Formaldehyde

by  Tyler Cowen in

Formaldehyde is a known irritant poison, capable of causing severe internal damage, and formic acid is equally destructive, best known to scientists as an essential part of the venom in bee stings.  People poisoned by methyl alcohol would often seem to recover from that first bout of dizzy sickness, feel better while the alcohol was being metabolized, and then ten to thirty hours later by poisoned again by the breakdown products.

First, their vision would blur.  The optic nerve and retina are acutely vulnerable to formic acid salts.  The nerve, with its continual processing of images, runs in a high metabolic state, causing blood to circulate through it rapidly — which causes poison to be delivered there continuously.  Autopsies often revealed a startling atrophy of the optic nerve area, the surrounding tissue swollen, bloody, and spongy.  Methyl alcohol and its by-products caused similar damage in the parietal cortex, a region of the brain essential in processing vision.  It concentrated as well in the hardworking lungs — the breakdown of pulmonary tissue was what usually killed people.

That is from the new and consistently interesting The Poisoners' Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, by Deborah Blum.  Although she has won a Pulitzer Prize, she remains an underrated author.

Sources of funding for Nobel Prize work

by  Tyler Cowen in

Athina Tatsioni, Effie Vavva, and John P. A. Ioannidis have an interesting new paper:

Funding is important for scientists’ work and may contribute to exceptional research outcomes. We analyzed the funding sources reported in the landmark scientific papers of Nobel Prize winners. Between 2000 and 2008, 70 Nobel laureates won recognition in medicine, physics, and chemistry. Sixty five (70%) of the 93 selected papers related to the Nobel-awarded work reported some funding source including U.S. government sources in 53 (82%), non-U.S. government sources in 19 (29%), and nongovernment sources in 33 (51%). A substantial portion of this exceptional work was unfunded. We contacted Nobel laureates whose landmark papers reported no funding. Thirteen Nobel laureates responded and offered their insights about the funding process and difficulties inherent in funding. Overall, very diverse sources amounting to a total of 64 different listed sponsors supported Nobel-related work. A few public institutions, in particular the U.S. National Institutes of Health (with n=26 funded papers) and the National Science Foundation (with n=17 papers), stood out for their successful record for funding exceptional research. However, Nobel-level work arose even from completely unfunded research, especially when institutions offered a protected environment for dedicated scientists.

I thank Michelle Dawson for the pointer.

Sweden, Medicare, and what really matters

by  Tyler Cowen in

Tino writes:

Medicare was introduced 1965 in the US. Public health coverage for the elderly existed by 1950 in Sweden, but full universal coverage dates to 1955 in Sweden (a public health insurance was founded in 1891, and public municipal public health existed for even longer).

In 1950, before Medicare, and before Universal coverage in Sweden the difference was +2.6 at birth and +0.3 at 65. In 2001-2005 the difference between the Sweden and US was +2.7 at birth and +0.3 years at 65. Identical!

First, regarding the life expectancy at birth we can note that 50 years of different health policy, labor mark policy, welfare state coverage seems to have had zero effect on total outcome.

And:

Last note: around 1900, before the expansion of the welfare state, the estimated life expectancy at birth was 54.0 years in Sweden and 47.3 years in the US, a difference of 5.3 years, twice the current gap.

If you scroll through Tino's blog, you will find various critiques of The Spirit Level.  On the health care point, I would stress that Hansonian results also can be used to argue for the extreme exercise of monopsony power, so don't think the policy implications of this are so simple.

Alcohol Poisoning

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Deborah Blum writes about the Federal program to poison alcohol during prohibition:

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

What Blum fails to mention is that the Federal program to poison alcohol continues to this day.  Drinking-alcohol is heavily taxed but ethanol is heavily subsidized so poisoning or denaturing is used to prevent arbitrage.  Even today some people occasionally go blind or die when they try to drink some form of denatured ethanol but this is rare since safe, drinking alcohol is readily available, even if expensive.

(FYI, Tyler and I mention this unusual method of preventing arbitrage in our chapter on price discrimination in Modern Principles.)

Latino immigrants and crime

by  Tyler Cowen in

The connection between Latino immigration and criminal behavior is much overstated.  Here is an excellent article, full of good information.  Excerpt:

The overall age-adjusted national imprisonment rates are shown in Chart 1. Hispanic incarceration rates are now between 13 and 31 percent above the white average, depending upon which age range we choose for normalization purposes.

