J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, Aging Gracelessly (washingtonpost.com)

I was never forced to read Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (or Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sear) in high school, but, curious, I finally read it, maybe six months ago. In J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, Aging Gracelessly, Jonathan Yardley sums up the experience:

'The Catcher in the Rye' is now, you'll be told just about anywhere you ask, an 'American classic,' right up there with the book that was published the following year, Ernest Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the Sea.' They are two of the most durable and beloved books in American literature and, by any reasonable critical standard, two of the worst. Rereading 'The Catcher in the Rye' after all those years was almost literally a painful experience: The combination of Salinger's execrable prose and Caulfield's jejune narcissism produced effects comparable to mainlining castor oil.

The Asian aesthetic

The Asian aesthetic examines the (re)emergence of Asian cinema — and includes a few historical tidbits:

In the west, the arrival of talkies gave birth to a new genre — the musical — but in India, every one of the 5,000 films made between 1931 and the mid-1950s had musical interludes. The effects of this were far-reaching. Movie performers had to be able to dance. There were two parallel star systems — that of actors and that of playback singers.

I didn't know this about Japanese cinema:

In Japan, the film industry had long ceased to rival India's in size but was distinctive in two ways. Until the 1930s, commentators called benshis attended every screening, standing in front of the audience, clarifying the action and describing characters. Directors did not need to show every aspect of their tale, and tended to produce tableau-like visuals. Even more unusually, its industry was director-led. Whereas in Hollywood, the producer was the central figure — he chose the stories and hired the director and actors — in Tokyo, the director chose the stories and hired the producer and actors. The model was that of an artist and his studio of apprentices.

Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Is this Leonardo?

Is this Leonardo? asks, What did Leonardo da Vinci really look like?:

He was a handsome man. An eyewitness in Florence describes him thus: 'He was very attractive, well-proportioned, graceful and good-looking. He wore a short, rose-pink tunic, knee-length at a time when most people wore long gowns. He had beautiful curling hair, carefully styled, which came down to the middle of his chest.' There are nuances of fashion and sociology in this that are hard to catch, but the essential image is of someone very elegantly turned out, a bit of a dandy.

Indeed, I've heard that Leonardo was a bit of a...dandy.

Island of the Little People

By now you've probably heard of the tiny homo floriensis fossils found in Indonesia — just three feet tall, found with stone tools, and just 13,000 to 18,000 years old. Island of the Little People paints an amusing (moving) picture:

Archaeologists believe floresiensis, whose cohabitation on the island with Komodo dragons and pygmy stegodons must have resembled a Ray Harryhausen movie, were wiped out by a volcanic eruption.

They've been dubbed "hobbits":

The floresiensis skeletons were half-jokingly dubbed "hobbits" by some of the archaeologists who found them, a bon mot that has seized the imagination of headline writers across the mediasphere. "Lilliputians" would have been more appropriate. After all, according to the well-traveled mariner Lemuel Gulliver, the island of Lilliput was also located in Indonesia.

John Kerry's 19 Year Attack on Investors

John Kerry's 19 Year Attack on Investors presents some intriguing facts:

Despite claiming that he has voted to reduce the capital gains tax, the ASA analysis could not find one example of Kerry voting to reduce the capital gains tax. He voted to increase the capital gains tax by 40 percent in 1986 and voted against capital gains tax reduction at least 15 times since 1989. These votes were important to shareholders: the largest drag on shareholder returns is from the capital gains tax and the tax itself reduces the after tax return on equities.

What impact do capital gains taxes have?

An individual at 29 years of age with $40,000 of income making a $3,000 contribution per year to a Roth IRA will retire with more than $772,000 of income. Under a taxable account, however, the return is dramatically reduced to less than $343,000, and thus, the hypothetical investor lost 56 percent of his/her investment compared to the Roth IRA.

Ouch.

Wall of Exclusion?

Just how hard is it to get an H1B visa these days? From Wall of Exclusion?:

Just a few days after the start of the 2005 fiscal year, it became clear that the cap for H1B visas had already been reached. This means if a U.S. business finds a qualified professional who is not a U.S. citizen, it cannot hire that individual before October 2005. So, the qualified professional goes elsewhere and the U.S. business loses and becomes less competitive.

Mathematical "truth serum" promotes honesty

From Mathematical "truth serum" promotes honesty:

Now, Drazen Prelec, a psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, US, has devised a scoring system, or �Bayesian truth serum� to encourage people to divulge their honest opinions.

First you ask a straightforward question — "Will you vote in the next presidential election?" or "Have you had more than 20 sexual partners in the last year?" Then you ask the respondent to estimate of how many other respondents would answer the same way.

Prelec says if people truly hold a particular opinion, they tend to give higher estimates that other people share it. So if someone did have more than 20 recent sexual partners — but lied about it — that person would probably assume a higher rate of such behaviour in general than someone who had not had so many partners.
[...]
For example, he describes a situation where two paintings are viewed by a group of 10 people who are then asked, privately, to pick their favourite. Seven people say they prefer painting A, while three vote for painting B. If, on the second question, all 10 people said they thought everyone else would prefer painting A, then those three people expressing a personal preference for painting B might be thought of as a safer bet for having told the truth. That is because, argues Prelec, despite what they thought was more popular, those individuals still chose the other painting.

(Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)

Serious Games, Serious Questions

James Pinkerton's Serious Games, Serious Questions stemmed from his recent visit to the Serious Games Summit:

By preparing for war, do we make war less likely, by deterring enemies, or more likely, by making war seem fun? These thoughts followed me as I attended the Serious Games Summit at the L'Enfant Plaza Hotel, in the shadow of the Federal Triangle in Washington DC. It's appropriate that the Summit was held here in Powertown, because the goal of the conclave was to push Serious Gaming into Uncle Sam's consciousness — and wallet.

From the Serious Games Summit site:

The number of non-entertainment games under development is rapidly increasing and demand for the ideas, skills and techniques used in commercial entertainment games is at an all time high. As a result, an entirely new market has emerged.

Serious Games are applications of interactive technology that extend far beyond the traditional videogame market, including: training, policy exploration, analytics, visualization, simulation, education and health and therapy.

The Serious Games Summit gives professionals from the public and private sectors, policymakers, contractors, military personnel, government administrators, educators and experts in the game development arena an opportunity to meet and learn from successful serious games applications, as well as forge links between the traditional videogame industry and program managers for homeland security, state and local governments, military agencies, and educational institutions.

Turkey and the Problem of History

Turkey and the Problem of History examines European and American views on diplomacy and military force — and why the Euros are worried about Turkey:

Robert Kagan's groundbreaking book Of Paradise and Power brilliantly contrasts the different views of power held by Europeans and Americans. The United States and Europe, he says, have sharply diverging ideas about the role of diplomacy and the use of military force due to the stark differences in historical experience accumulated over the past century.

