Category: Science

Economist Ed Glaeser, a trim man, is a vigorous partisan of the Atkins Diet. Nonetheless he argues that McDonald’s brings social benefits, not social costs:

Glaeser’s rationale for suggesting that convenience foods are a social good is that, to judge from consumer behavior in the marketplace, people seem to prefer saving time to being thinner. And in economics, by and large, getting what you want is a good thing. Glaeser notes that until relatively recently, cheaper food (in terms of money as well as time) made us taller and healthier. Only in the past 25 years or so have diminishing returns set in.

Now that less is more when it comes to increased calorie intake, Glaeser expects the marketplace to correct the excesses he attributes to self-control problems. For one thing, food technology can’t advance much farther, “short of direct injection,” whereas weight-loss technology is only in its infancy, with vast room to grow. Glaeser can understand the need for regulation in the schools, or if food companies are misleading people. But he says: “I don’t think anybody ate at McDonald’s and thought it was good for them. I take a dim view of these lawsuits.”

Thanks to newmarksdoor.com for the link, and Daniel Akst for the article itself. See also Alex’s post on Three Oreo Cookies.

Ralph Nader’s Commercial Alert group seeks to restrict or prohibit commercial research into neuroscience. You might recall that researchers at Emory are hard at work on this problem:

Neuromarketing research uses a magnetic resonance imaging machine, or MRI, to determine which parts of the brain react to different types of advertising in an effort to help marketers develop more effective marketing techniques for selling their products or services.

The critics charge that the research is directed at finding a “buy button” in the mind. Critics also raise the specter of mind control and the loss of individual autonomy. Commercial Alert makes the following threat:

“It is wrong to use medical research for marketing instead of healing,” Ruskin said. “If Emory University doesn’t stop this immediately, we will do everything in our power to shut down Emory’s federal funding.”

My take: The neuroscience techniques remain unproven, but in the meantime corporations are subsidizing an important science. Many of our most significant scientific discoveries have been by accident, when people were looking for some other result altogether. The support for research may well have a real long-run payoff.

Furthermore the worries are overblown. Let’s say we found such a buy button and that corporations could use that knowledge in their ads. Would it really shift the marketing balance of power in favor of sellers? Over time I would expect buyers to compensate, as the knowledge would not stay secret for very long. We could imagine lists of products that were sold by manipulative techniques, and customers would know to stay away from such products. A technological arms race would be set off. We could imagine private entrepreneurs selling “counter-persuasion” techniques to customers, perhaps in the form of drugs, warning buzzers, or counter-subliminal images flashed into your eyeglasses (the latter product is already under development!). Or how about programming the microchip credit card embedded in your arm to discourage or prevent such manipulation-induced purchases? Or how about if consumers use neuroscience to learn how to be truly happy staying at home and cultivating their gardens?

Sellers seem to have the biggest advantage when manipulation techniques are less than transparent. So neuroscience research into buyer behavior may be a classic prisoner’s dilemma problem. Various sellers may pursue such knowledge, hoping to get a leg up on the competition. The long-run result may be an evaporation of business advantage and an empowering of consumers.

Thanks to Kevin McCabe for the pointer on this issue, check out his neuroeconomics blog.

The flu vaccine is now running very scarce, you can wait for weeks and there is no guarantee of getting it at all. Most of the supplies are already in the hands of doctors. Note also the following:

Random immunization is almost useless because, for many viruses, more than 95% of the population must be vaccinated to prevent the disease’s spread.

But things are not as grim as they might sound. First:

An alternative to the flu shot is FluMist, a more expensive inhaled version of the vaccine, which is recommended for healthy people between the ages of 5 and 49. There are about 4 million doses available of FluMist, health officials said.

Although those below 5 and over 49 are the at-risk groups, they are less likely to catch the flu if the rest of us are healthy.

Second, we could administer flu shots more wisely by targeting superspreaders, here is one proposal:

Reuven Cohen of Bar-Ilan University in Israel and his colleagues propose a simple modification of random vaccination that is more effective, according to their computer simulations. The idea is to randomly choose, say, 20% of the individuals and ask them to name one acquaintance; then vaccinate those acquaintances. Potential super-spreaders have such a large number of acquaintances that they are very likely to be named at least once, the researchers found. On the other hand, the super-spreaders are so few in number that the random 20% of individuals is unlikely to include many of them.

Using the team’s vaccination strategy, a disease can be stopped by vaccinating less than 20% of the individuals, in some cases, according to their computer model of a human population. The method can also be tweaked: if a larger sample is asked for names, and those named twice are vaccinated, the total number of vaccinations required can be even lower.

The trick may be getting these people to take the shots, but surely economists can come up with a useful incentives scheme for that, I would prefer a subsidy over a tax.

Everyone has his or her obsession, one of mine is collecting Mexican amate painting, for some people it is investing in space travel.

