Results for “best fiction” 318 found
What should I ask Michael Orthofer?
Soon I will be recording a podcast-only, no live attendance, no live video Conversations with Tyler with Michael Orthofer. Michael runs the site Literary Saloon and is perhaps the world’s most productive book reviewer and book review blogger, with a focus on foreign fiction translated into English. Michael is a deeply devoted infovore, and I expect this to be one of the most interesting conversations in the series.
Here is my short review of Michael’s big book on world literature: “If you measure book quality by the actual marginal product of the text, this is one of the best books written, ever. Reading the manuscript in draft form induced me to a) write an enthusiastic blurb, and b) order about forty items through Amazon, mostly used of course. The book is basically a comprehensive guide to what is valuable and interesting in recently translated world literature, a meta-book so to speak, with extensive coverage of most of the countries you might want.”
Here is the New Yorker profile of Orthofer:
“I can’t imagine not doing it,” Orthofer told me. “A day in which I don’t read or write, I have trouble falling asleep.” His goal is to read a book a day, though he confesses that this is “unrealistic.” He works on weekends, too, and has written four novels that are in the drawer. His main interests, according to the site, are inline roller-skating in Central Park and building snow sculptures, some of which are big enough that he carves staircases inside them to get to the top. When he tires of working, he steps out to a library or bookstore, “to see, be around books.” Last year, and this year, he worked through Christmas.
OK, so what should I ask Michael? Comments are open.
Addendum: Here are previous installments of Conversations with Tyler.
Do I think Robin Hanson’s “Age of Em” actually will happen?
A reader has been asking me this question, and my answer is…no!
Don’t get me wrong, I still think it is a stimulating and wonderful book. And if you don’t believe me, here is The Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Hanson’s book is comprehensive and not put-downable.
But it is best not read as a predictive text, much as Robin might disagree with that assessment. Why not? I have three main reasons, all of which are a sort of punting, nonetheless on topics outside one’s areas of expertise deference is very often the correct response. Here goes:
1. I know a few people who have expertise in neuroscience, and they have never mentioned to me that things might turn out this way (brain scans uploaded into computers to create actual beings and furthermore as the dominant form of civilization). Maybe they’re just holding back, but I don’t think so. The neuroscience profession as a whole seems to be unconvinced and for the most part not even pondering this scenario.
2. The people who predict “the age of Em” claim expertise in a variety of fields surrounding neuroscience, including computer science and physics, and thus they might believe they are broader and thus superior experts. But in general claiming expertise in “more” fields is not correlated with finding the truth, unless you can convince people in the connected specialized fields you are writing about. I don’t see this happening, nor do I believe that neuroscience is somehow hopelessly corrupt or politicized. What I do see the “Em partisans” sharing is an early love of science fiction, a very valuable enterprise I might add.
3. Robin seems to think the age of Em could come about reasonably soon (sorry, I am in Geneva and don’t have the book with me for an exact quotation). Yet I don’t see any sign of such a radical transformation in market prices. Even with positive discounting, I would expect backwards induction to mean that an eventual “Em scenario” would affect lots of prices now. There are for instance a variety of 100-year bonds, but Em scenarios do not seem to be a factor in their pricing.
Robin himself believes that market prices are the best arbiter of truth. But which market prices today show a realistic probability for an “Age of Em”? Are there pending price bubbles in Em-producing firms, or energy companies, just as internet grocery delivery was the object of lots of speculation in 1999-2000? I don’t see it.
The one market price that has changed is the “shadow value of Robin Hanson,” because he has finished and published a very good and very successful book. And that pleases me greatly, no matter which version of Robin is hanging around fifty years hence.
Addendum: Robin Hanson responds. I enjoyed this line: “Tyler has spent too much time around media pundits if he thinks he should be hearing a buzz about anything big that might happen in the next few centuries!”
The economics of *Hamilton*, and money left on the table
The average resale of “Hamilton” tickets on StubHub is roughly $872, according to a New York Times analysis, a markup of $700 above the current average original ticket sale price.
For any given performance, roughly 13 to 22 percent of the seats at the Richard Rodgers — somewhere between 180 and 300 tickets — are available on the secondary market, according to The Times’s research and interviews with ticket sellers. So for each performance of “Hamilton,” ticket sellers and brokers are reaping roughly $150,000. With the Broadway cast putting on more than 400 shows per year, that means these sellers could reap about $60 million per year, just in New York — money the producers, investors and Mr. Miranda will never see.
