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More Pregnancy, Less Crime

When it comes to crime, economists focus on deterrence. Deterrence works but it’s not the only thing that works. Simple things like better street lighting can reduce crime as can high-quality early education or psychological interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy. The sociological literature has emphasized that crime is about preferences as well as constraints. Life-events or turning points such as marriage and childbirth, for example, can greatly change crime preferences. The sociological literature is mostly from case studies but in an excellent new paper, Family Formation and Crime, Maxim Massenkoff and Evan Rose (both on the job market from Berkeley) demonstrate these insights in a huge dataset.

A big part of what makes their paper compelling is that almost all of the results are blindingly clear in the raw data or using simple analysis. Here, for example, is the crime rate for women (drug, DUI, economic, or property destruction crimes) in the years before pregnancy, during pregnancy (between the red dotted lines) and after birth. Crime rates fall dramatically with pregnancy and in the three years after birth they are 50% lower on average than in the years before pregnancy.

Pregnancy imposes some physical limits on women but the effects are also very large for men whose crime rates fall by 25-30% during pregnancy of their partner and continue at that lower rate for years afterwards. Keep in mind that in our paper on three strikes, Helland and I found that the prospect of an additional twenty years to life (!) reduce criminal recidivism by just ~17%, so the effect of pregnancy is astoundingly large.

It’s not obvious what the policy implications are. Have children at a younger age doesn’t sound quite right, although in an analysis on teen births Massenkoff and Rose do indeed show that whatever the costs of teen pregnancy there are some offsetting benefits in reduced crime of the parents. More generally, however, there are policy implication if we think beyond the immediate results. First, these results show that crime isn’t simply a product of family background, poverty and neglect. Crime is a choice.

In Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City, Edin and Nelson relay the following anecdote (quoted in Massenkoff and Rose):

Upon hearing the news that the woman they are “with” is expecting, men such as Byron are suddenly transformed. This part-time cab driver and sometime weed dealer almost immediately secured a city job in the sanitation department (p. 36).

Byron chose to change and he did so based on the rational expectation of a future event. Massnekoff’s and Rose show that these choices are common.

Instead of thinking of these results as being about pregnancy and marriage we should ask what is it about pregnancy and marriage that makes people reduce crime? Love, responsibility and long-run thinking are all at play. In economic terms, pregnancy reduces discount rates and gives men and women a reason to invest in human capital and work for the future. Children and marriage play a large role in socializing and “civilizing” both men and women but they surely can’t be the only such factors. Indeed, although men and women on average reduce their crime rates dramatically on pregnancy this is mostly coming from men and women who had high rates to begin with–there are plenty of men and women who don’t much reduce their crime rates on pregnancy because they were already low–in a way, these men and women were pre-socialized so how do we extend the benefits of pregnancy to the expectation of pregnancy or how can we widen the effect to other factors that can also civilize?

Could Women Be Trusted With Their Own Pregnancy Tests?

The first home pregnancy tests were controversial because it was believed that women could not be trusted to do the tests correctly or to use the results appropriately:

NYTimes: When a mail-order New York firm tried to sell Organon test kits to American consumers in 1971, it faced opposition from the United States Public Health Service. In 1973, a New Jersey drugstore bought kits made by the drug company Roche and offered fast and private tests to their customers, and though the technology was similar to that available in medical clinics, the state medical examiner questioned the legality of the service.

Why so much opposition? Some regulators worried that “frightened 13-year-olds” would be the main users of the test kits. But after the product did become available in the United States in 1977, it appealed instead to college-age and married women — many of whom desperately hoped for children.

Even so, the Texas Medical Association warned that women who used a home test might neglect prenatal care. An article in this newspaper in 1978 quoted a doctor who said customers “have a hard time following even relatively simple instructions,” and questioned their ability to accurately administer home tests. The next year, an article in The Indiana Evening Gazette in Pennsylvania made almost the same claim: Women use the products “in a state of emotional anxiety” that prevents them from following “the simplest instructions.”

The tale of the home pregnancy test is not unique. Breakthroughs that give patients control over their bodies are often resisted. Again and again, the same questions come up: Are patients smart enough? Can they handle bad news? And do they have the right to private information about their bodies?