Europe has never had it so good. After the meat-grinding horror of World War I and the defeat of the Axis Powers in World War II, the United States provided a protective security umbrella over Western Europe, under NATO auspices, permitting Europeans to build multilateralist institutions and lavish welfare states. And now, with the collapse of the Soviet Empire on the West's eastern border, Europeans feel they have entered a settled post-historic era where nations can settle differences through diplomacy and the merger of formerly separate bureaucracies. War is seen as an anachronism from Europe's monarchical, imperial, and machtpolitik past.

We Americans, on the other hand, have never felt more threatened. The attack on September 11, 2001, was the worst ever on our own soil. History is far from over for us. Neither Nazi Germany nor the Soviet Union ever struck such a blow against us at home. And because we are militarily powerful we are far more willing to use force than Europeans. Kagan quotes one European critic of America's policy who says 'When you have a hammer, all problems start to look like nails.' This is certainly true. Kagan's response: 'When you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like a nail.'

From Europe's perspective, that's the problem with Turkey. It's a nail.

Slashdot | Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor

In his recent Slashdot interview, Neal Stephenson divides writers into two camps: Beowulf writers, who write for "drunken Frisians" (the public), and Dante writers, who write for paying patrons (universities). Critics from the second camp don't understand writers from the first camp:

The relationship between that critical apparatus and Beowulf writers is famously awkward and leads to all sorts of peculiar misunderstandings. Occasionally I'll take a hit from a critic for being somehow arrogant or egomaniacal, which is difficult to understand from my point of view sitting here and just trying to write about whatever I find interesting. To begin with, it's not clear why they think I'm any more arrogant than anyone else who writes a book and actually expects that someone's going to read it. Secondly, I don't understand why they think that this is relevant enough to rate mention in a review. After all, if I'm going to eat at a restaurant, I don't care about the chef's personality flaws — I just want to eat good food. I was slagged for entitling my latest book 'The System of the World' by one critic who found that title arrogant. That criticism is simply wrong; the critic has completely misunderstood why I chose that title. Why on earth would anyone think it was arrogant? Well, on the Dante side of the bifurcation it's implicit that authority comes from the top down, and you need to get in the habit of deferring to people who are older and grander than you. In that world, apparently one must never select a grand-sounding title for one's book until one has reached Nobel Prize status. But on my side, if I'm trying to write a book about a bunch of historical figures who were consciously trying to understand and invent the System of the World, then this is an obvious choice for the title of the book. The same argument, I believe, explains why the accusation of having a big ego is considered relevant for inclusion in a book review. Considering the economic function of these reviews (explained above) it is worth pointing out which writers are and are not suited for participating in the somewhat hierarchical and political community of Dante writers. Egomaniacs would only create trouble.

Although I loathed his Snow Crash, he's a fascinating guy. Read the whole interview. (If you're a geek, you'll really enjoy his answer to In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?)

Two Nations in One

Two Nations in One cites Annie Sweeney of the Chicago Sun-Times on the "second" Iraq, the one we don't see on CNN:

On a Saturday afternoon in Iraq, between Baghdad and Camp Anaconda, the countryside looks a little like Wisconsin. There are farmers tilling fields and women walking on roads. Freight trains and major highways.

This wasn't exactly what I expected when I left for the war-ravaged country the first week of September. And initially, it made me feel lousy.
[...]
When I came back after three weeks, all everybody wanted to know was how scared I was.

Iraq was hot and smelly. It was dirty and dusty. Mortars sometimes boomed in the distance.

But I can't describe it as scary. I didn't see the hard-core stuff, and a lot of soldiers who live and work there don't, either.

Too Many Books?

I love the intro to Steve Landsburg's Too Many Books?:

This year's Man Booker Prize, Nobel Prize for Literature, and Pulitzer Prize for fiction have now all been awarded for works I will never read, and next month's National Book Award is certain to follow suit. Which causes me to wonder whether the world's got enough books already. I own hundreds of novels that I will never have the time to read. If these were the only copies on earth and a fire destroyed half of them, my life would not be signifcantly impoverished.

Of course, it's only amusing because he actually does love reading. Here's his real point:

The vast rewards that go to successful novelists can grossly overstate the social value of their work. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code has sold over 6 million copies and almost surely earned its author over $20 million. But if The Da Vinci Code hadn't been written, some other now-unnoticed book might have taken its place as the blockbuster of the year, and readers would have been almost as happy.

Writing a book is not like growing an orange. If you grow the best orange in the world, the second best orange still gets eaten. But if you write the best book in the world, the second best book loses a lot of readers. So the market price of an orange is an excellent reflection of its true social value, whereas the bulk of Dan Brown's $20 million is only an excellent reflection of what he was able to divert from some other author to himself.

Wise words on energy independence

Wise words on energy independence cites this ironic passage from Gideonsblog:

[I]f we increased fuel economy in modest ways, we could stop buying oil from the Persian Gulf. But we wouldn't stop buying oil from the Persian Gulf. We might even buy a greater percentage from there if we were more efficient — because if we consumed less oil, then the law of supply and demand should drive oil prices down, which in turn would mean a greater market share for the lowest-cost producer, which is Saudi Arabia. This is exactly what happened from the mid-1980s through the early 2000s: a collapse in oil prices led to greater demand on Persian Gulf oil specifically as more costly sources of supply stopped producing.

Status, Stress and Sex Ratios

Status, Stress and Sex Ratios opens with a few factoids:

The presidents of the United States have had, collectively, almost half again as many sons as daughters (148 to 102 if I've counted correctly). Far more strikingly — because the sample size is so much larger — the people listed in Who's Who have, collectively, about 15% more sons than daughters.

Humans have been polygynous through most of their (pre)history. Almost all women have children, and there's relatively little variation in the number of children they have. On the other hand, many men father no children (low-status men often have no access to women), while other men father dozens (high-status men can have access to dozens or even hundreds of women). Apparently, high-status women unconciously produce more sons to take advantage of this:

One suggestion from the biologists — and one that makes very good sense to an economist — is that a pregnant woman's body, in deciding how much to invest in nourishing the embryo, takes account of the parents' status and the embryos' sex. High status mothers give more nourishment to male embryos; low status mothers give more nourishment to female embryos; better nourished embryos are more likely to be born alive.

How can a process as involuntary as nourishing an embryo respond to conscious information like the status of the father? Well, how can a process as involuntary as sweating with fear respond to conscious information like the approach of a tiger? Clearly this kind of thing happens all the time. More fundamentally, decisions like how much to nourish your embryo are among the most important economic problems the body ever faces. Is it really plausible that the body would simply throw away highly relevant information when it's making a decision like that?

Four Myths About Social Security

Arnold Kling discusses Four Myths About Social Security. The first myth is that Social Security is a pension system. It's not, of course; there's no reserve accumulating interest in your name. That leads us to transition costs — and the Transition Cost Myth:

If Social Security were a pension, then the transition to private accounts would be simple. One day, at the stroke of a pen, the government would transfer the funds that had accumulated in your Social Security account into a personal private account, and the transition would be complete.

