Fascinating Facts and Trivia.

The Hedonic Treadmill

A second factor is what is called habituation or the hedonic treadmill. People adapt or habituate to their new incomes. Layard explains this in Happiness: “When I get a new home or a new car, I am excited at first. But then I get used to it, and my mood tends to revert to where it was before. Now I feel I need the bigger house and the better car. If I went back to the old house and car, I would be much less happy than I was before I had experienced something better…. Once your situation becomes stable again, you will revert to your `set-point’ level of happiness. “The things that we get used to most easily and most take for granted are our material possessions-our car, our house. Advertisers understand this and invite us to `feed our addiction’ with more and more spending. However, other experiences do not pale in the same way-the time we spend with our family and friends, and the quality and security of our job.”

–James Gustav Spaeth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (2009)

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Is An Excellent Instructor Worth $400,000?

 Good ol’ Eric Hanushek says she just might be:

Over the course of a school year, a good teacher produces $400,000 more in future earnings for a class of 20 students than an average teacher. What’s more, replacing the worst-performing five to eight percent of teachers with average teachers could catapult the U.S. to near the top of international math and science rankings, padding GDP by $100 trillion and generating returns that dwarf “the discussions of U.S. economic stimulus packages related to the 2008 recession ($1 trillion).”

These are the findings of a National Bureau of Economic Research study by Stanford’s Eric Hanushek, which investigates the interplay between teacher effectiveness and the economic impact of higher student achievement, specifically in terms of test scores. 

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Is Going to an Elite School Worth It?

It appears that it may well be:

Among the most cited research on the subject — a paper by economists from the RAND Corporation and Brigham Young and Cornell Universities — found that “strong evidence emerges of a significant economic return to attending an elite private institution, and some evidence suggests this premium has increased over time.” Grouping colleges by the same tiers of selectivity used in a popular college guidebook, Barron’s, the researchers found that alumni of the most selective colleges earned, on average, 40 percent more a year than those who graduated from the least selective public universities, as calculated 10 years after they graduated from high school. Those same researchers found in a separate paper that “attendance at an elite private college significantly increases the probability of attending graduate school, and more specifically graduate school at a major research university.

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The Size of the U.S. Military Footprint

While this map is a few years old (from the Bush Administration), it does show the reach of the U.S. military and its global bases. According to the 

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Department of Defense, there are 46 countries with no U.S. military presence and 156 with American troops.

Click on the image for more detail.

Other quick facts:

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American Prison State

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

 

There are roughly 2.3 million people in jails and prisons in America, more than any country in the world. 
 
The United States has 756 people in jail per 100,000 people. No other country has more than 700, and only two are over 600 Russia (629) and Rwanda (604).
 
Of the 2.3 million people in American jails, 806,000 are black males.  African-Americans–males and females–make up .6 percent of the entire world’s population, but African-American males–alone–make up 8 percent of the entire world’s prison population. I know there are people who think some kind of demon culture could create a world where a group that makes up roughly one in 200 citizens of the world, comprises one in 12 of its prisoners
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