The value of a lifetime of health, as calculated by how willing we are to jeopardize it, and what that reveals about the worth of modern medicine. (2000)

Economists’ plans for endangered rhinos and elephants. (1997)

Day-by-day coverage of the market makes as much sense as note-by-note coverage of a symphony. The Dow Jones String Index rose by 1.0. Most active were the violins, up from E-flat to F. (1997)

Patriotic investors can make sure that their hearts and their finances march to the beat of the same drummer. The companies in their portfolio wouldn’t hear that drumbeat, but that’s not the point. (fall 2001)

Shares of Dennis Rodman rose 7 percent in brisk mid-week trading, while stock in Dean Koontz fell 6.56 points. (2000)

On average, wives say they do 68 percent of the household tasks, while husbands estimate they pitch in for 42 percent. No wonder couples are exhausted at the end of the day. By then they apparently have completed 110 percent of the chores. (1998)

Discarded, your worn-out old shirt may go farther than you, joining the multi-million-dollar used-clothing industry and traveling to a rough-and-tumble marketplace in Africa or Asia. (1998)

Why the boss puts in longer hours than the workers. What a difference a century makes. (1998)

   Your life will be much easier if you return as an overweight man, a skinny woman, or anything in between.

   That's a frivolous way of looking at grim new statistics that strip bare some of the harm people suffer from our judge-by-appearances culture.

   To catch a glimpse of the depressing economics behind the anorexia epidemic among teenage girls and young women, look at a new study by economist Susan Averett and public affairs professor Sanders Korenman.

   Their research, recently published in The Journal of Human Resources, investigated how people's weight influences their income. The results show  the immense financial incentives women have to be thin.

  The pattern that Averett and Korenman found is painfully clear. Based on surveys of 5,048 women, these are women's average family income levels, by weight category:

   Obese  --  $16,978.

   Overweight  --  $21,829.

   At medically recommended weight  --  $27,747.

   Underweight  --  $29,423.

   There's a $12,445 annual difference in family income between a thin woman and a fat woman  --  more than a half-million dollars over the course of a lifetime.

   Even the annual $1,676 gap in income between a skinny woman and a mid-sized one would add up to more than $83,000 between ages 20 and 70.

   What causes the gap?

   Part of it comes from the workplace, where fatter women are paid less than thin ones  --  an average of $5.84 an hour vs. $7.56, Averett and Korenman discovered.

   Wages are held down, in part, by discrimination against fat women. But the two researchers say that low productivity by less-healthy fat women may also be a factor, since weight categories are based on medical evidence about what's bad for health.

   But the workplace isn't to blame for most of the lost income. Most is because fatter women are less likely to be married than thin ones. And those who marry tend to have husbands who don't make much money.

   The Averett and Korenman study found that only 35 percent of the largest women and 47 percent of overweight women are married.

   In contrast, wedding bells sounded for 54 percent of women at the recommended weight and 56 percent of skinny women. And those thin women catch the high rollers.

   Statistically, though not chronologically, the husband's income rises as the wife's weight falls.

   It starts at a average of $16,776 for husbands of obese women, rises to $19,331 if the wife is overweight, moves to $24,171 if she is a middleweight and peaks at $26,314 if she's underweight.

  Is it any wonder that so many teenage girls and young women get it into their heads that they should be thinner, thinner, thinner  --  to the point where their health is at risk? Male society rewards thin females by showering them with money.

   Females return the disfavor, but more moderately.

   The men who are out of favor are the thinnest ones. Only 37 percent of them are married, the researchers found. On the next step up the marital ladder are obese men and middleweight men, tied at 44 percent.

   The most likely to be married are overweight men, at 50 percent. Apparently it's not for nothing that women call the sexiest men ``hunks.''

   Men in this hunky weight category also fare best in average family income, at $29,766. They're followed by moderate-weight men, at $28,128, and obese men, at $27,267.

  Thin men trail the pack, with $23,638. That's $6,100 a year behind the hefty leaders, though it's only about half the deficit that obese women suffer.

    For obese women, 80 percent of the financial deficit comes from what the researchers crassly call the ``marriage market'' --  fat women are more likely to remain single or marry losers.

   For underweight men, 85 percent of the gap comes from the labor market. Skinny guys often don't find work or they land low-paying jobs.

  These are troubling thoughts to ponder over a zero-calorie black coffee and a chocolate-frosted honey-dipped doughnut.

   A box of newborn-size Pampers, $10.39.

   Baby powder, $2.99.