However, everyone who really understands Social Security knows that there are no funds accumulated in your Social Security account, or in anyone else's. Since Social Security cannot stop paying benefits, particularly for people already retired, there is a "gap." That is, if we reduce Social Security taxes on a young worker by $1000 in order to allow her to invest the money in her own account, then the government has to find another source for that $1000 in order to pay current retirees. Multiply this by hundreds of millions of taxpayers for a couple of decades.

In practice, the government would have to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars in order to fill this "gap." Opponents of private accounts call this the "transition cost" and flaunt this cost as a barrier to privatization. Senator Kerry used the term "catastrophe" to describe the transition cost.

The transition cost is a myth. In economic terms, the transition cost is zero.

From an economic perspective, the transition exchanges an off-balance sheet obligation of the government for an equal-value on-balance sheet obligation. It makes government accounting more honest, without changing the underlying debt structure.

When your Social Security taxes are reduced by $1000, the government will reduce its obligations to pay you Social Security by an equivalent amount. That is what partial privatization means — you have to take that $1000 and invest it yourself, because the government is reducing its future payments to you.

The crux of the problem is that government accountants ignore future Social Security payments; they don't count them as debt:

One way to eliminate the "transition cost" to partial privatization would be to first undertake a transition to better accounting. If the government were to put future Social Security obligations on its balance sheet as debt, then the accounting would be accurate. To borrow a locution from Warren Buffet, if promises to make Social Security payments are not a financial obligation of the government, then what are they? And if a financial obligation of the government is not debt, than what is it?

If unfunded liabilities to make future Social Security payments were counted as debt, then partial privatization would be nothing but a debt swap. The government would increase ordinary debt and reduce unfunded-liability debt by an equal amount. The transition cost would be zero.

Pasadena Star-News - Private prisons have public benefits

From Private prisons have public benefits by Alexander Tabarrok:

Texas houses about the same number of prisoners as does California, but the California taxpayer pays almost twice as much per inmate: around $30,000 per year, more than the cost of a decent college education.

If California prisons were unusually effective, the high cost might be acceptable. But with 300,000 prisoners packed into a system designed for only 170,000, it's a challenge simply to warehouse the prisoners, let alone provide effective programs for rehabilitation.

It's no surprise that private prisons cost less than public prisons. Private prisons also drive public prisons to keep their costs down:

Cost savings of 15 to 25 percent on construction and 10 to 15 percent on management are common. These are modest but significant cost savings in a $5.7 billion state system that continues to grow more expensive every year. [...] Perhaps moretellingly, from 1999 through 2001, states without any private prisons saw per-prisoner costs increase by 18.9 percent, but in states where the public prisons competed with private prisons, cost increases were much lower, only 8.1 percent.

Tabarrok makes the point that while, "The bad rap on private prisons has always been that cost-savings would come at the expense of quality," that's not the case:

Careful studies by the U.S. Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice and others indicate that if anything, private prisons are of higher quality than public prisons.

In fact, although prison privatization in the United States has been driven by cost savings, in Britain the driving motivation was higher quality, more humane prisons.

After studying the issue, the director general of Her Majesty's Prison Services concluded that the private prisons "are the most progressive in the country at controlling bullying, health care, and suicide prevention.'

2blowhards.com: Romeo, Juliet and Renaissance Urban Demographics

Romeo, Juliet and Renaissance Urban Demographics explains why gangs of young men rampaged through Renaissance Italian cities:

Based on very detailed information available from the Catasto, a combination tax assessment and census conducted in 1427, Professor Herlihy points out that the sex ratio between Florentine men and women aged 18 to 32 was 132:100. This is the kind of oversupply of men and undersupply of women that is normally found only in frontier towns. In the case of Renaisance Florence, this sex imbalance was the result of two causes. The first was a continuing immigration of ambitious young men from the countryside. The second was the tendency of Italian urban families to ship any unmarried daughters off to convents by the age of 15 or so, where they wouldn't need expensive dowries and were apparently beyond the reach of the census takers.

Added to the sex-ratio imbalance was the fact that urban males couldn�t get married until they could support a family. (This was the opposite of the situation in the Italian countryside, where you couldn�t start an independent life as a farmer without a hard-working wife.) And it took a long time to get established enough for a city-guy to contemplate marriage, if he ever made it to the altar at all. In Florence in 1427, only a quarter of men between the ages of 18 and 32 were either married or widowed. Married men didn't make up the majority of the masculine population until they reached their middle 30s. The average Florentine child was born to a 40-year-old father.

The Worst Jobs in Science: The Sequel

When you think of awful jobs, you tend to think of cleaning toilets or asking, "Would you like fries with that?" You think of the kinds of jobs you don't have to do once you have an education — but sometimes an advanced degree leads to a more disgusting job than anything in fast food or facilities maintenance. From The Worst Jobs in Science: The Sequel:

• Anal-Wart Researcher
• Worm Parasitologist
• Lab-Animal Veterinarian
• Tampon Squeezer
• Landfill Monitor
• K-25 Demolition Worker
• Ecologist at St. John�s Harbor
• Iraqi Archaeologist
• Tick Dragger
• Nurse
• Computer Help-Desk Tech
• Congressional Science Fellow
• Public-School Science Teacher
• Nosologist
• Root Sorter
• Crank
• Television Meteorologist

(Hat tip to Mercola's Health Blog.)

News Flash: Nobel Laureate Criticizes Bush Tax Cuts!

News Flash: Nobel Laureate Criticizes Bush Tax Cuts! explains how income and payroll taxes form a "tax wedge" that distorts labor markets.

This is how I was taught labor economics:

The traditional view looks at the elasticity of labor supply in terms of the choice between labor vs. leisure. That is, you either work longer, or you lie around watching TV and eating Bon-Bons. In that framework, if you get a higher wage, that makes working more profitable, but it also gives you more income, making leisure more attractive. These two effects more or less cancel one another out, it was thought, so that you do not increase labor supply very much in response to a higher wage.

This is how Nobel prize-winning economist Edward Prescott sees the labor market:

Prescott re-casts the trade-off as between "market time" and "non-market time." In addition to TV and Bon-Bons, you spend some of your non-market time producing goods and services, such as home-improvement projects, meals cooked at home, housework, and child care. Thinking of the choice in those terms, an increase in your wage rate could have a significant effect on your labor supply. The higher your wage rate, the more it makes sense for you to "outsource" household chores. If I can earn enough in six hours of work to pay for someone else to do eight hours of household chores, then I can get more hours for TV and Bon-Bons by increasing my "market time." Working six more hours but spending eight fewer hours on household chores gives me a net saving of two hours.

