Values and humility in economics

Greg Mankiw is a Harvard economist, former chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, and currently an advisor to the Romney presidential campaign. He teaches a large introductory economics course at Harvard and writes both the widely used Principles of Economics and a blog that displays the same crisp, eminently-readable prose as his textbook. In a show of solidarity with the Occupy Boston movement, some of his students walked out of that class earlier this year. Much has been written about the walkout  (Update: here's the students' open letter and a response that outlines why walking out of this particular class isn't the most informed move.) Still I wanted to highlight Mankiw's column in yesterday's New York Times, titled  "Know what you're protesting." I share some of his reaction:

But my second reaction was sadness at how poorly informed the Harvard protesters seemed to be. As with much of the Occupy movement across the country, their complaints seemed to me to be a grab bag of anti-establishment platitudes without much hard-headed analysis or clear policy prescriptions. Ironically, the topic of the lecture that the protesters chose to boycott was economic inequality, including a discussion of recent trends and their causes.

Fair. But later in the piece Mankiw says something that really rankles (emphasis added):

I don’t claim to be an economist of Paul Samuelson’s stature. (Probably no one alive can.) But like him, I have written a textbook that has introduced millions of students to the mainstream economics of today. If my profession is slanted toward any particular world view, I am as guilty as anyone for perpetuating the problem.

Yet, like most economists, I don’t view the study of economics as laden with ideology. Most of us agree with Keynes, who said: “The theory of economics does not furnish a body of settled conclusions immediately applicable to policy. It is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique for thinking, which helps the possessor to draw correct conclusions.”

That is not to say that economists understand everything. The recent financial crisis, economic downturn and meager recovery are vivid reminders that we still have much to learn. Widening economic inequality is a real and troubling phenomenon, albeit one without an obvious explanation or easy solution. A prerequisite for being a good economist is an ample dose of humility.

I'll preface my reaction to this with my own dose of humility: my studies at the Woodrow Wilson School this semester are my first exposure to serious economics, and I'm realizing every day that I have ever more to learn. I think it can be helpful to approach a field with fresh eyes so I hope my thoughts here won't be entirely discredited by my fresh arrival to the dismal science.

That said, No! This seems like denial, pure and simple. My impression is that one of the areas where economists have most often failed to display humility is when thinking of and talking about the interaction of their values and methodologies.  Yes, economics has epistemological limitations, but these are equaled or surpassed by its axiological limitations, and may be more consequential because -- unlike with the more readily acknowledged methodological shortcomings -- economists themselves don't always make clear the values implicit in their worldviews. I think economists and those who are impacted by their views (ie, everyone else) would benefit from clearer statements of how values impact economics.

Mankiw's textbook does very briefly address the political philosophies underlying views on income redistribution, from utilitarianism to liberalism to libertarianism (pages 442-3 in the 5th edition). But this is halfway through the text and only in the context of the chapter on "income inequality and poverty." In reality, your views on maximizing utility for all versus (at another extreme) only caring about how policies affect the poorest have an impact on pretty much every piece of welfare economics. Here from what I can tell Mankiw is quite mainstream -- when considering the effects of a particular policy using the tools of welfare economics, the underlying philosophical preferences are almost always assumed. The conclusions of those studies are then touted as positive statements ("Policy X is bad for the economy") when that may or may not be true, depending on whether you share the same fundamental normative roots.

Prof. Mankiw spoke at Princeton on October 20 (you can view the lecture here) and it was a well-presented talk. His remarks were broad and intelligent, though maybe a bit constrained by the fact that he is associated with a presidential campaign and thus can't rock the boat too much (even with a disclaimer that his remarks were his own). In that talk Mankiw similarly began by emphasizing the need for economists to show greater humility in light of recent failures; he then proceeded to discuss a good number of specific policy recommendations with quite a bit of confidence. My biggest question coming out of the lecture was how to square the Mankiw who calls for greater humility from economists with the Mankiw who makes policy prescriptions. If we don't know with certainty what the impacts of particular policies will be or how to do more than tweak the performance or recovery of an economy, why not start with the policies least likely to do harm to the most vulnerable members of society? That would generally be my preference, growing out of my own nascent political philosophy.

