Quotulatiousness

May 16, 2012

Nanny knows best, part MCMLXII

Filed under: Books, Britain, Food, Health, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

Chris Snowdon at the Adam Smith Institute blog:

When we scheduled the release of The Wages of Sin Taxes for 15th May, we did not guess that it would be sandwiched between the announcement of a 50p minimum price for alcohol in Scotland (Monday) and a new campaign for sin taxes on food and soft drinks (today). Writing in the British Medical Journal, two academics have just called for price hikes on sugar-sweetened beverages and ‘junk food’ as a way of dealing with Britain’s alleged obesity epidemic.

Obesity rates, like drinking rates, have not actually risen for ten years, but the same decade saw the medical profession gain an uncanny grip on the nation’s political process and they are in no mood to relinquish it. Taking a break from hassling smokers and drinkers, the mandarins of public health have taken the ‘next logical step’ and moved on to the general population.

“Economists generally agree,” they write, “that government intervention, including taxation, is justified when the market fails to provide the optimum amount of a good for society’s wellbeing.” Even if this dubious statement were true, there has never been a time when the market offered more choice in what we eat than drink than today. And, contrary to popular belief, it is much cheaper for a family to subsist on fresh fruit and vegetables than it is to eat out at McDonalds three times a day. For the spokespeople of public health, the problem is not that there is a lack of options, but that we plebs are not choosing the right ones.

Defining junk food is notoriously difficult. As Rob Lyons explains in his excellent book Panic on a Plate, a portion of McDonalds fries contains a quarter of an adult’s recommended intake of Vitamin C, while middle class favourites like olive oil, parmesan and pasta are rather fattening. A tax on “sugar sweetened beverages” will presumably leave apple juice and smoothies untouched, despite the fact that fruit juices are often sweeter and more calorific than Coca-Cola.

May 14, 2012

Scottish minimum alcohol pricing: “Health fascism is back with a vengeance”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

A released statement from Sam Bowman, Head of Research at the Adam Smith Institute, responding to Scotland’s minimum alcohol price decision:

“Minimum alcohol pricing is a miserable, Victorian-era measure that explicitly targets the poor and the frugal, leaving the more expensive drinks of the middle classes untouched. It’s regressive and paternalistic, treating people as if they’re children to be nannied by the government.

“To make things worse, all signs suggest that the minimum price will be successively raised once it’s in place. This is what happened in the UK with alcohol and tobacco taxes, which are now among the highest in the world. It’s like boiling a frog – bring in a low minimum price that only affects the most marginalized part of society, the poor, and raise it gradually every year without people noticing.

“The reality is that Britain does not have a drink problem. The definition of “binge drinking” has been redefined so that a grown man drinking more than two pints of lager is considered to be “binging”. The number of diseases defined as “alcohol-related” has tripled in the last twenty-five years. In fact, we drink less than we did ten years ago, less than we did one hundred years ago, and far less than we did in the 19th Century. Hysteria about drinking alcohol is a red herring invented by the health lobby. Health fascism is back with a vengeance, and minimum alcohol pricing is just another brick in the wall.”

May 12, 2012

The best news out of Africa in … well, ever

Filed under: Africa, Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:56

From Tim Worstall at the Adam Smith Institute:

That is the annual change in child mortality in those selected countries. No country, no group of countries, has ever seen anything like this, it simply has not happened so quickly anywhere else at all. Something, blessedly, is going very right indeed in this world. My suggestion is that we keep doing exactly what it is that we are currently doing: we might call it globalisation, foreign direct investment, openness to trade or as Madsen puts it, buying things made by poor people in poor countries. But it’s working, isn’t it?

May 6, 2012

Technology is not the panacea

Filed under: Education, Health, India, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:06

I’m generally very pro-technology, but the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) effort always struck me as putting the technology cart in front of the educational (and cultural) horse. A report at The Economist has examples of technological fixes that haven’t actually “fixed” the problems they were intended to solve:

The American charity has an ambitious mission — transform the quality of education in the developing world by giving every poor student a laptop. Targeting a $100 laptop, OLPC succeeded in creating a usable computer at a very low price point (the actual number was closer to $200). Unfortunately most of the attention in the project was focused on the technology and not enough on its efficacy. In the first rigorous evaluation of the programme, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) found little evidence that the laptops influenced educational outcomes. The study, conducted in Peru four years after the programme was launched, found no improvement in math or language. While the computers did lead to some gains in cognitive skills, the authors concluded that access to a laptop didn’t improve attendance. Neither did it motivate students to spend more time on their homework.

