Category: Current Affairs
Claims about embryos
A pressing question, said Rudolf Jaenisch, an M.I.T. biology professor, is why anyone would want to edit the genes of human embryos in order to prevent disease. Even in the most severe cases, involving diseases like Huntington’s in which a single copy of a mutated gene inherited from either parent is enough to cause the disease with 100 percent certainty, editing poses ethical problems. Because of the way genes are distributed in embryos, when one parent has the gene, only half of the parent’s embryos will inherit it. With gene editing, the cutting and pasting has to start immediately, in a fertilized egg, before it is possible to know if an embryo has the Huntington’s gene. That means half the embryos that were edited would have been normal — their DNA would have been forever altered for no reason. “It is unacceptable to mutate normal embryos,” Dr. Jaenisch said. “For me, that means there is no application.”
If I were grading an undergraduate philosophy class, I am not sure Dr. Jaenisch would exceed a C minus with that answer (the source article is here). Besides I have never known a normal embryo. Then there is the all too obvious question as to why it should be acceptable to abort embryos, but not to modify or mutate them. Oops.
The better arguments are surely the slippery slope worries that embryo tinkering will change the nature and future of humanity in dangerous ways, perhaps producing too much conformity, too much zero-sum competition (“buy the Harvard splice”), too much discrimination against various “types,” too much induced family loyalty, legal discouragement of rebellious genes, excess advantages for elites, too many decisions which too explicitly lower the social status of some groups of people, and perhaps ultimately too much drift from the world we know (and love?).
Those are my worries. Whether or not they are valid, they would seem to merit at least a C+. But many commentators wish to ensure these issues are not actually argued. Will this prove the new face of anti-scientific, anti-philosophical thinking? Check out the closing quotation from Professor Daley at Harvard, and his use of the word “deranged.”
A lot of parents will strongly desire some future version of this product, and I believe a number of countries are going to be willing to proceed with such innovations, if and when they become possible. They’ll also be willing to live with the costs of the failures in the meantime. So I don’t think the strategy of shutting down debate is going to fare so well in this case.
Robert E. Hall on secular stagnation
Do read the whole thing. Excerpt:
There has been no sign of a reversal of the decline in labour’s share of total income and no body of research that supports the idea that it will. Productivity growth is definitely under way, at rates similar to those in the 1970s and 1980s, but well below the rates of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1990s. In particular, there is no sign that a burst of productivity growth will make up for the complete stall in productivity growth around the crisis, as Figure 3 shows.
Most importantly, there is no sign suggesting a departure from the decline in labour-force participation shown in Figure 6. Some commentators have declared a turnaround in participation based on recent monthly data, but Figure 9 suggests this is wishful thinking. Participation has declined along a straight line during the period of improving conditions in the labour market, suggesting a complete disconnect between participation and the state of the labour market.
Excellent throughout.
Chinese scientists genetically modify human embryos
David Cyranoski and Sarah Reardon report:
In a world first, Chinese scientists have reported editing the genomes of human embryos. The results are published1 in the online journal Protein & Cell and confirm widespread rumours that such experiments had been conducted—rumours that sparked a high-profile debate last month about the ethical implications of such work.
In the paper, researchers led by Junjiu Huang, a gene-function researcher at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, tried to head off such concerns by using ‘non-viable’ embryos, which cannot result in a live birth, that were obtained from local fertility clinics. The team attempted to modify the gene responsible for β-thalassaemia, a potentially fatal blood disorder, using a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR/Cas9. The researchers say that their results reveal serious obstacles to using the method in medical applications.
“I believe this is the first report of CRISPR/Cas9 applied to human pre-implantation embryos and as such the study is a landmark, as well as a cautionary tale,” says George Daley, a stem-cell biologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “Their study should be a stern warning to any practitioner who thinks the technology is ready for testing to eradicate disease genes.”
There were too many off-target mutations, but the Chinese attitude seems to be if at first you don’t succeed…
…there are reports that other groups in China are also experimenting on human embryos.
The article is interesting throughout, for instance:
Huang says that the paper was rejected by Nature and Science, in part because of ethical objections; both journals declined to comment on the claim (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its research editorial team.)
There is more here. And Carl Zimmer wrote an explainer on it.
Public Choice Weekend!
Don’t forget the Public Choice Outreach Seminar is June 12-14. Applications are invited!
