More on placebos
Alex, in his blog post from earlier today, makes a good point about placebos. Sometimes the patient is getting better anyway, and we should not attribute this effect to a placebo.
Note, however, that the best-known “anti-placebo” study is not as strong as is commonly believed. It relies heavily on a meta-analysis of other studies. Placebos appear to be effective in relieving the sufferer of pain, if nothing else. And placebos appear more effective when the ailment is continuous rather than discrete. Furthermore it is unclear how many people in the so-called no-treatment groups in fact received no treatment at all.
Here is a defense of the placebo effect. Placebos also have measurable effects in the brain, comparable to those of drugs, though weaker or less persistent.
Robert Ehrlich’s Eight Preposterous Propositions offers a very good survey of the placebo debates. His conclusion:
In summary, the [critical] study may have shown that the placebo is not as powerful as some observers would believe, but it certainly is far from powerless.
By the way, did you know that people can become addicted to placebos, or suffer from harmful “side effects”? I’ll try to write more on “nocebos,” or negative placebos, soon, at least provided that my mental attitude holds up.
Education and economic dynamism
Does a good educational system make for economic dynamism?
Check out the raw data on the American states for yourself. A more detailed look at the question would have to adjust for other relevant factors, but the sheer “eyeball effect” suggests a very weak link between education and economic dynamism, at least at the state level.
I am well aware of the macroeconomic growth literature that finds education to be a key driver of growth, see this article by Robert Barro.
How can we reconcile these two results? First, maybe education is critically important at lower levels of economic development, but not at higher levels. Second, the data on the states may not have enough ceteris paribus to be trustworthy. Third, the macro growth literature is weak on showing causal connections. I wonder: if we took out “education” and put “hours spent watching TV” into the cross-country regressions, what would the results look like?
Defining the Placebo Effect Carefully
I agree with Tyler that there is some serious evidence for placebo effects, especially although not exclusively for subjective components of disease. But the evidence is usually overstated because it is confused with the natural tendency of sick people to get better. A typical medical study, for example, will compare the results of a new drug against a placebo. The improvement in health of those on the placebo is then labeled “the placebo effect” – but this is wrong. To correctly identify the effect of the placebo one needs three randomly selected groups – a treated group, a placebo group and a non-treated group. The effect of the placebo per se is then measured by the health differences between the placebo and non-treated group. Although spontaneous healing effects are large, placebo effects when measured correctly tend to be small although not non-existent.
Chris Mooney on John Lott
Here is Chris Mooney’s recent article on John Lott, as always Chris focuses on the substance of the issue, and it is replete with useful links.
Addendum: Instapundit offers various comments and links.
Mr. Grant and Mr. Stalin
This is Ed Asner speaking:
“I think Joe Stalin was a guy that was hugely misunderstood. And to this day, I don’t think I have ever seen an adequate job done of telling the story of Joe Stalin, so I guess my answer would have to be Joe Stalin.” – actor, Ed Asner, responding to the question, “If you had the chance to play the biographical story of a historical figure you respected most over your lifetime, who would it be?”
From www.andrewsullivan.com.
Addendum: The original source modifies his account, it looks much less bad for Asner than originally reported.
Happy Birthday
Did you know that AOL/Time Warner owns the rights to the Happy Birthday song? First published in 1893 the song still earns revenues of some $2 million a year. You don’t have to pay AOL for singing the song, however, unless you do it for profit – movies that feature a birthday scene can pay up to $50,000 for the rights. Interestingly, the Happy Birthday song is usually not dubbed which may account for the fact that it is sung in English in many countries around the world even by non-English speakers. Saddam Hussein was once caught on videotape singing it to his daughter.
A report on the bounty hunter conference tomorrow!
Understanding fashion
Why fashion? Why spend all that money on silk and sequins? Could it have to do with sexual selection?
