The Nature of Normal Human Variety

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2005

Armand Leroi discusses The Nature of Normal Human Variety:

After the Second World War, when the enormities of Nazi science really hit home — which were in turn the consequence of a much larger racial science, not just in Germany, but everywhere — all right-thinking scientists made a resolute effort to ensure that science would not be bent to such evil purposes again. They were determined that science would never again be used to make invidious discriminations among people. The immediate result of this was the UNESCO Declaration on Race in 1950, fronted by Ashley Montagu and backed up by geneticists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky which affirmed the equality of races. Then, in the 1960s, Dick Lewontin and others discovered that gel electrophoresis could be used to survey genetic variation among proteins. These studies showed that humans have a huge amount of concealed genetic variation. What is more, most of that genetic variation existed within continents or even countries rather than among them. UNESCO said races were equal; the new genetics said they didn’t exist. Finally, moving a few decades on, the Out-of-Africa hypothesis of the origin of Homo sapiens comes to the fore, and multi-regionalism falls from fashion as it becomes clear that humans are not only a single species — something which we’ve known since Linnaeus’ day — but a single species that has only diverged into sub-populations very recently.

The result of this history — which has been partly driven by data, and partly by ideology — is that these days anthropologists and geneticists overwhelmingly emphasise the similarities among people from different parts of the world at the expense of the differences. From a political point of view I have no doubt that’s a fine thing. But I suggest that it’s time that we grew up. I would like to suggest that actually by emphasizing the similarities but ignoring the differences, we are turning away from one of the most beautiful problems that modern biology has left: namely, what is the genetic basis of the normal variety of differences between us? What gives a Han Chinese child the curve of her eye? The curve I read once described by an eminent Sinologist as the purest of all curves. What is the source of that curve? And what gives a Solomon Islander his black-verging-on-purple skin?
[...]
The reason I love the problem of normal human variety is because, almost uniquely among modern scientific problems, it is a problem that we can apprehend as we walk down the street.

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What Steroids and Schiavo Have in Common

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2005

What Steroids and Schiavo Have in Common:

When you’re a lawmaker, apparently, every problem seems to cry out for a law.

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The Myth of Massive Health Care Waste

Monday, March 21st, 2005

In The Myth of Massive Health Care Waste, Arnold Kling rounds up “the usual suspects” for high health care spending (in the US):

  • spending in the last year of life
  • drug company profits and advertising
  • administrative overhead

The first point seemed perfectly plausible to me, but it’s not a large effect:

An urban legend has it that close to half of all health care spending comes in the last year of life. The facts are somewhat different. The most thorough study, by Donald Hoover, et al, finds that 27 percent of Medicare spending takes place during the last year of life.

Overall, 22 percent of health care spending on people over 65 takes place in the last year of life. However, only 1/3 of U.S. health care spending is for people 65 and older. Thus, as a percentage of overall U.S. health care spending, spending on the last year of life amounts to about 7 percent. That is high, but not staggering.

Big Pharma isn’t to blame either:

Another usual suspect is the evil pharmaceutical industry. However, total profits of pharmaceutical companies are about one-half of one percent of GDP. In the short run, stringent price regulation could reduce health care spending by perhaps one or two tenths of one percent of GDP. The long run effects of reducing the incentive to develop pharmaceuticals could be adverse, because pharmaceuticals often substitute for more expensive therapies.

An economist’s point of view on why Canadian health care spends less on administration:

In a fee-for-service system as in the United States, physicians have an incentive to spend their time doing procedures. They will want to off-load as much paperwork as possible to clerical staff. In a different health care system, where physicians are paid something more like a flat salary, two factors are at play. One is that there is less paperwork, which is good. The other factor, however, is that physicians have less incentive to offload paperwork, because spending time doing administrative work themselves will not lower their incomes. More administrative workers could be a symptom of more paperwork, or a more efficient system for handling paperwork, or both.

The real culprits, according to Kling, are physician compensation and the utilization of high-tech procedures, both of which are higher in the US than elsewhere — and both of which likely bring benefits, not just costs.

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Give nukes a chance

Monday, March 21st, 2005

From Give nukes a chance:

”The only thing a country can do with nuclear weapons is use them for a deterrent,” Waltz told me. ”And that makes for internal stability, that makes for peace, and that makes for cautious behavior.”

Especially in a unipolar world, argues Waltz, the possession of nuclear deterrents by smaller nations can check the disruptive ambitions of a reckless superpower. As a result, in words Waltz wrote 10 years ago and has been reiterating ever since, ”The gradual spread of nuclear weapons is more to be welcomed than feared.”