I still find this equilibrium puzzling. By the way, here are some numbers on book tie-ins:
“Hamilton” can even sell books. “Hamilton: The Revolution,” a behind-the-scenes book about the creation of the musical by Jeremy McCarter and Mr. Miranda, went on sale in April with a list price of $40. In less than two months, it sold more than 101,000 copies, according to Nielsen, and hit the No. 1 spot on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. (Other authors have benefited from “Hamilton” fever, too: Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography, which inspired Mr. Miranda to write the musical, has spent 33 weeks on the paperback best-seller list. This fall, Three Rivers Press will publish Jeff Wilser’s self-help book “Alexander Hamilton’s Guide to Life.”)
Here is the Michael Paulson and David Gelles NYT piece, it has much more of interest on the economics of the show.
What I’ve been reading
1. Tom Bissell, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve. Fun, engaging, and informative, worthy of the “best of the year non-fiction” list.
2. China Miéville, Embassytown. The first of his novels that has clicked with me, perhaps because it is the one that comes closest to being a true novel of ideas, Heideggerian ideas in this case. A new prophecy is needed, and the nature of the new prophecy, like the old, will be shaped by language. Just accept that upon your first reading you won’t enjoy the first one hundred pages and you should at some point go back and read them again.
3. Yuri Herrara, Signs Preceding the End of the World. Sometimes considered Mexico’s greatest active writer, this novella draws upon the Juan Rulfo-Dante-Dia de los muertos tradition to create a convincing moral universe in 128 pages. I find this more vivid and arresting than Cormac McCarthy’s treatment of the other side of the border.
4. The Gene: An Intimate History, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. This book filled in a number of gaps in my knowledge, plus it is engaging to read. Overall it confirmed my impression of major advances in the science, but not matched by many medical products for general use.
The other books I read weren’t as good as these.
*Dante: The Story of His Life*
…Dante’s fame as a necromancer is also in a certain sense documented.
Such notoriety shouldn’t be surprising. For one thing, he had a reputation as an expert in astrology, and we know that this discipline could easily spill over into magical and necromantic practices. And then, above all, he was famous after the publication of Inferno for having descended live into the realms of the afterlife and for having encountered devils there, the souls of the damned, and having spoken to them. It must have been a rumor widely spread and also disturbing. It seems, according to Boccaccio, that the women who used to pass him in the street would say to each other: Look, “he who goes into Hell, and returns whenever he likes, and brings back news of those who are down there…”
That is from the new Dante biography by Marco Santagata, Belknap Press at Harvard, definitely recommended, it will make my best non-fiction of the year list for sure.
What caught my attention in 2015
This was the year when it became clear that much of Eastern Europe probably won’t end up as free societies. It’s not just semi-fascism in Hungary. Poland and Slovakia, arguably the two most successful economies and societies in Eastern Europe, took big steps backward toward illiberal governance. How can one be optimistic about the Balkans? I imagine a future where African and North African refugees are bottled up there, and Balkan politics becomes slowly worse. As for Ukraine, a mix of Russia and an “own goal” has made the place ungovernable. Where is the bright spot in this part of the world?
Nothing good happened in China’s economy, although more fingers have been inserted into more dikes. I am not hopeful on the cyclical side, though longer term I remain optimistic, due to their investments in human capital and the growing importance of scale.
I have grown accustomed to the idea that Asian mega-cities represent the future of the world — have you?
Syria won’t recover.
This was the year of the rise of Ted Cruz.
It was an awful year for movies, decent but unpredictable for books. The idea that Facebook and social media rob the rest of our culture of its centrality, or its ability to find traction, is the default status quo. Not even that idea has gained much traction. Cable TV started to receive its financial comeuppance. Yet on the aesthetic side, television is at an all-time peak, with lots of experimentation and independent content provision, all for the better. I suspect this is one reason why movies are worse, namely brain drain, but I am hoping for longer-run elasticities of adjustment into the broader talent pool.
Against all odds, Homeland was excellent in its fifth season.
I became even more afraid to move my cursor around a web page, and in terms of content, more MSM sites became worse than better. Banning photos would solve twenty percent of this problem.