   Baby shampoo, $3.29.

   Health for a lifetime, $3 million.

   If only it were that simple. No MDs with MRIs. No HMOs run by CPAs.

   And if only each mom had that extra $3 million tucked in her change purse.

   The $3 million figure is the average value that people place on a lifetime of health, as estimated by economics Professor David M. Cutler of Harvard University and health policy researcher Elizabeth Richardson.

   To calculate that number, they checked how much money patients are willing to pay for life-extending medical care, and how large a bonus a boss must offer to induce employees to volunteer for hazardous work. They found that people value each year of healthy life at $70,000 to $175,000. For simplicity, Cutler and Richardson settled on a figure of $100,000 per healthy year.

   For a baby with a life expectancy of 75 years, that would work out to $7.5 million, except that the two economic researchers adjust for inflation and for declining health later in life, which shrink the value down to $3 million at birth.

    The $3 million is not the price people have to pay for a lifetime of medical care. It's the value people put on a full, healthy life. The difference is crucial, because the focus of Cutler and Richardson's study was on determining whether the price Americans pay for health care is more or less than the value of the health we get in return. Overall, their figures suggest, medical care is a bargain.

   In total, we spend an average of $180,000 per person on medical care over the course of a lifetime, including Medicare. Such a deal! A $3 million value for just $180,000? In fact, the deal isn't quite that good, since the $180,000 includes nothing but medical expenses. For a full tally, the costs of eating, exercising and everything else that contributes to good health would have to be added in.

   Even so, it's an offer you wouldn't refuse, even if you could.

   The Cutler-Richardson study wasn't a purely academic exercise. They were trying to cut through the fog that has surrounded discussions of the nation's health care system at least since Hillary Clinton tried to revamp it back in 1993.

    One key confusion: Many people find the modern health-care system to be costly and inefficient, but few would be willing to do without it.

    Who would swap the cost and technology of medical care in the 1990s for the cost and technology of earlier decades? Sure, you'd be comforted by a 1930s-era doctor who made house calls, but you'd want to return to modern medical technology in a heartbeat, as soon as that friendly old family doctor tried to diagnose a suspicious lump without any tools except a stethoscope and a tongue depressor.

   So, do we contradict ourselves? We're sure that the nation's health care system is a mess, but we don't want to give it up?

   That's not necessarily inconsistent, the two researchers said. Their explanation is that, even though the health care system produces high value overall at a bargain price, parts of it are inefficient. That's why people dislike it, but still wouldn't be willing to trade it for the medical care of 60 years ago.

    Cutler and Richardson's study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, was aimed at pinpointing the inefficient parts of the nation's health care mechanisms. In the process, it criticized politicians for focusing -- wrong-headedly -- on holding down the rising costs of medical care in general instead of analyzing how effective specific types of medical spending are in particular.

   “When policy begins by asking the wrong question,” the researchers said, “it is difficult to believe that it will ever get the right answer.”

    In search of an answer to a better question, they focused on two categories of medical technology to see if patients and potential patients are getting their money's worth.

    They gave a thumbs-up to modern technologies for combating heart disease, which are increasingly expensive and now comprise about a seventh of all medical spending. From 1970 to 1990, lifetime spending on heart-related treatments increased an average of about $3,000 per person, Cutler and Richardson calculated. But that was money well spent, they said, because it reduced the number of people who die of heart disease and increased the quality of life of heart-attack survivors. The net improvement in dollar terms: an average of $5,000 per person.

    The fight against cancer got a thumbs-down from Cutler and Richardson. Including prevention efforts, cancer-related spending now accounts for a tenth of all medical costs, an average increase of $3,000 per person from 1970 to 1990. But at the end of that 20-year period, more people than before are affected by the disease. Even though cancer patients now have a higher survival rate, the value of an average person's quality of life is down $2,000 because of cancer and its effects, the study estimated.

   For government agencies concerned with public health, the Cutler and Richardson methods could be useful for allocating limited resources and for focusing the national debate about the American health care system.

   For individuals, the study has a much different relevance: It's humbling to realize how valuable our health is. The $3 million worth of health is a gift that most of us receive at birth and rarely need to pay much to maintain.

   So, if you wake up tomorrow feeling like a million bucks, you now have the tools to refine that $1 million estimate. If you just retired at age 65 with perhaps 17 years of good life still in you, you probably should say you're feeling like $1.7 million. (Spare yourself the agonies of trying to adjust for inflation and declining health.)