With fashion in the game, a woman not only sends out face and figure cues–which are fairly easy to fake–but she also signals her knowledge of the rules of fashion and her strategies for coping with them–which requires a set of inputs that are much harder to fake. With fashion layered into the mix, men can now tell something about a woman’s alertness to social conventions and the world around her, about her problem-solving skills and about the financial resources she brings to the game. (If those financial resources are earned by the woman herself, that directly signals a certain degree of fitness; if the financial resources are provided by the woman’s family, well, that at least strongly implies that some fairly fit genes in her family tree, as well as potentially valuable social connections.)
…to fulfill its role in sexual selection as a sincerity-testing handicap, fashion cannot be about simply making women beautiful, despite the fact that designers always portray their craft in this light. Fashion (as opposed to the rag trade) is about creating a rapidly changing set of rules for dressing which are intentionally subtle, complex, and difficult-to-decode. To make fashion work even better as a sincere (i.e., hard to fake) signaling device, designers must create a hierarchy of rules from introductory to expert while also charging increasingly more for the garments necessary to play the game at advanced levels. Making women beautiful (providing positive face and figure cues) is actually a task that fashion deliberately makes more difficult and expensive.
The discussion can be found on www.2blowhards.com, one of my favorite blogs.
The standard economic story suggests that we should tax costly signaling. Note that an evolutionary perspective can overturn or modify this conclusion. If we have evolved to enjoy such signalling (this is surely one plausible mechanism for how we are led to do the signaling, and surely many people love fashion), the signaling suddenly looks more productive. Signaling has sorting benefits as well; fashion makes sure that the right people marry each other. We likely still have too much signaling, relative to a “first best optimum,” but practicable improvements are suddenly harder to find.
Blogs and the private production of public goods
Blogs are a remarkable example of the private supply of public goods. The writers are highly motivated, and often highly intelligent. They produce opinion and commentary on just about everything, with remarkable speed and timeliness. Yet few of these authors are paid directly. They write either for love, or in the hope of converting their fame into profit. Well over four million blogs have been created.
Yet as we might expect, not all bloggers contribute much to the public good. To put it bluntly, many of you out there are slackers. Here are some results from a recent study:
Some highlights: about a quarter of all blogs created are abandoned after only one day. Men tend to abandon their blogs slightly faster than women do, while women are slightly more likely to create a blog in the first place. More than 90% of all blogs were created by people under 30 years old. The average active blog is updated only once every 14 days.
The summary remarks are from www.2blowhards.com.
Chilean vouchers
Co-blogger Alex and I had been having a debate over school vouchers, here is Alex’s last word, with links to the debate and my earlier posts, click here and here. I am skeptical about vouchers, although not from an anti-market point of view. We have seen from the electricity and water sectors that mixed public-private systems often create bad incentives, and do not always improve performance.
Brad Delong now cites NBER research (the paper itself costs $5) that school vouchers have not improved educational performance in Chile.
Here is a quotation from the paper:
In 1981, Chile introduced nationwide school choice by providing vouchers to any student wishing to attend private school. As a result, more than 1,000 private schools entered the market, and the private enrollment rate increased by 20 percentage points, with greater impacts in larger, more urban, and wealthier communities. We use this differential impact to measure the effects of unrestricted choice on educational outcomes. Using panel data for about 150 municipalities, we find no evidence that choice improved average educational outcomes as measured by test scores, repetition rates, and years of schooling. However, we find evidence that the voucher program led to increased sorting, as the best public school students left for the private sector.
My take: I am still willing to experiment with vouchers, mainly because they would give many inner city kids a chance they don’t currently have. But sometimes I wonder how much schooling, in the formal sense, matters at all. The United States has mediocre schooling, by international standards, but still produces highly productive individuals. Maybe a school is really just a collection of kids, in which case you can only get so far by reshuffling the mix.
Addendum: Here is a version of the paper.