I wrote about these issues in Our DNA, Our Selves which discussed the FDA’s unconstitutional over-regulation of DNA tests. The legal questions in that case are yet to be fully resolved but the technology is pushing towards the freedom to know our own bodies.

Markets in everything, positive pregnancy tests

The latest, uh, must-have appears to be positive pregnancy test results.

Women across the country are selling — and buying — them on Craigslist.

One post from Buffalo, New York, sums up the appeal for potential shoppers:

“Wanna get your boyfriend to finally pop the question? Play a trick on Mom, Dad or one of your friends? I really don’t care what you use it for.”

That particular test was going for the reasonable rate of $25 dollars. The tests in Texas seem to be slightly more expensive, at $30 a pop.

There is more here, via Marcela Veselková.

The economics of compensated pregnancy surrogates, and who wants surrogates?

From Anemona Hartecollis, here are some interesting points:

Agencies prefer to contract with surrogates who are married with children, because they have a proven ability to have a healthy baby and are less likely to have second thoughts about giving up the child.

Conversely, gay couples are popular among surrogates. “Most of my surrogates want same-sex couples,” said Darlene Pinkerton, the owner of A Perfect Match, the agency in San Diego that Mr. Hoylman used. Women unable to become pregnant often go through feelings of jealousy and loss, she said. But with gay men, that is not part of the dynamic, so “the experience is really positive for the surrogate.”

Or as her husband, Tom, a third-party reproductive lawyer, put it, “Imagine instead of just having one husband doting on you, you have three guys now sending you flowers.”

The piece is interesting throughout.

Teenage pregnancy

Since 1991 the teenage pregnancy rate has fallen by about 22 percent, reversing a 40 year trend. In a lengthy story, the NYTimes suggests that learning from the hard experience of others is the explanation for the drop without explaining why it should take 40 years for this learning to take effect. They do note “teenage pregnancy had already begun its decline in 1991, well before welfare changes and the economic boom, and well after the first round of sex education programs.” The Times, however, does not examine the most controversial but well-supported explanation, the introduction of legalized abortion in the 1970s.

If this explanation rings familiar it should. In a very controversial paper, Steve Levitt and John Donohue provided evidence that legalized abortion in the 1970s reduced crime some 18 years later. The theory is simple. Abortion rates are higher among the poor, the unmarried, teenagers, and African Americans than among other groups and children born to mothers with several of the preceeding characteristics are at increased risk for becoming involved in crime. Legalized abortion gave these mothers an option and thus reduced the number of at-risk children who might otherwise have grown up to become criminals (note that abortion doesn’t mean fewer children per-se, it may simply delay childbearing to when the mother is not poor, a teenager or unmarried which works just as well.)

In brief, the evidence for the Levitt-Donohue theory is a) the timing is consistent, b) states that legalized earlier had earlier drops in crimes, c) there is a dose-response effect i.e. states that had more abortions had bigger drops in crime, d) the drop in crime in the 1990s occured among those cohorts who were potentially affected by abortion policy in the 1970s (and not among say 40 years olds.)

Joined by co-author Jeff Grogger, Levitt and Donohue apply the same idea to teenage pregnancy and find very similar results – thus reinforcing their earlier story. They write:

Parents who are least able or willing to begin caring for a newborn are most likely to make use of abortion. The abortion rates for teens, the unmarried, and the poor are substantially higher than for the general population. Children who are born unwanted are subjected to poorer care both during pregnancy and the early years of life. With the legalization of abortion, mothers with unwanted pregnancies suddenly had a new recourse. Consequently, the number of children raised in adverse environments dropped substantially. Donohue and Levitt [2001] showed how this change reduced crime among the subsequent generation by 15-25 percent. As teen childbearing is a closely associate social pathogen, the magnitude of the drop should be similar.

Our empirical evidence suggests that birth rates as teens are strongly negatively associated with being born in a state and time period in which abortion rates were high. Our results suggest that teen birth rates today may be 20 percent lower as a consequence of legalized abortion in the 1970’s.