The tangible pieces of John Carmack’s dream are scattered around an 8,000-square-foot warehouse: industrial water-purification tank, aluminum cones, compressed air cylinders, used Russian spacesuit.

All are components of the software developer’s project to launch a manned rocket 62 miles up by January 2005.

What binds the pieces together are Carmack’s quiet intellect and considerable bankroll.

“We mostly look at it as a two-horse race,” the 33-year-old millionaire said of the international competition for the $10 million X Prize, offered by a St. Louis-based foundation.

The entrepreneur has a background in computer games and works with a team out of a warehouse, sometimes using the parking lot for small-scale launch attempts. Rather than pursuing secrecy, progress is publicized on the project website, there you can even see videos of failed launch attempts.

NASA had the following response:

NASA has no official comment on the civilian attempts.

“It’s certainly a complicated business. Sometimes [sic] we make it look easy,” said Melissa Mathews, a space agency spokeswoman.

Is Carmack crazy? Beats me, read this interview if you want more data. The whole point is that there is only one way to find out, which is to let him try. Maybe he is right that “Aerospace is plumbing with the volume turned up.”

Thanks to Marko Siladin for the pointer.

The year in which IQ is tested can make the difference between life and death for a death row inmate. It also can determine the eligibility of children for special services, adults’ Social Security benefits and recruits’ suitability for certain military careers, according to a new study by Cornell University researchers.

That’s because IQ scores tend to rise 5 to 25 points in a single generation. This so-called “Flynn effect” is corrected by toughening up the test every 15 to 20 years to reset the mean score to 100. A score from a test taken at the end of one cycle can vary widely from a score derived from a test taken at the beginning of the next cycle, when the test is more difficult, says Stephen J. Ceci, professor of human development at Cornell.

In other words, our definitions of intelligence and mental retardation are more relativistic than we would like to think. Yet the law, and various institutional categories, look to IQ scores as if they were fully objective. Here is the full story.

The Flynn effect implies, if you take it literally, that most people were morons as recently as a few generations ago. Just think, “someone who scored among the best 10% a hundred years ago, would nowadays be categorized among the 5% weakest. That means that someone who would be considered bright a century ago, should now be considered a moron!” So much as I believe in the idea of progress, I don’t think we can take the numbers at face value. If you are not convinced, try reading David Hume. Here is another survey of hypotheses, and why they fail to explain the data.

We’re past the point where nutrition can explain the rise in IQ scores, and more generally the Flynn effect numbers are inconsistent with more general data about the limits on environment for improving IQ scores. The less culturally specific the test, the stronger the Flynn effect appears. Bill Dickens and Flynn offer some interesting evidence on how genes and environment interact.

My favorite hypothesis, which has no hard data to support it, cites “the impact of the visual and spatial demands that accompany a television-laden, video-game-rich world. ” In other words, TV helps us do well on IQ tests. This does not explain why the Flynn effect predates 1950, but perhaps the more general increase in world complexity forces our brains to adapt. In earlier times people were “smart enough” for their environments, and still could create brilliant achievements on the frontiers they faced, still they might have been ill-suited to live in modern times.

Recently the Bush administration has been making noises about sending a man to the moon again. Gregg Easterbrook offers some cogent critical points:

A rudimentary, stripped-down Moon base and supplies might weigh 200 tons. (The winged “orbiter” part of the space shuttle weighs 90 tons unfueled, and it’s cramped with food, oxygen, water, and power sufficient only for about two weeks.) Placing 200 tons on the Moon might require 400 tons of fuel and vehicle in low-Earth orbit, so that’s 600 tons that need to be launched just for the cargo part of the Moon base. Currently, using the space shuttle it costs about $25 million to place a ton into low-Earth orbit. Thus means the bulk weight alone for a Moon base might cost $15 billion to launch: building the base, staffing it, and getting the staff there and back would be extra. Fifteen billion dollars is roughly equivalent to NASA’s entire annual budget. Using existing expendable rockets might bring down the cargo-launch price, but add the base itself, the astronauts, their transit vehicles, and thousands of support staff on Earth and a ten-year Moon base program would easily exceed $100 billion. Wait, that’s the cost of the space station, which is considerably closer. Okay, maybe $200 billion.

What can a man do on the moon that automated vehicles cannot? Virtually nothing, and of course he requires far more maintenance and protection.

Given all that, where should we go from here?

NASA doesn’t need a grand ambition, it needs a cheap, reliable means of getting back and forth to low-Earth orbit. Here’s a twenty-first century vision for NASA: Cancel the shuttle, mothball the does-nothing space station, and use all the budget money the two would have consumed to develop an affordable means of space flight. Then we can talk about the Moon and Mars.

Mostly I agree, though I expect private enterprise can beat NASA in this latter project, at least provided we allow the privatization of space.