In his textbook (5th edition page 35) Mankiw evenly explicitly notes that "Economists give conflicting advice sometimes because they have different values." This is true, and if anything it is under-emphasized. Elsewhere Mankiw has been more direct, contrasting the philosophies of Nozick and Rawls and noting how those might result in very different policy prescriptions on taxation. Mankiw ends up closer to Nozick and so it's no surprise that his policy prescriptions are for lower corporate taxes (re-emphasized in the Princeton talk as one of the things on which he very strongly agrees with Romney).

How is this anything but a heavy dose of ideology being injected into economics? How can we square this with the Mankiw who says he doesn't see the study of economics as "laden with ideology"? Part of the problem is that there are figures such as Mankiw who are concurrently serious researchers on scientific questions within economics and proponents of normative preferences in the political sphere. Can the outside observer tell when an economist is being one and not the other? Can economists realize this in themselves? When you couch these preferences in the language of economics without making the underlying values explicit, it's hard to believe that the field is not laden with ideology. To the extent that he doesn't even recognize how these value statements pervade the field, Mankiw is -- in his own words -- as guilty as anyone for perpetuating the problem.

Genesis

I highly recommend Patient Zero, the  latest episode of the podcast RadioLab. It covers Typhoid Mary, the origin of HIV, and the diffusion of ideas. Evocative as always, but what I like the most is how they add new information to stories you think you know. For one, you really feel sorry for Mary. And I've read quite a bit on the origin of HIV (a great way to learn more about phylogenetics!) but RadioLab takes it back even further and highlights some research I hadn't seen. Related: I haven't read it yet, but Tyler Cowen really likes Jacques Pepin's new book, The Origin of AIDS -- more happy reading for Christmas break.

About grad school

Mr. Epidemiology, a PhD student who blogs at mrepid.wordpress.com, has put together a great round-table where he asks open-ended questions about grad school and collects answers from a variety of Masters and PhD students from across mostly related fields. A little about the roundtable and its respondents is here. Questions covered so far include:

I thought the piece on impostor syndrome was particularly helpful. Although not exactly the impostor syndrome (which also hits me often), this is somewhat related: While blogging and going to school concurrently I've had difficulty writing about certain subjects that I've studied more intensively. The more I study, the more I realize my lack of expertise and hesitate to say anything definitive without endless qualifiers and references. For instance, I TA'ed a class on on malnutrition, infection, and immunity, and spent a summer researching lead poisoning in New York City -- but those are two of the more difficult subjects for me to write about for a popular audience. I know PhD students and true scholars must feel this more intensely, but at the same time it's probably even more important for those with more time invested in a subject to weigh in on it.

Update: the latest addition to the series is What has surprised you the most so far?

Ugh!

There are many things we can do to avoid illness and injury. Given the proper resources and opportunity, you'd think we would all maximize our well-being: eat well, exercise, get your vaccines, and wear your seatbelt for starters. But no, not only do we not do those things, we humans go far out of our way to expose ourselves to all sorts of exotic risks. Four recent illustrations of collective human stupidity from the news: (1) Epidemiologist Tara Smith writes, "Does bestiality increase your risk of penile cancer?" (See Cowen's First Law: there is literature on everything.) These Brazilian researchers should win an Ig Nobel. And true to form for public health, they coin an acronym: SWA (Sex With Animals). Prof. Smith read the paper so you won't have to  -- but you should at least read her summary to get the complete mental picture.

(2) Why is Delta Airlines running anti-vaccine in-flight infomercials? Doh-inducing background and petition here.

One of my Hopkins classmates who does not yet have a blog (but should) emailed a small group the following two stories:

(3) Parents in the US are mailing each other chickenpox-infected lollipops, amongst other things, to spread the disease and acquire natural immunity. Her summary: "Because asking your child to exchange bodily fluids with a sick stranger is a great idea!" True.