The Birth-Weight Pollution Paradox

Maxim Massenkoff asks a very good question. If pollution reduces birth weight as much as the micro studies on pollution suggest, why aren’t birth weights very low in very polluted cities and countries? Figure 1, for example, shows birth weights in a variety of highly polluted world cities. The yellow dashed and blue lines show “predicted” birth weights extrapolated from the well-known Alexander and Schwandt “Volkswagen study” which looked at the effects of increased pollution in the United States. Despite the fact that every one of the highly-polluted cities is much more polluted than the most polluted US city, birth weight is not tremendously lower in these cities. Indeed, there is no obvious correlation between birth weight and pollution at all.

Similarly, US cities were more polluted in the past but were birth weights lower in the past? Figure 2 shows a number of US cities which were two to three times more polluted in 1972 (right side of diagram) than 2002 (left side of diagram). Yet, birth weights do not appear lower in the more polluted past and certainly do not follow the extrapolated birth weight-pollution predictions from the micro literature.

Massenkoff looks at a variety of possible explanations. One possibility, for example, is culling. Perhaps in highly polluted areas there are more miscarriages, still births or difficulty conceiving with the result that the observed sample of births is highly selected. There is some evidence that pollution increases miscarriages and stillbirths but these tend to be correlated with lower birth weight–a scarring effect rather than a culling effect. In addition, the effect of pollution on miscarriages and stillbirths also appears to be bigger on a micro level than on a macro level. That is, these rates aren’t massively higher in high pollution countries.

Another possibility is that pollution isn’t that bad and, in particular, not as bad as I have suggested. As a good Bayesian, I update, but for reasons I have given here, it’s not justifiable to update very much.

I assume, as I always do, that there are some overestimates in the micro literature for the usual reasons. But, more fundamentally, my best guess for the birth-weight pollution paradox is that weight is one of the easiest margins on which the body can adapt and compensate. Even in poor countries there are plenty of calories to go around and so it’s relatively easy for the body to adjust to higher pollution, on this margin. Indeed, weight is known as a variable that creates paradoxes!

Micro studies on weight and exercise, for example, show that exercise reduces weight. But looking across countries, societies, and time we don’t see big effects–indeed, calorie expenditure doesn’t vary much with exercise! Importantly, notice that the micro-estimates are correct. If you increase physical activity for the next 3 months, holding all else equal (which is possible for 3 months), you will lose weight. However, the micro estimates are difficult to extrapolate to permanent, long-run changes because there are complex, adaptive mechanisms governing weight, calorie consumption and energy expenditure.

The exercise paradox doesn’t mean that exercise isn’t good for you–the evidence on the benefits of exercise is extensive and credible. In the same way the birth-weight pollution paradox doesn’t mean that pollution isn’t harmful–the evidence on the costs of pollution is extensive and credible. In particular, it’s going to be much harder to adapt to pollution for heart disease, cancer, life expectancy and IQ than for weight. 

I am always impressed with papers that present big, obviously-true facts that most people have simply missed. Massenkoff is becoming a leader in this field.

The FDA Still Doesn’t Trust Women

The FDA has a long history of antipathy towards personal testing. The FDA has opposed personal pregnancy tests, HIV tests, genetic tests, and COVID tests, as I discussed in my article Testing Freedom. Well, the FDA is at it again:

NYTimes: At a hearing Tuesday to consider whether the Food and Drug Administration should authorize the country’s first over-the-counter birth control pill, a panel of independent medical experts advising the agency was left to reckon with two contradictory analyses of the medication called Opill.

During the eight-hour session, the manufacturer of the pill, HRA Pharma, which is owned by Perrigo, and representatives of many medical organizations and reproductive health specialists said that data strongly supported approval. They said that Opill, approved as a prescription drug 50 years ago, was safe, effective and easy for women of all ages to use appropriately — and that over-the-counter availability was sorely needed to lower the country’s high rate of unintended pregnancies.

In contrast, F.D.A. scientists questioned the reliability of company data that was intended to show that consumers would take the pill at roughly the same time every day and comply with directions to abstain from sex or temporarily use other birth control if they missed a dose. The agency seemed especially concerned about whether women with breast cancer or unexplained vaginal bleeding would correctly choose not to take Opill and whether adolescents and people with limited literacy would use it accurately.

