A couple of days ago, I blogged about time spent watching television and video by different age groups in Norway. Of course the issue of internet immediately popped up, so I made this graph showing both time spent watching television and time spent on the internet:
With regards to total screen time, note that these graphs leave out time spent watching video tapes and dvds and time spent on computers, electronic games and mobile phones without using the internet.
Inspired by a tweet by Gray Kimbrough graphing changes in television and video watching in the US between the mid-2000s and the mid-2010s for various age groups, I decided to follow up with a similar figure with Norwegian data. Gray showed that in the US, people aged 45 and older increased their watching substantially, while younger people decreased it at least to some extent. In Norway the picture was somewhat different – there was very little change for the oldest groups, but the youngest ones reduced their watching by much more than in the US.
Part of the reason for making the graph was to learn how to use the pcarrow option in Stata, which I accomplished, however, I found that in this case with only five groups, a simple line chart may actually provide more information and be preferable:
Last year I wrote about making a reverse Advent calendar, based on giving rather than receiving. In terms of my kids’ enthusiasm, I would call it a measured success, however I still love the idea, and decided to make one this year also. What did I learn from last year?
Last year, the calendar had a gift only every other day. This year I kept that format for the monetary gifts, but filled in the rest of the days with more personal good deeds.
I wanted to employ the same effective giving strategy as last year, and since GiveWell have not changed their recommendations, that also saved me a lot of work. For further details about which charities to include and how to allocate between them, see last year’s post. The final list this year is as follows:
1. Against Malaria Foundation (AMF)
2. Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI), END Fund for work on deworming, Sightsavers for work on deworming and Deworm the World Initiative
3. GiveDirectly
4. Malaria Consortium for work on seasonal malaria chemoprevention
5. Development Media International produces mass media to promote improved health behaviors in developing countries.
6. Food Fortification Initiative and Project Healthy Children work to reduce micronutrient deficiencies through food fortification programs.
7. The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN)’s Universal Salt Iodization program and Iodine Global Network (IGN) aid salt iodization programs in developing countries.
8. Living Goods supports a network of community health promoters in sub-Saharan Africa.
9. Helen Keller International (HKI) – Vitamin A Supplementation (VAS) program
10. Red Cross
11. Doctors without borders
12. Amnesty International
I am currently working on making the documents presenting the charities a little more appealing than last year. To the right is how it looked then. Could probably do with some colors and perhaps a few personal stories and small cartoons.
This one was harder, as I had to come up with new items. I found some good ideas online, e.g. here. I tried to find activities that required some personal interaction, were quite easy, and could be a little fun. This is the final list, in no particular order:
Below is a picture of how the calendar looked last year. I have not finished this year’s calendar yet, but I wanted to blog about it now in case I could inspire others to do something similar. Let me know if you want tips or some of my material to make a reverse Advent calendar yourself.
SOS Children’s Villages Norway have a project for schools that they call a reverse Advent 
calendar, in which pupils collect funds every day and learn about the organisation’s projects. I think that is a great concept, combining doing some good, letting kids join in the do-gooding, and teaching them something about the world at the same time. I wanted something to implement at home for my 8-year old, however, and when I did not find anything, I decided to make my own.
I felt that to prepare something for all the 24 days before Christmas eve would probably require too much work to do it properly, and would also risk turning the reverse calendar into a chore, so I decided to go for every other day. I wholeheartedly support the thinking behind GiveWell’s strategy of efficient giving, and therefore took as a basis the seven top charities from GiveWell, combining three of those working on deworming to create three groups:
1. Against Malaria Foundation (AMF)
2. Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (SCI)
3. END Fund for work on deworming, Sightsavers for work on deworming and Deworm the World Initiative
4. GiveDirectly
5. Malaria Consortium for work on seasonal malaria chemoprevention
I added four groups from their six Other Standout Charities (GiveWell’s descriptions):
6. Development Media International produces mass media to promote improved health behaviors in developing countries.
7. Food Fortification Initiative and Project Healthy Children work to reduce micronutrient deficiencies through food fortification programs.
8. The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN)’s Universal Salt Iodization program and Iodine Global Network (IGN) aid salt iodization programs in developing countries.
