RiskProf

Where have I been?

I have been posting for a little over three years and except for trips where I didn't have good Internet access, I have been posting regularly up to last month.  I had to take a little sabbatical.  Katrina, Mississippi, and Louisiana was just plain wearing me out.  I wasn't planning on a sabbatical, but it felt good to take a break.

During the sabbatical I sat around in my boxers watching Judge Judy and eating bon bons. In between commercials, I was able to get two papers published (see March Issue of the JRI where I appear twice), another two papers accepted (Experimental Economics and the Journal of Banking and Finance).  I also had a rejection and a revise and resubmit.  (Everyone say awwww).  I am also working on a optional federal chartering project and one involving insurance taxation.  And, huff,  I have been working with the gang at the Wharton School on an economic analysis of (mostly) the Florida homeowners market. I cowrote two grant proposals --and the early indications are that they are going to be funded.  I will be talking about them more after the official notification.  Finally, I was writing a paper for the AEI on tort reform which is almost done.  So done, in fact, that I can feel good about posting once again. Now this is just the fun  part of my job.  I also did some executive education teaching, taught my classes, and served on both the department's and the college's promotion and tenure committee.  So, I am feeling like I earned my salary this month.

I can't wait until I get tenure so I can goof off.

In other news, I have invited a new blogger to join us here at Riskprof.  I will let him introduce himself when makes his first post.

It's David Giacalone Day at GSU

Keeping in the time honored tradition of having days at GSU, I thought I'd talk about David Giacalone today.  Mr. Giacalone has the multi-named (and multi -personality) blog which is currently called f/k/a.  We are treated daily to haiku, snarky comments about blawg adverts, and One Breath Punditry (although, as I said the other day I think it could be called ten or twelve breath punditry!).

One of the more interesting themse of note is his commentary on statistics about lawyers.  Are there too many lawyers, do they have big brains, and are they stupid because they don't take the GRE?  Inquiring minds want to know.

This talk about statistics reminds me of Stephen Magee's graph (from this book) on the relationship between lawyers and gdp.  In fact, the relationship is between gdp growth rates and the ratio of lawyers to physicians.

(Click on the image to blow it up).  Now what is interesting is that the gsp growth rate is measured from 1960-1980.  Things are different today, but the long term US GDP growth rate is not much different today than it was from 60-80.  However, Japan's and India's are.  I suspect that India was able to increase its growth rate without resort to any Shakespearean style advocat-i-cide . Japan's problems, in turn, weren't caused by 12 new ABA approved law schools churning out thousands of lawyers a year. 

I should be grading, but I got some data from the AMA, the ABA, and the BEA (plus some population data from the Census).  I then made the following plot like Magee's that shows the average growth of state's gsp per capita versus the lawyer/ratio for each state. (I took some short cuts, so if a more thorough person wants to take a stab at this too, be my guest.)

Interpreting this graph is almost like reading tea leaves, but it appears that there are two types of relationships among the states.  The first type shows relatively no sensitivity between gsp growth and lawyers/doctors.  This includes states like MA, NY, IL, CA, FL, GA (among others) and then there are states like NH, VT,ND,HI,MT,RI that appear to show a different type of behavior.  It is this second group of states that shows the Magee relationship of an inverse relationship between growth and lawyers.  There is no obvious distinction to be made between the flat states and the inverse states.  Commentators can suggest hypotheses and I will try to work on that next week after I finish grading!