Category: Medicine
In which professions are Americans most likely to be married?
Catherine Rampell reports:
While engineers, mathematicians and scientists today are (unfairly) stereotyped as awkward nerds who don’t know how to interact with the opposite sex, in 1950 they were among the occupations most likely to be married. Today, the most commonly conjugated occupations are instead more often medical professionals with doctorates, starting with dentists (81 percent of whom are hitched)…
The top of the list looks like this:
1) Dentist
2) Chief executive
3) Sales engineer
4) Physician
5) Podiatrist
6) Optometrist
7) Farm product buyer
8) Precision grinder
9) Religious worker
10) Tool and die maker
We also learn this:
Turns out that in 1950, many of the occupations whose members were most likely to end up divorced were creative or artistic ones (artist, writer/director, dancer, designer, writer), which perhaps reflects the communities that were most accepting of divorce at the time. In 2010, the occupations with the highest divorce rates were predominantly in manufacturing or other areas that have been subject to downsizing (drilling machine operator, knitter textile operative, force operator, winding machine operative, postal clerk). This seems to support the idea that economic stability is a good predictor of marital status.
Do read the whole thing.
Is the Great Stagnation soon over?
The method, which extracts drugs from bacteria that live in dirt, has yielded a powerful new antibiotic, researchers reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday. The new drug, teixobactin, was tested in mice and easily cured severe infections, with no side effects.
Better still, the researchers said, the drug works in a way that makes it very unlikely that bacteria will become resistant to it. And the method developed to produce the drug has the potential to unlock a trove of natural compounds to fight infections and cancer — molecules that were previously beyond scientists’ reach because the microbes that produce them could not be grown in the laboratory.
Studies on people will start in about two years, the NYT article is here. Here is the underlying Nature article.
Alternatively, here is a claim that James Harden is the future of basketball.
I thank numerous MR readers for related pointers.
The effect of the TseTse fly on African development
Marcella Alsan has a new paper in the American Economic Review:
The TseTse fly is unique to Africa and transmits a parasite harmful to humans and lethal to livestock. This paper tests the hypothesis that the TseTse reduced the ability of Africans to generate an agricultural surplus historically. Ethnic groups inhabiting TseTse-suitable areas were less likely to use domesticated animals and the plow, less likely to be politically centralized, and had a lower population density. These correlations are not found in the tropics outside of Africa, where the fly does not exist. The evidence suggests current economic performance is affected by the TseTse through the channel of precolonial political centralization.
You will find ungated versions here.
Model this (online dating fact of the day)
According to forecasts from Match.com and Plenty of Fish, two of the country’s largest dating sites, the single most popular time for online dating — the window when the most people sign up, log on and poke around — will be Jan. 4, from roughly 5 to 8 p.m. Zoosk, another data-focused dating site, backs that estimate up; in 2014, it’s most trafficked time was on the Sunday after New Year’s.
The full article is here, via Ninja Economics. Might it mean that a) online dating is a kind of palliative against holiday depression? Or that online dating is a kind of New Year’s resolution, a willingness to undergo a brutal experience for a supposed potential long-run benefit? Or a bit of both? Personally, I engage in some of my least productive work on Sunday evenings.
Your model, by the way, should not neglect these corollary facts:
Interestingly, this cycle doesn’t just play out on dating sites — in fact, it’s far broader than that. Researchers have also observed a post-holiday spike in searches for porn, for instance, and a 2012 study by Facebook’s data team found that people are far more likely to change their relationship status in January or February than they are at any other time of year. Offline, the holiday season tends to see a jump in both condom sales and conceptions.
Markets in everything: discomfort furniture
Sitting for longer than four hours a day increases a person’s chance of suffering chronic disease.
Now, inspired to address the lack of physical activity in modern work life, one French designer believes he might have created the answer.
With just two legs, the ‘Inactivite’ chair relies on the user engaging the muscles in their core to keep it upright.
Benoit Malta, the man behind the creation, said he wanted to encourage movement for those office workers who spent around 70 per cent of the day sitting down.
There is video and further description at the link, and for the pointer I thank Mark Thorson.