And this:

Another important point to emphasize is the wide disparity in white incarceration rates throughout the country, even when adjusted relative to the number of whites in high-crime age ranges. For example, age-adjusted imprisonment rates for whites in large Southern states such as Florida, Texas, and Georgia may be 200 percent or even 300 percent higher than those for whites in large Northeastern or Midwestern states such as New York, New Jersey, or Illinois, as shown in Chart 5. Although it is impossible to disentangle completely how much of this gap may be due to higher criminality and how much due to harsher judicial systems, it seems likely that both play important roles. So even if the age-adjusted Hispanic incarceration rate is somewhat above the white rate–perhaps 15 percent higher on average–it still falls close to the center of the overall white distribution.

Don't forget this:

Nearly all of the most heavily Latino cities have low or even extremely low crime rates, and virtually none have rates much above the national average. Eighty percent Latino El Paso has the lowest homicide and robbery rates of any major city in the continental United States. This is not what we would expect to find if Hispanics had crime rates far higher than whites. Individual cities may certainly have anomalously low crime rates for a variety of reasons, but the overall trend of crime rates compared to ethnicity seems unmistakable.

And this:

…if we restrict our analysis to major cities of half a million people or more and compare the average crime rates for the five most heavily Hispanic cities–Albuquerque, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Antonio, and El Paso–to the those of the five whitest–Oklahoma City, Columbus, Indianapolis, Seattle, and Portland. This time, the more Hispanic cities are the ones with the lower crime rates–10 percent below the white cities in homicide and 15 percent lower in violent crime. A particularly remarkable result is that gigantic Los Angeles–50 percent Hispanic and frequently perceived as a dangerous urban hellhole–has violent crime rates close to those of Portland, Oregon, the whitest major city in the nation at 74 percent.

And finally:

Los Angeles today ranks as America’s least white European large city. Half of the population is Hispanic, and many of these are impoverished illegal immigrants and their families. Yet all crime rates have been falling steadily over the last two decades, with homicide dropping a further 18 percent just last year. As Chart 14 illustrates, most major crime categories are now back down to where they were in the early 1960s, when the population really did look very much like the actors appearing in “Dragnet” and “Leave It to Beaver.” And indeed, violent crime is now roughly the same as for Portland, Oregon, America’s whitest major city.

There is a lot more which I did not pass along, so read the whole thing.  I thank The Browser and Ezra Klein for the pointers.

Haiti vignette markets in everything The Ricardo Effect

by  Tyler Cowen in

Haiti, a nation of 10 million, does not have a single sewage treatment plant. Trucks often simply take the waste to the Troutier trash dump near the slums of Cité Soleil on this city’s edge.

The trucks empty into pits filled with medical waste like intravenous bags and garbage. Smoke billows from burning piles of trash. One truck from a private company, Sanco, with its motto “Fighting for a Clean Environment” emblazoned on its side, did not bother to go to a pit, dumping its cargo of human waste on the open ground.

A squatter community of a dozen families, including some new arrivals whose homes were destroyed in the earthquake, tries to eke out its survival by scavenging in this setting.

…The human waste problem was daunting even before the earthquake. Lacking a municipal sewage system, many families here employ a socially scorned class of nocturnal latrine cleaners known in Creole as the “bayakou.” They descend into latrines to clean excrement with their hands, before transporting it in carts to improvised disposal sites.

The story is here.

Revisiting Simon-Ehrlich

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Paul Kedrosky revisits the famous Simon-Ehrlich bet:

Without getting into it too deeply, here are some things worth knowing. Given
the above graph of the five commodities’ prices in inflation-adjusted terms, it
will surprise no-one that the bet’s payoff was highly dependent on its start
date. Simon famously offered to bet comers on any timeline longer than a year,
and on any commodity, but the bet itself was over a decade, from 1980-1990. If
you started the bet any year during the 1980s Simon won eight of the ten decadal
start years. During the 1990s things changed, however, with Simon the decadal
winners in four start years and Ehrlich winning six – 60% of the time. And if we
extend the bet into the current decade, taking Simon at his word that he was
happy to bet on any period from a year on up (we don’t have enough data to do a
full 21st century decade), then Ehrlich won every start-year bet in the 2000s.
He looks like he’ll be a perfect Simon/Ehrlich ten-for-ten.

ehrlich-table-2

So, what does all this mean? A few things. First, and most importantly, it
means Simon was right but fairly lucky. There is nothing wrong with being lucky,
of course, but compulsive Simon/Ehrlich-citers need to be reminded that it is no
law of nature (let alone of rickety old economics) that commodity prices
(inflation-adjusted or otherwise) trend inexorably downward, even over a
decade.