What is the Public Choice Outreach Conference?
The Public Choice Outreach Conference is a compact lecture series designed as a “crash course” in Public Choice for students planning careers in academia, journalism, law, or public policy. Graduate students and advanced undergraduates are eligible to apply. Many past participants of the Outreach seminar have gone on to notable careers in academia, law and business.
When and where is the Conference?
The 2015 Conference will be held at the Hyatt Arlington in Rosslyn, Virginia during June 12-14, 2015.
What are the fees involved?
Outreach has no conference fee – it is free to attend. Room and meals are included for all participants. However, travel costs are the responsibility of the participants.
More information and application here:
Slovenia (Greece) fact of the day
“Our exposure to Greece is 2.7% of GDP, which was in a year after we had a 8% fall in GDP and when we had to slash pay and economise in all areas.”
This is why Slovenia will insist on Greece continuing with the restructuring and continuing to meet its obligations to Slovenia as well as international institutions, [Slovenia’s Finance Minister Dušan] Mramor said.
That is cited in a good post by Sober Look. Oh, by the way, pensions are still lower in Slovenia than in Greece.
Turkish economic myths
That is a new must-read post from Dani Rodrik. Here is a pieced-together excerpt:
…low domestic saving has been the perennial constraint on the Turkish economy…Under Erdogan, the constraint has become ever more binding, as the saving rate (and particularly, the private saving rate) has come down…
So how has Turkey overcome this constraint over the last 12 years? By applying the same recipe of macroeconomic populism it has always relied on to generate growth – by borrowing, especially short-term, to sustain domestic consumption and investment. This strategy typically bears fruit as long as finance is cheap and available. But it comes at the cost of accumulating fragility and increased vulnerability to reversals in financial market sentiment. It often ends up in crisis as the funds dry up.
The novelty under AKP is that the populist strategy was modified in two respects. First, there was much greater reliance on foreign capital inflows and less reliance on printing money. Second, there was a switch from public-sector to private-sector borrowing.
There are useful pictures at the link.
*North Korea Confidential*
That is the new book by Daniel Tudor and James Pearson, the subtitle is Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors. The basic message is that North Korea is far more (black) marketized — and more corrupt — than most outsiders realize. Here is one representative passage:
Homes near the Sino-North Korean border are apparently quite expensive, since living there offers good business opportunities, and the ability to access Chinese cell phone networks. There are reports of high-quality apartments changing hands for US$30,000 in the border city of Hyesan, for instance. But this pales in comparison to the upmarket areas of the capital: a decent apartment in the central Pyongyang district of Mansudae (which is now jokingly referred to by expats as “Dubai” or “Pyonghattan”) will change hands for US$100,000 or more. There are even those who talk of US$250,000 apartments.
A fascinating look at the hard to access part of the Hermit Kingdom, definitely recommended and as far as I know this book has no close substitute.
By the way, in Pyongyang, rain boots are seen as quite fashionable footwear. And it can take up to a week to cross the (small) country by train. In the border city of Hyesan, up to ten percent of the population may be involved in the meth trade.
Which buyers benefit the most from the Export-Import Bank?
Veronique de Rugy and Diane Katz have the scoop:
…the primary beneficiaries on the buyer side of the transactions are also very large firms. Among the top 10 buyers, 5 are state-controlled and rake in millions of dollars from their own governments in addition to Ex-Im Bank subsidies.
Five of the top ten buyers are related to the production of oil or natural gas. The other five top buyers are airlines. Number one on the list is…can you guess it? Pemex. Clearly a company worthy of further subsidy, and from the American government too.
On the sell side, 80 percent of Ex-Im financing goes to support the exports of large American firms, note that the number one firm — Boeing — already receives plenty of implicit subsidy from DOD contracts. Is there no limit to strategic trade policy? And to the extent carbon emissions are important, how is the Ex-Im Bank doing on that scorecard?
Is the Income Tax Legal? Voluntary?
Just in case you are tempted to go all Wesley Snipes and refuse to pay your taxes on “constitutional” grounds, the income tax is legal and mandatory. Sorry.
Jonathan Siegel, professor of law at GWU has carefully examined all the primary tax protester arguments. All are wrong. Some are quite interesting
Some tax protestors claim that [the 16th] amendment is not really part of the Constitution — it was never ratified! Therefore, they say, the income tax is unconstitutional. This argument was popularized by Bill Benson in a book called “The Law That Never Was.”