This use of market time to increase leisure time is an application of one of the most basic concepts in economics — comparative advantage. An accountant could put together the bookshelves that she just bought from Ikea, but her comparative advantage is using spreadsheets, not screwdrivers. She and the economy are better off if she does more work as an accountant and pays a professional to assemble her bookshelves.

Taxes, Deficits and War: the History Lessons

Taxes, Deficits and War: the History Lessons explains that our current regime is far from the first to pay for a war through borrowing (rather than an immediate tax hike):

America finances wars through borrowing. So does virtually every other modern nation. In fact, our modern financial markets were born in the various open-air auctions at which the debt instruments of warring nations were traded. Nations that were expected to lose wars had their bonds discounted by the marketplace and vice versa. Powerful banking interests such as the Rothschilds became very adept at quickly ascertaining real-time war news and using it to receive an edge in the marketplace. Debt in times of war is not an unusual aberration; it is universal.

Some financial insight:

As during the era of the Rothschilds, the danger signal is not that borrowing occurs, but that the marketplace begins to worry whether economic weakness or military defeat will harm the borrower's ability to repay. This can occur either in the form of outright default for the vanquished party or in the form of repayment in a debauched currency for the overstretched. What is the international marketplace saying about our borrowing? High degrees of confidence have caused them to lend to us at roughly 4%, the lowest rates in four decades.

Should we worry about passing along debt to our children? Not really:

Ronald Reagan ended a multi-generational threat through his military build-up in the 1980s. Soviet missiles are not pointed at us any longer. The collapse of the Soviets freed up enormous resources (remember the peace dividend?) which helped lay the foundation for the growth of the '90s. The generation following WWII reaped enormous benefits from the defeat of the Nazis. The generation following the demise of the Cold War reaped similar benefits from the demise of the Soviets.

Atavistic Socialism

Atavistic Socialism looks at Hayek's evolutionary take on culture and why he held that socialism was a primitive step back to our hunter intincts, not a scientific leap forward:

Hayek himself had little time for inevitability. He looked at human development with a more empirical mind, and observed that the human societies which prospered and survived were those which enabled certain institutions and practices to take firm root and be passed on to succeeding generations. Prominent among the cultural traditions which enabled this were things like respect for property rights, and a strong value placed upon family ties and loyalty. He included traditions such as those which encourage people to forgo present gratification in favour of greater future benefit.

Nobody thought this out, said Hayek. It was simply that the societies which respected and practised such things survived, while the other did not. New religions came and went through the ages, he observed. Those which incorporated values such as these might last, but the others would not. Hayek expressed the view that the 'false' religions which did not respect these values would be counted out, on average, after a few score years. The first generation adopted the new ways in the flush of enthusiasm; their children's loyalty to the ideas was weaker; and they would finally be abandoned during the third generation.

To the consternation of Socialists, Hayek treated Communism as if it were just another 'false' religion, albeit a seductive and deadly one. He conjectured that it would suffer the same fate as those other value systems which had run counter to the traditional values. His prescience was remarkable, for it was just over 70 years between the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the final collapse of its edifice just 15 years ago. Fortunately Hayek himself lived long enough to see his ideas vindicated, and saw Socialism, his lifelong enemy, predecease him.

The three sources of human values, according to Hayek:

In that lecture Hayek explained that from the first source came ideas which were genetically determined and innate. The second source was the product of rational thought, the ideas we think up. These two were relatively minor. The third, and by far the most important, came by cultural transmission, the ideas passed on by society.

Part of his thesis was that human beings had developed their inherited moral instincts as hunters. As they later developed an extended society, interacting and trading, they had to learn culturally to subjugate the inherited instincts to the wiser and more rewarding morality of what he called The Great Society.

Hayek told his rapt audience that the old values of the hunting band still had their allure, including the urge to share everything when value could not be stored. Even with all that modern society makes possible, we still feel the inherited urge that we have learned to subjugate to the transmitted rules which make more worthwhile goals possible. The groups which learned to do that were the ones which survived and prospered.

Members of the audience actually gasped when Hayek referred to Socialism as 'atavistic' — the reversion to an older, more primitive form. Many of the students were among those who thought that Socialism was modern and scientific, and could perhaps bring rational order to a chaotic and unjust world. Now here was Hayek equating it with a primitive instinct, inferior to the learned rules which had enabled human society to develop.

Indian Mounds Mystify Excavators

From Indian Mounds Mystify Excavators:

A thousand years ago along the banks of the Mississippi River, in what is currently southeast Illinois, there was a city that now mystifies both archeologists and anthropologists.

At its zenith, around A.D. 1050, the city that is now called Cahokia was among the largest metropolitan centers in the world. About 15,000 people lived in the city, with another 15,000 to 20,000 residing in its surrounding 'suburbs' and outlying farmlands. It was the region's capital city, a place of art, grand religious rituals and science.

But by 1300, the city had become a ghost town, its carefully built structures abandoned and its population dispersed.
[...]
Cahokia is not the historical name of this city; the current name comes from the native people who were living in the area when French explorers arrived in the early 1600s. The city's authentic name — the name given to it by its creators — is lost to time, as its residents did not appear to have a written language.

But what really puzzles archeologists and anthropologists is that there are no legends, no records, no mention whatsoever of the once-grand city in the lore of any of the tribes — Osage, Omaha, Ponca and Quapaw — that are believed to be the direct descendents of the city's builders.

This odd silence on the matter of Cahokia has led some experts to theorize that something particularly nasty happened there.

For Its Own Reasons, Singapore Is Getting Rather Gay-Friendly

One of my favorite quirky statistics is the high correlation between high-tech industry and gay population. I'd forgotten where I'd read about, but a quick web search on "technology correlation cities" brought up Technology and Tolerance: Diversity and High Tech Growth:

Perhaps our most striking finding is that a leading indicator of a metropolitan area's high-technology success is a large gay population. Frequently cited as a harbinger of redevelopment and gentrification in distressed urban neighborhoods, the presence of gays in a metro area signals a diverse and progressive environment and provides a barometer for a broad spectrum of amenities attractive to adults, especially those without children. To some extent, the gay and lesbian population represents what might be called the "last frontier" of diversity in our society. [...] In our statistical analyses, the gay index does better than other individual measures of social and cultural diversity as a predictor of high-tech location. The correlations are exceedingly high and consistently positive and significant. The results of a variety of multivariate regression analyses support this finding. The gay index is positively and significantly associated with the ability of a region both to attract talent and to generate high-tech industry.

It sounds like the social engineers in Singapore have read the research. From For Its Own Reasons, Singapore Is Getting Rather Gay-Friendly:

'Singapore's become much more tolerant and open,' says Sean Ho, surveying the raucous scene at the dance party. Mr. Ho, a 33-year-old information-technology consultant, was decked out in a T-shirt proclaiming 'Choose Sin' in large, red letters and 'gapore' in smaller print. 'They are giving us a lot more space,' he says.

