Random Wednesdays

I have a bunch of random things in my head today. Here goes:

1) Is it just me or does the Democratic Party always find innovative ways to lose elections? This year infighting might be their undoing. Indeed, the ongoing Clinton-Obama spat should certainly make John McCain happy.

I've tried to stay away from expressing my political opinions in this space, but I've been so frustrated with the current goings on that I have to get this out: if the Democrats lose the general election, you can blame Hillary Clinton. I find it unbelievable how dirty the Clinton campaign has been in this election. Here's a great illustration: they've somehow made Sen. Obama responsible for other people's incendiary comments. Why should Obama be responsible for each and every view or rant presented by his friends? (By the way, Sen. Obama handled the whole ruckus about his pastor with the usual thoughtfulness and aplomb.)

Check out my aunt's recent post on the subject for more on this troubling race to the nomination.

2) I realized recently that I take way too long to make simple decisions. I guess I'm too deliberate for my own good. As such, I've decided to follow the Blink philosophy and allow my intuition/gut-instincts to inform my opinions and decisions. My plan is to start with minor decisions and, over time, work this approach into more important ones.

My first application of this thinking? TV shows. Every day someone recommends a new show to me. I don't have the time to watch full episodes, so I thought it would be interesting to watch a five minute sample of a show and see if I like it enough to invest more time in it.

While waiting for someone to show up, I decided to start with One Tree Hill (on the totally useless Soap Network). In the five minute span, I witnessed cheerleaders and basketball players fighting during some Midnight Madness Celebration; a creepy guy urinating in his wife's pool before she goes for a swim and, later, announcing his intention to run for mayor; Chad Michael Murray's girlfriend flipping out because he was hanging out with another girl even though she made him do so; some girl named Peyton accusing her newly introduced biological mother of not having cancer, etc.

I'm happy to report that I was able to make a quick, firm decision: I will never watch this show again.

3) I'm not a big fan of going to the dentist, but it turns out there might be some economic benefits to having nice teeth, especially for women. Check out this recent paper by Sherry Glied and Matthew Neidel. Here is the abstract:

Healthy teeth are a vital and visible component of general well-being, but there is little systematic evidence to demonstrate their economic value. In this paper, we examine one element of that value, the effect of oral health on labor market outcomes, by exploiting variation in access to fluoridated water during childhood. The politics surrounding the adoption of water fluoridation by local water districts suggests exposure to fluoride during childhood is exogenous to other factors affecting earnings. We find that women who resided in communities with fluoridated water during childhood earn approximately 4% more than women who did not, but we find no effect of fluoridation for men. Furthermore, the effect is almost exclusively concentrated amongst women from families of low socioeconomic status. We find little evidence to support occupational sorting, statistical discrimination, and productivity as potential channels of these effects, suggesting consumer and employer discrimination are the likely driving factors whereby oral health affects earnings.