   If you just celebrated your 16th birthday, with 66 years of life ahead of you and without a worry in your head about inflation or illness, you should feel like $6.6 million.

    Ahead, at the water's edge, an endangered black rhino snorts and tosses its head to left and right. A thirsty elephant tramples its way through the bush.

    In the past, the poacher has shot many rhinos, cut off their horns and sold them for $100 per kilogram on the black market. Traders grind the bone into a powder and sell it as an aphrodisiac in the Far East.

    On other forays past the game wardens, the poacher has killed dozens of elephants and cut off their tusks. Black-market traders can sell ivory for $450 a pound.

    Today, as the sun rises, the poacher takes aim at the rhino. He tightens his finger on the trigger, but then eases off. Another mammal has blocked him from a clear shot at a quick profit.

    This new mammal isn't large or fierce or fleet, but it's one of the subtlest  -- the economist.

    A rhino weighs 35 times more than your typical economist. An elephant weighs 60 times more. Yet the diminutive economist could possibly be the savior of the huge endangered beasts.

    Because of poaching and environmental pressures, the number of rhinos has fallen from 65,000 in 1970 to a few thousand today. During the 1980s, the number of African elephants fell by half  -- from about 1.2 million to about 600,000.

    Governments have had limited success trying to preserve rhinos and elephants through tough law enforcement  -- as tough as shooting poachers on sight. The ivory trade was banned in 1989, and since then, the elephant population has been holding its own. But the rhino remains close to extinction in the wild.

    Across hundreds of miles of savanna, poachers can easily escape detection. They are violating criminal laws, but they have the laws of economics on their side.

    As the number of elephants has gone down, the price of ivory has gone up. The price per pound of uncarved elephants' tusks rose from $7 in 1969, to $52 in 1978, to $66 in 1989.

    Rhinos are even rarer, and prices have soared higher. In powdered form, rhino horn is sold at retail prices that can range from $5,000 to $50,000 per kilogram.

    From an economist's point of view, it's basic. As the supply falls, prices rise.

    From a poacher's point of view, it's profitable. The more elephants and rhinos the poachers kill, the more valuable the tusks and horns become.

    From the rhinos' and elephants' point of view, it's a vicious cycle that sends them down the road to extinction.  Higher prices give poachers greater incentives to kill the endangered animals, which drives prices even higher.

    The situation seems desperate.

    But two economists at MIT have come up with a new suggestion for saving elephants, rhinos, and any other species that is endangered by hunters seeking its fur, feather, teeth, tusk or horn  -- anything that can be hoarded.

    Michael Kremer and Charles Morcom propose a tactic that a government or private conservation organization could use to disrupt the vicious cycle that spirals down toward extinction.

    To illustrate their simple idea, which is based on sophisticated analysis, Kremer and Morcom showed how the price of ivory could be held down even at a time when the number of elephants was dropping. Lower prices would reduce the incentive for poaching and would allow the elephant population to recover.

    How to manipulate the price of ivory that way? With a worldwide black market, no government decree can fix the price of ivory. But a threat by someone holding a hoard of ivory could do the trick, Kremer and Morcom said. The threat would have to be specific  -- to dump a huge stockpile of ivory onto the world market if the size of the elephant population fell to a specified danger level (or if ivory prices rose above a specified price).

    If the stockpile were suddenly put up for sale, prices would crash.

    The threat of causing a crash in prices, if credible, would change the incentives for poachers. No longer would they raise the value of ivory with each elephant that they killed.

    Instead, each kill would increase the risk of a plunge in ivory prices.

    If the animal population dropped close to the danger zone, black-market traders and poachers with ivory to sell would have a strong incentive to preserve the value of their possessions by temporarily cutting back on poaching.

    Building up the hoard in the first place would take some care, but wouldn't be too difficult, Kremer and Morcom said. The ivory could come from confiscated contraband, or from sickly elephants, or from elephants that were hunted at a time when a spell of good weather gave the elephant population a boost.

    Poachers would have good reason to believe the threat. If the hoarder hesitated and didn't sell the stockpile of ivory or rhino horn, the endangered animal would become extinct. Then the hoarder would no longer have any reason to keep the stockpile. It would be sold and prices would fall, exactly as threatened.

    At the African water hole, in the mists of dawn, the poacher aiming at the rhino would have to think of the possibility that pulling the trigger would make him poorer.

    He would no longer have a clear shot at a quick profit.

   The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 31.00, to 4700.72.  The Nasdaq Composite Index rose 6.77, to 1057.85.  On the New York Stock Exchange, advancing issues led decliners by 7 to 4 on volume of 317.3 million shares.,

   What do the day’s numbers all add up to?

