Emily Oster

is a PhD student at Harvard. She seems to have created a stir several months back with a paper linking Hepatitis B infection rates to Asia's missing women. Now there is a Slate article written by Levitt and Dubner about her.

Personally, I think its an excuse to talk about a chick who sits poolside on vacation in Las Vegas reading Hepatitis B: The Hunt for a Killer Virus. Is that not the perfect woman?

Nuclear Energy

Here's an article I was pointed to by macroblog. Three pretty good reasons why the US hasn't gone to nuclear energy to a larger degree:

• Unknown costs of a disaster (Chernobyl) - better to face a known cost of a coal plant's pollution.
• The political problem of storing nuclear waste.
• Coal is cheaper/more profitable?
  

I don't know if that last one is true. If its not I would be really interested why we don't have more nuclear power. It could be a path-dependency problem. By the time nuclear technolgies matured we already had a huge infrastructure of coal burning plants whose costs were already sunk in building them. We don't have nuclear energy because we wanted those plants to pay themselves off first.

Couple of other things: France relies very extensively on nuclear power. Becker asserted they "recycle" their nuclear waste and don't have a big storage problem. Secondly, why couldn't we blast the waste into space? Presumably we could shoot if off I a direction where it wouldn't hit anything for hundreds of millions of years if ever.

Secondly, how scarce are the materials for nuclear power? Would we be trading dependence coal mines for dependence on uranium mines?

Finally, Wind farms. Basically you're pulling energy out of the sky. If you had big enough wind farms wouldn't that effect the local or global whether?

Europe Productivity

Macroblog sneers at Europe for their "productivity bust". The graph indeed shows American productivity growth catching up and then exceeding Europe's since the mid 90's. US productivity growth has been steadily accerating while Europe is decelerating.

Last year the Economist published a good rebuttal to this argument that US productivity growth has out done Europe. Key points:

• Europe GDP per capita growth 1.8% vs. USA GDP per capita growth 2.1%
• That small difference can be explained by Germany's lone performance
• Productivity figures are incomparable. Europe's include public sector. Also, there are differences in GDP calculation
  
• Europeans take more leisure, Americans more income. The preference for leisure over income might be explained by higher marginal tax rates. Average GDP per hours worked is very close in both regions. (I'd suspect higher unemployment rates are involved here as well).