If the conclusion is that prices go up as well as down, even over a 10 year period, then there isn't much to complain about in Paul's analysis.  But I think he misses the key point.  The bet was never fundamentally about prices, the bet was about scarcity, living standards and whether we were running out of natural resources–remember that at the time Ehrlich was predicting hundreds of millions would die of starvation and even that England would not exist in the year 2000!  Prices were just a convenient but imperfect way to mark the bet to market.

The reason prices have risen in the 1990s is not that things are getting worse but that things are getting better–especially in China and India where things have been getting much better.  As China and India have become richer demand has increased tremendously in these countries putting upward pressure on prices.  In other words, prices have risen because the value of resources has risen.  That's quite different–indeed the opposite–of what Ehrlich was predicting.

To see this concretely take a good which is really fixed in supply, Picasso paintings.  Now consider two worlds – in one world the price of a typical Picasso is $50,000; in the other, it's $5 million.  Which world would you guess has a higher standard of living? 

Alan Stockman passes away at 58

by  Tyler Cowen in

A talented teacher, inspiring mentor, and respected scholar, Professor Stockman made major contributions to the fields of international finance and macroeconomics, publishing seminal papers on exchange rates and international business cycles. He is remembered by colleagues as a man whose infectious enthusiasm for economics was characteristic of his general approach to life.

There is more here.  I met Stockman once and was very impressed with him and his ability to think like an economist.  He was a prominent economist but I think he was nonetheless an underrated economist.

Are wage and price controls a solution for Greece?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Larry Kotlikoff has an idea:

The government can implement wage and price controls for, say, the next three months, with these controls covering not just the growth in wages and prices over the next three months, but also their initial levels. Specifically, the Greek government would decree that all firms must lower their nominal wages and prices by 30 per cent, effective immediately, and not change them for three months. After three months, everyone would be free to put prices and wages back up.

I say it won't work, because the underlying problems of the Greek economy are real and structural and not just nominal.  (They do have a nominal problem, but they have a nominal problem in part because they have a structural problem.)  But if you think the inability to devalue is the overriding problem, it seems a (fairly) simple solution is at hand.  The fact that such "solutions" don't gain much political traction is one reason to think that pushing on aggregate demand is not the answer to all or even most macroeconomic problems.

That said, I still favor the Scott Sumner recipe over price deflation.

Publish Referee Reports?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

A number of prominent scientists working on stem-cell research have written a letter calling for peer-reviews to be made publicly available:

We suggest a simple step that would greatly improve transparency, fairness and accountability; when a paper is published, the reviews, response to reviews and associated editorial correspondence could be provided as Supplementary Information, while preserving anonymity of the referees.

In cutting edge fields such as stem-cell research it's very common for scientists to be working on exactly the same problem with the first to publish receiving the bulk of the plaudits.  As a result, peer-sabotage can be a problem.  Sabotage is not such a problem in economics because researchers rarely work on exactly the same problem but laziness and low-quality reviews are real concerns.  (Note that my experiences with journal editors and reviewers has been more good than bad so I don't speak with sour grapes).

But would publishing anonymous referee reports really increase quality?  Blog comments are public and anonymous and they can be stupid, rude, and ill-informed (not this blog of course).  Indeed, the trend in blogs has been to remove anonymity as a way of increasing accountability and quality.  In science, however, anonymity is essential because the opportunities for repeat play and thus collusion are too common.

The primary effect of published referee reports would be on editors who would have their work put under greater scrutiny.  That is not necessarily a bad thing although editors are professionally under-rewarded in my view so more work is not necessarily going to lead to a better selection.

Note also that regardless of any change in quality, the value of the referee comments themselves should not be overlooked.  Referees may also appreciate the opportunity to have their work published in some form. Early results from the EMBO Journal which recently switched to publishing referee reports online appear to be satisfactory. Thus, I favor experiments along these lines. 

Here are previous MR articles on the peer-review process.

Addendum: Seth Roberts comments. See also Barkley Rosser in the comments.