Category: Science
Economic development and mental illness
Subsequent studies have confirmed that patients in the developing world are much more likely to recover from severe mental illness than patients in the richer countries, well served by psychiatrists and clinical psychologists.
That is from Richard P. Bentall's Doctoring the Mind: Is Our Current Treatment of Mental Illness Any Good? You can think of this book as an updated, more traditionally empirical, less polemic version of Thomas Szasz. It makes large claims which are difficult to evaluate. Ultimately I don't find that it offers a persuasive alternative framework for thinking about either mental illness or "mental illness." Nonetheless the book is stimulating, it relies on substantive argument, and it will induce skepticism about a lot of what passes for treatment these days. Here is one review of the book, here is another.
Paul Dirac on economics
This was from his 1933 Nobel acceptance speech (!):
I should like to suggest to you that the
cause of all the economic troubles is that we have an economic
system which tries to maintain an equality of value between two
things, which it would be better to recognise from the beginning
as of unequal value. These two things are the receipt of a
certain single payment (say 100 crowns) and the receipt of a
regular income (say 3 crowns a year) through all eternity. The
course of events is continually showing that the second of these
is more highly valued than the first. The shortage of buyers,
which the world is suffering from, is readily understood, not as
due to people not wishing to obtain possession of goods, but as
people being unwilling to part with something which might earn a
regular income in exchange for those goods. May I ask you to
trace out for yourselves how all the obscurities become clear, if
one assumes from the beginning that a regular income is worth
incomparably more, in fact infinitely more, in the mathematical
sense, than any single payment? In doing so I think you would
then get a better insight into the way in which a physical theory
is fitted in with the facts than you could get from studying
popular books on physics.
I thank Eric R. Weinstein (Twitter!) for the pointer.
Of course you can read this paragraph as offering differing (better?) microfoundations for a liquidity trap argument. The problem is not expectations of unfavorable interest rate changes (no one buys bonds with cash), but rather no one parts with bonds to receive goods and services. Is it a behavioral argument, namely that no one wants to give up the feeling of "forever" for the feeling of getting something which is only "temporary." Or is it a maximizing argument, namely that a kind of zero discount rate hyper-rationality takes over the people who won't spend? Does the argument require that consols are the dominant form of bonds?
Outliers
It's now a rather famous anecdote in the life and times of Michael
Jordan that he was cut from the varsity when he was in high school. You
think that's merely a footnote more than 30 years later? You think
Jordan's forgotten the details or is willing to let go? Guess whom
Jordan invited to the Hall of Fame Friday night? Leroy Smith, the kid
who took his spot on the high school team. Jordan said he's still
saying "to the coach who picked Leroy over me: 'You made a mistake,
dude.' "
That is from Michael Wilbon, here is more.
Addendum: Here is another version of the tale.
Robert Wiblin has a question
Which conspiracy theory is most likely to be true?
How much will denser suburbs help the environment?
John Thacker points us to a study of California (registration required, but free). I've only browsed it but the introduction states:
In September 2008, the California state legislature passed the first state law (Senate Bill 375) to include land use policies directed at curbing urban sprawl and reducing automobile travel as part of the state’s ambitious strategy to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The legislature recognized that cleaner fuels and more fuel-efficient vehicles would not be sufficient to achieve the state’s goal of reducing GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The bill requires the state’s 18 metropolitan planning organizations to include the GHG emissions targets established by the state Air Resources Board (ARB) in regional transportation plans, and to offer incentives for local governments and developers to create more compact developments and provide transit and other opportunities for alternatives to automobile travel to help meet these targets. ARB currently estimates that reductions in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) resulting from these actions will contribute only about 3 percent of the 2020 targets–an estimate that reflects uncertainties in the state of knowledge about the impacts of more compact development patterns on travel and the short time horizon involved.
In other words, the environmental benefits of checking pro-suburb subsidies are real, but they are smaller than many people think. That's from the National Academy of Sciences and the authors are no haters of the environment. If you check out p.59, you'll see that a forty percent increase in population density decreases vehicle miles traveled by less than five percent. pp.131-132 offer a summary of the study's conclusions and quantitative estimates.
The authors conclude that density-friendly policies are a good idea, and I agree, but still these are not overwhelming effects. Keep in mind that current trends are strongly pointing toward population dispersion, so to reverse those trends and see greater density would take some doing. We're not close to that margin.
There are many other interesting parts of the report, including case studies of Portland and Arlington.
Nose jobs
According to a number of sources, Iran is the "nose job capital of the world" probably because other signals of beauty are shrouded (by law). Iran also has plenty of well-educated doctors. Gene Expression has some links and a few alternative hypotheses.
How to achieve artistic immortality
…now a Canadian writer is using science to create a poem that could live forever..
Christian Bök, an experimental poet and associate professor of English at the University of Calgary, is working on a piece he plans to encipher and insert into the genetic code of an "extremophile" bacterium, one that is tough enough to survive conditions that would wipe out the human race.
He notes that others have already stored enciphered text in strands of bacterial DNA, including the lyrics to It's a Small World After All. But his poem will be the first that actually contains instructions for a protein or, as he sees it, a second poem.
That is from a piece by Anne McIlroy in the 5 September Globe and Mail; the article is not yet on-line. "Each letter of the alphabet is assigned to a tiny piece of DNA that codes for an amino acid…", which limits the vocabulary. It is noted that the author is having trouble coming up with the fifty words or so which deserve immortality. Here is background information on the poet. You can follow his tweets here.
I will make the more general observation that Canadian newspapers remain underblogged.