Stephen Curry and Magnus Carlsen were the two (public) individuals I thought about the most and followed the most closely. Each has a unique talent which no one had come close to before. For Curry it is three point shooting at great range and with little warning; for Carlsen it is a deep understanding of the endgame as the true tactical phase of chess, and how to use the middlegame as prep to get there. It wasn’t long ago Curry’s weapons were “trick” shots, perhaps suitable for the Harlem Globetrotters; similarly, players such as Aronian thought Carlsen’s “grind ’em down” style could not succeed at a top five level. Everyone was wrong.
But here’s what I am wondering. Standard theory claims that with a thicker market, the #2 talents, or for that matter the #5s, will move ever closer to the #1s. That is not what we are seeing in basketball or chess. So what feature of the problem is the standard model missing? And how general is this phenomenon of a truly special #1 who breaks some of the old rules? Does Mark Zuckerberg count too?
I realized Western China is the best part of the world to visit right now. The food trends where I live were Filipino and Yemeni, which I found welcome. Virginia now has a Uighur restaurant in Crystal City, and the aging San Antonio Spurs continue to defy all expectations. Kobe Bryant, who “ranks among the league’s top 5 percent of shot-takers and its bottom 5 percent of shot-makers,” has redefined the retirement announcement, among other things.
Top curling teams say they won’t use high-tech brooms. Just wait.
Saturday assorted links
My conversation with Cliff Asness
Here is the full transcript, video, and podcast of the chat. Cliff was great from beginning to end. The first thirty minutes or so were an overview of “momentum” and “value” trading strategies, and to what extent they violate an efficient markets hypothesis. Much of the rest covered:
…disagreeing with Eugene Fama, Marvel vs. DC, the inscrutability of risk, high frequency trading, the economics of Ayn Rand, bubble logic, and why never to share a gym with Cirque du Soleil.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: I think of you as doing a kind of metaphysics of human nature. On one side, there’s behavioral economics. They put people in the lab, one-off situations, untrained people. But here it’s repeated data, it’s over long periods of time, it’s out of sample. There’s real money on the line, and this still seems to work.
When you back out, what’s the actual vision of human nature? What’s the underlying human imperfection that allows it to be the case, that trading on momentum across say a 3 to 12 month time window, sorry, investing on momentum, will work? What’s with us as people? What’s the core human imperfection?
ASNESS: This is going to be embarrassing because we don’t have a problem of no explanation. We have a problem with too many explanations. Of course, we can observe the data. The explanations you have to fight over and argue over. I will give you the two most prominent explanations for the efficacy of momentum.
The first is called underreaction. Simple idea that comes from behavioral psychology, the phenomenon there called anchoring and adjustment. News comes out. Price moves but not all the way. People update their priors but not fully efficiently. Therefore, just observing the price move is not going to move the same amount again but there’s some statistical tendency to continue.
Take a wild guess what our second best, in my opinion, explanation for momentum’s efficacy is? It’s called overreaction. When your two best explanations are over- and underreaction, you have somewhat of an issue, I admit. Overreaction is much more of a positive feedback. It works over time because people in fact do chase prices. So if you do it somewhat systematically and before them you make some money.
One of the hard things you find out in many fields but I found out in empirical finance is those might be the right explanations but they’re not mutually exclusive.
And here is from the overrated/underrated part of the chat:
COWEN: …In science fiction, the author Robert Heinlein.
ASNESS: Early stuff, underrated. Later stuff, overrated.
COWEN: What’s your favorite?
ASNESS: That is a really — Methuselah’s Children.
COWEN: Ah, good pick.
ASNESS: I could have gone with the obvious. I’m a bit of a libertarian. I could have gone with, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. It’s his most famously libertarian book.
COWEN: But it doesn’t age so well.
ASNESS: No, no. I like Methuselah’s Children.
This was the funniest segment:
ASNESS: I live in Greenwich, Connecticut. In some parts of the world, if you said, “my daddy runs a hedge fund,” I’d say, “what’s a hedge fund?” In Greenwich, Connecticut, the kids say, “what kind of hedge fund is your daddy running? Is he event arbitrage? Trend following? What does dad do?”