*Do No Harm*
I loved this book, which is written by a neurosurgeon with a knowledge of behavioral economics (he even has designed a talk “All My Worst Mistakes,” based on Daniel Kahneman’s work). The subtitle is Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery and the author is Henry Marsh. Here is one bit:
…as the brain has the consistency of jelly a sucker is the brain surgeon’s principal tool.
Here is another:
All that really matters is that I am as sure as I can be that the decision to operate is correct and that no other surgeon can do the operation any better than I can. This is not as much of a problem for me now that I have been operating on brain tumours for many years, but it can be a moral dilemma for a younger surgeon. If they do not take on difficult cases, how will they ever get any better? But what if they have a colleague who is more experienced?
And another:
Few anaesthetists believe what surgeons tell them.
How about this one?:
‘There are operations where one really doesn’t know what’s going to happen,’ I muttered to Mike.
Highly recommended, it is already out in the UK, in the U.S. coming out in May 2015. It has made many best of the year lists in the UK. Here are some related videos.
Finding good Medicaid treatment remains difficult
Large numbers of doctors who are listed as serving Medicaid patients are not available to treat them, federal investigators said in a new report.
“Half of providers could not offer appointments to enrollees,” the investigators said in the report, which will be issued on Tuesday.
Many of the doctors were not accepting new Medicaid patients or could not be found at their last known addresses, according to the report from the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services. The study raises questions about access to care for people gaining Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
That is from Robert Pear, there is more here. And about one-quarter of actual providers had wait times of over a month. Once again, it is the supply-side problems in American medicine which are paramount.
That was then, this is now
Some of the White House economists were dubious and privately called Mrs. Clinton’s health care team “the Bolsheviks.” In return, according to Ms. Rivlin, the economists were “sometimes treated like the enemy.” Their suggested changes were ignored. “We could have beaten Ira alone,” said Mr. Blinder. “But we couldn’t beat Hillary.”
There is more here from the NYT, mostly about Hillary, not about that episode.
China to stop harvesting organs from prisoners
The mainland – which has long been criticised by international human rights groups for using organs harvested from executed prisoners as its main source of organ transplants – will completely ban the practice from next year.
All organs used in future transplants must be from donors, the Southern Metropolis News quoted Dr Huang Jiefu as saying. Huang is former deputy director of the health ministry and director of the China Organ Donation and Transplant Committee.
Major transplant centres had already stopped using executed prisoners’ organs, said Huang, who chaired an industry forum in Kunming on Wednesday.
There is more here, via Mark Thorson. The article notes China has one of the lowest voluntary organ donation rates in the world. 0.6 individuals out of a million sign up to donate their organs after they die, and that means the number of actual donors is lower yet. If you google around, you will find some ambiguity as to whether the donation rate or the “register to donate rate” is that low, but as far as I can tell (try this Chinese source) it is the actual register to donate rate, in part because they just aren’t many ways to register right now. Please let us know if you have additional information on this point.
Wikipedia by the way reports:
The wait times for organ transplants for organ recipients in China are much lower than elsewhere in the world, and there is evidence that the execution of prisoners for their organs is “timed for the convenience of the waiting recipient.
Here are some of Alex’s earlier posts on a market for transplanted organs.
The value of an NFL roster spot
One of the most self-sacrificing—read: craziest—players from that era, Jack Youngblood, played through the 1979 playoffs and 1980 Pro Bowl with a broken leg. (That’s right: he played through a severe injury in the Pro Bowl). Last year, Youngbloodtold the New York Post that guys who missed time with an injury back then didn’t just have to explain themselves to their untrusting employers—they had to explain themselves to their own teammates. Rather than fake injuries to swindle their way into bogus workers’ compensation claims, it has always been much more common for NFL players to fake health.
In the same New York Post story, Antrel Rolle says he hid not one, but two rotator cuff tears from team doctors. In 1974, the team doctor for the Los Angeles Rams told the Washington Post that he’d learned to check both legs for injuries because limping players liked to trick him by presenting the wrong one. The marginal guys, it is generally understood, are the most likely to fake good health, knowing how tenuous their hold on a roster spot can be.
Most of the rest of the quite interesting article details a case of a player who was administered truth serum in 1986. The full article, by Andrew Heisel, is here.
