Letters & Science 88-1:
Health, Human Behavior, and Data

Spring 2016
Visiting Prof. Ryan D. Edwards

L&S 88-1 is one of five new 2-unit connector courses at Cal that supports DS 8, Foundations of Data Science, the new Data Science core course for undergraduates at UC Berkeley that is cross-listed as Computer Science / Statistics / Information c8.

DS 8 is designed to instruct first-year students in statistical methods and theory and in the mechanics of manipulating large data sets through programming in Python.

In L&S 88-1, students study how and why to apply these analytical and programming skills to real-world problems in health economics and population studies. Health inequalities in the U.S. and worldwide are large and remain the focus of great political and research interest. But the sources of health inequalities remain unclear, especially when the inferential challenges of observational data are binding constraints.

Like DS 8, L&S 88-1 is a new course that is evolving to best meet the needs of students in a world that is increasingly data-rich but where cogent analysis sometimes may be lacking. The didactic emphasis on L&S 88-1 begins with understanding the open questions in health economics and the statistical methods available to answer them, and it continues with hands-on examination of real data designed to elucidate key messages.

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Syllabus: available as a PDF

All Course Materials: click here

In-Class Exercises in Jupyter notebooks:
(Click each one to load it into your data8.berkeley.edu environment)

1. Class 1 Notebook: Intro and also Class 1 Notebook: Same Birthday Probability
2. Class 2 Notebook: Tables
3. Class 3 was canceled & replaced with office hours
4. Class 4 Notebook: Subcharacteristics
5. Class 5 Notebook: Variance and Dice
6. Class 6 Notebook: Confidence Intervals
7. Class 7 Notebook: Smoking and Weight Over Time
8. Class 8 Notebook: Wine, weather, exogeneity, and multiple X's
9. Class 9 Notebook: Economic growth, fluctuations, and health
10. Class 10 Notebook: World War II Veterans, Earnings, Ability, and Health
11. Class 11 Notebook: Quarter of birth and maternal characteristics
12. Class 12 Notebook: The minimum legal drinking age, mortality, and regression discontinuity

Slides from class:
(Links will become available throughout the term)

1. Background and motivation
2. Health metrics, social indicators, inequality, and policy
3. Class 3 was canceled & replaced with office hours
4. How to think like a health economist: The Grossman model of health capital
5. Randomized controlled trials: Lind's Scurvy Experiments
6. Randomized controlled trials: The RAND Health Insurance Experiment revisited
7. Observational studies: In utero influences
8. Strong exogeneity: Weather, beer and Student's t, wine quality models
9. More strong exogeneity: Are recessions good for your health?
10. Natural experiments and instrumental variables: War and wages
11. Case studies: Season of birth and later outcomes
12. Case studies: The minimum legal drinking age

Old slides from Fall 2015:

1. Background and motivation
2. Health metrics, social indicators, inequality, and policy
3. Mortality rates and life expectancy
4. How to think like a health economist: The Grossman model of health capital
5. How to think like a health economist: Causal influences, variance
6. Randomized controlled trials: Lind's Scurvy Experiments
7. Randomized controlled trials: The RAND Health Insurance Experiment revisited
8. Observational studies: In utero influences
9. Strong exogeneity: Weather, beer and Student's t, wine quality models
10. More strong exogeneity: Are recessions good for your health?
11. Natural experiments and instrumental variables: War and wages
12. Case studies: Season of birth and later outcomes
13. Case studies: The minimum legal drinking age
14. Perception and behavior: Risk over the life bicycle

Datasets using in class:

1. (No data set this week)


2. Data: c02_mex_e0.csv | c02_usa_e0.csv
   Doc: c02_tables.html
3. (No data set this week)


4. Data: c04_hrspets.csv
   Doc: c04_subchar.html




7. Data: c07_smokeweight.csv
   Doc: c07_smokeweight.html
8. Data: c08_ashenfelter.csv and c08_ashenfelter.csv, which includes vector of ones and "septemp," September temperature
   Doc: c08_ashenfelter.html
9. Data: c09_sweden.csv
   Doc: c09_sweden.html
10. Data: c10_wwii.csv
    Doc: c10_wwii.html
11. Data: c11_b1960.csv | c11_b1970.csv | c11_b1980.csv
    Doc: c11_birthqtr.html
12. Data: c12_drinkage.csv | c12_drinkage_u21.csv | c12_drinkage_o21.csv
    Doc: c12_drinkage.html