There is similarly disappointing news on cooking stoves. The World Health Organization estimates that indoor pollution from primitive cooking fires contributes to 2m deaths annually. One solution is to use clean cooking stoves. At a cost of $12.50, these stoves are an inexpensive way to reduce respiratory ailments and improve air quality. The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves (GACC), a public-private initiative, is making a big push for 100m homes in the developing world to switch to clean stoves by 2020. But a new NBER paper by Rema Hanna from Harvard University and Esther Duflo and Michael Greenstone from MIT, questions the long-term health or environmental benefits from this programme. The authors evaluated a clean-stove programme in eastern India, covering 15,000 households over five years. Their study found that after the initial year, enthusiasm for the stoves waned and households didn’t make the necessary investments to maintain them. As a result, the programme had very little effect on respiratory health or air pollution.

Both these projects highlight some common misconceptions in using technology for development. For one, solving intractable social problems requires fundamental changes in the target population. It also needs a supportive institutional framework to reinforce the right behaviour. Technology can complement this process, but it is no substitute for the human element. In Peru, simply adding laptops to the classroom, without investing in teachers who were proficient in computer-aided education, meant that the academic impact was limited. The IDB paper rightly points out that in poor countries where wages are low, development money may be better spent on labor-intensive education interventions than on expensive tools.

May 4, 2012

Gordon O’Connor on the abortion debate

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:04

A fascinating moment in the House of Commons, as related by the editors at Maclean’s:

And then Gordon O’Connor rose from his seat on the government side, immediately behind the Prime Minister. O’Connor, a retired brigadier-general, is the chief Conservative whip — the living symbol, in other words, of the ministry’s discipline and unity. His words bit with surprising sharpness. “The House of Commons . . . is not a laboratory,” he admonished Woodworth. “It is not a house of faith, an academic setting or a hospital. It is a legislature, and a legislature deals with law.” The Criminal Code definition of a human being, he said, is not a medical one; it is a purely legal test defining the moment when personal rights receive protection independent from those of the mother. It is quite reasonable, he added, that this should happen at the moment of their physical separation.

O’Connor went further. He denounced the oft-repeated right-wing heckle that abortion is “unregulated” in Canada. It happens to be absent from the criminal law, O’Connor observed, but the provinces regulate their medical professions, and the doctors in turn regulate their own conduct. The provincial governments and the medical colleges have agreed that since abortion cannot be abolished, it ought to be provided safely by, and to those whose private judgment allows for it. “The decision of whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is essentially a moral decision,” said the whip, “and in a free and democratic society, the conscience of the individual must be paramount and take precedence over that of the state.”

O’Connor concluded by reaffirming that the Conservative determination not to reopen Canada’s abortion debate is unwavering. “Society has moved on and I do not believe this proposal should proceed,” he said. “As well, it is in opposition to our government’s position. Accordingly I will not support [this] motion. I will vote against it and I recommend that others oppose it.” [. . .]

What is interesting about O’Connor’s brief speech is that it frames reproductive choice as a matter of small-C conservative principles. He appealed not only to libertarian considerations of individual conscience, but to the idea that regulations should be made at the political level closest to the citizen. Viewed in this light, the Harper rule against legislating on abortion is not just a convenient, cynical means to social peace and election success. It suggests the influence within the government caucus of a Charter-friendly breed of conservative, one whose first instinct is not always to “stand athwart history yelling, stop.”

May 3, 2012

Is the NFL at the peak of popularity also at the peak of risk?

Filed under: Football, Health — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:49

Jim Souhan’s column in the Minneapolis Star Tribune shows the risks players are taking may be greater than they expect:

The problems faced by today’s NFL makes the notion of ballplayers inflating their muscles in an attempt to hit baseballs far almost charming.