(4) Finally,though this one strikes me as an example of the "They're calling it [...]!" genre of local news stories about teenaged antics based mostly on hearsay, someone somewhere tried it: "Teens using vodka tampons to get drunk." My friend helpfully notes: "Your vagina does NOT have a gag reflex." Very astute. [Update: For the record, Scopes calls this one "undetermined."] OK, this one was an urban legend -- sorry.

I can't even begin to write an appropriate closing sentence for this post.

Beyond economic growth

Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, writing in Outlook India ("Putting Growth In Its Place") argue that India should see economic growth as a means to an end and not the end in and of itself. Whether you see GDP growth or human development as an end will shape whether India's recent history is an extraordinary history or something much more grim:

So which of the two stories—unprecedented success or extraordinary failure—is correct? The answer is both, for they are both valid, and they are entirely compatible with each other... Indeed, economic growth is not constitutively the same thing as development, in the sense of a general improvement in living standards and enhancement of people’s well-being and freedom. Growth, of course, can be very helpful in achieving development, but this requires active public policies to ensure that the fruits of economic growth are widely shared, and also requires—and this is very important—making good use of the public revenue generated by fast economic growth for social services, especially for public healthcare and public education.

On a more specific social policy, they comment on how conditional cash transfers -- the hot social policy of the moment (of the decade?) -- worked in Latin America precisely because some level of public social services were already in place, and the condition of receiving the transfer was often utilizing those services. They argue that India can't shortcut around investing in social services, skipping straight to the transfers and waiting for things to get better.

In Latin America, conditional cash transfers usually act as a complement, not a substitute, for public provision of health, education and other basic services. The incentives work for their supplementing purpose because the basic public services are there in the first place. In Brazil, for instance, basic health services such as immunisation, antenatal care and skilled attendance at birth are virtually universal. The state has done its homework—almost half of all health expenditure in Brazil is public expenditure, compared with barely one quarter (of a much lower total of health expenditure) in India. In this situation, providing incentives to complete the universalisation of healthcare may be quite sensible. In India, however, these basic services are still largely missing, and conditional cash transfers cannot fill the gap.

Cash transfers are increasingly seen as a potential cornerstone of social policy in India, often based on a distorted reading of the Latin American experience in this respect. There are, of course, strong arguments for cash transfers (conditional or unconditional) in some circumstances, just as there are good arguments for transfers in kind (such as midday meals for school children). What is remarkably dangerous, however, is the illusion that cash transfers (more precisely, “conditional cash transfers”) can replace public services by inducing recipients to buy health and education services from private providers. This is not only hard to substantiate on the basis of realistic empirical reading; it is, in fact, entirely contrary to the historical experience of Europe, America, Japan and East Asia in their respective transformation of living standards. Also, it is not how conditional cash transfers work in Brazil or Mexico or other successful cases today.

Here's the rest of the article.

The state of mHealth

Amanda Glassman of the Center for Global Development and Vicky Hausman of Dalberg Global Development Advisors write about the "elusive power of mHealth" (ie, mobile phones and technology for global health efforts, a hot field):

Yet despite these successes, mHealth remains in its infancy, with many of the characteristics and issues typical of young industries.  The majority of deployments are still small-scale pilots, so much so that it’s been said there are more pilots in mHealth than there are in the US Air Force.   In many of these pilots, the evidence base that would enable decision-making and prioritization for further investment is missing.  Finally, mHealth tools are not always clearly linked to health systems’ needs and priorities, at times leaving solutions in search of a problem rather than products and services designed with end-user preferences and needs in mind.

Their five recommendations for moving forward:

  1. Invest in the evidence base.
  2. Align on standards and systems.
  3. Ground mobile and information and communications technology (ICT) strategies in country-level realities, needs and opportunities.
  4. Share learnings and best practices.
  5. Build a coalition of global health funders to improve coordination.

You can read the details here. If you're a student who's interested in mHealth, you should join this Google Group.

Off by a factor of 100

GiveWell is an "independent, nonprofit charity evaluator" that finds "outstanding giving opportunities and publish[es] the full details of [their] analysis to help donors decide where to give." Their Giving 101 page is a good place to start regarding their methodology and conclusions. I want to highlight a recent blog post of theirs titled "Errors in DCP2 Cost Effectiveness Estimate for Deworming". DCP2 stands for "Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries," a report funded by the Gates Foundation and produced for many partners including the World Bank.