The driving force behind this change appears to be economic. One consideration: reaping so-called pink dollars from gay tourists. The August dance party and related events, including plays and art exhibitions with gay themes, pulled in about 2,500 foreign visitors and about $6 million, according to event organizers.

Singapore's more relaxed attitude toward homosexuality is also part of a broader government strategy to transform the small former British colony into a creative, idea-driven economy. That, Singapore's leaders realize, will require some loosening up, as well as a serious effort to change the world's perception of Singapore as a rigid, authoritarian place.

Re-Inventing the Flu Vaccine

You may not realize how vaccines are made. From Re-Inventing the Flu Vaccine:

If ya wanna make a flu vaccine, ya gotta break a few eggs. Actually, over a million. The current 'hen oviduct bioreactor technology' (a.k.a., using eggs) takes up to nine months in its entirety. That means if health authorities goof in choosing the viral strains they think will be prevalent in the winter, or we have a flu-shot shortage like this year, it's too late to start a new batch. People get sick; people die.

When War Games Meet Video Games

I don't know how useful this is, but it sounds like a fun project. From When War Games Meet Video Games:

You'd hardly expect to find dozens of defense strategists setting aside two weeks at a time to play a video game. But then, Urban Resolve is no ordinary video game.

Developed by the U.S. Joint Forces Command, or JFCom, a division of the Department of Defense, the $195,000 program is a combat simulation on a massive scale. It pits two opposing teams of soldiers against one another in a fight for control over a city under siege, and it's capable of modeling the behavior of the nearly 1 million entities — the soldiers, civilians, cars, tanks and so on — that might exist in such a conflict.

In other words, it's one part Risk, one part The Sims and one part raw supercomputing power.

The New York Review of Books: Dreams of Empire

In Dreams of Empire, Tony Judt explores how "the world has changed in ways that make imperial power uniquely difficult to sustain":

In the first place, it is hard to be an imperial democracy. Given the choice, voters are reluctant to pay the full cost of sustaining an empire. In a democratic setting the sentiment that money might be better spent at home can be more easily exploited by political opponents, especially when expensive postwar "stabilization and reconstruction" (i.e., nation-building) is at stake. That is why US administrations have sought to underwrite overseas adventures (first in Vietnam and now in Iraq) by borrowing money rather than taxing the American citizenry, and have tried, so far as possible, to outsource — i.e., privatize — the unglamorous nation-building part.

Moreover, the US is handicapped when it comes to exporting the image of its own democratic virtues: because it has rather too many undemocratic allies (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan come to mind) and because America does not always regard democracy as an unalloyed virtue if it produces the wrong results. Open elections in Iraq or Palestine right now would produce outcomes wholly unwelcome in Washington, as they have done or threatened to do in other places at other times. The British and the French, not to mention the Russians, did not have this problem: whatever "values" they were exporting, universal suffrage was not one of them.

Secondly, it is almost impossible to practice empire in a world of instantaneous mass media transmission. Imperial control is violent. Colonization, as the Marquis de Gervaisis observed apropos of France's seizure of Algeria back in the 1830s, unavoidably entails "the expulsion and extermination of the natives." But most people at home in the imperial metropole never saw that. Not so today.

To watch crimes being enacted is very different from reading about them after the fact. That is why Bill Clinton was forced into the Balkans in 1995, once the images from Bosnia had become daily fare on American television. There is a good reason why Washington now "embeds" reporters and looks with disfavor upon the independent Qatar-based al-Jazeera television network (whose equipment we damaged in both Kabul and Baghdad and which the sovereign authorities in Iraq have now temporarily banned) — the same reason the Bush administration severely restricts visual coverage of American casualties in Iraq.

The crimes of Abu Ghraib were as nothing set against what King Leopold of Belgium did to his Congolese slave laborers or the British massacre of 379 civilians at Amritsar in the Punjab in 1919. The difference is that everyone has seen what happened at Abu Ghraib. We don't know how ordinary Belgians would have responded to seeing what their government was doing in central Africa; but in any case our own sensibilities are heightened. When the inevitable dirty work of exercising power over reluctant foreigners — expropriation, violence, corpses — is available in real time for all to see, the case for empire becomes a lot harder to sell.

Thirdly, the US cannot be an effective empire precisely because it comes in the wake of all the other empires before it and must pay the price for their missteps as well as its own. The French had been to Vietnam before the US got there. The Russians (and before them the British) have been to Afghanistan. And everyone has been to the Middle East. When Donald Rumsfeld assured his troops in Baghdad that

unlike many armies in the world, you came not to conquer, not to occupy, but to liberate, and the Iraqi people know this [emphasis added]

he was decidedly unoriginal. That's what the British General Stanley Maude said in Baghdad ninety-seven years earlier ("Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators") — not to mention Napoleon Bonaparte's proclamation upon occupying Alexandria in 1798:

Oh Egyptians...I have not come to you except for the purpose of restoring your rights from the hands of the oppressors.

The Ketchup Conundrum

For some time now, I've been wondering, Why is there no Grey Poupon of ketchup? Malcolm Gladwell's The Ketchup Conundrum answers exactly that question:

Many years ago, one mustard dominated the supermarket shelves: French�s. It came in a plastic bottle. People used it on hot dogs and bologna. It was a yellow mustard, made from ground white mustard seed with turmeric and vinegar, which gave it a mild, slightly metallic taste. If you looked hard in the grocery store, you might find something in the specialty-foods section called Grey Poupon, which was Dijon mustard, made from the more pungent brown mustard seed. In the early seventies, Grey Poupon was no more than a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year business. Few people knew what it was or how it tasted, or had any particular desire for an alternative to French�s or the runner-up, Gulden�s. Then one day the Heublein Company, which owned Grey Poupon, discovered something remarkable: if you gave people a mustard taste test, a significant number had only to try Grey Poupon once to switch from yellow mustard. In the food world that almost never happens; even among the most successful food brands, only about one in a hundred have that kind of conversion rate. Grey Poupon was magic.

So Heublein put Grey Poupon in a bigger glass jar, with an enamelled label and enough of a whiff of Frenchness to make it seem as if it were still being made in Europe (it was made in Hartford, Connecticut, from Canadian mustard seed and white wine). The company ran tasteful print ads in upscale food magazines. They put the mustard in little foil packets and distributed them with airplane meals--which was a brand-new idea at the time. Then they hired the Manhattan ad agency Lowe Marschalk to do something, on a modest budget, for television. The agency came back with an idea: A Rolls-Royce is driving down a country road. There�s a man in the back seat in a suit with a plate of beef on a silver tray. He nods to the chauffeur, who opens the glove compartment. Then comes what is known in the business as the "reveal." The chauffeur hands back a jar of Grey Poupon. Another Rolls-Royce pulls up alongside. A man leans his head out the window. "Pardon me. Would you have any Grey Poupon?"

