Researchers at Bath University studied over a thousand couples, and I'll let the BBC report the results:

They found that if the wife was five or more years older than her husband, they were more than three times as likely to divorce than if they were the same age. If the age gap is reversed, and the man is older than the woman, the odds of marital bliss are higher. Add in a better education for the woman - Beyonce has her high school diploma, unlike husband Jay-Z - and the chances of lasting happiness improve further.

Older men have higher status, more money, and more experience than younger men. Education as an important variable for lasting happiness suggests that when a man desires a woman with an education he's doing so for another reason than her looks. This comes after Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson's research showing that inequality between women and men has decreased, but happiness of women has decreased, both absolutely and relative to men, since the 1970's. It's unfortunate that evolution is undermining equality in this fashion.

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The Seven Stories career exercise is probably one of the better ones I've heard as far as giving unsure people an idea of what they want, and a not terrible conversational gambit. This exercise is much better than a computer algorithm, or personality test. Here's how it goes: for four or five days, you write down a list of things that gave you a sense of accomplishment, at least twenty five or thirty, rank the top seven and then find common threads between them. This is supposed to give you a good idea of what career you want to enter (and heaven help you if the things you enjoy doing aren't things that the market pays lots of money for). This is another extension of the "do what you want, not what pays well" attitude that most college-bound young people share. I am not telling you what is on my list.

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David Rohde was a New York Times reporter kidnapped by the Taliban. Here's Rohde trying to argue for his release:

When I told them I was an innocent civilian who should be released, they responded that the United States had held and tortured Muslims in secret detention centers for years. Commanders said they themselves had been imprisoned, their families ignorant of their fate. Why, they asked, should they treat me differently?

If I was kidnapped by a woman-hating, suicide-bombing organization, I'd like to think I would be able to rebut most accusations and allegations my captives made. This one does not have an easy rebuttal.

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Mo Ibrahim's good idea is to reward African heads of state that govern well with a $5 million prize upon retirement, and $200K annually for the rest of their lives. I agree that the prize should be bigger, but it seems to me like giving the reward after retirement is a little too far away to really change a potential despot's behavior. Just as there have been a number of studies showing that the severity of a punishment doesn't really affect a criminal's behavior, but the chance of being caught does affect his behavior, the prospect of a far-away reward doesn't really seem likely to motivate an African leader's behavior. I propose the following changes. First, set up a bank account for every African leader, that they can't touch until they retire. Then credit the account when they do well for their countries and debit their account when their countries slide further into corruption. The Ibrahim Prize Foundation produces the Ibrahim Index, a comprehensive measure of every sub-Saharan African country's quality of governance. I say if a leader raises his country's score on the Ibrahim Index by 1 point, he should get $500K. This way the leaders know right away that they're earning positive money, even though they can't touch it until after they leave. I think the eventual amount of money given away will be about the same. After all, if Ibrahim is giving away money, that means leaders are earning the prize and that's a good thing. Is that such a tough idea? It's a huge improvement on the way the prize is currently set up. If you give everyone a bank account their incentive to do good rises dramatically. A large reward far in the future is just that, too far in the future. Between now and then a leader might die, get deposed or earn substantial amounts of money for screwing over his country. This form of bribery is also extraordinarily cheap compared to everything else we're doing, like aid. One problem is that a leader with $0 in his account could just let his country slide dramatically. But that isn't worse than the current situation, and we just start paying him for improvement once he gets the country back to where it was when he started.

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I keep things clean:

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First I write an article for the Forum explaining the controversy behind Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's new book, SuperFreakonomics. Then I read this post on their blog today:

An overwhelming majority of the teachers surveyed associate “traditional” names with positive character traits and non-traditional names with weak performance and bad behavior. The name Kevin has particularly negative connotations; as one teacher wrote, “Kevin is not a name — it’s a diagnosis!”

I guess I am just reinforcing stereotypes.