Surprisingly enough, this argument has a little something to it. When the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified by state legislatures in the early twentieth century, the versions that some states voted on contained minor textual errors. Some of them neglected to capitalize the word “States,” one had “income” in place of “incomes,” one said “remuneration” instead of “enumeration,” one said “levy” instead of “lay,” and so on.
If the states didn’t all vote on the same, identical text for the Sixteenth Amendment, can the amendment really be considered ratified? When Congress makes a law, the House and the Senate must vote on the same text. Similarly, if the states didn’t vote on the right text, one could argue that they didn’t ratify the amendment. No Sixteenth Amendment, no income tax, the argument goes.
However, it seems that the amendment really was ratified. The alleged defects in the ratification process were considered at the time of ratification in 1913. The Solicitor of the Department of State convincingly explained why the minor textual variations in the versions the states voted on should be disregarded.
First, it seems that the state legislatures intended to ratify the amendment as proposed by Congress. They understood themselves to be voting to approve the proposed Sixteenth Amendment. The text set forth in their instruments of ratification was for recitation purposes only. The errors in the text were not proposals to change the text being ratified; they were just inadvertent errors that do not detract from the intention of the state legislatures to ratify the amendment as proposed.
Benson denies this. He claims that states deliberately altered the text of the proposed amendment. But the evidence just isn’t there. In one of his court filings, Benson singles out Oklahoma as a particularly clear case. He says the facts “unequivocally show that Oklahoma intentionally amended what the United States Congress had proposed” (see page 2 of Benson’s filing). But looking at Benson’s own book (pp. 61-67), one can see that the Oklahoma legislature adopted what it called “A resolution ratifying an amendment proposed by the sixty-first Congress of the United States” (emphasis added). This resolution then begins its ratification by reciting that “Whereas . . . Congress . . . on Monday the fifteenth day of March, one thousand nine hundred and nine, by joint resolution proposed an amendment to the constitution of the United States, in words and figures as follows:” Then, it’s true, the resolution misstates the text of the amendment (and pretty badly too). But it sure looks as though the Oklahoma legislatorsthought they were ratifying the amendment that Congress had proposed on the specified date and just misstated it. So even in a case that Benson himself singles out, it seems quite clear that the state legislature thought it was ratifying the Sixteenth Amendment, not proposing to change it.
…For all these reasons, it seems clear that the Sixteenth Amendment really is part of the Constitution.
Certainly that has been the uniform holding of the courts in cases in which this argument has been raised. For some representative cases, see United States v. Benson, 941 F.2d 598 (7th Cir. 1991) (rejecting these arguments in a criminal case brought against the author of the “Law that Never Was” book); United States v. Foster, 789 F.2d 457 (7th Cir. 1986); Cook v. Spillman, 806 F.2d 948 (9th Cir. 1986) (calling the argument that the Sixteenth Amendment was never ratified “frivolous” and imposing sanctions of $1,500 on the party making it); United States v. House, 617 F.Supp. 237, 238-39 (W.D. Mich.1985).
So while this argument is not as utterly absurd as most tax protestor arguments, one can be confident that it would not succeed in any actual court proceeding.
Is globalization slowing down?
Probably so:
For at least three decades before the 2008 financial crisis, global trade regularly grew at twice the rate of the global economy, leading some economists to hail an era of “hyperglobalisation”. According to the WTO, the annual average recorded since 1990 has been 5.1 per cent growth.
With last year’s growth of 2.8 per cent, global trade has now expanded at, or below, the rate of the broader global economy for three straight years.
That is from Shawn Donnan, the rest of the FT piece is here.
Is happiness inequality up or down?
Steven Quartz writes:
…our current Gilded Age has been greeted with relative complacency. Despite soaring inequality, worsened by the Great Recession, and recent grumbling about the 1 percent, Americans remain fairly happy. All of the wage gains since the downturn ended in 2009 have essentially gone to the top 1 percent, yet the proportion of Americans who say they are “thriving” has actually increased. So-called happiness inequality — the proportion of Americans who are either especially miserable or especially joyful — hit a 40-year low in 2010 by some measures. Men have historically been less happy than women, but that gap has disappeared. Whites have historically been happier than nonwhites, but that gap has narrowed, too.
