do Mothers Breastfeed Girls Less Than Boys? Evidence and Implications for Child Health in India by Seema Jayachandran (Stanford University) and Ilyana Kuziemko (Princeton University), NBER Working Paper No. 15041, http://www.nber.org/papers/w15041, June 2009

Seema Jayachandran and Ilyana Kuziemko’s answer to the question in their title is that (a) breastfeeding acts as a natural contraceptive, (b) Indian mothers are aware of this, (c) they have a preference for male babies, and, therefore, (d) after the (somewhat disappointing) birth of a female baby they cut the nursing period short in order to try again ASAP.

The authors do not speculate on the reasons for Indian mothers’ preference for male babies; they are empiricists par excellence and their data—from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) in India—do not allow them to go any farther.

The existence of this preference for male babies did not surprise me. What did strike me as valuable about this paper is that it is a brilliant demonstration of how wide the reach of economics can be, how exciting good empirical work in economics can be, and how important the policy implications of such work often is.

First, let us look at how Jayachandran and Kuziemko sleuthed out the answer to their title question. The key to figuring out the reason behind a phenomenon (such as the observed gender disparity in breastfeeding) is variation. If the phenomenon under study is found to exist to the same extent in all manner of situations, we’ve hit a brick wall; its causes cannot be deduced. But if the phenomenon exists strongly in some situations and not so strongly (or perhaps not all) in other situations, then we have in our sights an explanation for the phenomenon.

First, J and K find that higher birth-order children—that is, babies with more siblings that are older—are breastfed more. There is no known biological reason why this should be so; it looks like a deliberate choice. But what’s behind this deliberate choice? J and K conclude reasonably that a mother who already has had many children and has just given birth to another, is more likely to have reached or exceeded her desired number of children and would therefore be less inclined to cut breastfeeding short in order to have yet another baby. In other words, the observed fact that higher birth-order children are breastfed more tells us something important: mothers keep in mind the contraceptive properties of breastfeeding and adjust their breastfeeding behavior according to their personal goals.

Second, J and K find that “daughters are weaned sooner than sons”. What can explain this? We have already seen that Indian mothers regulate weaning to attain a desired family size. So, it is not a stretch to conclude that they wean female babies quicker in order to attain a higher proportion of male children.

Third, “for both sons and daughters, having few or no older brothers results in earlier weaning”. If you are a newborn baby—male or female—and you have no older brothers, you are out of luck in the breastfeeding department. Your mom is not quite done having boys yet. Therefore, she will cut off your supply soon so that she can quickly try to get pregnant again; breastfeeding is nature’s contraceptive, remember.

Finally, Jayachandran and Kuziemko find that gender disparity in breastfeeding has an inverted-U shape when graphed against family size. That is, gender disparity in breastfeeding is low for small families and for large families, and peaks in the middle, close to each mother’s desired family size. What does this pattern of variation tell us?

To an Indian mother, the number of male children matters a lot, but the overall number of children—both male and female—matters too. For a mother who has just given birth to her first child, her desire to have another baby will not depend much on whether her newborn is a boy or a girl. Therefore, her breastfeeding of her first-born will be largely independent of the baby’s gender.

Now assume that this mother’s desired number of children is three and she has just given birth to her second daughter. She will be desperate to try quickly for a boy, and will, therefore, cut the breastfeeding short. Had she given birth to a boy instead, there would have been less of an urge for another baby, and the breastfeeding would have gone on for a while longer.

Finally, if our hypothetical mother—who, remember, would ideally like to have three children—has just given birth to her fourth child, she would have little urgency to cut breastfeeding short to get pregnant again, irrespective of the gender of the newborn.

In this way, J and K are led by the observed variation in breastfeeding behavior across family size and family sex composition to infer the following theory of fertility choice: an Indian mother cares about how many children she has and how many of those children are male, and she will adjust breastfeeding according to the newborn’s birth order, the newborn’s sex, and the sexes of her other children in order to achieve her ideal family.

Okay, so we now know why Indian mothers breastfeed girls less than boys. But why should we care about this?

Apart from the well known health benefits of breast milk compared to its substitutes, “breastfeeding is thought to have greater health benefits for infants who would otherwise consume unsafe drinking water and contaminated food”. J and K argue that the gender disparity in breastfeeding accounts for 14% of the gender gap in mortality rates of Indian children. Tellingly, J and K find that the excess mortality of girls is small for firstborns and for the first six months of a baby’s life and those are exactly when the gender disparity in breastfeeding is small as well. Moreover, J and K find that most of the excess mortality of female children is in families with no access to piped water. In other words, the preference for male babies has a cost: female babies are being denied breast milk and are instead being fed infected water that is killing them. In the measured tones of the best academic research, Jayachandran and Kuziemko write: “Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that breastfeeding accounts for 14 percent of the gender gap in child mortality (deaths between ages one and five) in India, or 22,000 missing girls each year.”