The DCP2 blog post and its comments are wonky but worth reading in full because of their implications. It's a pretty strong argument for why calculations need to be as transparent as possible if we're going to make decisions based on them:

Over the past few months, GiveWell has undertaken an in-depth investigation of the cost-effectiveness of deworming, a treatment for parasitic worms that are very common in some parts of the developing world. While our investigation is ongoing, we now believe that one of the key cost-effectiveness estimates for deworming is flawed, and contains several errors that overstate the cost-effectiveness of deworming by a factor of about 100. This finding has implications not just for deworming, but for cost-effectiveness analysis in general: we are now rethinking how we use published cost-effectiveness estimates for which the full calculations and methods are not public...

Eventually, we were able to obtain the spreadsheet that was used to generate the $3.41/DALY [Disability-adjusted life year] estimate. That spreadsheet contains five separate errors that, when corrected, shift the estimated cost effectiveness of deworming from $3.41 to $326.43.

From later in the post:

Whether or not the long-term effects are taken into account, the corrected DCP2 estimate of STH treatment falls outside of the $100/DALY range that the World Bank initially labeled as highly cost-effective (see page 36 of the DCP2.) With the corrections, a variety of interventions, including vaccinations and insecticide-treated bednets, become substantially more cost-effective than deworming.

Frequent health miles

Perhaps surprisingly, the most interesting incentives have been developed in an emerging economy: South Africa. The Discovery group, based in Johannesburg, has crafted a programme called Vitality that applies the “air miles” model to health care. You earn points by exercising, buying healthy food or hitting certain targets. You rise through various levels, from blue to gold, as you accumulate points (rewards are adjusted to your starting level of fitness to give everybody a chance of making progress). And you are given a mixture of short- and long-term rewards ranging from reduced premiums to exotic holidays... This model has taken Discovery from “one man and a desk” in 1992 to become South Africa’s largest health insurer, with 5,000 employees.

That's from the Economist. One disagreement: I don't find it surprising that some of the most innovative models are coming out of an emerging economy -- in fact I imagine that if you're looking for innovative social ventures and policies, BRICS are the countries to keep an eye on.

The Ghost of 0.7%

One thing about being new to a field is that you not only have to keep up with the latest developments, but also have to explore the voluminous literature that built up before your time. A lot of it is no longer relevant, but there's a lot of good stuff that isn't appearing on social media or in the news. Case in point: this working paper by Michael Clemens and Todd Moss of CGD, "Ghost of 0.7%: Origins and Relevance of the International Aid Target" (PDF). The abstract:

The international goal for rich countries to devote 0.7% of their national income to development assistance has become a cause célèbre for aid activists and has been accepted in many official quarters as the legitimate target for aid budgets. The origins of the target, however, raise serious questions about its relevance.

First, the 0.7% target was calculated using a series of assumptions that are no longer true, and justified by a model that is no longer considered credible. When we use essentially the same method used to arrive at 0.7% in the early 1960s and apply today’s conditions, it yields an aid goal of just 0.01% of rich-country GDP for the poorest countries and negative aid flows to the developing world as a whole. We do not claim in any way that this is the ‘right’ amount of aid, but only that this exercise lays bare the folly of the initial method and the subsequent unreflective commitment to the 0.7% aid goal.

Second, we document the fact that, despite frequent misinterpretation of UN documents, no government ever agreed in a UN forum to actually reach 0.7%—though many pledged to move toward it.

Third, we argue that aid as a fraction of rich country income does not constitute a meaningful metric for the adequacy of aid flows. It would be far better to estimate aid needs by starting on the recipient side with a meaningful model of how aid affects development. Although aid certainly has positive impacts in many circumstances, our quantitative understanding of this relationship is too poor to accurately conduct such a tally. The 0.7% target began life as a lobbying tool, and stretching it to become a functional target for real aid budgets across all donors is to exalt it beyond reason. That no longer makes any sense, if it ever did.