Interesting throughout, as they are known to say…
Saturday assorted links
1. “The Russian navy had to lease and purchase eight commercial transports in order to deliver supplies for the operation at the level of up to 50 sorties a day (which means one sortie per aircraft).” Link here. And: “Over the last three years I have found that the best way of learning what is really happening in the war is to visit military hospitals.”
2. Ted Gioia praises John Fowles.
3. This could pass as satire. (That link was taken down but it is still posted here.) Don’t neglect the subtitle of the publication itself. In fact you could have convinced me it was a bad right-wing satire of something that doesn’t happen, but I’ve seen it so many times in my Twitter feed I think it must be true.
4. Jonathan Haidt talk on how Ethical Systems Design could reduce inequality.
6. JEP piece on how the Fed plans to raise interest rates and how monetary policy works today. Boring, but a very good explainer.
*Genghis Khan*, by Frank McLynn
The subtitle is The Man Who Conquered the World, and this is one of the very best non-fiction books of the year, quite possibly the best. Virtually every page is fascinating and should be read carefully. It makes intelligible a period of history which is so often a blur to the unfamiliar Western reader,and rather than just throwing a bunch of dates and facts at you it tries to make them intelligible in terms of underlying mechanisms. Here is one summary bit:
The harshness of the Mongolian habitat and the complexities of nomadic pastoralism help to explain the many potentialities of Mongol society eventually actualised by Genghis Khan. Care of massive and variegated herds and flocks produced a number of consequences: adaptability and ingenuity of response and initiative; mobility and the capacity for rapid mobilisation; low levels of wealth and of economic inequality; almost total absence of a division of labour; political instability. Migration meant constant alertness and readiness to fight, since wealth in livestock is almost by definition highly vulnerable to raiding, reiving and rustling. Managing large animals was inherently more strenuous and dangerous than tending crops, so the very nature of pastoral life produced a hardier breed than would be generated by the peasantry. Migration in peacetime also produced martial qualities via the surplus energy available for fighting, since in a pacific context warriors could leave the minutae of herding and droving to women and children. when the fighting came, it was less destructive than for sedentary societies that had to defend fields of crops, cities, temples and other fixed points.
There were other military ‘spin-offs’ from pastoralism. Moving huge herds of animals generated logistical skills and the capacity to navigate through uncertain terrain, coordinating with far-flung comrades while doing so.
Strongly recommended, you can buy the book here.
What’s wrong with this picture?
The New York Times covers a controversy about a Texas history textbook:
Coby Burren, 15, a freshman at a suburban high school south of here, was reading the textbook in his geography class last week when a map of the United States caught his attention. On Page 126, a caption in a section about immigration referred to Africans brought to American plantations between the 1500s and 1800s as “workers” rather than slaves.
The black lives matter movement is upset that slaves are referred to as workers.
I am upset that the caption is factually incorrect even if rewritten not to use the word worker. In particular, it is not true that millions of slaves were brought from Africa to the southern United States. In fact, less than half a million came to the United States.
Here is Henry Louis Gates Jr:
The most comprehensive analysis of shipping records over the course of the slave trade is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, edited by professors David Eltis and David Richardson. (While the editors are careful to say that all of their figures are estimates, I believe that they are the best estimates that we have, the proverbial “gold standard” in the field of the study of the slave trade.) Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America.
And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. That’s right: a tiny percentage.
Here is the primary database for what we know about the Atlantic Slave Trade which lists 305,326 slaves brought to the USA. Gates goes on to note that some 60-70 thousand slaves initially brought to the Caribbean ended up in the United States so he estimates that perhaps 450,000 African slaves in total were brought to the U.S. over the course of the slave trade.
If you want to understand the slave trade it’s important to understand that the vast majority of the slaves taken from Africa were shipped to the Caribbean and South America. If you want to understand slavery in America it’s important to understand that most slaves in the United States were born into slavery. Also, as Gates notes, it’s a rather striking and amazing fact that “most of the 42 million members of the African-American community descend from this tiny group of less than half a million Africans.”
Regardless of whether you think that slaves are workers or not the textbook failed its students by getting the facts wrong. In a better culture, that failure would make for a controversy and a story in the New York Times.
Hat tip: Arthur Charpentier on twitter.
