The Numbers Game: Is College Worth The Cost?
According to a new report from the Pew Research Center, 57 percent of Americans say “the higher education system in the United States fails to provide students with good value for the money they and their families spend.”
Does that mean that college isn’t worth it? Not exactly. In fact, given the crappy economy, a college degree is more valuable than ever, a point that Levitt makes in a recent Freakonomics Radio podcast. The most telling statistic as to the value of college: the unemployment rate among college graduates is less than half (4.5%) that for people with only a high school diploma (9.7%) (See the BLS employment status table here.) Read More »
No Worries, Mate: Australia Is Happiest Industrialized Nation
Growing up in Australia, I always knew it was true. And now The Wall Street Journal confirms it:
No worries, mate: Australia may be the world’s happiest industrialized nation by one reckoning, even as it grapples with rising inflation, pricey housing and worries that it is developing a two-track economy.
The resource-rich nation ranked highly in areas such as overall satisfaction, health, leisure time and community networks, according to a new survey released Wednesday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development of the 34 nations that make up its membership. The index found that 75% of Australians were satisfied with their lives, above the U.S. average of 70% and well above the OECD’s average of 59%, while 83% expect things to be even better in five years from now.
Strangely enough, a few years back Danny Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald—perhaps unsurprisingly, a pair of Brits—wrote a paper, “Happiness and the Human Development Index: The Paradox of Australia,” arguing that Australia was surprisingly unhappy. But there really never was a paradox. Instead, the authors were simply over-interpreting two datapoints. Read More »
Road Blocks: The Strange Things That Cause Traffic
The cause of a lot of the traffic congestion we battle everyday is pretty simple: too many people want to travel at the same time in the same direction to the same place, usually a job center. Since telework has been slow to replace the traditional workplace, it looks like this problem will be with us for a while.
For decades we have known about a way to deal with chronic congestion: levy tolls which vary depending on how crowded the road is. I’ve written about this here and here.
But pricing is not as well-suited for dealing with congestion related to unusual incidents, like breakdowns and wrecks. Even when these are relatively minor, incidents can start shock waves that cause serious amounts of delay as they ripple back through the traffic flow. Read More »
FREAK-est Links
MIT turns 150, women prefer sad men to happy ones, an interactive map of wages in cities across the U.S., and more. Read More »
and 
. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors. Paste Magazine named it one of the 