The power of suggestion
Placebos have been shown to be quite effective in treating skin warts, which are clearly not a subjective ailment and are caused by viruses. According to an Australian physician, F.E. Anderson, warts probably have the highest number of folk remedies of any disease, which is not surprising if they respond well to placebos.
From the excellent Eight Preposterous Propositions, by Robert Ehrlich.
Francis Bacon recommended treating warts with pig fat. Sometimes warts respond well to hypnotic suggestion, an effect which is not well understood. And this is from an author strongly opposed to pseudo-science.
The fate of co-blogger Alex
You haven’t heard from Alex for a few days, he is out at Lake Tahoe addressing, get this, a conference of bounty hunters. In fact he is the keynote speaker, having done some excellent work on the topic. I mean work as a researcher, not work as a bounty hunter. I hope he will tell us more about this when he returns. And if he doesn’t come back, we will have some inkling of the reason.
The new Nobel Prize
Read David Warsh on the new Nobel Prize selections. There has been a paucity of interesting press on these picks, in part because the contributions are so technical. But this commentary, like everything else by David, is worth reading.
Here is one good point:
It was the third time in four years that the award was given for contributions to the tool-kit of empirical economists…The committee seems to be buttressing the case for the Nobel award itself…coming so quickly on the heels of the earlier award, this year’s prize may be directed less at the lay public, which is always hoping to understand what is going on in economics, than at the award’s real constituency – the scientists of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, mainly physical scientists, who actually vote the award.
At the end of the link you will find a separate bit, comparing Arnie to Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
Here is a result I do not believe
Consider this hypothesis: In the past, such as the nineteenth century, resources were far less mobile. So corrupt officials had to keep their ill-gotten gains at home. This (supposedly) helped the growth prospects of those economies:
In the relatively closed economies of the 19th century, the gains from corruption remained inside the country and became part of the economy’s productive capital. In contrast, in today’s open economies, corrupt agents smuggle stolen money abroad depleting their country’s stock of capital.
Here is a link to the paper. Here is a recent and slightly misleading summary from The New Scientist.
My take: This can’t be right. Most corrupt agents hold and want money, they do not keep capital goods under their pillow. Let’s say that those agents simply burned the money. This would not destroy any real capital for the economy; co-blogger Alex and I used to call this the “Junker fallacy” (recall the mistaken old view that early Germany did not grow because the Junkers bought land instead of investing in capital). So sending money abroad should not be the fundamental problem. Furthermore the distorting effects of corruption are more important than any so-called loss of capital.
The authors do have an interesting empirical result, namely that corruption damages wealth more when the economy is open. But even if this relationship is causal, we have to look for another mechanism. My best intuitive shot is the following: if the economy is open, international investors will, sooner or later, punish it for the corruption, a’ la Indonesia or Argentina.
Is it cheap corn that makes Americans fat?
Read here. Here is a short bit on the scientific developments behind cheap corn. I wouldn’t want to take any of these developments back, as they have saved millions of lives around the world. Nonetheless the biological/behavioral arguments for market failure are growing in importance (human beings did not evolve to handle fully abundant fats and sugars), relative to the traditional externalities arguments. If you don’t believe me, check back in thirty years.
Movies and capitalism
I continue to be amazed at the high-quality specialized blogs out there. The latest: a new blog about how capitalism is portrayed in the movies, courtesy of Larry Ribstein, legal scholar.
From the blog, here is a list of movies that portray business and private enterprise in a favorable or semi-favorable fashion:
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
Executive Suite
Charley Varrick (1973)
Heaven Can Wait (1978)
Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988)
Do the Right Thing (1989)
You’ve Got Mail (1998)
Cast Away (2000)
Thanks to ProfessorBainbridge.com for the pointer.
Addendum: David Hecht points out that “Sabrina” and “Working Girl” are missing from this list. And I haven’t seen “You’ve Got Mail,” but I recall that the previews villainized book superstores.
Second addendum: Here is a very useful discussion of “You’ve Got Mail,” from ProfessorBainbridge.com.