What I’ve been reading
1. Deep South, by Paul Theroux. It’s OK enough, but Theroux’s best writing was motivated by bile and unfortunately he has matured. Still, he can’t get past p.9 without mention Naipaul’s “rival book” A Turn in the South. My favorite Theroux book is his Sir Vidia’s Shadow, a delicious story of human rivalry and one of my favorite non-fiction books period.
2. Elmira Bayrasli, From the Other Side of the World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places. A well-written, completely spot on analysis about how the quality of the business climate needs to be improved in emerging economies, and about how much potential for entrepreneurship there is. If economists were to do nothing else but repeat this message, the quality and usefulness of our profession likely would rise dramatically.
3. Michael White, Travels in Vermeer: A Memoir. Nominated in the non-fiction National Book Award category, I actually enjoyed reading this one, all of it except the parts about…Vermeer. It’s better as a memoir of alcoholism and divorce, interspersed with visits to art museums.
Tom Gjelten’s A Nation of Nations is an interesting “immigration history” of Fairfax County. I enjoyed Deirdre Clemente’s Dress Casual: How College Students Redefined American Style.
Jennifer Mittelstadt’s The Rise of the Military Welfare State is a useful history of how a social welfare state for the military was first created, for recruitment purposes, and then later dismantled.
I recommend L. Randall Wray’s Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist, forthcoming in November. Minsky isn’t so readable, but Wray is. I’ve just started my review copy, I hope to report more on it soon.
Saturday assorted links
1. Liz Lutgendorff is offended by fantasy and science fiction novels.
2. There is no great stagnation, drug delivery edition. And the value of certain and immediate rewards.
3. What do we infer from disclosure?
4. “Superfluids aren’t usually purely super…”
5. More on why fair trade doesn’t work.
6. Greece just got fifty-five billion euros in debt relief.
7. The LKY Musical: Singapore’s history set to song.
8. Oliver Sacks on his cousin Robert Aumann. And other things.
What I’ve been reading
1. David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: on Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Don’t judge Graeber by his mistakes or by how he responds (doesn’t respond) to criticism. This one is still more interesting to read than most books. In fact, most of us quite like bureaucracy.
2. John Gray, The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom. The usual dose of pessimism, with a choppier argument and a slightly larger typeface than usual. It induced me to order Mr. Weston’s Good Wine. In any case, I’ll still buy the next one, engaging with John Gray if nothing else has become a ritual. I once predicted to Jim Buchanan that John would end up converting to Catholicism, but I still am waiting.
3. Juan Goytisolo. I’ve tried to read a bunch of his books, so far they all bore me, in both Spanish and English, the fault is probably mine. Various sophisticates suggest he is great, should I keep on trying?
4. Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. He is one of the best non-fiction essay writers, and he remains oddly underrated in the United States. It is no mistake to simply buy his books sight unseen. I think of this book as “happiness for grumps.”
5. Harry G. Gelber, The Dragon and the Foreign Devils: China and the World, 1100 B.C. to the Present. No, this isn’t the best Chinese history book. But it is the one most written in a way that you will remember its contents, and in this context that is worth a lot.
Genetically Engineering Humans Isn’t So Scary (Don’t Fear the CRISPR, Part 2)
Yesterday I outlined why genetically engineered children are not imminent. The Chinese CRISPR gene editing of embryos experiment was lethal to around 20% of embryos, inserted off-target errors into roughly 10% of embryos (with some debate there), and only produced the desired genetic change in around 5% of embryos, and even then only in a subset of cells in those embryos.
Over time, the technology will become more efficient and the combined error and lethality rates will drop, though likely never to zero.
Human genome editing should be regulated. But it should be regulated primarily to assure safety and informed consent, rather than being banned as it is most developed countries (see figure 3). It’s implausible that human genome editing will lead to a Gattaca scenario, as I’ll show below. And bans only make the societal outcomes worse.
1. Enhancing Human Traits is Hard (And Gattaca is Science Fiction)
The primary fear of human germline engineering, beyond safety, appears to be a Gattaca-like scenario, where the rich are able to enhance the intelligence, looks, and other traits of their children, and the poor aren’t.
But boosting desirable traits such as intelligence and height to any significant degree is implausible, even with a very low error rate.