Authorities said Seau apparently took his own life with a shot to the chest. Former Bear Dave Duerson also killed himself with a shot to his chest, and left a note asking that his brain be studied to increase awareness of how head injuries affect football players. Duerson believed hits to his head left him mentally impaired.

The NFL never has been more popular, or more endangered. Every year what was once suspected moves closer to universally accepted fact: Human beings shouldn’t play tackle football, at least at the level of violence required by professional coaches.

Malicious hits have become such an important part of the NFL that players, for the Saints and other teams, have defended the bounty system as nothing more than a bureaucratic form of violence as usual. Every NFL defender knows he should knock opponents out of the game, or just out; the Saints were the rare team arrogant enough to systemize their goals.

If Seau indeed committed suicide, and if he indeed shot himself in the chest so his brain could be studied, we will have another reminder of the NFL’s punitive laws of physics: Current NFL players are so explosive that allowing them to smash into each other at will is criminal.

April 26, 2012

Canada’s strange and imperfect approach to the abortion debate

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:40

It’s a highly contentious topic that nobody really wants to tackle (well, no politician anyway). Canada has had no abortion laws on the books, and just the hint that someone wants to bring some in is cause for panic in certain quarters:

Canada’s “consensus” on our unlimited abortion licence — any time, for any reason, fully funded by tax dollars — is a strange one. First of all, it’s not really a consensus, as only a minority of Canadians, when polled, support the extreme position we currently have.

Yet the faux-consensus is apparently so essential that any attempt to moderate Canada’s abortion enthusiasm is thought to be unpatriotic, as if adopting, say, French or German abortion policies would be to accede to the most retrograde social policies imaginable. At the same time, the faux-consensus is so fragile that every attempt must be made to prevent any discussion about it.

This odd consensus produces odd behaviour. This week, Conservative backbench MP Stephen Woodworth has a private member’s motion coming up for debate in the House of Commons. Given that Stephen Harper is committed to maintaining the status quo, pro-life MPs must resort to nibbling around the edges of issues that perhaps, one day, under certain circumstances, might lead to questions being asked about why Canada has the most extreme abortion licence in the world, save for China, where abortions are sometimes compulsory.

April 25, 2012

The War on Drugs: “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong”

Filed under: Economics, Health, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:59

The Wall Street Journal looks at the drug war and considers alternatives:

Our current drug policies do far more harm than they need to do and far less good than they might, largely because they ignore some basic facts. Treating all “drug abusers” as a single group flies in the face of what is known as Pareto’s Law: that for any given activity, 20% of the participants typically account for 80% of the action.

Most users of addictive drugs are not addicts, but a few consume very heavily, and they account for most of the traffic and revenue and most of the drug-related violence and other collateral social damage. If subjected to the right kinds of pressure, however, even most heavy users can and do stop using drugs.

Frustration with the drug-policy status quo — the horrific levels of trafficking-related violence in Mexico and Central America and the fiscal, personal and social costs of imprisoning half a million drug dealers in the U.S. — has led to calls for some form of legalization. Just last week, at the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, President Barack Obama got an earful from his Latin American counterparts about the need to reverse current U.S. drug policy.

In brief, American (and to a lesser extent, Canadian) drug policies follow this pattern: 1) identify a problem, 2) pass laws against it, 3) discover that the laws haven’t solved the problem, 4) double-down and ratchet up enforcement and penalties. In other words, if it’s not working, then derp it again.

The quote in the headline is, of course, from the writings of H.L. Mencken.

April 23, 2012

Autism

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:41

Sandy Starr refutes the notion that “we are all on the autism spectrum now”:

Is autism a disorder? Is autism an identity? If you had asked me these questions a few years ago, before I became involved with the Autism Ethics Group at King’s College London, then my answer would have been a clear ‘yes’ and ‘no’ respectively. Clearly, autism is most usefully understood as a disorder. And clearly, it is not useful to understand autism as an identity.

If you were to ask me the same two questions today, then I would say exactly the same thing.
[. . .]