   Nothing.

   What do any day’s numbers all add up to?

   Nothing.

   In the short term, the stock market fidgets, making or losing money for short-term speculators. Newspapers and TV news cover the daily fidgeting as devotedly as the latest clashes in the Middle East. But except for people who think they can make quick money by cashing in on a brilliant insight, an inside tip or a lucky guess, it's irrelevant.

   The long term is far different.  Over a period of years, the stock market rises, making money for millions of long-term investors with diversified holdings, small or large.

   This is where the meaningful movement of the market occurs, although it tends to leave newspapers, financial magazines and TV news perplexed. We in the media specialize in news of fast-changing events, not changes that occur at a glacial pace. 

   The movement of the stock market is like a symphony -- producing beautiful results for people with the patience to stick with it.  But day-by-day coverage of the market is as senseless as note-by-note coverage of a symphony would be:

   "As the Boston Symphony Orchestra reached the third measure of  Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the melody was up slightly.

   "The Dow Jones String Index rose by 1.0. Most active were the violins, up from E-flat to F.

   "Volume was strong, at fortissimo, and tempo picked up to a seemingly overheated pace, arousing speculation that Seiji Ozawa will make a move to slow the orchestra to the desired allegro con brio."

   For most people, daily monitoring of the stock market would be as absurd as that.

   Of course, for people who like to gamble, the daily fidgeting of the stock market is as fascinating as the Latest Line on the sports pages.

   For people who like to talk about their investments, the daily financial pages provide news to bemoan or boast about at a cocktail party.

   Even for non-speculative investors, the financial pages can provide a comforting status report.  If your stock or mutual fund is up, checking the listing gives a pleasure like seeing the latest interest payments typed into a savings account passbook that you hadn't used for months.  The fact that you're being paid interest isn't news, but you like to see the figures in print.

   If your stocks or mutual funds are down today?  Oh, well, it's disappointing, but not a reason to sell them. Long-term, the decision to buy or sell ought to be inspired by less exciting images. Instead of hot-blooded reactions to fever charts, cool-headed plans for a heart-warming nest egg.

    The egg imagery, though worn with constant use, still marks the path to a comfortable future. It’s boring but rewarding:

   It’s too bad that so far most suggestions for investing patriotically have been deeply flawed.  Good-hearted, high-minded, but wrong-headed.

   Nothing’s inherently wrong with the idea of putting individual citizens’ personal finances to work rebuilding the parts of the nation that sustained the greatest damage on Sept. 11. But common notions of accomplishing that through the stock market are based on fundamental misconceptions about how the financial system works.

    In the days before the stock markets reopened Sept. 17, many small investors endorsed the idea that citizens should buy stock as a show of support for the United States and the financial system that the terrorists had temporarily disabled.

    But suggesting that it is patriotic to buy stock and, by implication, that it’s unpatriotic to sell stock misses an obvious point: Except during an initial or secondary stock offering, stock is traded back and forth, with a seller for every buyer. You can’t have a patriotic buyer without an “unpatriotic” seller -- it’s a wash. That’s neither patriotic nor unpatriotic; it’s just how the system works.

    Sure, if a noticeable portion of the American public decided to shift assets into the stock market, that would have some effect. Stock prices would move higher because demand for stock would be higher. But why bother? Treating the stock market as a referendum on capitalism doesn’t make it so. The market reflects investors’ evaluations of earnings potential of individual companies, not their vote on the future of the American way.

     The fact that share prices fell in the week of Sept. 17 and have remained down since then suggests that this variety of financially patriotic investor remained a tiny minority, despite the upsurge in traditional patriotism nationwide.  That doesn’t mean investors were voting against the American way. Instead, in their stock purchases and sales, investors were reflecting their revised expectations for companies’ future earnings in light of the blow that the economy has sustained.

    In any case, patriotically motivated investments in the stock of American companies would have little direct effect on the companies themselves. If a company’s stock rises, it gains some additional flexibility for future financing and its executives are delighted to see the value of their stock options rise. But companies don’t get any money directly when their shares rise, or lose money directly when their shares fall.

    Even a portfolio that consisted entirely of defense companies, or entirely of flag companies, wouldn’t be especially helpful to the companies -- and would be needlessly risky for the investor.

    In a sense, trying to support the nation through personal investing is like trying to back the armed forces through our choice of wallpaper or to demoralize Osama bin Laden through our grocery purchases. The two don’t intersect.