The largest ever survey of genes associated with IQ found 69 separate genes, which together accounted for less than 8% of the variance in IQ scores, implying that at least hundreds of genes, if not thousands, involved in IQ. (See paper, here.) As Nature reported, even the three genes with the largest individual impact added up to less than two points of IQ:
The three variants the researchers identified were each responsible for an average of 0.3 points on an IQ test. … That means that a person with two copies of each variant would score 1.8 points higher on an intelligence test than a person with none of them.
Height is similarly controlled by hundreds of gene. 697 genes together account for just one fifth of the heritability of adult height. (Paper at Nature Genetics here).
For major personality traits, identified genes account for less than 2% of variation, and it’s likely that hundreds or thousands of genes are involved.
Manipulating IQ, height, or personality is thus likely to involve making a very large number of genetic changes. Even then, genetic changes are likely to produce a moderate rather than overwhelming impact.
Conversely, for those unlucky enough to be conceived with the wrong genes, a single genetic change could prevent Cystic Fibrosis, or dramatically reduce the odds of Alzheimer’s disease, breast cancer or ovarian cancer, or cut the risk of heart disease by 30-40%.
Reducing disease is orders of magnitude easier and safer than augmenting abilities.
2. Parents are risk averse
We already trust parents to make hundreds of impactful decisions on behalf of their children: Schooling, diet and nutrition, neighborhood, screen time, media exposure, and religious upbringing are just a few. Each of these has a larger impact on the average child – positive or negative – than one is likely to see from a realistic gene editing scenario any time in the next few decades.
And in general, parents are risk averse when their children are involved. Using gene editing to reduce the risk of disease is quite different than taking on new risks in an effort to boost a trait like height or IQ. That’s even more true when it takes dozens or hundreds of genetic tweaks to make even a relatively small change in those traits – and when every genetic tweak adds to the risk of an error.
(Parents could go for a more radical approach: Inserting extra copies of human genes, or transgenic variants not found in humans at all. It seems likely that parents will be even more averse to venturing into such uncharted waters with their children.)
If a trait like IQ could be safely increased to a marked degree, that would constitute a benefit to both the child and society. And while it would pose issues for inequality, the best solution might be to try to rectify inequality of access, rather than ban the technique. (Consider that IVF is subsidized in places as different as Singapore and Sweden.) But significant enhancements don’t appear to be likely any time on the horizon.
Razib Khan points out one other thing we trust parents to do, which has a larger impact on the genes of a child than any plausible technology of the next few decades:
“the best bet for having a smart child is picking a spouse with a deviated phenotype. Look for smart people to marry.”
3. Bans make safety and inequality worse
A ban on human germline gene editing would cut off medical applications that could reduce the risk of disease in an effort to control the far less likely and far less impactful enhancement and parental control scenarios.
A ban is also unlikely to be global. Attitudes towards genetic engineering vary substantially by country. In the US, surveys find 4% to 14% of the population supports genetic engineering for enhancement purposes. Only around 40% support its use to prevent disease. Yet, As David Macer pointed out, as early as 1994:
in India and Thailand, more than 50% of the 900+ respondents in each country supported enhancement of physical characters, intelligence, or making people more ethical.
While most of Europe has banned genetic engineering, and the US looks likely to follow suit, it’s likely to go forward in at least some parts of Asia. (That is, indeed, one of the premises of Nexus and its sequels.)
If the US and Europe do ban the technology, while other countries don’t, then genetic engineering will be accessible to a smaller set of people: Those who can afford to travel overseas and pay for it out-of-pocket. Access will become more unequal. And, in all likelihood, genetic engineering in Thailand, India, or China is likely to be less well regulated for safety than it would be in the US or Europe, increasing the risk of mishap.
The fear of genetic engineering is based on unrealistic views of the genome, the technology, and how parents would use it. If we let that fear drive us towards a ban on genetic engineering – rather than legalization and regulation – we’ll reduce safety and create more inequality of access.
I’ll give the penultimate word to Jennifer Doudna, the inventor of the technique (this is taken from a truly interesting set of responses to Nature Biotechnology’s questions, which they posed to a large number of leaders in the field):
Doudna, Carroll, Martin & Botchan: We don’t think an international ban would be effective by itself; it is likely some people would ignore it. Regulation is essential to ensure that dangerous, trivial or cosmetic uses are not pursued.
Legalize and regulate genetic engineering. That’s the way to boost safety and equality, and to guide the science and ethics.