What if you start from an estimate of recipient 'need' rather than from the donor end?

One recent estimate that does try to start from the recipient ‘need’ and add up the costs is the Millennium Project.69 Even if one were to accept their methodology and their long list of recommended interventions (many of which are problematic), they nonetheless only arrive at 0.54% of rich country GNI as the total aid requirement. That is, even the most ambitious estimates suggest that 0.7% is vastly overstated.

But from a purely political point of view, aren't these goals helpful? (As they ask it, "Is there any harm in promoting nonsensical goals?") Their answer to this is more cursory, but basically they hypothesize that the 0.7% goal may be politically useful in European countries, while it may be counterproductive in the United States where it represents a drastic -- and politically unlikely -- increase in aid.

US global health architecture

How confusing is the US global health bureaucracy? Here's a sentence with 6 acronyms to help clear it up:

We tried to map out what the USG GH architecture might look like with USAID as the GHI leader, and OGAC as the PEPFAR coordinator; after several attempts to create a diagram, we gave up.

From "Is USAID Being Set Up to Fail on the GHI?" by Nandini Oomman and Rachel Silverman.

"We are nowhere"

What happens when you don't have a country? Here's the India/Bangladesh answer to that question, from the NYT a few weeks ago:

Mr. Ali, however, exists in a no man’s land. The patch of earth here on which he lives and farms is part of an archipelago of villages, known as enclaves, that are technically Bangladeshi territory but sit entirely surrounded by India, stuck on the wrong side of the border.

“The Indians say we are not Indian; the Bangladeshis say we are not Bangladeshi,” Mr. Ali said. “We are nowhere.”

There are 50 other Bangladeshi enclaves like Mr. Ali’s inside India; there are 111 Indian enclaves inside Bangladesh. The people of the enclaves are orphans, citizens of no country.

Libya backlash

I'm fresh off a roleplay for a course where I had to argue that, in hindsight, the Libyan intervention was a bad idea. Being given a role to play can make thinking through tough issues deceptively easier -- your mind is made up, so you just have to sort through the available evidence and narratives to make the best possible case for that decision. If I had had to choose my own position, well... I'm much more conflicted. The media narrative of the moment is that Qaddafi's death proves that the Libya intervention was a success. Maybe I'm under the influence of my assumed position, but here are two alternate perspectives that I think are extremely valuable. First, Daniel Larison, writing at The Week, says the Libya war is still a failure. It weakened the "responsibility to protect" principle and has already made it harder to respond to other situations (such as in Syria):

Instead of protecting the population of Libya — which is what the U.N. authorized — the West's intervention allowed the conflict to continue and consume perhaps as many as 30,000 Libyan lives, including many thousands of civilians, in addition to tens of thousands wounded and hundreds of thousands displaced. Rather than the "limited" war presented by the intervention's defenders, it immediately expanded into a policy of regime change. The official goal of protecting civilians was subordinated very early on to the real purpose of the war — namely, the destruction of the existing government and the elimination of its leaders.

Contrary to the hope that Libya would provide a deterrent to regime violence elsewhere, the political fallout from the war has stalled any international response to Syria's crackdown. By exceeding the U.N. mandate they received in March, the U.S. and its allies have poisoned emerging democratic powers such as India and Brazil against taking any action in other countries. Libya has confirmed every skeptic's worst fears that in practice, the "responsibility to protect" is little more than a pretext for toppling vulnerable governments.

And David Rieff, writing at Foreign Policy, calls Qaddafi "the man who knew too much":

Qaddafi was, quite simply, a man who knew too much. Taken alive, he would have almost certainly have been handed over to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which had indicted him -- along with his son, Saif al-Islam, and brother-in-law and military intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi (whereabouts unknown) -- for crimes against humanity in late June. Imagine the stir he would have made in The Hague. There, along with any number of fantasies and false accusations, he would almost certainly have revealed the extent of his intimate relations with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the details of his government's collaboration with Western intelligence services in counterterrorism, with the European Union in limiting migration from Libyan shores, and in the granting of major contracts to big Western oil and construction firms.