    So, is there no way a patriotic American can support the country through the stock market?

   In a general way, we can -- by remaining involved in the financial system. The nation wouldn’t be as strong as it is without its small and large investors -- we provide the capital that makes capitalism strong. Both for the good of the nation and for the good of individual investors, now isn’t a time to retreat from the stock market.

   It’s even possible to create a patriotic portfolio and not be an idiot about it. One way to do that is to purchase every stock on the market, in essence. You can do that by buying shares of a total market index fund. That supports the nation’s economy and keeps your portfolio widely diversified.

   If that’s too abstract for you, it would be a simple matter to create a red, white and blue portfolio that’s a patriot’s equivalent to the “socially responsible” portfolios of mostly liberal or religiously motivated investors.  Instead of shunning companies that sell tobacco, exploit workers or profit from nuclear power, as socially responsible investors tend to do, a patriotic portfolio would invest in companies supporting or representing the United States.

     Your patriotic portfolio might invest in companies that carry the country’s image overseas -- McDonald’s, Disney, Coke, and Levi Strauss..

   It might invest in companies that support the country’s war effort, such as defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

   It might invest only in companies that call themselves American -- American Airlines, American Home Products, American Cyanamid.

   It would definitely counterbalance its stock holdings with some bonds -- U.S. Treasury bonds, of course.

   Admittedly, the benefits of any of these investment strategies -- just like a socially responsible portfolio -- would be mostly psychological. If the patriotic stocks are a diverse group, with patriotic bonds represented in a proportion that’s appropriate to the investor’s age, this patriotic portfolio wouldn’t present a great financial risk.

    But that wouldn’t be the main concern. Patriotic investors would know that their hearts and their finances were marching to the beat of the same drummer. The companies in their portfolio won’t really hear that drumbeat, but that wouldn’t be the point.

     The point would be to do what feels right. In this case, doing what feels right might be well doing what is right.

   Shares of Newport Beach bad boy Dennis Rodman rose 7 percent in brisk mid-week trading, while stock in local thriller author Dean Koontz fell 6.56 points.

   Gwyneth Paltrow shares were the most heavily traded celebrity stock, rising 5.6 percent on a day when 10,175,735 of her shares changed hands.

   Such transactions go on night and day in a worldwide celebrity stock exchange called the Rogue Market. It's the offspring of a cyberdazzled Internet alliance between pop culture and modern technocapitalism.

   On the Rogue Market's computerized trading floor, nothing of value changes hands -- a fact that doesn't bother its tens of thousands of celebrity-loving traders.

   Shares are traded for almost every media-beseiged personality and political figure you can think of, from Queen Elizabeth to Lauryn Hill. The shares give stockholders nothing more than boasting rights, and that only if they invested yesterday in today's transitory winner.

   But even down-to-earth, show-me-the-money investors can learn from this celebrity marketplace. The Rogue Market is a fantasyland that illustrates some real-life investing principles. Among these, diversification. By buying stocks of a wide variety of celebrities, investors can protect themselves against a PR catastrophe that befalls their favorite.

   The celebrity stock market also allows investors to try things they can't, won't or shouldn't in the real world -- for example, playing the market on the basis of inside tips and rumors. In real-life markets, that's always dangerous and often is illegal. In the Rogue Market, it's encouraged, with a portion of the site set aside for rumor mongering.

   Traders in the celebrity marketplace can try their hand at short-selling, betting that the glamour of a Hollywood star is about to fade, just as short-sellers on Wall Street bet that the price of a stock they "sold short" is about to drop.

   What's intriguing - even disconcerting -- is how much Wall Street behaves like the Rogue Market, although the celebrity market lacks the fundamental underpinnings in corporate value that supposedly keep stock markets in touch with financial reality.

    From a fundamental perspective, stock purchased on the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq represents a share of a company's future profits. On that basis, its price should rise or fall as a company's prospects for future profits rises or falls. That should keep a real-world stock from soaring or plunging wildly, except when investors' expectations for a company changed drastically.

    In contrast, the celebrity market moves entirely on the currents of buzz, gossip and momentum. Traders in celebrity shares can't rely on a stock's underlying value to help them determine how much to pay for a share. In deciding how much to pay for a stock today, they must try to scope out what others will be willing to pay for it tomorrow.

    Buzz, gossip and momentum have always played a role on Wall Street, but in recent months those factors have seemed to dominate, pushing Internet stocks to inexplicable levels. People have been buying shares of Internet companies at prices that are preposterously high, if investors actually were expecting to get their money back when today's money-losing firms finally start making profits and distributing dividends.