Note carefully: The FDA isn’t worried that women won’t take the pill at the same time every day they are worried that women who get the pill without a prescription won’t take it at the same time every day. I guess in the FDA’s view women need some mansplaining to take birth control or at least some doctorplaining.

Dr. Westhoff suggested that for most women, there is no advantage to a doctor prescribing the pills because doctors don’t typically monitor patient adherence and often only see such patients once a year.

Similarly, I suspect that women with breast cancer will be concerned enough about their health to read the warning, Don’t Take This Pill if You Have Breast Cancer. Who knows, women with breast cancer might even ask their cancer physician or Google or their GP(T) about what foods and drugs to take and which to avoid.

If I didn’t know the FDA’s long history of opposing personal testing, I would think this simply bizarre but not trusting people with their own health decisions is practically in the FDA’s DNA.

Testing Freedom

In the latest Discourse Magazine I discuss the FDA’s long-standing fear and antipathy toward personalized medical tests and how this violates the 1st Amendment.

In 1972, the FDA confiscated thousands of home pregnancy tests, declaring that they were “drugs” meant to diagnose a “disease” and thus fell under the FDA’s regulatory dominion. The case went to the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, and Judge Vincent P. Biunno ruled that the FDA had overstepped. “Pregnancy,” he said, “is a normal physiological function of all mammals and cannot be considered a disease … a test for pregnancy, then, is not a test for the diagnosis of disease. It is no more than a test for news….” As a result of Judge Biunno’s ruling, home pregnancy tests are easily available today from pharmacies, grocery stores and online shops without a prescription.

These days, debates over home pregnancy tests from the 1970s seem anachronistic and paternalistic. Yet the same paternalistic arguments appear again and again with every new testing technology. In the late 1980s, for example, the FDA simply declared that it would not approve at-home HIV tests, regardless of their safety or efficacy. As with pregnancy tests, the concern was that people could not be trusted with information about their own bodies…the first rapid at-home HIV test was developed and submitted to the FDA in 1987 [but] it took 25 years before the FDA would approve these tests. (Now, you can easily buy such a test on Amazon.)

…The FDA has a vital role in ensuring that tests are clinically accurate—tests should do what they say they do. Tests don’t need to be perfectly accurate to be useful (think of thermometers, personality tests and tire pressure gauges), but if a test advertises that it measures HDL cholesterol, it should do that within the tolerances the firm promises. The FDA has the technical knowledge to ensure that tests work, and that’s a skill that Americans value from the agency.

What Americans don’t want is to be told they can’t handle the truth. Yet when it came to at-home tests such as pregnancy tests, HIV tests and genetic tests, that’s exactly the reasoning the FDA used—and continues to use—to suppress information. The FDA should ensure that tests are safe, but “safety” means physical safety. The FDA may not declare a product unsafe because it might produce dangerous knowledge. Patients have a right to know about their own bodies. Our antibodies, ourselves. The FDA has authority over drugs and devices but not over patients.

Judge Biunno had it right back in 1972 when he said that diagnostic tests produce “news.” Test results, therefore, are a type of speech that fall under the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. The Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected restrictions on freedom of speech based on “a fear that people would make bad decisions if given truthful information”; thus, FDA restrictions on tests based on such fears are unconstitutional. The question of whether consumers will respond “safely” to test results is no more relevant to the FDA’s regulatory authority than the question of whether readers will respond safely to political news published in The New York Times. The FDA does not have the constitutional authority to regulate news.

Testing Freedom

I did a podcast with Brink Lindsey of the Niskanen Center. Here’s one bit on the FDA’s long-history of banning home tests:

Brink Lindsey: …it’s on the rapid testing that we had inexplicable delays. Rapid tests, home tests were ubiquitous in Europe and Asia months before they were in the United States. What was going on?

Alex Tabarrok: So I think it’s not actually inexplicable because the FDA has a long, long history of just hating people testing themselves. So the FDA was against pregnancy tests, they didn’t like that, they said women they need to consult with a doctor, only the physician can do the test because literally women could become hysterical if they were pregnant or if they weren’t pregnant, this was a safety issue. There was no question that the test itself was safe or worked. Instead what the FDA said, “We can regulate this because the user using it, this could create safety issues because they could commit suicide or they could do something crazy.” So they totally expanded the meaning of safety from is the test safe to can somebody be trusted to use a pregnancy test?