In the cities where the ads ran, sales of Grey Poupon leaped forty to fifty per cent, and whenever Heublein bought airtime in new cities sales jumped by forty to fifty per cent again. Grocery stores put Grey Poupon next to French�s and Gulden�s. By the end of the nineteen-eighties Grey Poupon was the most powerful brand in mustard. "The tagline in the commercial was that this was one of life�s finer pleasures," Larry Elegant, who wrote the original Grey Poupon spot, says, "and that, along with the Rolls-Royce, seemed to impart to people�s minds that this was something truly different and superior."

The rise of Grey Poupon proved that the American supermarket shopper was willing to pay more--in this case, $3.99 instead of $1.49 for eight ounces--as long as what they were buying carried with it an air of sophistication and complex aromatics. Its success showed, furthermore, that the boundaries of taste and custom were not fixed: that just because mustard had always been yellow didn�t mean that consumers would use only yellow mustard. It is because of Grey Poupon that the standard American supermarket today has an entire mustard section. And it is because of Grey Poupon that a man named Jim Wigon decided, four years ago, to enter the ketchup business. Isn�t the ketchup business today exactly where mustard was thirty years ago? There is Heinz and, far behind, Hunt�s and Del Monte and a handful of private-label brands. Jim Wigon wanted to create the Grey Poupon of ketchup.

Seriously, read the whole article.

The Language Police

I've been meaning to read Diane Ravitch's The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, but it might just make me angry. From the Times Literary Supplement:

Ravitch's discovery of textbook censorship began when she was appointed by the Clinton administration to the National Assessment Governing Board, a non-partisan federal agency charged to develop a voluntary national proficiency test. The Board began gathering material from literature and history for a fourth-grade national test. But no sooner had they compiled this material than it was handed over for review to a "sensitivity committee", a group with backgrounds in counselling, diversity training, guidance, bilingual education, and so forth. The committee flagged many seemingly innocuous passages gathered by the Board as potentially offensive or biased: an essay on peanuts because some children are allergic to peanuts; a biography of the designer of the Mount Rushmore monument because the site is considered sacred by some Native Americans; a legend about dolphins because it reflects a regional bias against children who don't live near the sea; an inspirational story about a blind mountain climber because it suggests that a blind person might find it harder to climb a mountain than a sighted one. The examples go on. Even Aesop's fable, "The Fox and the Crow", was flagged as sexist because a male fox flatters a female crow; to gain approval, the gender of the animals had to be changed. The review committee also gave the Board a list of topics to be avoided. These included abortion, evolution, expensive consumer goods, magic, personal appearance, politics, religion, unemployment, unsafe situations, weapons and violence — among others.

This sounds good though:

Perhaps the best alternative to bad textbooks is no textbooks. The Language Police has an appendix containing a list of primary readings for grades three to ten.

Better Playing Through Chemistry

Beta blockers are drugs that block the effects of adrenaline — increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, etc. — and, for that reason, they're often prescribed after heart attacks.

But they're also, oddly enough, performance-enhancing drugs — for certain kinds of sport:

Speaking from the Athens Olympics in August, Steven Ungerleider, a sports psychologist and the author of 'Faust's Gold,' said that beta-blocking medications are prohibited for some events, like riflery, in which competitors use the drug to slow the pulse so that they can fire between heartbeats to avoid a jolt.

I first heard about beta-blockers as performance-enhancing drugs for the biathlon, that peculiar mix of cross-country skiing (a cardio-intensive aerobic event) and rifle shooting (which requires calm, steady aim).

Now it turns out that musicians are relying on beta-blockers to tame their stage fright — and more. From Better Playing Through Chemistry:

Indeed, the effect of the drugs does seem magical. Beta blockers don't merely calm musicians; they actually seem to improve their performances on a technical level. In the late 1970's, Charles Brantigan, a vascular surgeon in Denver, began researching classical musicians' use of Inderal. By replicating performance conditions in studies at the Juilliard School and the Eastman School in Rochester, he showed that the drug not only lowered heart rates and blood pressure but also led to performances that musical judges deemed superior to those fueled with a placebo. In 1980, Dr. Brantigan, who plays tuba with the Denver Brass, sent his findings to Kenneth Mirkin, a frustrated Juilliard student who had written to him for help.

"I was the kid who had always sat last-chair viola," said Mr. Mirkin, whose bow bounced from audition nerves. Two years later, he won a spot in the New York Philharmonic, where he has played for 22 years. "I never would have had a career in music without Inderal," said Mr. Mirkin, who, an hour before his tryout, took 10 milligrams.

Digital Cameras Appropriated for Automobile Safety - Help Deter Distracted Drivers

While using a "cell phone while driving can increase chances of an accident by 400 percent," new digital-camera technology may reduce the risk of such distractions. From Digital Cameras Appropriated for Automobile Safety - Help Deter Distracted Drivers:

Digital cameras are now being used in cars to keep drivers awake and less distracted. The cameras are used as part of the automotive vision system; some cameras scan drivers� eye movements to detect where the driver is looking, while others watch the road for animals or pedestrians. If a pedestrian crosses the street in front of a car with the automotive vision system, the digital cameras will see the person and scan the driver�s eyes to check for alertness. If the driver is not paying attention, an alarm will alert the driver. According to a study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, about 25 percent of all automobile accidents and 68 percent of rear-end crashes are caused by distracted drivers.

Yahoo! News - Caesarean Birth May Raise Allergy Risk in Babies

An interesting factoid from Yahoo! News - Caesarean Birth May Raise Allergy Risk in Babies:

Researchers at the Children's Hospital at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich found the babies delivered by Caesarean section were twice as likely to be sensitive to cow's milk and other food allergens than infants born naturally.

The researchers suspect that in babies born by Caesarean section the colonisation of natural bacteria in the gut which promotes health and plays an important role in the immune system response is delayed or altered by a Caesarean birth.

Science Fiction Weekly Interview

Modern fantasy is largely derivative of J.R.R. Tolkien. This Science Fiction Weekly Interview with Michael Moorcock harks back to when he was the other fantasy writer:

I've noticed I don't read a lot of fantasy — I never did. I just started writing it. I just happened to have the facility. Pretty much all the other stuff in that form has been published since I started writing it. So I'm not particularly interested in it as a genre. I didn't start writing it because there was a big genre out there to write into. There was me and Tolkien. Basically, at the beginning, me and Tolkien were selling about the same, which was very, very few. Tolkien was regarded as just another writer, like [Mervyn] Peake, who had an enthusiastic following, but wasn't in any way mainstream or likely to take off.
[...]
In a sense, I started writing Elric as much in contrast to Tolkien as I was writing it in contrast to Conan. I didn't like Tolkien because it had a fairy-story quality. It didn't have what I would regard as a properly tragic quality. It was too sentimental for my taste. I'm attracted to lyrical, romantic, tragic kind of stuff, rather than the five-people-solve-a-problem-together, which is essentially the Tolkien formula. It's the formula which most people prefer. It's the one that goes into RPG games and stuff like that. I'm writing about alienated individuals who are fundamentally solitary, who don't really want do an awful lot with other people. And again, it's my own experience. I pretty much brought myself up, and I pretty much looked after myself on my own feet from a very early age. I was earning my own living from the age of 15. I don't think in terms of five friends getting together to solve a problem.