Worse than the NAFTA superhighway and U.S. capitulation
This is about Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, from Frommer's Guide:
Bald eagles have become so plentiful around the lake that they are exported to the United States to restock natural habitats.
How to test theories of beautiful women
No, I don't mean you should do that. I mean you should apply location theory. Maybe you think that Alex's claims don't adjust for the nationality or ethnicities of the women under consideration. Pick then a city of your choice in a country of your choice. Ask where, in that city, can the beautiful women be found. Will you find them in the most globalized parts of the chosen city? Probably so. Will the least globalized parts of the city have less attractive women or perhaps even the least attractive women?
I also believe, in accord with my previous hypothesis, that you'll find the most beautiful women in the parts of the city where different income classes mix and there is lots of inequality among passersby. That's in a museum, or in the Village, not in a Tiffany store or even in most of the upper East Side.
I think about location theory a lot.
A Theory for Why Latvian Women are Beautiful
Recently a colleague returned from a trip to Latvia and remarked on how beautiful the women were. A discussion ensued at which it was agreed that women in a number of other countries were also very beautiful but markedly less outgoing than the Latvians. As you may recall, beautiful Latvian women like to parade their beauty. My colleague further informed us that the latter event was not unique, having witnessed something similar himself.
Is my colleague's observation a mere statement of prurient preference? Does this kind of thing belong in a family blog? Don't worry, at Marginal Revolution we never serve our prurience without a little theory.
Sociosexuality is a concept in social psychology that refers to how favorable people are to sex outside of commitment. It can be measured by answers to questions such as "I can
imagine myself being comfortable and enjoying "casual" sex with
different partners" (agree strongly to disagree strongly) or "Sex without love is ok," as well as with objective measures such as the number of sexual partners a person has had. A low score indicates subjects who favor monogamous, long-term, high-investment relationships. A high score indicates subjects more favorable to sex for pleasure's sake alone. with less regard to commitment. On average, males have higher sociosexuality scores than females but sociosexuality scores for females vary widely across countries.
Why might female sociosexuality scores vary? One hypothesis is that in cultures with low operational sex ratios (the number of marriageable men/number of marriageable women) female sociosexuality will be higher. The argument is that when the relative supply of males is low, competition for mates encourages females to shift towards the male ideal, i.e. when supply is scarce the demanders must pay more. (Note that this theory can also explain trends over time, e.g. Pedersen 1991).
Ok, where does this get us? Well in Sociosexuality from Argentina to Zimbabwe, Schmitt (2005) surveyed some 14,000 people on sociosexuality and he correlated female sociosexuality with the operational sex ratio. Here are the results:
Notice that Latvia has one of the highest rates of female sociosexuality in the 48 nations surveyed and the lowest sex ratio.
Thus, the theory is that Latvian women appeal more strongly to the male ideal because the number of marriageable men in Latvia is low relative to the number of women. Is it any wonder that my colleague found the Latvian women beautiful?
Serial monogamy and hypergamous women
In her analysis, Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder found that although Pimbwe men
were somewhat more likely than their female counterparts to marry
multiple times, women held their own and even outshone men in the upper
Zsa Zsa Gabor end of the scale, of five consecutive spouses and
counting. And when Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder looked at who extracted the
greatest reproductive payoff from serial monogamy, as measured by who
had the most children survive past the first five hazardous years of
life, she found a small but significant advantage female. Women who
worked their way through more than two husbands had, on average, higher
reproductive success, a greater number of surviving children, than
either the more sedately mating women, or than men regardless of
wifetime total.
Here is more. I believe those last two words — "wifetime total" — should in fact be "lifetime total." This was interesting:
Provocatively, the character sketches of the male versus female
serialists proved to be inversely related. Among the women, those with
the greatest number of spouses were themselves considered high-quality
mates, the hardest working, the most reliable, with scant taste for the
strong maize beer the Pimbwe famously brew. Among the men, by contrast,
the higher the nuptial count, the lower the customer ranking, and the
likelier the men were to be layabout drunks.
“We’re so wedded
to the model that men will benefit from multiple marriages and women
won’t, that women are victims of the game,” Dr. Borgerhoff Mulder said.
“But what my data suggest is that Pimbwe women are strategically
choosing men, abandoning men and remarrying men as their economic
situation goes up and down.”
Dare one whisper "hypergamy"?
Very good sentences
That’s right: someday soon scientists may be working to develop a pill that can mimic the placebo effect.
That's from Tom Lee, my source was here.
What do kids find worth fighting over?
Maybe Alchian and Demsetz would not be surprised:
A team of leading British and American scholars asked 108 sibling pairs in Colorado exactly what they fought about. Parental affection was ranked dead last. Just 9% of the kids said it was to blame for the arguments of competition.
The more common reason the kids were fighting was the same one that was the ruin of Regan and Goneril; sharing the castle's toys. Almost 80% of the older children, and 75% of the younger kids, all said sharing physical possessions — or claiming them as their own — caused the most fights.
Nothing else came close. Although 39% of the younger kids did complain that their fights were about…fights. They claimed, basically, that they started fights to stop their older siblings from hitting them.
That is from the new book NurtureShock, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, which I found interesting at times. "Interesting enough to read" is perhaps its category. Here is a WSJ review.
I should add that I don't think the cited research settles the matter. Children might fight over toys as credible signals of parental affection, caring more about the signal than about the toy per se.
Mathematics of a Zombie Attack
Here is the abstract of a new paper in Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress.
Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all.
Hat tip to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.
Timing
That's a question from Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing. The answer says a lot about how you implicitly think about time.
According to this research, a bit sketchy it seems to me, Friday people tend to be angrier. FYI, I'm a Monday person (it took me some time to see the question could have another answer!).