Waltz is not a crank. He is not a member of an apocalyptic death cult. He is perhaps the leading living theorist of the foreign policy realists, a school that sees world politics as an unending, amoral contest between states driven by the will to power. His 1959 book, ”Man, the State, and War,” remains one of the most influential 20th-century works on international relations.

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The Failure of the War on Drugs

Monday, March 21st, 2005

Gary Becker discusses The Failure of the War on Drugs:

After totaling all spending, a study by Kevin Murphy, Steve Cicala, and myself estimates that the war on drugs is costing the US one way or another well over $100 billion per year. These estimates do not include important intangible costs, such as the destructive effects on many inner city neighborhoods, the use of the American military to fight drug lords and farmers in Colombia and other nations, or the corrupting influence of drugs on many governments.

Assuming an interest in reducing drug consumption — I will pay little attention here to whether that is a good goal — is there a better way to do that than by these unsuccessful wars? Our study suggests that legalization of drugs combined with an excise tax on consumption would be a far cheaper and more effective way to reduce drug use. Instead of a war, one could have, for example, a 200% tax on the legal use of drugs by all adults — consumption by say persons under age 18 would still be illegal. That would reduce consumption in the same way as the present war, and would also increase total spending on drugs, as in the current system.

But the similarities end at that point. The tax revenue from drugs would accrue to state and federal authorities, rather than being dissipated into the real cost involving police, imprisonment, dangerous qualities, and the like. Instead of drug cartels, there would be legal companies involved in production and distribution of drugs of reliable quality, as happened after the prohibition of alcohol ended. There would be no destruction of poor neighborhoods — so no material for “the Wire” HBO series, or the movie “Traffic” — no corruption of Afghani or Columbian governments, and no large scale imprisonment of African-American and other drug suppliers. The tax revenue to various governments hopefully would substitute for other taxes, or would be used for educating young people about any dangersous effects of drugs.

As Arnold Kling points out in his EconLog, “a tariff creates revenue for the government, while a quota creates rents for sellers.”

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The poor are not the problem but the solution – an exclusive interview with Hernando de Soto

Sunday, March 20th, 2005

In The poor are not the problem but the solution, Hernando de Soto explains that much of the economy in non-Western societies is extralegal:

When I was working in the Middle East, there was an entrepreneur that I got to known so well that I could ask him about corruption and pay-offs — ?baksheesh? is the local word. He explained: ?I love baksheesh because it gives me certainty and predictability.? They change the law continually. We have calculated that the government brings out about 30.000 new rules every year. None of these is enacted in a transparent manner, with public participation. The result is that the law is totally unpredictable and only serves the powerful and those who have the means to remain informed. So, from this point of view, ?baksheesh? gives a kind of predictability. All the entrepreneur had to do was pay-off five key policemen either near his workplace, or where he made his transactions. And he knew what his outcome would be.

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Will Wright Presents Spore… and a New Way to Think About Games

Sunday, March 20th, 2005

Will Wright is famous for creating The Sims and, before that, SimCity. His experience with The Sims has led him to move toward user-created content. From Will Wright Presents Spore… and a New Way to Think About Games:

Wright opened his presentation by explaining how he’s seeing firsthand how budgets are going up. For Sims 2, the characters had over 22,000 separate animations. All of those were done by hand by an army of animators. Modern games demand more and more content.

At the same time, what he calls the ‘value to gamers’ levels off after a while. A game with 22,000 animations isn’t twice as good as a game with 11,000 animations. But fortunately, Wright learned another lesson from The Sims: People love to make their own content. They love to customize their experience. By way of example, he put up a slide showing his Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas character — who wore a fedora and red-heart boxer shorts. His character was ridiculous-looking, but it made the experience custom for him. Players get a huge value out of content they make for themselves.

‘Owning’ the content in this way means that all the stories that the gamer creates are much more meaningful.

Putting two and two together, Wright concluded that there had to be some way where users could create content, instead of armies of developers, and a way to make a game craft itself around the user’s contribution.

I’d never heard of this “demo scene”:

For inspiration, Wright looked to the “demo scene,” a group of (mostly European) coders who specialized in doing a whole lot with a little bit of code. Their procedural programming methods were able to, for example, fit an entire 3D game in 64K, using mathematics to generate textures and music, etc. “I just found this incredibly exciting,” Wright confesses, describing the kinds of work that he saw come out of the demo scene.

