The Cult of Theoi: Economic Uncertainty and Religion

Sacrifices to deities occur in nearly all known religions. In this paper, we report on our attempts to elicit this type of religious behaviour towards "Theoi" in the laboratory. The theory we test is that, when faced with uncertainty, individuals attempt to engage in a reciprocal contract with the source of uncertainty by sacrificing towards it. In our experiments, we create the situation whereby individuals face an uncertain economic payback due to "Theoi" and we allow participants to sacrifice towards this entity. Aggregate sacrifices amongst participants are over 30% of all takings, increase with the level of humanistic labelling of Theoi and decrease when participants share information or when the level of uncertainty is lower. The findings imply that under circumstances of high uncertainty people are willing to sacrifice large portions of their income even when this has no discernable effect on outcomes.uncertainty, religion, sacrifice, experiment

Do the Obese Really Die Younger or Do Health Expenditures Buy Them Extra Years?

A recent debate in the medical literature has arisen around the mortality effects of obesity. Whereas it has been argued that the obese die younger, the data that have become available do not immediately support this. This potentially undermines the hypothesis that modern life with its physical ease and cheap food would eventually make us die younger, and undermines the notion that economic growth comes with health warnings. We revisit this debate going over the mortality effects of obesity, using the US Health and Retirement Study. Whilst we find that obesity leads to chronic diseases that reduce length of life, we also find that the obese survive strokes and lung disease more often than the non-obese. A possible explanation is that the obese are under greater medical scrutiny, meaning that lung disease is more quickly diagnosed. This result holds when controlling for smoking and the long-term effects of obesity.obesity, longitudinal data, mortality, smoking, reverse-causality

Do the obese really die younger or do health expenditures buy them extra years?

A recent debate in the medical literature has arisen around the mortality effects of obesity. Whereas it has been argued that the obese die younger, the data that have become available do not immediately support this. This potentially undermines the hypothesis that modern life with its physical ease and cheap food would eventually make us die younger, and undermines the notion that economic growth comes with health warnings. We revisit this debate going over the mortality effects of obesity, using the US Health and Retirement Study. Whilst we find that obesity leads to chronic diseases that reduce length of life, we also find that the obese survive strokes and lung disease more often than the non-obese. A possible explanation is that the obese are under greater medical scrutiny, meaning that lung disease is more quickly diagnosed. This result holds when controlling for smoking and the long-term effects of obesity

The cult of Theoi: Economic uncertainty and religion

Sacrifices to deities occur in nearly all known religions. In this paper, we report on our attempts to elicit this type of religious behaviour towards Theoi in the laboratory. The theory we test is that, when faced with uncertainty, individuals attempt to engage in a reciprocal contract with the source of uncertainty by sacrificing towards it. In our experiments, we create the situation whereby individuals face an uncertain economic payback due to Theoi and we allow participants to sacrifice towards this entity. Aggregate sacrifices amongst participants are over 30% of all takings, increase with the level of humanistic labelling of Theoi and decrease when participants share information or when the level of uncertainty is lower. The findings imply that under circumstances of high uncertainty people are willing to sacrifice large portions of their income even when this has no discernable effect on outcomes

Happiness and the Human Development Index : the paradox of Australia

According to the well-being measure known as the U.N. Human Development Index, Australia now ranks 3rd in the world and higher than all other English-speaking nations. This paper questions that assessment. It reviews work on the economics of happiness, considers implications for policymakers, and explores where Australia lies in international subjective well-being rankings. Using new data on approximately 50,000 randomly sampled individuals from 35 nations, the paper shows that Australians have some of the lowest levels of job satisfaction in the world. Moreover, among the sub-sample of English-speaking nations, where a common language should help subjective measures to be reliable, Australia performs poorly on a range of happiness indicators. The paper discusses this paradox. Our purpose is not to reject HDI methods, but rather to argue that much remains to be understood in this area

Mortality and immortality : the Nobel Prize as an experiment into the effect of status upon longevity

