1. My thesis committee chair Jody Sindelar, along with Bill Gallo and Tracy Falba on the relationship between deviations from one's a priori expectations about working and subsequent depression among those around retirement age. While causality is always difficult to establish, the symmetric correlation between working longer OR shorter than expected and depressive symptoms is striking and consistent with "feelings of loss of control" type explanations for depression:
"We found significant effects on depression at age 62 both for full-time workers who expected not to be working full-time, and for participants not working full-time who expected to be doing so. These results hold even after adjustment for earlier depressive symptoms, sociodemographic and other relevant controls. The findings suggest that working longer and retiring earlier than expected each may compromise psychological well-being. The current financial crisis may result in both scenarios as some workers may have to work longer than expected due to the decline in pension and other wealth while others may retire earlier due to job loss."
2. A fantastic back-and-forth between filmmaker Oliver Stone and venerable journalists Bob Woodward, Ron Suskund and Jacob Weisberg on Stone's new tragi-comic-biopic W and the Bush (II) presidency more generally. By the way, if you haven't seen W. yet, you should.
3. Dan Ariely presents evidence that conservatives may have a better sense of humor than liberals. Surprising? Not to me.
4. Chris Blattman on pictoral descriptions of the world wealth distribution from 1 AD onwards.
5. The financial crisis and funding for college athletics.
4 comments:
I can't believe you aren't surprised about the conservatives finding. Those guys are so stodgy and often NEVER think things are funny. I would have definitely expected the opposite. :-P
who cares about funding for college athletics? what is much more important is funding for health economists and policy analysts! maybe the economic downturn means less hiring for public universities. but if the economy is bad then maybe they need more programs to help people, in which case they may need more people to design and evaluate policies.
i like tracy, bill, and jody's paper, even if its not clear if the relationship is causal. i like it because it anticipates mental health impacts of financial crisis, which can be used as a natural experiment of changes in employment among near elderly to estimate impact on mental health. i bet there will be a bazillion social scientists studying impacts of financial crisis on various outcomes in a few years once data is available.
man, south asia was rockin' out in 1 AD...I'm awaiting the election analysis, Atheen!
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