He would have had much to tell, for this cooperation was extensive. In the war against the jihadis -- a war to which Qaddafi regularly claimed to be as committed to prosecuting as Washington, Paris, or London -- links between Libyan intelligence and the CIA were particularly strong, as an archive of secret documents unearthed by Human Rights Watch researchers has revealed. If anything, the CIA's British counterpart, MI6, was even more involved with the Qaddafi family. As the Guardian reported in early September, it was Sir Mark Allen, then the director of the counterterrorism section of MI6, the British overseas spying agency, who was the key figure on the Western side in the secret negotiations to get Qaddafi to give up his WMD programs. The Guardian story further laid out how, after failing to become director of MI6 in 2004, Allen went into the private sector, becoming a senior advisor to the Monitor Group, a consulting firm that was paid huge fees by Qaddafi to burnish his image around the world, and, while they were at it, helped Saif (who had been his father's initial envoy to MI6) research his PhD thesis for the London School of Economics (LSE). Allen was also an advisor to BP, helping the oil giant secure major contracts in Libya from the Qaddafi regime.

Messy all around.

Polio and confidence

Maryn McKenna writes about a new report (PDF) on polio eradication at Wired's SuperBug blog. The report comes from the Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI). The GPEI has existed for 23 years now, and while they've made much progress (polio cases are down 99% since the campaign started) the campaign has repeatedly missed the deadlines it sets for itself for eradication. The latest goal is to interrupt polio transmission worldwide by 2012, and despite a recent infusion of funding and enthusiasm the campaign is -- according to the IMB -- likely to miss yet another of its own goals. McKenna writes, "Possibly the biggest problem, the board concludes, is a get-it-done optimism so ingrained in the 23-year effort that it cannot acknowledge when things are not working." She quotes the report to the same effect:

The Programme has an established narrative of positivity – a pervading sense of "nearly there". The danger comes in how the Programme deals with information that does not sit well with this narrative. We have observed that the Programme:

  • Is not wholly open to critical voices, perceiving them as too negative – despite the fact that they may be reporting important information from which the Programme could benefit.
  • Tends to believe that observed dysfunctions are confined to the particular geography in which they occur, rather than being indicative of broader systemic problems.
  • Displays nervousness in openly discussing difficult or negative items.

This report is likely to ruffle some feathers as the public discussion regarding polio eradication often suffers from the same dearth of criticism. One reason for that -- and likely for GPEI's own "get-it-done optimism" -- seems to be that polio eradication is an epic high-stakes gamble. If we can do it the benefits are huge: no more polio, and less need for continued vaccination (though much of the projected cost-savings are predicated on the idea that the US and other countries will stop polio vaccination, which is highly unlikely given fears of vaccine-derived strains or bioterrorism). But if we can't do it then it might be better to spend resources on some other priority in global health; spend some lesser amount on polio, allow a bit of resurgence (but not too much), and focus resources on other vital needs. Thus the real battle is over the general donor consensus around whether polio eradication will be achieved soon. As soon as the global health donor community decides that eradication isn't actually possible, that belief will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Save Google Reader

Update 2: (1 pm EST 11/2) now up to 13,745 signatures with some love from Mashable and Weibo. Those signatures include many from Chinese and Iranian users upset about the loss of the ability to securely and horizontally share items outside of social networks like Google+ that are blocked in Iran and China. Sidenote: who came up with the term "Sharebros"? Ugh -- it's gendered and conjures images of obnoxious popped collars -- can everyone stop using the term please?

Also annoyed by Google Reader changes: Tyler Cowen and Brian Shih (who used to work at Google). Austin Frakt links to a script that fixes many of the aesthetic problems.