    More likely, investors in Internet stock are thinking like Rogue Market traders, at least subconsciously. They're deciding how much to pay for an Internet stock today by guessing what others will be willing to pay for it tomorrow.

    The Rogue Market was conceived in 1996 by two partners, telecommunications entrepreneur Matthew Lederman and marketer Bill Fisher, both of New York City. The idea appeared ``at the bottom of a Rolling Rock bottle,'' Fisher said.

    Two years ago, they officially opened the Rogue Market to the Internet public. Since then, they have made a few refinements, including short-selling, but mostly the market has remained constant while celebrities have come and gone. The founders of the Rogue Market sell advertising on its Web pages in hope of making a profit.

    The site still has drawbacks, including frustratingly scanty historical statistics. And trading is still effected through a sophisticated computer algorithm that sets prices in response to demand, rather than by matching up actual buyers and sellers.

   To get in on the action, computer users link up to the Web site at www.roguemarket.com, sign up electronically, receive 10,000 points as a startup gift, and then use those points to begin buying and selling celebrities' stock.

   In my own experience as a Rogue Market trader, I've turned that initial investment of 10,000 points into a 45,481-point nest egg. That's a 355 percent return in two years. (In dollar terms, I turned an initial investment of $0 into a 45,481-point portfolio that's worth what? $0. Hmmm. Oh, never mind. Let's just focus on points and my 355 percent return.)

   Unlikely as it might seem in a celebrity marketplace, I achieved my 355  percent return by applying a buy-and-hold strategy. I made my investments in early 1997, visited Rogue Market to trade a few times in the following weeks, got bored with it and soon lost my password. Only recently I stumbled across the password, so I returned to Rogue Market to see how my investments had done.

   My biggest successes include United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan, who hadn't been in office long when I bought his stock. Now he has emerged from obscurity to achieve not-quite-celebrity status and my Kofi Annan holdings are up 786 percent.

   Even greater gains came from my picks of Nomar Garciaparra of the Boston Red Sox (up almost 800 percent) and reclusive novelist J.D. Salinger (up twelvefold since his Rogue Market IPO).

   Note the impressive degree of diversification I achieved - politics, sports, literature. That protected me from my ineptness at picking Hollywood celebrities.

    My biggest disappointment came there, where I was most confident of my prowess. I had spotted "Titanic" as a winner long before its premiere, so I bought stock early in Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. When I returned to the Rogue Market this year, after the movie had achieved greatness, I figured that some of its greatness would have rubbed off on my celebrity portfolio. I was so wrong.

   Shares of both Winslet and DiCaprio ended the two years essentially back where they started when I purchased them. There's no telling what went wrong.

   Perhaps other Rogue Market traders had anticipated their fame, as I had, bidding up Winslet and DiCaprio prices to their current level before I bought in.

   Perhaps the Rogue Market is dominated by computer nerds who don't give a hoot for romantic tragedy and don't cry unless a power surge blows out their mother board.

   Perhaps the two young stars are already past their prime and their stock prices will fall from here on out.

   Perhaps it's time for me to bail out. Perhaps I should sell their shares and hitch my hopes to another celebrity. How about Roberto Benigni? The rumor board at the Rogue Market says he'll take home this year's Oscar for best actor.

    Now, in the mathematical tradition of Davy Crockett, modern American couples are dividing up the housework.

    On average, women say they do 68 percent of it. Men estimate they pitch in for 42 percent.

    No wonder husbands and wives are exhausted at the end of a busy day. By then they apparently have completed 110 percent of the chores.

    Those over-the-top figures, from a national 1,200-person survey analyzed by Brown University sociologist Chloe Brown, hint at how difficult it is for modern American dual-income couples to divide the housework fairly. On average, at least one spouse doesn't know how much housework there is or the portion of it that - let's make a bold assumption here - he is doing.

    And, as if that weren't problematic enough, a deeper issue emerges from new research by a male sociologist and female economist: Should the housework be divided fairly?

    That question seems to invite a quick retort - perhaps a kick in the shin or the verbal equivalent: "You dung beetle, of course couples should split the chores fairly. Only a Neanderthal male-chauvinist couch-potato bottom-feeder would doubt it."

    But that reaction may be undeserved. Here's why: The new economic analysis found an increased risk of divorce among couples where husband and wife agree that both paid work and housework have been divided fairly.