Then we had exactly the same thing with AIDS testing. So we delayed personal at-home tests for AIDS for literally 25 years. 25 years these tests were unavailable because the FDA again said, “Well, they’re dangerous.” And why are they dangerous? “Well, we don’t know what people will do with this knowledge about their own bodies.” Now, of course, you can get an HIV test from Amazon and the world hasn’t collapsed. They did the same thing with genetic tests from companies like 23andMe. So I said, “Our bodies ourselves, our DNA ourselves.” That people have a right to know about the functioning of their own bodies. This to me is a very clear violation of the Constitutions on multiple respects. It just stuns me, it just stuns me that anybody could think that you don’t have a right to know, we’re going to prevent you from learning something about the operation of your own body.

Again, the issue here was never does the test work. In fact, the labs which produce these tests, those labs are regulated outside of the FDA. So whether the test actually works, whether yes, it identifies this gene, all issues of that nature, what is the sensitivity and the specificity, are the tests produced in a proper laboratory, I don’t have a lot of problem with that because that’s all something which the consumers themselves would want. What I do have a problem with is then the FDA saying, “No, you can’t have access to this test because we don’t know what you’re going to do about it, what you’re going to think about it.” And that to me is outrageous.

Here’s the full transcript and video.

Do we live in a “post-outrage” world?

From David Siders at Politico:

“I wish we lived in a world where outrage mattered. But I think we live in a post-outrage world, and voters today are affected only by that which directly affects them, which is why the economy, affordability and cost of living is such a major issue for so many people. While a lot of people will express sympathy for that 12-year-old girl in Texas who got raped but no longer can terminate her pregnancy, it’s not what motivates them to go to the polls, sadly.”

And some details:

Interviews with more than a dozen Democratic strategists, pollsters and officials reveal skepticism that the court’s decision will dramatically alter the midterm landscape unless — and perhaps not even then — Roe is completely overturned. Privately, several Democratic strategists have suggested the usefulness of any decision on abortion next year will be limited, and some may advise their clients not to focus on abortion rights at all.

Some of that thinking is colored by Virginia’s gubernatorial race earlier this year. After the Supreme Court allowed a law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy to take effect in Texas, the party was so sure abortion would resonate with voters that Democrat Terry McAuliffe made it a centerpiece of his campaign, saying “it will be a huge motivator for individuals to come out and vote.”

By the time ballots were cast, just 8 percent of voters listed abortion as the most important issue facing Virginia, according to exit polls. Even worse for Democrats, of the people who cared most about the issue, a majority voted for the Republican, Glenn Youngkin.

Cancellations up, outrage down — model that!

Air Pollution Reduces Health and Wealth

Great piece by David Wallace-Wells on air pollution.

Here is just a partial list of the things, short of death rates, we know are affected by air pollution. GDP, with a 10 per cent increase in pollution reducing output by almost a full percentage point, according to an OECD report last year. Cognitive performance, with a study showing that cutting Chinese pollution to the standards required in the US would improve the average student’s ranking in verbal tests by 26 per cent and in maths by 13 per cent. In Los Angeles, after $700 air purifiers were installed in schools, student performance improved almost as much as it would if class sizes were reduced by a third. Heart disease is more common in polluted air, as are many types of cancer, and acute and chronic respiratory diseases like asthma, and strokes. The incidence of Alzheimer’s can triple: in Choked, Beth Gardiner cites a study which found early markers of Alzheimer’s in 40 per cent of autopsies conducted on those in high-pollution areas and in none of those outside them. Rates of other sorts of dementia increase too, as does Parkinson’s. Air pollution has also been linked to mental illness of all kinds – with a recent paper in the British Journal of Psychiatry showing that even small increases in local pollution raise the need for treatment by a third and for hospitalisation by a fifth – and to worse memory, attention and vocabulary, as well as ADHD and autism spectrum disorders. Pollution has been shown to damage the development of neurons in the brain, and proximity to a coal plant can deform a baby’s DNA in the womb. It even accelerates the degeneration of the eyesight.