His Spore game concept sounds a lot like an idea I was playing with (but did nothing about) maybe ten years ago:

Clicking on the egg brought up a creature editor, and allowed the player to “evolve” with a new generation of critters. The editor was amazingly flexible. Wright could give his creature extra vertebrae, he could give it fins or tails to move faster, he could add claws or extra mouths, whatever he wanted. More importantly, all the creature animations weren’t hard-coded; they were dynamic. If he put six tails on his creature, the game would figure out how a six-tailed creature would move. The critter was completely his.

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The New York Times > Toward a Unified Theory of Black America

Sunday, March 20th, 2005

Toward a Unified Theory of Black America tells the story of Roland G. Fryer Jr., a 27-year-old assistant professor of economics at Harvard — who happens to be black. Naturally, this allows him the liberty to tackle racial issues — including some unusual theories:

Fryer’s notion that there might be a genetic predisposition at work was heightened when he came across a period illustration that seemed to show a slave trader in Africa licking the face of a prospective slave. The ocean voyage from Africa to America was so gruesome that as many as 15 percent of the Africans died en route, mainly from illnesses that led to dehydration. A person with a higher capacity for salt retention might also retain more water and thus increase his chance of surviving.

So it may have been that a slave trader would try to select, with a lick to the cheek, the ”saltier” Africans. Whether selected by the slavers or by nature, the Africans who did manage to survive the voyage — and who then formed the gene pool of modern African-Americans — may have been disproportionately marked by hypertension.

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My Borg Pony

Sunday, March 20th, 2005

Boing Boing points to a number of peculiar toys, including My Borg Pony.

Certainly, My Borg Pony is funny, but I also enjoyed The Cubes: Create a corporate labyrinth!

Things are changing in upper management. There’s a new boss in charge: you. That means you control the fate of Bob. Will you make his job satisfying, boring or unbearable? Will he be your lackey, your fall guy or your best pal? It’s all up to you, because in this office, you’re the boss. Each set has one 2-3/4″ posable plastic figure and all the necessary plastic parts to build a classic corporate cube: four walls, desk, chair, file cabinet, in/out box, phone, and computer. Comes with a sticker sheet of decor for your cube, complete with graphs, charts, screens for the computer and pithy office posters. Also includes a job title sticker sheet so you can create a convoluted and meaningless position for your employee.

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Capitalism & slavery

Sunday, March 20th, 2005

Donald J. Boudreaux, chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University, opens Capitalism & slavery with a few economic fallacies:

Wrongheaded notions about the economy are always in high supply. Most calamitous was the idea that central planning outperforms the market. The pulverizing poverty and tyranny of the former Soviet Union, North Korea, and similar Workers’ Paradises have ended that particular illusion.

Other less disastrous but equally mistaken notions about the economy remain on the loose — for example, that tariffs promote prosperity.

But the most far-fetched myth that I’ve encountered recently is that the wealth of the modern Western world, especially that of the United States, is the product of slavery.

His story:

I first encountered this notion during a talk I gave in Toronto. I explained to the college-age audience how extraordinarily wealthy all of us are today compared to our preindustrial ancestors. I wanted them to understand the great benefits of capitalism. During the Q-&-A session, a young woman informed me that the wealth we enjoy today is the product of slavery.

At first I thought she was speaking figuratively, as in “workers under capitalism really are slaves.” Having heard such an argument before, I was half-expecting it. But no. What she meant is that the modern world’s prosperity is the product of the pre-20th-century enslavement of Africans in the Americas.

“But slavery ended in the United States in 1863!” I responded. “Look at all the wealth produced since then — telephones, automobiles, antibiotics, computers. None was built with slave labor.”

She anticipated my response. “Not directly. But the capital that made these innovations possible was extracted from slave labor. The wealth accumulated by slaveholders is what financed the industrialization that makes today’s wealth possible.”

I looked at her in raw disbelief. (Not a good strategy, by the way, for a public speaker.)

Collecting my thoughts, I pointed out that slavery had been an ever-present institution throughout human history until just about 200 years ago. Why didn’t slaveholders of 2,000 years ago in Europe or 500 years ago in Asia accumulate wealth that triggered economic growth comparable to ours? Why is Latin America so much poorer today than the United States, given that the Spaniards and Portuguese who settled that part of the world were enthusiastic slavers? Indeed, the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery was Brazil — in 1888, a quarter-century after U.S. abolition. By American and western European standards, Brazil remains impoverished.

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Felonious Funk

Saturday, March 19th, 2005

According to Glenn Harlan Reynolds, we’re in a Felonious Funk:

Felonies were once a fairly rare class of crime, a class that generally carried capital punishment as a more-than-theoretical possibility. A felon was, by virtue of his heinous acts, an outcast from society. Even if permitted to live, he was expected to bear the mark of his iniquity for life, in the form of lost civil rights like the right to vote and the right to bear arms. To be a felon was to be a permanent outcast within one’s own society.