    You'd think that if both spouses believe the division of labor is fair, that would reduce the chance of divorce. Not so, say University of Virginia sociologist Steven L. Nock and economist/law professor Margaret F. Brinig at the University of Iowa, who based their analysis on a national survey of about 3,600 couples.

    Surprisingly and depressingly, they found a 59 percent higher-than-average risk of divorce among couples who agreed that all the work was fairly divided.

    Nock and Brinig also revealed how unevenly the average couple divides up the housework.

    The average husband - including those who were unemployed, retired or on vacation - was paid for 34.3 hours of work the previous week. The average wife was paid for 18.5 hours. At home, she put in an average of 36.0 hours of housework, compared with 16.7 hours by the average husband.

    Including both paid and unpaid tasks, the average husband worked 51.0 hours. The average wife, 54.5 hours.

    Is that fair? No comment.

    Economics is called the dismal science, and usually it lives up to that name. It's fundamentally about how people divide up a limited resource - often money, but in this case time. So, people in economic studies usually end up with half a loaf, at best.

    You might think that this study of housework is another case of irredeemably dismal economic analysis.

    The bad news is that the average couple divides the work unfairly. The further news is also bad - those who think they've divided all the work fairly tend to get divorced.

    There's a ray of hope.

    What the study by Nock and Brinig may show is that couples are kidding themselves if they think that everything is fair in their division of paid and unpaid labor. A perfect balance can't be achieved in the rough-and-tumble of modern American society, which places irreconcilable demands on career and family and provides unequal rewards for male and female workers. How many of California's more than 4 million two-income households would claim to have achieved a perfectly fair balance?

    For most couples, fairness is not just an elusive goal, it's perhaps not even an especially important goal.

    "As spouses, we worry about fairness or rights at times when our affections for each other or our commitment to the marriage ebb to a low point,'' the two researchers point out.

    Marriage isn't about fairness. It's about love and commitment and sharing.

    It's often about traditional roles, which are different for husband and wife. Different and often not fair.

    If the couple realizes that - recognizes the inherent unfairness - the marriage can be strengthened. In couples who both say the division of paid work is unfair to the wife, divorce is unlikely. If those couples also agree that they divide the housework fairly, their chance of divorce is 78 percent below average.

     The ruined collar makes it an unlikely sale item at a nearby thrift shop. As you drop it off, you think perhaps it will be donated to a homeless person in Quincy or Boston.

    That's possible, but not probable. More likely the shirt will travel thousands of miles, eventually finding its way to a rough-and-tumble marketplace in Africa or Asia.

    Along that path, the shirt will become a tiny piece of the United States export trade in used clothing -- a $220-million-plus-a-year industry. The country's ``rag dealers'' sort, bale and ship more than 290 million pounds of clothes overseas each year.

   Much of the discarded clothing comes from non-profit organizations such as Goodwill Industries and the Salvation Army, which collect many more shirts, blouses, pants and skirts than they can sell at their thrift shops. So they sell old clothes wholesale and use the proceeds to support their workshops for the disabled, food pantries, and shelters.

     The Salvation Army unit serving the Boston area collects more than $1 million a year from its sales to rag dealers, and Morgan Memorial / Goodwill Industries takes in another $1 million locally. That accounts for about 5 percent of the local group's annual budget, said local Goodwill Industries chief executive Joanne Hilferty.

   ``Without our rag market, thrift stores and the generosity of people, we wouldn't be able to house the people we do,'' said Major Alan Thompson of the Salvation Army.

    Overseas, the used clothes are a mixed blessing. The supply of cheap imported goods adds an obstacle that poor nations must overcome as they try to start up clothing and textile industries of their own.

    To avoid that problem, some underdeveloped nations, including Egypt and Nigeria, have banned imports of used clothing.

    But only a few nations have imposed a ban, in part because their people need the clothes, and in part because the import and resale of old clothes creates many jobs.

    Except for emergency relief during a crisis, rich countries shouldn't subsidize the export of used clothing, but they shouldn't worry about the economic impact of unsubsidized exports, according to two economists whom the government of Sweden hired to study whether the used-clothes trade helps or harms poor countries.

    In some countries, used clothes have become an important source of employment and a cherished part of popular culture.

    ``There's a whole world out there that people don't know about,'' Thompson said, describing the eventual uses for clothes donated to the Salvation Army.

    For example, this was the scene in Rwanda, as witnessed in 1990 by economist Steven Haggblade: First, distributors haul 100-pound bales of used clothing to the marketplace. ``Shortly after daybreak, they break open the bales (and) referee a wild melee in which prospective retailers swarm over the merchandise to select the prime articles.''