A high pollution level in the year a baby is born has been shown to result in reduced earnings and labour force participation at the age of thirty. The relationship of pollution to premature births and low birth weight is so strong that the introduction of the automatic toll system E-ZPass in American cities reduced both problems in areas close to toll plazas (by 10.8 per cent and 11.8 per cent respectively), by cutting down on the exhaust expelled when cars have to queue. Extremely premature births, another study found, were 80 per cent more likely when mothers lived in areas of heavy traffic. Women breathing exhaust fumes during pregnancy gave birth to children with higher rates of paediatric leukaemia, kidney cancer, eye tumours and malignancies in the ovaries and testes. Infant death rates increased in line with pollution levels, as did heart malformations. And those breathing dirtier air in childhood exhibited significantly higher rates of self-harm in adulthood, with an increase of just five micrograms of small particulates a day associated, in 1.4 million people in Denmark, with a 42 per cent rise in violence towards oneself. Depression in teenagers quadruples; suicide becomes more common too.

Stock market returns are lower on days with higher air pollution, a study found this year. Surgical outcomes are worse. Crime goes up with increased particulate concentrations, especially violent crime: a 10 per cent reduction in pollution, researchers at Colorado State University found, could reduce the cost of crime in the US by $1.4 billion a year. When there’s more smog in the air, chess players make more mistakes, and bigger ones. Politicians speak more simplistically, and baseball umpires make more bad calls.

As MR readers will know Tyler and I have been saying air pollution is an underrated problem for some time. Here’s my video on the topic:

Historical Migration, Vitamin D Deficiency, and Health

In an interesting new paper, Andersen et al. (2021) use the Putterman-Weil historical migration index to show that life-expectancy is lower in countries where a large proportion of that country’s population emigrated from places with more sunlight (UV-R). Ethiopians in Israel, Indians in the UK and blacks in the United States, for example, tend to have Vitamin D deficiency and higher levels of mortality and morbidity from a wide variety of diseases. The effect at the global level is small but significant, about the same order of magnitude as the effect of income, inequality, and schooling.

Lots of other things are going on globally, of course, so the authors go to some lengths to control for confounding. They show, for example, that the same relationship exists within the United States. Unfortunately, they don’t have a direct measure of Vitamin D deficiency by place but they suggest based on previous research that Vitamin D deficiency is a cause of allergies so they look for whether differences in sunlight between current location and the ancestor population (DIFFUV) can explain epinephrine autoinjector prescription rates. Admittedly, there quite a few links in that causal chain but the idea is clever!

we utilize the link between vitamin D deficiency and anaphylaxis; the latter being a serious allergic reaction (often caused by food), which is rapid in onset and may even cause death. A growing body of evidence suggests that vitamin D deficiency is an important cause of anaphylaxis (Mullins and Camargo, 2012). Laboratory evidence, for instance, suggests several mechanisms through which vitamin D affects allergic reactions in general and anaphylaxis in particular (Camargo et al., 2007). Studies also show a clear relationship between season of birth (fall and winter, the least sunny months) and food allergy prevalence (Sharief et al., 2011). A large US survey shows higher rates of food sensitization in infants born to mothers with low vitamin D intake during pregnancy (Nwaru et al., 2010). Finally, several studies document that epinephrine (a medicine used for life-threatening allergic reactions) autoinjector prescription rates vary with latitude (proxy for exposure to sunlight) in Australia, the UK, and the USA (Peroni and Boner, 2013).

Accordingly, we propose to employ epinephrine autoinjector prescription rates (EAPRs) as a crude proxy for actual vitamin D deficiency across US states. The questions we are then able to pose are the following: Does DIFFUV predict EAPR? Does EAPR correlate with life expectancy once we omit DIFFUV? Naturally, if both answers are in the affirmative then this further supports the interpretation of our main findings. Table 7 provides answers to these questions. In the first five columns we explore whether DIFFUV is a predictor of EAPR. In interpreting EAPR as a proxy for health we also control for our baseline variables: income, inequality, and human capital, as well as regional fixed effects. As can be seen upon inspection of the said columns, DIFFUV indeed correlates with EAPR in the expected way.

