From the LOTR project:

I was curious what Nate Silver was going to do until the next campaign season started….analyzing growth in government spending seems like a great project to me.

Also from the NYT, an interactive pick your own New York based basketball team game.  I’m thinking Kareem’s the first pick I’d make.

I’ve already started scouring Craigslist and yardsales for Legos, so I was interested to see this article on why they’re so popular (yeah, I’d say they’re for the little lord but I am STOKED to get to play with them again).

This blog picks a random spot every day and takes a picture of it.  Surprisingly fascinating.

And just because it’s Friday, the 40 best dog GIFs of all time.

I ran in to this post on Ann Althouse’s blog yesterday, and was intrigued by her comment that ladies looking for a man should move away from the east coast. She linked to a map from the NYT that showed where the unmarried men in the 18-34 demographic tended to live, and indeed at the top of the list were states like Wyoming, Alaska and North Dakota.

After taking a look at the map and accompanying graph though, I was a little baffled by her follow up:

But you guys, in New York and Massachusetts (and #1, my home state, Delaware), you have rich pickings in the female-heavy disproportion, where you can continue to behave in ways that women will angst over in the pages of the New York Times, which the guys in North Dakota and Alaska and Wyoming probably don’t read, but if they did, would they shed a tear for you?

Being a Massachusetts resident who hasn’t been on the dating market in a few years, I was curious how bad our “female-heavy disproportion” was…..so I scrolled down.  I was a little surprised to find out that every single state in the nation has more young unmarried men than women.  I normally like Althouse quite a bit, and I was a little surprised to see this oversight there*.  I immediately checked the comments and found that it took over 30 comments before someone even mentioned the numbers, and it was around comment 60 that someone finally spelled out that men were actually the majority everywhere (at least on the state level).  In case you’re curious, feminists were directly blamed for making women the majority in comment 6.

Since that part had already been corrected in the comments by the time I got there, I added this:

From the 2010 census, the population of Massachusetts is 8 times the population of North Dakota…and it’s 25-34 year old population is 10 times as large. If you assume half of people in that demographic are single (just to pick a random number), then Massachusetts would actually have 193,000 more single men than North Dakota even though Massachusetts has a lower percentage.  So basically, your odds might be slightly worse, but your selection is much bigger. Which you prefer probably depends on what you’re looking for.

I always find it a little fascinating when people default to presuming the “odds” model of dating works better than the “numbers” method…..because in real life most people use the numbers method.  Young people tend to move to cities, then back out once they’re married.  When you’re only looking for one, numbers matter more than odds.

Oh, and in case you’re curious about the cities she was presumably referencing, here’s the city data.  Men still outnumber women in Boston, and in most cities actually.  Even NYC is more even than many would have you believe.

*To be fair, I think she was more annoyed at the next NYT article she linked to in that post that portrayed North Dakota men as bad people.  I don’t think the state populations were her overall point.

It’s already been solved, but can you top this answer in thoroughness?

It will probably come as no surprise to anyone that I get really nervous when people attach a definitive number to something a little abstract.  I get even more nervous when they start explaining their methodology and have to list over a dozen presumptions they made to get there.  Each one of these is a potential source of error, and if I realize they haven’t thought that through and barreled ahead anyway, I start to really cringe.

To be clear, the focus of this article was policy based issues that cost singles money. I am not here to comment on particular policy, or to rate singleness as good bad or neutral. I am merely curious about their figures, and their claim that these “are the most conservative of estimates”.  But are they really?  I mean, according to them a woman earning $40,000 works for 12 years just to pay for being single (out of the 40 years of working life they estimated for their model).  That seems excessive, so I wanted to break it down further.

Income Taxes: To be clear, I’m not a tax professional, so I have no idea if the assessment that a married woman pays dramatically less in taxes is accurate.  However, presuming that it is*, I thought it was rather deceitful to calculate out only income taxes when this does not accurately represent tax burden for most people.  Looking at my own tax burden, my property taxes have risen dramatically since I got married.  I would imagine this is the case for most people….married people represent 64% of home buyers, and anecdote would suggest they likely buy bigger homes than single people.  Thus, property tax burden would be larger.  Depending on your state, this burden isn’t negligible, and would likely cancel out at least part of the income tax difference.  Taxes for Social Security and Medicare tend to also be quite burdensome for people, and those are applied equally and without deductions.

Social Security: I’ll just take their word for it on this one, social security rules baffle me….and I’m pretty sure the whole system’s going to be gone by the time I get there anyway.

IRAs: This one was a little strange to me.  Again, these rules get tricky, but I was curious how many people actually are using their IRAs enough to feel either the advantage or disadvantage of this every year.  It turns out, not many.  Only 15% of Americans make yearly contributions to their IRAs.  Some of the other moves complained about (a spouse being able to contribute while the other is disabled) also seemed like something most people wouldn’t use.

Health Spending:  This was the one that really got me.  It starts with this:

According to the BLS, couples spent 6.9 percent of their annual income on health on average; single men spent only 3.9 percent (the data doesn’t explain why this number is so low); and single women spent 7.9 percent. It’s not clear how the BLS broke down these numbers into component parts (ie., did they include insurance premiums?).