    To prepare the clothing for resale, the retailers hire cleaners, ironers, and tailors who repair and restyle it.

    ``This activity attracts a phalanx of push-pedal sewing machines, coal-fired clothes irons and washing basins which line the perimeter of the large used-clothing markets,'' Haggblade wrote.

    Similar enthusiasm surrounds the sale of used clothing in Zambia, where it is called salaula, meaning ``selected from a pile'' in the local language.

     ``The salaula section in markets is many times larger than the food section,'' reported anthropologist Karen Tranberg Hansen.

    The recipients of the clothing aren't well off, but they're far from pitiful charity cases.

    ``Detailed care for clothing helps to transform old clothes into new ensembles,'' Hansen said. ``Customers, traders, and tailors work hard to make salaula into their own creation.''

    That old shirt you donated even became the subject of a song by a popular Zambian singer, Teddy Chilambe. In a 1988 record, ``Salaula,'' he praised the sale of used clothing and criticized people who buy new clothes instead, because they waste money they should use to feed their children.

     Mostly it still feels upside down, populated with low-life scoundrels in high places and the more upright folks down below. But at least one piece of the worldly puzzle has been set right, and there's a new statistical study to prove it.

    To understand what has happened, start by casting your imagination back a hundred years. It's a dewy morning on an elm-lined avenue of stately Victorian homes. At 7:30 a.m., the local mill owner emerges from his front door and begins his stroll to the office. He arrives there at 8 a.m., works until noon, takes an hour for lunch, resumes work at 1 p.m., continues until 6 p.m. and walks home for dinner. His workday lasts nine hours.

    Across town, his lowest-paid mill workers, living in ramshackle tenements, start their days an hour before their boss does. Their shift begins at 7 a.m. with a lunch break that lasts only 30 minutes. They have put in an exhausting total of 11 hours when the workday ends. It's 8 p.m. before they arrive home, if they don't stop at a bar after work.

    For both the boss and the lowly mill hands, those work hours are typical of the 1890s. It was a time when American men with the lowest 10 percent of income averaged 11-hour workdays, while those in the top 10 percent worked an average of nine hours. Among the relatively few women who worked, a similar pattern prevailed.

   Now fast-forward to the 1990s.

   The elms have succumbed to Dutch elm disease and the mill has closed. The mill owner's great-grandson is a corporate executive living in a subdivision of new four-bedroom homes, three-car garages, bubbly jacuzzis and professionally tailored lawns. He commutes in his Lexus, arriving at his office at 8 a.m. each weekday. He sets out for home just before 6 p.m., putting in nearly nine hours on work -- almost identical to the workday of his mill owner ancestor in the 1890s.

    Across town, in a run-down neighborhood of old duplexes, a part-time worker in the same corporation's mail room is living in the back bedroom of her parents' house. She drives to the job in her 1989 Ford Escort. She starts sorting mail at 8 a.m. and is done a little past 2 p.m. After that six-hour workday, she hangs out with friends.

    The work hours of both the corporate executive and the part-time mail clerk  are typical of the 1990s, as documented in a recent study by MIT economist Dora L. Costa. In her analysis of workdays from 1890, 1973 and 1991, she found that the highest-paid American men in this decade averaged 8.7-hour workdays, while women at the top of the pay scale averaged 8.1 hours.

    Men earning the lowest pay worked only a little less than their highly paid counterparts -- an average of 8.1 hours a day, by coincidence the same as the highest-paid women. The lowest-paid women averaged only 6.7 hours a day. Among the lowest-paid women who were also unmarried, the average was just 6.2 hours.

    What does this mean? It means that over the past 100 years the working patterns of rich and poor have reversed. A century ago, the rich worked relatively short hours, while the poor worked long hours to make a few measly dollars. In the 1990s, the rich put in the long hours, while the poor are more likely to be stuck in low-paying part-time jobs.

     That's a problem that society should try to solve, but the pattern is not as perverse as in the past. At least now the rich put in long hours to earn their money, instead of raking in big bucks while working short hours.

     There's even a sliver of good news for those who are stuck at the low end of the pay scale. They trail the rest of society in income, but they lead the way in leisure time. That sounds facetious and black-humored, like telling a man who has just been fired to enjoy his new-found free time. But for those who can make ends meet on a slender paycheck, the benefits of increased leisure time are real.

    As Costa states, "income differences no longer mean that the poor have less time for fun."