In fact, American happiness has not only stayed steady, but converged, since wages began stagnating in the mid-1970s. This is puzzling. It does not conform with economic theories that compare happiness to envy, and emphasize the impact of relative income for happiness — how we compare with the Joneses.
Here is part of the answer, consistent with what I argued in my book What Price Fame?:
…social status, which was once hierarchical and zero-sum, has become more fragmented, pluralistic and subjective. The relationship between relative income and relative status, which used to be straightforward, has gotten much more complex.
…A new generation of ethnographers has discovered an explosion of consumer lifestyles and product diversification in recent decades. From evangelical Christian Harley-Davidson owners, who huddle together around a motorcycle’s radio listening to a service on Sunday mornings, to lifestyles organized around musical tastes, from the solidarity of punk rockers to yoga gatherings, from meditation retreats to book clubs, we use products to create and experience community. These communities often represent a consumer micro-culture, a “brand community,” or tribe, with its own values and norms about status.
The article is very interesting throughout, hat tip goes to Claire Morgan.
Note that the closing bit of this piece is…this: “Money may not buy happiness in the long run, but consumer choice has gone a long way in keeping most Americans reasonably content, even if they shouldn’t be.”
China fact of the day
“There are individual US pilots that have had more carrier landings than the whole of the Chinese military,” says Mr Midgley. Gary Li, an independent defence analyst on Beijing, adds that having an aircraft carrier “does not equate to knowing how to use it. They are years away from being able to conduct carrier operations.”
I am not sure however that this is true:
The army will eventually have to get rid of troupes of dancers, opera singers and drivers who are more representative of a former era when ideological concerns were more pressing.
The FT article is interesting throughout.
China (Korea) fact of the day
Producer prices deflated for a 37th consecutive month in March, falling 4.6 per cent, versus a 4.8 per cent fall in February.
That is the longest period of factory gate deflation in China on record.
“The current bout of goods deflation in China and South Korea is the longest in postwar East Asia outside of Japan in the 1990s,” said Rodney Jones, Beijing-based principal of Wigram Capital.
Producer prices in South Korea have also fallen for 39 consecutive months.
The producer price index, often regarded as a leading indicator for consumer prices, has been mired in deflation thanks to sliding domestic demand and chronic overcapacity in many sectors.
That is from McGee and Anderlini at the FT.
By the way, here is the FT citing Deutsche Bank:
Bubble watchers point out median earnings multiples for Chinese technology stocks are twice US peer valuations at their dot.com peak. More worrying perhaps is a health-goods-from-deer-antlers producer on 70 times, the seamless underwear manufacturer on 90 times or those school uniform and ketchup makers on 330 times!
Last week there were 1.67 million new brokerage accounts.
Does education in economics make politicians corrupt?
Maybe so, I haven’t yet had a chance to look at the paper, so I can’t lay out for you how the measurements work, or how many data points they have, but the abstract sounds interesting, albeit in a possibly speculative way:
The present article analyzes the differences between economists and non-economists with respect to observed corruption behavior used as a proxy for selfishness. For this purpose, I analyzed real world data of relating to the 109th–111th US Congress between 2005 and 2009, including 695 representatives and senators. I show that those who hold a degree in economics are significantly more prone to corruption than ‘non-economists’. These findings hence support the widespread, but controversial hypothesis in the ‘economist vs. non-economist literature’ that economists lack what Frey and Meier (2004) call ‘social behavior’. Moreover, by using real world data, these findings overcome the lack of external validity, which impact on the (low cost) experiments and surveys to date.
That is from René Ruske in Kyklos. Hat tip goes to Kevin Lewis.
Can any of you find an ungated version?
Will youth sports disputes be improved by the intervention of the courts?
When Audrey Dimitrew won a spot on a club volleyball team in Chantilly, Va., the 16-year-old hoped to impress varsity coaches and possibly college coaches.
But when her coach benched her and the league told her she couldn’t join another team, the action shifted from one court to another — she and her family sued.
…The lawsuit is one of a number filed across the country in recent years as families have increasingly turned to the courts to intervene in youth sports disputes. Parents upset that their children have been cut, benched, yelled at by coaches or even fouled too hard are asking judges to referee.
The culture that is American youth sports, there is more here, via Michael Rosenwald.