First, in defense of the BLS, they are incredibly open about their methodology for their Consumer Expenditure Survey.  It’s right here (and yes, that included insurance premiums). Upon looking at it, two things jump out at me.  The first is that the BLS uses the designation married/single woman/single man to refer to the head of household.  Second, their expenditures survey asks about total expenses for the entire household.  So it’s entirely likely that women pay more not because of the “discriminatory policies by companies and the U.S. government” that the authors blame, but because they have children.  82% of custodial parents are women, and of course the same medical costs for children will add up to a smaller percent of income in two parent home (which is likely to have a higher income than a single earner home).  Single men likely have a lower cost because they are likely not caring for kids.

I actually couldn’t find the survey they authors were talking about, but I did find this one that stated that married couples in their 20s pay a higher percentage  in health care costs than their single counterparts (both without kids), and this one that said the per capita outlay for health care is higher for married parents.

This section actually got really weird because the authors got mad that disability favors married people because they can just add their disability payment to their spouses income whereas single people have to live on it alone.  That just struck me as an odd complaint, as it’s really more about who you have in your life to take care of you than about a government policy.  If half of an unmarried couple went on disability the same thing is true.  Same goes if your parents/siblings/children can step in.  To argue that it’s discriminatory is just bizarre.

Housing: This part started to touch on the obvious issue, but quickly veered in to a strange place.  They touched on logistics, but then decided most of the gap was probably because landlords, realtors and developers discriminate against single people.  That’s fine, if you buy that’s a bigger factor than the “married people have a built in roommate to split costs” thing, but again, there’s no mention of children.

My next door neighbor is a single woman with 3 kids.  She bought her house for almost exactly what we bought ours for.  I have no idea if she’s widowed/divorced/never married, but I do know she’d have to make quite a bit of money (or have had a fantastic down payment) in order to pay the same percentage of her salary on housing as I am.  Again, “single women” are heads of household, and if they have children their cost will be much higher than married people ,with no one to split it with.

My last point would be that a higher housing cost should not necessarily be counted as lost money.  Homeowners certainly pay a lot in interest, but at some point they also acquire an asset.  Single women buy homes at twice the rate of single men, and thus we can presume that many of them are ultimately recouping their increased payments in a solid asset.


The conclusion: I have no doubt being single effects people and their spending habits in a myriad of ways, but my guess is having kids affects it even more.  To lump all single women together and extrapolate costs is ridiculous.  To make this article convincing, the women in question would have had to clearly find numbers for single women without kids vs married women without kids and then compare it to those with kids for both categories.   Most people have kids.  Families form because they are the most efficient way of raising kids physically, emotionally and economically.  Efficiency cuts costs.  You’re never going to have a scenario in which being a single mother or father costs less per person than being a couple raising children, and at no point in this article were childless singles and marrieds compared.

*Then what’s this marriage penalty we’re always hearing about?

I mentioned yesterday’s post to a coworker today, who went on a long rant about how her daughter grew out of all the baby sizes so fast it was ridiculous.

It occurred to me to go back and look at the sizing on baby clothes compared to growth charts, and here’s  what I found for boys:

Size                            Upper Weight Limit           Age 50th percentile boys/girls reach that weight
Newborn                               8 lbs                                             1-2 weeks/2 weeks
3  Month                             12.5 lbs                                           2 months/3 months
6 Month                              16.5 lbs                                           5 months/7 months
9 Month                              20.5 lbs                                           8 months/13 months
12 Month                            24.5 lbs                                           18 months/22 months

So a boy outgrowing all the sizes early is actually extremely likely (though the upper sizes seem a bit confused).  Interestingly, the height based portion was actually pretty accurate.

Just thought it was an interesting take on what baby clothes sizes actually meant, at least for one company.

Alright, done with the baby stuff now, at least for a bit.

But not right up front, that would put me in mommy blog territory.

I think this is another interesting misunderstanding of the height/weight charts.  Average is not necessarily the same thing as normal.  Normal can be a broad spectrum, average is just one number.  My baby is normal, thankyouverymuch.

After a few of those comments, I went and took a look at the growth charts.  In reality, the differences between the percentiles are quite small.  The difference between the 25th percentile and 50th percentile at 4 months is around 1 lb.  That’s about the same as the difference between the 50th and 75th as well….so half of all babies fall in the same 2 lb range (or at least half of all babies in the group they used 40 years ago to make the charts. That range doesn’t change much….it’s about +/- .6 kg up until a year.  The differences on the more extreme ends get bigger as the months go by….at birth the difference between the 5th percentile and the 50th is .6 kg and at a year it’s 1.6 kg.

All right, now that you’ve sat through all that metric system, here’s the baby picture I promised (and yes, he’s labeled in this picture….5 months old):

I told you he was cute.

If you ever want to get stuff done, don’t google “top youtube videos of 2012”.  That’s a rabbit hole it can take a while to get out of.  That being said, enjoy!

From sciencebasedmedicine.org a review of a great new paper titled “Is everything we eat associated with cancer? A systematic cookbook review.”  Spoiler alert: the answer is yes.

As a blogger, I suppose I shouldn’t enjoy ads for newspapers, but this one was really clever:

I especially like the part with the Indian.

From the Onion:
Breaking News: Series Of Concentric Circles Emanating From Glowing Red Dot
Experts are still trying to determine the effect of the concentric circles on the long squiggly green objects. located in the blue area.

I’m headed to Salk Lake City for a conference in a few weeks.  Glad I’m doing it in 2013 and not 1857, when it would have taken at least 3 weeks to get there.

Not a brain teaser in the traditional sense, but a question I’d like an answer for….