Update: (9 pm EST 10/26) up to 7,383 signatures, with links from TechCrunch and Andrew Sullivan. As those two posts note, a bunch of Iranian activists are quite upset over the pending removal of social features from Google Reader, as it allows them to share news and commentary horizontally even after the source websites are blocked (and other social networks are blocked). I had no idea about all that when I set up this petition. My original thought was that Google should add features to Plus rather than taking them away from Reader, and not try and force us over, just because as a user I was annoyed. But now it seems there's an even better reason they should retain the social functions within Google Reader itself.  Hundreds if not thousands of the early signatures came from Iranians -- you can see petition results here.

save the whales! and/or fail whaleFor those who don't use Google Reader, you probably know it as just another RSS feed reader, so this post may not interest you at all.

For those of us who do use it it can be a major part of our daily routines. Last year I posted an "information flow audit" where I critiqued what and how much I read, along with how I prioritize information -- all of which is done through Reader. Needless to say, I'm a heavy user. I think it's the Google service I use most -- more than search, and even more than GMail.

So I'm apprehensive about this announcement on the Google Reader blog (which I of course found through Reader) regarding upcoming changes to the service:

As a result of these changes, we also think it's important to clean things up a bit. Many of Reader's social features will soon be available via Google+, so in a week's time we'll be retiring things like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader.

We think the end result is better than what's available today, and you can sign up for Google+ right now to start prepping Reader-specific circles. We recognize, however, that some of you may feel like the product is no longer for you.

Basically, Google wants us all to use Google+, and it seems Reader is destined to go the way of other niche services like Buzz and Wave. In the likely misguided hope that Reader's vocal users can make Google rethink this decision to push us towards Google+, or that they'll at least keep an old version of Reader available indefinitely, I put together a brief petition in response. You can sign here or below:

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Some other reactions I've seen so far -- ranging from agnostic to angry -- include:

Timing

This week in one of my classes we were scheduled to discuss humanitarian intervention and the "responsibility to protect" principle. Our case study is on Libya, and especially on the initial decision to intervene. Not coincidentally, one of the professors for the course is Anne-Marie Slaughter (see her NYT editorial in support of action, just days before UN Resolution 1973). The news of Gadhafi's death broke just before class. Then, after a session touching on these topics in the context of broader theories of international relations, I found myself in a computer lab with several of my classmates. We were mostly checking our email or printing assignments, but the conversation turned to Libya. Someone mentioned that a video had been posted of Gadhafi still alive when he was captured (see here), and we started pulling up different videos and trying to piece together what happened. What order, who did what, how we should react, and so forth.

Separate from the implications of Gadhafi's death for the future of Libya, there's a question of how quickly media has changed how we interact with world events, and how participants in those events seek to portray them. A century ago radio brought real-time news, followed a few decades later by TV. The last decade has seen the proliferation of digital video cameras and the rise of sites like YouTube where anyone can disseminate footage to the entire world, at first side-stepping the old media and then being amplified by it.

I don't know how this situation would have played out a few decades ago, but here we were watching videos taken earlier the same day by rebel forces in Libya. Has there ever been faster turnaround between the fall of a despot, the spread of imagery to shape the narrative of what happened? As viewers and discussants we were participating in the immediate struggle to claim responsibility.

Monday Miscellany

  • Japan started a huge cohort study to look at health problems in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster -- they'll follow children in the area for decades, watching for thyroid problems in particular.
  • Community health centers lose funding and no one notices. One of my friends works for this program and I didn't even know this.
  • Just how messed up are our political and lobbying processes? Morgenson and Rosner's Reckless Endangerment is a great read on Fannie Mae's role in the housing bubble, but this NY Review of Books critique is a necessary corrective to the somewhat myopic point of view taken by Morgenson and Rosner, who portray Fannie as the primum movens of the crisis.
  • Planned Parenthood in Texas struggles after state budget cuts. Battles over health care (of which PP is a major -- or the only --provider to many women and low-income families) and abortion rights are increasingly being fought in the states.
  • Rush Limbaugh reacted to Obama's decision to send 100 US (armed) military advisers to Uganda to help hunt Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army by saying "Obama Invades Uganda, Targets Christians." Best Twitter reaction came from @jonathanshainin: "I remember when Rush Limbaugh was one of our top central Africa experts. Looks like he may be slipping a bit."
  • Did you know top MBA programs don't disclose grades? Bizarre. Grades definitely aren't the most important part of school, but still...

