"Oh I do like to be beside the seaside ... "

New research from my colleague Susana Mourato, and George MacKerron, shows that people are happiest in marine and coastal environments, and more generally when experiencing the great outdoors. No great surprise there, perhaps, but this is a pretty novel attempt at quantifying the effects. The study is the first to use a tailor-made smartphone app to record individuals' wellbeing in different environments, and is based on over a million observations, from 22,000 individuals. Results are interesting in and of themselves, but the method also has great potential as a new means of estimating the intrinsic value of the natural environment. Could be useful, for example, in evaluating climate adaptation measures such as flood defenses. The paper is published in Global Environmental Change. More details here.

Teaching Economics

This week I reviewed Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics (edited by Kalle Lasn and Adbusters) for the LSE Review of Books. (You can read the full review here). Meme Wars styles itself as an alternative ‘Econ 101′ textbook and the core of the book is a collection of short essays that question the ideas and teaching of mainstream, neoclassical economics. Its radical approach (in both design and content) might be off-putting to some, but I'd recommend it - both for experienced economists, as a challenge to think more broadly about underlying assumptions and fundamental questions about the purpose of the discipline - and especially for those who are new to economics, as an introduction to some alternative ways of thinking about the economy. 

While many of the criticisms raised here are already gaining traction within the discipline, for example through the emerging paradigms of ecological, behavioural and complexity economics, Meme Wars is right in complaining that these developments are generally not reflected in the economics taught to undergraduate students. A recent paper (available here) that tracks changes in the content of the bestselling introductory economics textbooks since the onset of the global financial crisis, would appear to confirm this view, i.e. little has changed.

However, that is not to say that 'mainstream' voices in economics are not willing to challenge the status quo. Meme Wars contains contributions from the likes of Joe Stiglitz and George Akerlof, among others. I also recently came across a collection of essays titled What's the Use of Economics? Teaching the Dismal Science After the Crisis edited by Diane Coyle (see here for details), which includes contributions from numerous established names in economics.

The currents of change and debate within economics make this an exciting time to be a part of the discipline. It would be a shame not to share this excitement with those being introduced to the subject for the first time.

Media disasters?

What influence does popular media coverage have on the allocation of humanitarian aid following a natural disaster?

In his excellent short films (see here and here) Arno Waizenegger documents the responses of both the international aid community and the international media to the tsunami that devastated the Indonesian province of Aceh in December 2004. Donors pledged so much money (about US$8 billion) to the region that one aid agency - Medecins sans Frontieres - took the unprecedented step of announcing that they would not be accepting any further donations for that cause. The tsunami also became a major international "news event". Was the massive aid response directly attributable to the intense media coverage of the event? Waizenegger points to another 'silent disaster' - a civil conflict that claimed 15,000 lives - that had been ongoing in the same region for 29 years prior to the tsunami, but received little of either international media attention - in part because the government had previously banned foreign journalists from entering the areas affected by the conflict - or humanitarian assistance for its victims.

Of course, the 2004 tsunami was of such a scale - around 170,000 were killed in Aceh alone - that it was almost certain to receive international attention both from the media and from aid organizations. The question is whether relatively marginal disasters are more likely to receive humanitarian aid if given media attention. In their elegant paper on this topic "News droughts, news floods and U.S. disaster relief", Thomas Eisensee and David Stromberg find evidence that U.S. disaster relief depends on whether or not a disaster occurs during periods when there are other newsworthy events - such as the Olympic Games - that effectively crowd out media coverage of the disaster.

This is the topic of my latest research. I use newspaper archives to quantify the amount of media attention given to a particular disaster event. Based on data gathered from the Washington Post archive, for disasters occurring in developing countries between 1995 and 2010 (a sample of around 3,400 events), there appears to be some distinct patterns of media coverage across regions and disaster types. Earthquakes and storms appear to generate the most media coverage on average (with about 0.6 news articles per person killed), floods generate considerably fewer stories (around 0.14 articles per person killed), while news coverage for drought episodes is an order of magnitude lower again (at just 0.03 articles per person killed). Part of the reason for the relative lack of attention on droughts may be due to the nature of such events, given that they are slowly evolving crises as opposed to dramatic lightning strikes. This also has the added effect of making it difficult to define start and end dates for a drought event. As a consequence the search window (from two days prior to the event onset, up to 40 days after the event) is unlikely to cover the entire drought 'event' - given that some drought episodes can last months or even years - and therefore may not capture the total amount of media attention that the event receives.

Turning to media coverage by region, again we find a distinctive pattern in the data. Disasters that occur in Latin America and the Caribbean generate the most news coverage (with an average of around 0.6 news articles per person killed), those occurring in either the East Asia Pacific or Europe and Central Asia regions generate slightly fewer stories (on average around 0.4 per person killed), while South Asia (with just 0.16 articles per person killed), the Middle East North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa regions (each with just 0.11 articles per person killed) are relatively neglected. Of course these figures are simple averages and take no account of the relative distribution of disaster types across regions. Therefore the relative neglect of Africa could be a reflection of the relative lack of media attention on drought events, for example. A more structured analysis may uncover whether or not these patterns represent a genuine tendency for some disaster types and regions to be relatively neglected and if such media biases have any influence on the political decision to grant humanitarian aid relief to a disaster affected region.

The research will also extend to archive searches in major news publications of other countries (starting for linguistic convenience with Anglophone countries - US, Canada, Australia, UK and perhaps Ireland - reflecting the home bias of the author) to investigate whether the media's influence on relief decisions differs across countries. 

This is early stage research and comments or suggestions are most welcome.

Easter Island

The economy of Easter Island collapsed as a result of resource exploitation: trees were felled to use as sleds and rollers for moving giant stone statues. This led to soil erosion and a collapse of the economy. (As described in this article from the IT, Friday 8 January, 2010).