China political surgery markets in everything
This passage is from Gao Wenqian’s Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary:
Doctors in China could not conduct major medical procedures on top leaders without the approval of the Politburo Standing Committee. Such was the long-standing rule. Thus, in 1975, Deng Ziaoping and Marshal Ye Jianying, leaders among the old CCP cadres who had generally despised the Cultural Revolution and had shown little enthusiasm for the political style of the mercurial Jiang Qing, now had to negotiate emergency surgery for Zhou Enlai with her allies Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chunqiao. For once, these tough political adversaries managed to see eye-to-eye. They all gave their consent to surgery and sent their decision to Mao, who always had the final say.
Zhou Enlai had four operations before dying of cancer. For the last two operations, however, Mao instructed the doctors to tell Zhou that in fact he was being cured and the tumors were removed. He ceased to believe that when the unbearable pain arrived.
What’s up with GruberGate?
Is it up to three cynical tapes about Obamacare now? I’ve lost track.
I’m not so interested in pushing through the mud on this one. It’s a healthy world where academics can speak their minds at conferences and the like without their words becoming political weapons in a bigger fight. Or how about blogs?: do we want a world where no former advisor can write honestly about the policies of an administration? I’ve disagreed with Gruber from the beginning on health care policy and I thought his ObamaCare comic book did the economics profession — and himself — a disservice. But I’m simply not very interested in his proclamations on tape, which as far as I can tell are mostly correct albeit overly cynical. (If anything he is overrating the American voter — most people weren’t even paying close enough attention to be tricked.) Criticisms of Gruber are not criticisms of a policy, and it is policy we should focus upon and indeed there is still a great deal of health care policy we need to figure out. It’s hardly news that intellectuals who hold political power, even as advisors, very often do not speak the truth. If anything, I feel sorry for Gruber that he has subsequently felt the need to so overcompensate by actively voicing such ex post cynicism, it is perhaps the sign of a soul not at rest.
In the meantime, I’d like to see more open discourse, not less. Perhaps we should subsidize people who end up looking foolish, rather than taxing them.
The pot legalization gender gap
Scott Sumner directs us to this passage from Michele Martinez Campbell:
A fascinating new national poll from Quinnipiac University shows that men and women disagree markedly on the question of marijuana legalization. While men surveyed strongly favor legalization by a margin of 59 to 36 percent, women oppose it by a clear majority of 52-44 percent. This 15-point gender gap in support for marijuana legalization –let’s call it the “pot gender gap” — is not quite as large as the 20-point gender gap in support for President Obama in the 2012 presidential election, but it is striking. What’s most interesting, though, is how it confounds the expectations set by the voting gender gap. In voting, women trend more liberal and Democratic, while men trend more conservative and Republican. Yet with the pot gender gap, we see women taking the more conservative, law-and-order approach.
The article is here, Scott’s post, with commentary, is here.
When do economists laugh and what does it mean?
Here is the new paper by Michael Reay in Social Forces:
Analyses of the multiple cognitive structures and social effects of humor seldom look at why these tend to center on particular topics. The puzzle of how humor can be highly varied yet somehow constrained by its source “material” is explored using a corpus of over 600 incidents, not of deliberate jokes, but of the “wilder,” unplanned laughter that occurred during a set of interviews with economists—professionals who at the time (1999–2000) enjoyed an unprecedented degree of status and influence. The analysis finds that the source material for this laughter typically involved three kinds of socially structured contradiction: between ideals and reality, between different socially situated viewpoints, and between experiences occurring at different times. This illustrates how particular kinds of content can have a special laughter-inducing potential, and it suggests that wild laughter may at root be an interactional mechanism for dealing with social incongruity—even for members of relatively powerful groups. It is argued that this could not only help solve the larger puzzle of simultaneous variety and constraint in deliberate comedy, but also explain why the characteristic structures of humor are associated with a particular range of social effects in the first place.
Reading that abstract caused me to engage in some unplanned (silent) laughter.
For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Pharmaceutical regulation is getting tougher
From Diana Carew at the Progressive Policy Institute:
…the number of ‘restrictions’ on drug companies increased by 767, or 40% since 2000. This represents a substantial rise in the overall regulatory burden of pharmaceutical companies, which must allocate resources to ensure regulatory compliance. The word “restriction” refers to command clauses such as “shall” and “must,” as contained in sections of the Code of Federal Regulations related to the FDA.
The full study is here (pdf).