This is as good a time as any to remind readers of the economist Amartya Sen’s famous 1990 article in The New York Review of Books, “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing”. Sen had quantified the extent of this grisly excess mortality of women and speculated that its roots lay in women being denied basic access to the resources that are essential for life. J and K provide a slightly nuanced explanation for (14 percent of) the problem identified by Sen: “Son preference is the underlying cause of this excess female mortality, but in a subtle way: Rather than resulting from parents' explicit decisions to allocate more resources to sons, the missing girls are mainly an unintended consequence of parents' desire to have more future sons.” (Please see this Wikipedia entry on the whole missing women debate.)

Okay, now that we have seen why Indian mothers breastfeed girls less than boys and why it matters, what if anything should we do about all this? What, in other words, are the policy implications of the findings of Jayachandran and Kuziemko?

Perhaps Indian mothers are not entirely well informed about the effects that their breastfeeding behavior can have on their female children. (Actually, I probably should have said this with greater force and certainty because the alternative is the ghoulish idea that Indian mothers are knowingly and deliberately hobbling the lives of their daughters.) In that case an education or advertising campaign would be an obvious solution to try. Other equally obvious remedies to try would be to expand access to clean water (so that weaned babies have healthy alternatives to mothers’ milk) and to provide better medical care for newborns in general and female babies in particular.

A campaign to reduce total fertility may also be in order. The more children a mother seeks to give birth to during her finite reproductive period, the more inclined she may be to cut short the breastfeeding of her children, with all the attendant health problems discussed above.

In case some women are giving birth to more children than they want, expanded access to artificial contraceptives—perhaps through subsidies—may help. But one needs to watch out for the law of unintended consequences. Some women who breastfeed their babies because breastfeeding is nature’s contraceptive may reduce breastfeeding when artificial contraceptives become available. This could worsen the health of children. So, Jayachandran and Kuziemko dutifully attach a warning label to their recommendation: if you expand access to synthetic contraceptives, be sure to expand access to piped water and medical care at the same time, because breastfeeding might decrease.

This is a really nice paper and I am glad I took the time to read it.

One final thought: How many people do you think know that economics may just as easily be about breastfeeding behavior as about the gross domestic product, the inflation rate, or the Dow Jones Industrial Average? Economics is the study of what rational people choose to do when faced with trade-offs and the overall consequences of those choices. Those choices could be involve deciding what stocks and bonds to buy with one’s savings, or how much time to devote to sleep, or when to stop breastfeeding a newborn.

Blue Dog Hell

Paul Krugman's column in today's New York Times is on the same them as my post yesterday. Forget the Republicans in Congress -- they were never going to support Obama on anything anyway. Those who want a public option in helath insurance should focus on the so-called "moderate" Dems.

We Didn't Drink the Kool Aid!

Who would've thunk it! After all the incessant and unbearable MSM propaganda excoriating the supposed cluelessness -- if not the outright un-American-ness! -- of Obama's proposal that John and Jane Q. Public should have the option of joining the same sort of public health insurance plan available to their Congresspersons and Senators, today's New York Times provides a Gestalt altering jolt: The people have tuned out the media whores! They have figured it all out on their own. They want a public option. They are prepared to pay more for the public option, if needed. They are not scared by the bogeymen being paraded on TV by Conservatives for Patients' Rights, the Republican Party, the health insurance industry, their lobbyists, and the bought-and-paid-for media. Maybe they even think Michael Moore was right in "Sicko."

See the article for yourself: "In Poll, Wide Support for Government-Run Health" by KEVIN SACK and MARJORIE CONNELLY, The New York Times, June 20, 2009. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Americans overwhelmingly support substantial changes to the health care system and are strongly behind one of the most contentious proposals Congress is considering, a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
The poll found that most Americans would be willing to pay higher taxes so everyone could have health insurance and that they said the government could do a better job of holding down health-care costs than the private sector.

Now, will Sens. Kent Conrad (D-ND), Max Baucus (D-MT), Bill Nelson (D-FL), and other such let's-give-in-even-before-the-fight-has-truly-begun Democrats finally set aside their "co-op plans" and other distractions and fight for the President's plan? Don't bet on it, but at least they can no longer go on TV and say that "the American people" do not support the public option.