Good Bad Attitude

In Good Bad Attitude, Paul Graham explores the American nature of the "hacker" attitude:

There is something very American about Feynman breaking into safes during the Manhattan Project. It's hard to imagine the authorities having a sense of humor about such things over in Germany at that time. Maybe it's not a coincidence.

Hackers are unruly. That is the essence of hacking. And it is also the essence of American-ness. It is no accident that Silicon Valley is in America, and not France, or Germany, or England, or Japan. In those countries, people color inside the lines.

I lived for a while in Florence. But after I'd been there a few months I realized that what I'd been unconsciously hoping to find there was back in the place I'd just left. The reason Florence is famous is that in 1450, it was New York. In 1450 it was filled with the kind of turbulent and ambitious people you find now in America. (So I went back to America.)

Vioxx, We Hardly Knew Ye

I can remember my father saying that glass would never be approved as a building material if it were introduced today. Vioxx, We Hardly Knew Ye makes a similar case about aspirin:

No other anti-arthritis drug, including aspirin and the older NSAIDs, have been studied over the length of time that Vioxx has been. Even aspirin would not be approved for human use if it had to pass FDA evaluation today, due to its propensity for inducing GI bleeding, allergic reactions, and blood thinning. Indeed, while critics accuse the FDA of being lax, the opposite is true: getting an innovative, life-saving pharmaceutical to market in the US is an incredibly daunting, time-consuming and expensive endeavor.

The Drug War

The Drug War talks about the war on prescription drugs:

As a myopic consumer, I'm all for beating up on the drug companies and forcing them to lower their prices — in the short term. But as an economist trained to appreciate scarcity and the need to finance research and development, the public pillaring of the drug companies gives me lots of pause.

Yes, drugs are expensive. But so are lots of goods and services. Where I live, three bedroom homes cost an outrageous amount. Gasoline has gone through the roof. College tuition is stratospheric. And consuming double espresso latte frappe mocha grande supremos or whatever they call a cup of coffee at Starbucks can bust your budget in no time flat.

Funny, isn't it, that no one is accusing Starbucks of price gouging even though millions of Americans are addicted to the place and can't afford it. But who knows, Starbucks may be next on the hit list, particularly if Senator Lott's mom is a Frappucino junkie.

The drug companies get our gall because their products are so tiny, yet still cost so much. Take the new purple pill, Nexium. Each pill costs roughly 6 bucks. At one level, this just seems amazing. But spend a day suffering with acid reflux, and you'll view it as a bargain. Also think of the millions upon millions of dollars that went into researching, developing, testing, and marketing those little purple pills and all the other little pills that didn't pan out or, like the arthritis drug Vioxx, were introduced to the market only to be recalled.

Of course no one is forced to buy coffee, let alone coffee from Starbucks, whereas we all need to fill our prescriptions. And for those drugs that we buy that are still protected by patents, there aren't a lot of substitutes. Consequently, drug companies are free to charge what the market will bear, which is typically a high price. Is this immoral? No, it's exactly what we established our patent system to produce. We want drug companies to charge high prices and reap high profits from new drugs that they discover and/or help bring to market so they'll have the incentive to keep developing new medications. We also want the business to be profitable so that the industry will experience lots of new entry.

This argument won't make any sense to people who don't "get" capitalism:

Dr. Angell would have us believe this virtue is a vice. In a nutshell, she claims the drug companies are super profitable, don't spend enough on R&D, waste money on marketing and advertising, don't generate enough new discoveries, and free-ride on government research support. Rather than debate these dubious propositions, let's assume, for argument's sake, that they are all true. In this case, Dr. Angell should set up a new drug company or engineer the buyout of an existing company. With her new company, she can choose to spend more on R&D, make more discoveries, bring more drugs to market, cut back, if not eliminate, marketing and advertising, benefit from government research support, and end up with higher profits than current drug companies. That's the nice thing about an open market. You're free to invest your time and money where your mouth is.

As far as I know, Dr. Angell is not setting up her own drug company. Nor are new entrants to the drug industry popping up every day. Nor is there a plethora of pending takeovers of existing drug companies. These facts suggest that the market is properly pricing these companies, that the risk-adjusted expected return available to pharmaceuticals on marginal investments is not supernormal, and that the industry isn't acting stupidly when it comes to deciding how much to spend on R&D, marketing, advertising, etc.

Yahoo! News - Raimi's 'Spider-Man' Thrills Turn to 'Grudge' Chills

This Friday, Sam Raimi's The Grudge, based on the Japanese film series by Takashi Shimizu and starring Sarah Michelle Gellar (of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer), comes out. From Yahoo! News - Raimi's 'Spider-Man' Thrills Turn to 'Grudge' Chills:

It was produced by Raimi as the first release from Ghost House Pictures, which he formed with long-time partner Rob Tapert to bring horror films to U.S. audiences.

Although best known for directing the two 'Spider-Man' movies that combined for nearly $1.6 billion in global ticket sales, Raimi's early career centered on horror movies with titles like 'The Evil Dead.'

Sam Raimi's best known for directing Spider-Man? And his Evil Dead movies are just a footnote? Wow.

An Ownership Society with Opportunity Through Tax Loans

Just the other day, I was asking why there's little or no discussion of giving out loans rather than subsidies or grants for education, unemployement, welfare, etc. Why subsidize a university education when the problem isn't that the student has no money; it's that the student has no money yet? And why give free money to someone who's fallen on hard times — with the obvious incentive to partake of that free money — when it's clearly supposed to be a temporary problem?

In An Ownership Society with Opportunity Through Tax Loans, Tom Grey, senior advisor to the F. A. Hayek Foundation in Slovakia, discusses loans enforced via the tax system:

Politicians are drug pushers, voters are drug addicts, and the drug of choice is OPM — Other People's Money. Free money. Money from the government. Politicians say there's always more available: more for education, for retirement, for housing, for health care. Political signs say 'vote for me' but mean 'I'll give you more cash.' This addictive behavior is explained by the Two Things of Economics:

1. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
2. Incentives matter.

Voters know that somebody has to pay — their big incentive is to have the state pay, to use Other People's Money. Taxpayers know it is urgent to kick this habit, but how? Yes, cutting taxes, cutting the supply of money to the treasury. But while cutting taxes is popular, the more difficult need is to reduce demand. Americans, Slovaks, the entire democratic world, need a policy to reduce the demand for more state cash. What's needed is a demand reduction program, starting with higher education.