The whole concept of autism originates in psychopathology. Hans Asperger (after whom Asperger’s syndrome is named) talked about ‘autistic psychopathy’. Autism is found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). And yet we now seem uneasy about the characterisation of autism as a disorder. Why?

For one thing, a disorder implies a lack of normal or typical function. The increasing numbers of people who are thought to warrant a diagnosis of either ‘classical’ autism, atypical autism or Asperger’s syndrome is now of a scale sufficient to make one ask whether autism is, in fact, exceptional. Only last month, there were newspaper headlines about the fact that about one per cent of schoolchildren in the UK are now recorded as having some kind of autistic spectrum disorder (double the figure from only five years previously). This was followed by the news that according to a new study by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, one in 88 children in the USA now have an autistic spectrum disorder (again, almost double the figure from five years previously).

We can speculate about the reasons for this recent upsurge, but, in order to understand it, I think it’s necessary to go back a little further and look at the broadening of autism through the concept of the ‘autism spectrum’, which is what has made it possible for autism to encompass high-functioning individuals such as myself. I think the potential for an unimpeded expansion of the category of autism, of the sort we are now seeing, may have already been there when autism was first conceptualised in the 1940s. It was certainly there once the notion of the ‘spectrum’ was introduced into psychiatry at the end of the 1960s.

I would argue that the category of autism has become less coherent, and consequently less meaningful and less useful, as a result of its expansion. And I think the osmosis into informal discourse and the pop culture of clinical terminology about autism has further undermined the category’s coherence. This has led to a situation where the ‘spectrum’ — once a categorical means of bringing together low- and high-functioning individuals who (arguably) have some features in common — is now routinely used to mean an uninterrupted continuum, ranging all the way from the pathological to the normal.

April 22, 2012

Earth Day: 42 years of crying “wolf”

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

Peter Foster piles on the scorn for the 42nd anniversary of Earth Day:

For more than 40 years, Earth Day has both reflected genuine environmental concern and mirrored the UN’s attempted eco power grab. Sunday’s Earth Day comes two months ahead of the vast, but significantly brief, UN Rio+20 conference. Both are pale reflections of their original radical aspirations. Earth Day is still celebrated, but 42 years of crying wolf have inevitably had an effect. The event has also been corporatized, greenwashed and taken over by such announcements as that of the “50 sexiest environmentalists.” Rio+20 will represent the graveyard of aspirations for all prospective — and inevitably less sexy — Captains of Spaceship Earth, Global Saviours, and High Priests of Gaia.

That Earth Day has gone Happy Face, and Rio+20 will be a farce, reflects the fact that their apocalyptic assumptions have turned out to be so wrong. In Canada, as in other developed countries, we can celebrate significant improvements in air quality, and success in coping with industrial impacts on water. The Great Lakes have been cleaned up, forest cover has been maintained, and the amount of “protected” land doubled. The use of toxic chemicals in industrial production has been slashed. Some credit must obviously go to activism, but the more radical end of the movement has always had a lot more than just the environment in mind.

[. . .]

That misunderstandings and misrepresentations were at the root of radical environmental thinking was exemplifed by an “equation-of-doom” hatched in the 1970s by two prominent radicals, Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren (President Obama’s current senior science and technology advisor). The equation was I=P x A x T: Human Impact (I) equals Population (P) times Affluence (A) times Technology (T). The formula was vague, but it clearly suggested that population, wealth and technology were all “bad” for Mother Earth.

Such thinking was based on a primitive, static, zero-sum view of economic development and a demonization of business. Since resources were “finite,” all development was claimed by definition to be “unsustainable.” Advancing technology merely chewed up resources faster and accelerated us down the road to exhaustion. All this came with biblical overtones. On the first Earth Day, Prof. Ehrlich thundered that “In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.”

April 17, 2012

Buckyballs: the silver bullet for aging?

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

Well, it’s been shown to almost double normal lifespan … in rats. But in only one study so far:

In the current study researchers fed the molecule dissolved in olive oil to rats and compared outcomes to a control group of rats who got plain olive oil.

The main question they wanted to answer was whether chronic C60 administration had any toxicity, what they discovered actually surprised them.