But felonies aren’t so few anymore. New felonies are being created all the time, often for activity that seems, morally, not terribly awful. [...] Where once “felony” meant things like murder, rape, or armed robbery, now it includes things like music piracy, or filling in potholes that turn out to be “wetlands.” As the title to a recent book edited by Gene Healy notes, we’ve achieved the criminalization of almost everything.

Which means, in fact, the criminalization of almost everyone, too — if you haven’t been convicted of some felony or other, it’s probably because no prosecutor has tried to put you away, not because you haven’t committed one, whether you realized it at the time or not.

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Fighting Crime the 11th Century Way….

Friday, March 18th, 2005

This would be bad satire if it weren’t true. From Fighting Crime the 11th Century Way….:

Tighter gun ownership laws are pushing South Africans to buy crossbows, spears, swords, knives and pepper sprays to protect themselves from violent crime.

‘We’ve had to build an entirely new shop because the demand from people is so great,’ Justin Willmers, owner of Durban Guns and Ammo, told Reuters. ‘It can be anything from a Zulu fighting spear, battle axes, swords, crossbows.’

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Hit by iPod and Satellite, Radio Tries New Tune: Play More Songs

Friday, March 18th, 2005

From Hit by iPod and Satellite, Radio Tries New Tune: Play More Songs:

Previously, like most stations, 105.1 let computer scheduling programs pick the songs from a library of 300-400 titles, with the same 30-40 songs playing most of the time. Now the station is going against the grain of the past two decades in radio, more than tripling the number of song titles played on any given day. With more than 1,200 songs on the playlist, most songs get played only once every few days, rather than several times a day. Program director Mike O’Reilly and his assistants handpick the music and the order in which they are played.

‘It’s all about train wrecks,’ Mr. O’Reilly says, using radio terminology for two unlikely songs played back-to-back. ‘If you hear MC Hammer go into the Steve Miller Band, I’ve done my job.’ Indeed, the station boasts that it might play a grunge rock anthem by Nirvana alongside a disco hit by K.C. and the Sunshine Band — the kind of serendipitous combination offered by an iPod.

So, they’re moving away from computerized scheduling to hand-picked playlists in order to emulate the randomness of an iPod. Fortunately, my ironometer goes to 11.

A little history:

Doomsayers predicted radio’s demise back in the 1950s, when television became widely available and long-playing records made listening to music on record players easy. But the industry adapted to competition from television dramas by cutting many of its own dramas and playing more music. And it turned out people who bought LPs didn’t stop listening to radio broadcasts. Once the 1960s hit and the invention of the transistor made receivers small and portable, radio boomed again.

When FM and stereo sound started to take off in the 1970s, conventional wisdom held that AM radio was finished. Instead, it became the home for talk radio, while music stations migrated to the FM dial. Radio overcame another perceived threat in the 1980s, when Sony Inc.’s popular Walkman became the first device to make custom-selected music truly portable.

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Failed Test

Friday, March 18th, 2005

ETS has revamped the SAT by removing analogies and introducing an essay. From Failed Test:

If the SAT can train 3,000 scorers to judge essays with something resembling consistent criteria, Kaplan can train tens of thousands of college-bound teens to reproduce those criteria.

This criticism is flawed:

The company’s own studies show the SAT to predict a paltry 16 percent of the variance in first-year grades.

If students get into schools based on SAT scores and other factors, then the lower-scoring students who get into a school obviously have other qualities that predict success. (At least if we ignore the admissions office’s other goals…)

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The Morale of the Story

Friday, March 18th, 2005

The Morale of the Story lists ways to keep team morale up in a business setting. Communication combats helplessness:

When a Boston design firm went through some tough times a few years ago, resentment between the management and the workforce grew. At a board meeting, executives expressed their frustration that no one was staying late and making that extra effort to do projects better, faster, cheaper.

But management had never spelled out the peril the company was in or revealed a plan for dealing with it. They didn’t want to frighten employees. In the absence of information, employees thought either that their managers couldn’t see the writing on the wall (so they were stupid) or that they did see it and were making secret plans for dealing with it (so they were sinister). Another mutually assured stalemate.

By contrast, the CEO of a furniture company successfully steered his employees through the trauma of being acquired with weekly, sometimes even twice weekly, updates. He’d gather everyone in the lunchroom and simply explain, this is where we are in the negotiations and this is where we’re going. Why was he so successful? Because what he said would happen did happen. Each time he outlined a future that came true, he demonstrated his own competence and reinforced trust.

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