The government should give people loans instead of grants. One's loans are repaid by one's own future money. Loan money is your own money, but shifted in time. When a borrower accepts a state loan, taxes paid would be loan repayments — hence Tax Loan — with an extra loan repayment surcharges. The loan provides the opportunity, the taxes plus surcharge repays the loan, and the surcharge provides the demand reduction.

Tax Loans solve the financing problem for poor people, replacing Robin Hood's gifts to the poor. Paying for higher education is a big expense everywhere. Students often don't have the money or opportunity to buy the best education. The usual solution has been some state transfers to Universities, allowing admission of students who pay little or no tuition (especially children of the elite). Instead, that same amount of money should be distributed through individual Tax Loans, to the same students. Tax Loans could be much larger than the current Federal Loan programs, while using taxes to repay the loans increases the transparency, and reduces default.

Investing in an education then emulates business investment cycle — borrow money, invest, and repay through that famous return on investment. The contractual agreement would specify how much money is borrowed, and how it is to be repaid. Just like a real loan. Students who take out Tax Loans become investors in their own human capital, owners of their own education.

Are you down with OPM? (Yeah, you know me!)

Forbes.com - Regulatory Overdose

Regulatory Overdose looks at some of Alex Tabarrok's (and Dan Klein's) suggestions for improving FDA regulations — largely by reducing them, of course:

There's an odd contradiction in the current FDA regime: Before marketing a drug, a company must spend years proving it's effective for a particular condition. Yet once the FDA approves a drug for a single 'on-label' use, doctors are free to prescribe it for any other malady, whether closely related or not. Such off-label use is now common, with studies finding most cancer, AIDS and pediatric patients receive off-label prescriptions. 'Off-label is almost the rule, not the exception, in this country,' says Dr. Lawrence Reed, a Manhattan plastic surgeon.

Fans of the nanny state might prefer to bar the use of drugs for any patients or purposes the FDA hasn't approved. But George Mason University economist Alexander Tabarrok has a different idea: Abolish FDA-required efficacy testing altogether. Such testing is a big reason it typically takes 10 to 15 years from the time a new drug is discovered until the FDA approves it for sale. In Phase I trials a company studies how a drug moves through the body and its safety for human use. Then a drug enters Phase II and Phase III trials, which typically take years and focus on efficacy as well as safety. The long wait can cost lives and runs up new-drug costs — to an estimated $900 million per successful drug.

Tabarrok says this system makes little sense; the FDA demands costly, time-consuming efficacy tests for some uses and no tests for others. And while the FDA allows off-label prescribing by docs, it strictly limits the drugmakers' promotion of such uses to doctors and permits none at all to patients.

Some other suggestions:

Of course, drugs aren't simply safe or unsafe; all have side effects. If a drug is effective enough, even substantial side effects may be acceptable, while with minimal or no effectiveness they wouldn't be. The present system gives a drug a green or red light after a combined review of safety and efficacy. Patients might be better off with a system that scored a drug on each attribute and let the doctor and patient make the final decision.

While Tabarrok's proposal is radical, a recent survey of 500 doctors he carried out with Santa Clara University economist Daniel Klein revealed that 27% backed the idea. Another 15% were undecided. By contrast, just 2% favored banning off-label prescribing.

Tabarrok and Klein also offer some alternative proposals at FDAReview.org. One is to make all FDA testing optional. Drugs that didn't go through the process would be labeled "Not FDA Approved." Under this approach, they say, "the FDA would become a genuinely voluntary institution, much like Underwriters Laboratories." Another idea is for the FDA to award letter grades, A to D, to claims made by drugmakers, much as it is considering doing for health claims for foods and dietary supplements. The FDA could still have its say, but wouldn't be able to impose long delays, since a new drug could be marketed at first as "unrated."

At the least, Tabarrok argues, the FDA should permit drug companies to sell any drug that has been approved by other sophisticated drug regulators, such as those in Canada, Australia or the European Union. Under such a system U.S. patients would get speedier access to new medicines without losing out on safety protection.

And why isn't big pharma fighting for these changes?

Tabarrok's cynical view is that big pharma companies like the status quo because it drives up costs, thus forcing many entrants to sell off their discoveries to established drug companies.

Boing Boing: Live-action women's Dungeons and Dragons show

I'm not sure what to say. From Boing Boing: Live-action women's Dungeons and Dragons show:

Dungeon Majesty is a cable-access TV show in which four young women play Dungeons and Dragons — the show is intercut with Z-grade green-screen masks of them staging D&D fights in front of fakey caves or deep in spooky woods, and illustrated with flip-book animations fo D&D monsters drawn in pen on lined paper. This is really fantastic stuff — it's got nerd pride to burn, and production values that make MST3K look slick.

Enjoy the teaser video.

The New Yorker: Northern Lights

In Northern Lights, David Denby explores "how modern life emerged from eighteenth-century Edinburgh," while reviewing James Buchan's Crowded with Genius:

Edinburgh in the early eighteenth century, Buchan says, �looked and smelled like a medieval city.�

It was an inauspicious place for intellectual revolution. Yet there were long-standing institutions of true distinction in Edinburgh, including the printing presses and the university. And Scottish Protestantism, however sour and intrusive, was a revolutionary force. John Knox, the brimstone-tempered Scot who founded the Presbyterian movement in the sixteenth century, had insisted on universal literacy; worshippers were expected to read the Bible and enter into intense communion with God on their own. Every congregation had its school, its local library, its contentious readers. And those who were well educated were extraordinarily well educated. Scotland had long maintained close ties to universities in Holland and France, and the scholars returning from Leiden or the Sorbonne were up to date on European intellectual currents in a way that men at Cambridge and Oxford often were not.

The tie with England was fraught with ambiguous tensions and dependencies, but, in the end, the economic benefits were real. The country�s political union with England, in 1707, may have occasioned resentment and nationalist nostalgia, but it gave Scotland access to world markets dominated by the British Empire. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Edinburgh had become prosperous from foreign trade.

Thailand: Bird Flu Killed 23 Tigers

I don't mind a flu-vaccine shortage so much, but I may be in the market for a bird-flu vaccine. From Thailand: Bird Flu Killed 23 Tigers:

Twenty-three tigers have died from bird flu at a private zoo in Thailand after being fed the carcasses of chickens infected with the disease, a government official said Tuesday.

The tigers had been dying at the Sriracha Tiger Zoo in central Chonburi province since Sept. 14, said Charal Trinvuthipong, director of the Bird Flu Prevention and Elimination Center. The animal park was forced to close its doors to the public while authorities investigated.

"We've discovered that all 23 dead tigers had bird flu," he said. "We've found that another 30 tigers are sick. We believe that the tigers contracted bird flu because they ate chicken carcasses, and we believe the carcasses had bird flu."

Note to self: no more raw chicken.