Discarding efficacy?

Andrew Grove, former CEO of Intel, writes an editorial in Science:

We might conceptualize an “e-trial” system along similar lines. Drug safety would continue to be ensured by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. While safety-focused Phase I trials would continue under their jurisdiction, establishing efficacy would no longer be under their purview. Once safety is proven, patients could access the medicine in question through qualified physicians. Patients' responses to a drug would be stored in a database, along with their medical histories. Patient identity would be protected by biometric identifiers, and the database would be open to qualified medical researchers as a “commons.” The response of any patient or group of patients to a drug or treatment would be tracked and compared to those of others in the database who were treated in a different manner or not at all.

Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution (who is a big advocate for FDA reform, running this site) really likes the idea. I hate it. While the current system has some problems, Grove's system would be much, much worse than the current system. The biggest problem is that we would have no good data about whether a drug is truly efficacious, because all of the results in the database would be confounded by selection bias. Getting a large sample size and having subgroups tells you nothing about why someone got the treatment in the first place.

Would physicians pay attention to peer-reviewed articles and reviews identifying the best treatments for specific groups? Or would they just run their own analyses? I think there would be a lot of the latter, which is scary since many clinicians can’t even define selection bias or properly interpret statistical tests. The current system has limitations, but Grove's idea would move us even further from any sort of evidence-based medicine.

Other commenters at Marginal Revolution rightly note that it's difficult to separate safety from efficacy, because recommending a drug is always based on a balance of risks and benefits. Debilitating nausea or strong likelihood of heart attack would never be OK in a drug for mild headaches, but if it cures cancer the standards are (and should be) different.

Derek Lowe, a fellow Arkansan who writes the excellent chemistry blog In The Pipeline, has more extensive (and informed) thoughts here.

Update (1/5/2012): More criticism, summarized by Derek Lowe.

Genius

The MacArthur "genius" grants this year went to -- as always -- some awesomely creative people. It's exciting to see this award given to those you already admire because it's $500k in absolutely no-strings-attached cash; they'll be able to do a lot more of the good stuff they're already doing. One recipient is Jad Abumrad, of the show Radiolab. If you're not already listening to the show it'd be a disservice to just say it's a radio show about science. A better take comes from Ira Glass in this appreciation of Radiolab:

Take the opening of their show on the mathematics of random chance, stochasticity. The first aesthetic choice Jad and Robert make is that they don’t say you’re about to listen to a show about math or science. They don’t use the word stochasticity. They know those things would be a serious turn off for lots of people. In doing this, Jad and Robert sidestep most of the conventions of a normal science show – hell, of most normal broadcast journalism.

Or try the recent short episode "Damn It, Basal Ganglia."

Another recipient is author/journalist Peter Hessler. He's written three books on China: Country Driving (which I haven't gotten to yet) which was preceded by Oracle Bones and River Town, his first book. The best thing about these books is that they convey (as nothing else I've read has) the incredible pace of change in China. Hessler picks and chooses stories and builds them into a narrative arc that would make a novelist weep for joy. In this post-MacArthur interview Hessler says his next step is to learn Arabic in Egypt and write about the Middle East. This bodes well for fans of long-form journalism.

So who will win it next year, or in years to come? MacArthur's tend to go to folks who are decently well-known within their own field, not for being the best at a traditional discipline but for pushing the boundaries of that field in some way. My picks for people who might win in the next 10 years include:

  • Jonah Lehrer, science writer extraordinaire. (Proust was a Neuroscientist, How We Decide, blog).
  • Sheri Fink (MD/PhD) is a journalist currently working for ProPublica. She won a Pulitzer recently for her reporting on deaths at a hospital following Hurricane Katrina, but I think her best work today is still her first and only book, War Hospital, which tells the story of the people (and half dozen doctors) trapped in the Srebrenica enclave during the Bosnian War. It's incredibly under-appreciated.
  • Siddharta Mukherjee, obviously.
  • Honorable mention: David McCandless of Information is Beautiful (if he just moved to the US he'd be eligible...)

Who else do you think -- or hope -- might win?