It has been known for centuries that the rich and famous have longer lives than the poor and ordinary. Causality, however, remains trenchantly debated. The ideal experiment would be one in which extra status could somehow be dropped upon a sub-sample of individuals while those in a control group of comparable individuals received none. This paper attempts to formulate a test in that spirit. It collects 19th-century birth data on science Nobel Prize winners. Correcting for potential biases, we estimate that winning the Prize, compared to merely being nominated, is associated with between 1 and 2 years of extra longevity

Who settles for less? Subjective dispositions, objective circumstances, and housing satisfaction

In recent years there has been growing interest in individuals’ self-perceptions of their wellbeing on the grounds that these complement well-established objective indicators of welfare. However, individuals’ assessments depend on both objective circumstances and subjective, idiosyncratic dispositions, such as aspirations and expectations. We add to the literature by formulating a modelling strategy that uncovers how these subjective dispositions differ across socio-demographic groups. This is then tested using housing satisfaction data from a large-scale household panel survey from Australia. We find that there are significant differences in the way in which individuals with different characteristics rate the same objective reality. For instance, male, older, migrant, and Indigenous individuals rate equal housing conditions more favourably than female, younger, Australian-born, and non-Indigenous individuals. These findings have important implications for how self-reported housing satisfaction, and wellbeing data in general, are to be used to inform evidence-based policy

Life satisfaction and confidence in national institutions: evidence from South America

A number of South American countries experienced turbulent democratic, political and economic upheaval over the last 40 years in the form of coup d’états in the 1970s, tumultuous elections, and repeated severe economic crises, some of which happened fairly recently. Starting in 2010, a number of court proceedings across the region have made past military coup d’états the focus of national conversations. South American citizens may, therefore, have lost confidence in national institutions that have repeatedly disappointed their trust and expectations; a situation with potentially detrimental effects on their well-being. Using eight waves of the Gallup World Poll collected between 2009 and 2016 across ten South American countries, we investigate to what extent people’s confidence in financial institutions, the honesty of elections, the military, the judicial system, the national government and the police is associated with people’s current and expectation of future life satisfaction. We find that people who report confidence in these six institutions rate their current and expected life satisfaction, on average, to be higher than those who lack these types of institutional confidence, even after controlling for demographic factors and macroeconomic indicators. In addition, we investigate changes over time for all six measures of confidence in institutions as well as for current and expectation of future life satisfaction. Our results suggest that governments’ investments in well-functioning institutions may contribute positively to subjective well-being in a society. However, our analysis is correlational and we thus cannot rule out reverse causality

Neurocognitive Predictors of Reading Outcomes for Children With Reading Disabilities

This study reports on several specific neurocognitive process predictors of reading outcomes for a sample of 278 children with reading disabilities. Three categories of response (i.e., poor, average, and good) were formed via growth curve models of six reading outcomes. Two nested discriminant function analyses were conducted to evaluate the predictive capability of the following models: (a) an intervention and phonological processing model that included intervention group, phonological awareness, and rapid naming and (b) an additive cognitive neuropsychological model that included measures of memory, visual processes, and cognitive or intellectual functioning. Over and above the substantial explanatory power of the base model, the additive model improved classification of poor and good responders. Several of the cognitive and neuropsychological variables predicted degree of reading outcomes, even after controlling for type of intervention, phonological awareness, and rapid naming

Psychometric Stability of Nationally Normed and Experimental Decoding and Related Measures in Children with Reading Disability

Achievement and cognitive tests are used extensively in the diagnosis and educational placement of children with reading disabilities (RD). Moreover, research on scholastic interventions often requires repeat testing and information on practice effects. Little is known, however, about the test–retest and other psychometric properties of many commonly used measures within the beginning reader population, nor are these nationally normed or experimental measures comparatively evaluated. This study examined the test–retest reliability, practice effects, and relations among a number of nationally normed measures of word identification and spelling and experimental measures of achievement and reading-related cognitive processing tests in young children with significant RD. Reliability was adequate for most tests, although lower than might be ideal on a few measures when there was a lengthy test–retest interval or with the reduced behavioral variability that can be seen in groups of beginning readers. Practice effects were minimal. There were strong relations between nationally normed measures of decoding and spelling and their experimental counterparts and with most measures of reading-related cognitive processes. The implications for the use of such tests in treatment studies that focus on beginning readers are discussed