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In this week's New Yorker, Dana Goodyear has a fascinating profile of James Cameron. The profile is a series of stories about Cameron with some life detail filled in; it leaves you with a very good picture of who Cameron is. Here's Cameron on the making of Terminator:

One night, he said, he dreamed of “a chrome skeleton emerging out of a fire.” Then he sketched the figure cut in half and crawling after a woman. He said, “I thought, That was cool. I’ve never seen that in a movie before.” Cameron came home and recruited Wisher and Frakes to help him with a storyline centered on the chrome skeleton he had begun to think of as the terminator. He analyzed the common traits of the ten most successful movies of all time: an average person in extraordinary jeopardy was a major trope. His story posited a future when much of Earth has been destroyed in a catastrophic nuclear war; out of the rubble, a race of machines rises up and tries to eliminate the few remaining human beings. To win the war for good, the machines send a cyborg terminator back in time, to 1984 Los Angeles, to kill the woman, Sarah Connor, a waitress at a burger joint who will later give birth to the leader of the human resistance.

Note that Cameron didn't try to reinvent the story; he found some new idea and fit it into a popular trope, in other words, he made a movie that people want to watch. Terminator was, of course, a big hit. I did not know that Schwarzenegger was initially going to be the good guy.

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I have a post up on CMC Forum about California's plan to impose new standards on manufacturers of large televisions. Read and debate.

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Every new car with a dashboard navigation screen has a feature that doesn't let you fiddle with the controls while the car is going over 10 miles per hour. This is annoying but maybe for the best, as if you are trying to punch in an address while driving on the freeway you're not going to be focused on the road. But the safety feature isn't complete, as you can still fiddle with the audio and temperature controls at any speed. My guess is that the car companies know that changing these controls isn't safe but if they banned the controls at high speed there would be a significant backlash from consumers. The most annoying thing is that if you have a passenger in the car, it's logical to assume that the driver can focus on driving while the passenger enters new directions into the nav screen. This division of labor is perfectly safe. And furthermore cars can tell if there's a passenger, because if there's a heavy weight in the front seat and the passenger doesn't have their seatbelt on a blinking light flashes on the dash. Why can't car companies combine those two features so if there's a passenger in the car you can control the nav screen while moving at high speed? That's a pretty simple innovation. Obviously you can hack around it by putting a few watermelons in the front seat or something but people hack around the driving system as it is, by idling along until they've entered in directions, or accelerating all the way to a red light and then braking suddenly, so that they maximize the amount of time they have to punch in directions. Perhaps there's a law against entering in directions while driving over 10 mph but I doubt it.

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Today's must-read article is this report by Democracy Corps summarizing the results of their focus group testing of conservative Republicans and independents. They sampled one group of Republican voters in Georgia and one group of white, non-college voters from Ohio (the independents). To summarize,

these voters identify themselves as part of a ‘mocked’ minority with a set of shared beliefs and knowledge, and commitment to oppose Obama that sets them apart from the majority in the country. They believe Obama is ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt the United States and dramatically expand government control to an extent nothing short of socialism. While these voters are disdainful of a Republican Party they view to have failed in its mission, they overwhelmingly view a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of this country’s founding principles and are committed to seeing the president fail.

The quotes from the Republicans are harrowing; they back up the above conclusion 100%. Obviously the beliefs of any group of voters will sound a little wonky but these people are living in a parallel universe. The Republican politicians' problem is that to win the primary they need to win over these conservative (if conservative is really the right word) voters, but to win the general election they need to win over independents, who have worries about Obama but generally don't believe that he, as the arm of a secret cabal, is going to bring about the ruin of the United States. Furthermore the base believes that most Republican politicians have "sold out" - the only figure they support enthusiastically is Sarah Palin. How can I prove that Obama isn't trying to bring about the destruction of America, that Fox News isn't the only media channel telling "the truth," and that we are not going to become a socialist economy? I'm not sure that I can, with words; think about how hard of a job the evolutionists have, and the science is on their side all the way. But I could with bets; asking someone to put their money where their mouth is is the easiest way to get them to say what they really believe to be true. Perhaps we could ask them to, as Robin Hanson and Bryan Caplan suggest, put their money where their mouth is; force them to make specific bets on their political beliefs. If, as they suggest, the rest of America is wrong and uninterested in knowing the truth, there would be a lot of money to be made by betting on a government takeover of other sectors of the economy, or on the growth of GDP, etc. But for a large group of people to be this wrong about the state of things cannot be good for the country at large.

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