9. Living Goods supports a network of community health promoters in sub-Saharan Africa.
That made 9 charities in total. I also wanted to have represented some well-established charities that my son might have heard of or come across himself, and that I believe do important work but that for various reasons are not able to cut it in the kind of evaluation that GiveWell performs. Thus for the final three I chose:
10. Red Cross
11. Doctors without borders
12. Amnesty International
For each charity, I prepared a one-page document presenting some of the charity’s work 
in simple language and with some illustrations. (Tip: The organisation Effektiv altruisme, which bases its recommendations on GiveWell, has material available in Norwegian about some of the top charities.) I wanted each donation to be presentable as a round number, and since giving NOK 100 per day had some salience, I settled for an average of NOK 200 (€22) per gift. I ended each document with the words “We give X kroner to cause/charity”.
GiveWell recommends prioritizing the Against Malaria Foundation because they have the most valuable current funding gap, so I decided to allocate 900 NOK to them, 200 to the other four of the top five, and 100 to the rest.
All the envelopes were with Christmas stickers and hung from the curtain pole. The first picture above shows how it looked in the end.
A silly proposal to spend public money on giving everyone a type of sports equipment that in average can be used around one quarter of the year got me wondering how many Norwegian actually do ski. So I looked up some data from Statistics Norway’s survey on living conditions:
Source: Statistics Norway
More than half the population skis at all, skiing (on the extensive margin) is clearly on a downwards sloping trend, but is free skis to everyone the solution? Given that skis can be obtained nearly for free already, perhaps interest is just not that high. Better to build out opportunities for all-year activity close to where people live, restrict time spent watching television, raise sugar taxes, and get more physical activity into school.
Two papers in The Economic Journal November 2014 deal with how childhood information may predict adult outcomes.
Frijters, Johnston and Shields consider the question Does Childhood Predict Adult Life Satisfaction? Using repeated surveys of people born in the UK in 1958, they are able to explain only 7 % of people’s adult life satisfaction with a very wide range of family and childhood variables. Interestingly, exploiting the panel dimension, they estimate that around 40 % of adult life satisfaction is a trait (i.e. fixed), so it is surprising that their first number is so low. It is as if type of childhood almost does not matter. Education and wages are predicted much better.
I do not know if information on time preferences would have helped, but Golsteyn, Grönqvist and Lindahl at least claim that Adolescent Time Preferences Predict Lifetime Outcomes in their article in the same issue. They find that Swedes who were future-oriented (had low discount rates) as children went on to obtain more education, better grades, higher incomes, and better health (obesity and mortality) as adults than their more impatient peers. The authors are admirably clear that they are not estimating causal effects.
I have always liked time use surveys and would love to use them more, for example to write posts like this one at Vox. Now I have recently begun working a little with some such Norwegian surveys, so here is a little about recent developments in how young Norwegians spend their leisure time.
(Apologies for the unsatisfying look of some of the graphs, they are simply lifted from an online resource.)
Percent spending time on various leisure activites an average day, 1970-2010.
In short, since 1970 fewer of us are reading an average day (turquoise), while more area watching television (light blue), and recently using internet (included in “Other” (dark brown)).
A bit more detailed look on average time for 1991-2005 confirms that television time is increasing; 
and although there might be somewhat of a Harry Potter effect for the youngest in the beginning of the 2000’s, time spent reading is quite consistently going down, 
including time spent on newspapers,
magazines, 
and even cartoons. 
Is that a bad thing? Well, that depends, but if it is passive television entertainment that crowds out reading, I would not be surprised if that had some long term consequences.
Many reported the paper on smart phones and child injuries by Craig Palsson the previous days. The finding is that the construction of 3G networks in US cities may have lead to increased use of smartphones, less supervision of children, and more children going to hostpital with injuries. I believe most parents are too restrictive, so I was happy to see the following sentence regarding the welfare effects:
“Even though child injuries should not be taken lightly, some might argue that parents were oversupplying supervision or that injuries help build character, and therefore the smartphone-induced injures are welfare enhancing.”
Though I would rather call it a sign that the children are more physically active, which is good for both body and brain, as shown by a recent RCT. And as I have written about before, children tend to be very active during self-organized play.
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