“Here we show that oral administration of C60 dissolved in olive oil (0.8 mg/ml) at reiterated doses (1.7 mg/kg of body weight) to rats not only does not entail chronic toxicity,” they write “but it almost doubles their lifespan.”

“The estimated median lifespan (EML) for the C60-treated rats was 42 months while the EMLs for control rats and olive oil-treated rats were 22 and 26 months, respectively,” they write.

Using a toxicity model the researchers demonstrated that the effect on lifespan seems to be mediated by “attenuation of age-associated increases in oxidative stress”

March 30, 2012

Reason.tv: Remy explains health care mandates

Filed under: Economics, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:06

March 28, 2012

Science and journalism, two flavours that have uneven results when mixed together

Filed under: Environment, Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:54

James Randerson on the intersection between science and popular journalism:

Just to be clear, we are talking here about standard news stories based on a single journal paper — the science hack’s bread and butter. For me, the answer is straightforward. Of course a good science/health/environment journalist should read the paper if possible. It is the record of what the scientists actually did and what the peer reviewers have allowed them to claim (peer review is very far from perfect but it is at least some check on researchers boosting their conclusions).

Without seeing the paper you are at the mercy of press-release hype from overenthusiastic press officers or, worse, from the researchers themselves. Of course science journalists won’t have the expertise to spot some flaws, but they can get a sense of whether the methodology is robust — particularly for health-related papers.

In any case, very often the press release does not include all the information you will need for a story, and the paper can contain some hidden gems. Frequently the press release misses the real story.

The tricky question is whether you go ahead and write the story if you can’t get hold of the paper. I think a blanket ban would be going too far. Sometimes, it is not possible to get hold of the research paper in the time available.

I’m not scientifically trained, so the odd time when I post something with a link to a recent scientific paper, you can be pretty sure that I’ve only read the summary — but I’m not being paid to present my readers with scientific information. I’d expect professional science journalists to at least do a bit more due diligence than I expect bloggers to do…

March 26, 2012

I’ve thought this might be the case for years

Filed under: Environment, Health, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:13

So it’s nice to find that the science seems to be pointing in the same direction:

Maybe it’s okay to let your toddler lick the swing set and kiss the dog. A new mouse study suggests early exposure to microbes is essential for normal immune development, supporting the so-called “hygiene hypothesis” which states that lack of such exposure leads to an increased risk of autoimmune diseases. Specifically, the study found that early-life microbe exposure decreases the number of inflammatory immune cells in the lungs and colon, lowering susceptibility to asthma and inflammatory bowel diseases later in life.

The finding, published today (March 21) in Science, may help explain why there has been a rise in autoimmune diseases in sterile, antibiotic-saturated developed countries.

“There have been many clues that environmental factors, particularly microbiota, play a role in disease risk, but there’s very little information about when it’s critical for that exposure to take place,” said Jonathan Braun, chair of pathology and laboratory medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the research. “This is one of the most compelling observations to pin down that time frame.”

Debating “granny tax” and generational warfare

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:38

In the Guardian, Patrick Collinson looks at the media’s response to the British government’s recent “granny tax” moves:

In case you missed every newspaper front page (the Telegraph went for “Granny tax hits 5m pensioners”, the Daily Mail said “Osborne picks the pockets of pensioners”, but Metro won with “Gran theft auto”), at issue is the decision to freeze and then scrap the higher personal allowances for people over 65.

But let’s first ask why people in retirement are awarded better income tax breaks than those who are working? There was a fascinating analysis in the Financial Times last weekend of the economically “jinxed generation” — and they’re not pensioners. It found that today’s adults in their 20s will be the first generation who won’t be better off than their parents. What’s more, the disposable income of people in their 60s is now higher than people in their 20s, for the first time ever. We’ve created a society where the non-working retired earn more than working people — and that’s before adding up the largely unearned wealth tied up in the houses of those in their 60s.

It wasn’t like this when the welfare state started. Before the second world war, retirement was for most people short and miserable. It was entirely right that as a rich society we found a way to improve the lot of the elderly with better state pensions and free healthcare. Along the way, we added better personal allowances, fuel payments, free bus passes, free TV licences, free prescriptions and so on.

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