Hat tip: Kevin Lewis.

Pandemic sentences to ponder

Of course, there are national health systems in Canada, Mexico, England, and France, among many others, and the uniformity of failure across this heterodox group suggests that structure may have made less of a difference than culture.

“One of the common features is that we are a medical-centric group of countries,” says Michael Mina, a Harvard epidemiologist who has spent the pandemic advocating for mass rollout of rapid testing on the pregnancy-kit model — only to meet resistance at every turn by those who insisted on a higher, clinical standard for tests. “We have an enormous focus on medicine and individual biology and individual health. We have very little focus as a group of nations on prioritizing the public good. We just don’t. It’s almost taboo — I mean, it is taboo. We have physicians running the show — that’s a consistent thing, medical doctors across the western European countries, driving the decision-making.” The result, he says, has been short-sighted calculations that prioritize absolute knowledge about everything before advising or designing policy about anything.

…in East Asia, countries didn’t wait for the WHO’s guidance to change on aerosols or asymptomatic transmission before masking up, social-distancing, and quarantining. “They acted fast. They acted decisively,” says Mina. “They made early moves. They didn’t sit and ponder: ‘What should we do? Do we have all of the data before we make a single decision?’ And I think that is a common theme that we’ve seen across all the Western countries—a reluctance to even admit that it was a big problem and then to really act without all of the information available. To this day, people are still not acting.” Instead, he says, “decision-makers have been paralyzed. They would rather just not act and let the pandemic move forward than act aggressively, but potentially be wrong.”

This, he says, reflects a culture of medicine in which the case of the individual patient is paramount.

Here is more from David Wallace-Wells, interesting throughout and with a cameo from yours truly.

How to reform the economics Ph.D

This has been bothering me, so I’m putting it out there – The shift to 6 yrs for an Econ PhD is a TERRIBLE trend for female PhD students – & also some men, obviously – but especially for women. This issue warrants much more attention.

So says the wise Melissa S. Kearney.

Along those lines, I have a modest proposal.  Eliminate the economics Ph.D, period.  Offer everyone three years of graduate economics education, and no more (with a clock reset allowed for pregnancy).  Did Smith, Keynes, or Hayek have an economics Ph.D?  This way, no one will assume you know what you are talking about, and the underlying message is that economics learning is lifelong.

After the three years is up, you would be free to look for a job, or alternatively you might find someone to support you to do additional research, such as in the newly structured “post doc without the doc.”  The researchers who absolutely need additional training would try to glom on to a lab or major grant, but six years would not be the default.

Of course, in that setting, schools could take chances on more students, and more students could take a chance on trying economics as a profession.  Furthermore, for most of the most accomplished students, it is already clear they deserve a top job by the time their third year rolls around, usually well before then.  Women would hit their tenure clocks much earlier, also, easing childbearing constraints.  A dissertation truly would become just a job market paper, which has already been the trend for a long time.  Why obsess over the non-convexity of “finishing”?  Finish everyone, and throw them into the maws of some mix of AI and human evaluators sooner rather than later.

Over time, I would expect that more people would take the first-year sequence in their senior year of undergraduate study, and more first-year jobs would have zero or very low teaching loads.  All to the better.

And if you’re mainly going to teach Principles at a state university, three years of graduate study really is enough.  You’ll learn more your first year teaching anyway.

Which other fields might benefit from such a reform?

People, you have nothing to lose but your chains.

Slavery is usually worse than you think

The men were allowed to come on deck night and day if they wished, but it was the rule to whip the Negro men if they went in the hold with the women.  Aboard the Creole, sex was apparently (and, it turned out, wrong) deemed a greater threat than slave rebellion.  Gonorrhea, according to slaveholding commonplace, was a disease “generally contracted among Negroes en route who are brought for sale.”  A number of different traders had their slaves aboard the ship, and segregating them by sex was a way to keep one slaveholder’s slaves from diminishing the value of another’s by passing a disease — or starting a pregnancy.

That is from Walter Johnson, Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market.