In 2003, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development published a paper on the ‘sources of economic growth in OECD countries’ between 1971 and 1998 and found, to its surprise, that whereas privately funded research and development stimulated economic growth, publicly funded research had no economic impact whatsoever. None. This earthshaking result has never been challenged or debunked. It is so inconvenient to the argument that science needs public funding that it is ignored.
December 2, 2018
QotD: There’s investment and then there’s “public investment”
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October 27, 2018
The Progressive case for Americans to pay higher drug prices than the rest of the world
Tim Worstall carefully explains — in full compliance with Progressive philosophy and pointing out that Trump is wrong (which is extra bonus Progressive points) — why Americans should continue to pay more for drugs that are cheaper in other countries:
Working out which drugs work and how is expensive. There’s then another expensive in actually proving this well enough to gain a licence. All in costs are in the $1 to $2 billion range dependent upon who you want to listen to. Unfortunately, once you’ve done all that and paid all that anyone could just come along and copy your drug. Which means you don’t make your $2 billion back – that in turn meaning that no one does spend $2 billion, we don’t get new drugs and we all die in ditches.
This is a classic public goods problem and the solution we use – not the only one, not even the only viable one – is patents. You get about 10 years, the time between approval and patent expiry, to make your $2 billion back. Then anyone can copy it and we all get cheap copy drugs.
For this system to work it is not necessary that everyone pay these high patent protected prices. There’s no point in trying to charge some farm worker in S Africa $10,000 a year for HIV retrovirals anyway, they don’t have the cash and demanding it will gain nothing except their death. We just need some group to pay the high prices so that drug development still happens. Everyone else can get drugs at some margin above their manufacturing, not development, costs.
So, who is it who should be carrying this cost of producing this public good? Good progressive principles tell us that it should be the rich folk. Imagine that we used some other system of drug development, maybe taxpayers cough up for it all. It’ll still be the rich doing the paying, right? So, patents, where the rich pay full freight for drugs, the poor don’t, this meets our equity criterion.
And who are the rich in this global sense, for we’re talking about a global public good here? That would be the citizens of the richest large nation, the largest rich nation, the United States of America. So, yes, Americans should be paying high prices for drugs and the rest of us shouldn’t.
Do note that we’ve used impeccable redistributionist logic to reach this conclusion. It’s only if you think the rich shouldn’t be paying to benefit the poor that this is a bad idea. Which might be why Trump is agin it but it still puzzles as to why the progressives would be.
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October 10, 2018
Coming to a foxhole near you: Between 2 Wars, Q&A, and WW2 day by day
World War Two
Published on 9 Oct 2018Six Weeks of WW2 and 112,450 Subscribers later and thanks to your support there will be more.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvA WW2 TimeGhost Public Service Announcement with Indy Neidell and Spartacus Olsson produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
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September 12, 2018
QotD: Origins of India’s caste system
In India, the notion of Hindu culture as a giant conspiracy by Aryan invaders to enshrine their descendants at the top of the social order for the rest of eternity perhaps struck a little too close to home.
But Reich’s laboratory has found that the old Robert E. Howard version is actually pretty much what happened. Conan the Barbarian-like warriors with their horse-drawn wagons came charging off the Eurasian steppe and overran much of Europe and India. Reich laments:
The genetic data have provided what might seem like uncomfortable support for some of these ideas — suggesting that a single, genetically coherent group was responsible for spreading many Indo-European languages.
Much more acceptable to Indian intellectuals than the idea that ancient conquerors from the Russian or Kazakhstani steppe took over the upper reaches of Indian culture has been the theory of Nicholas B. Dirks, the Franz Boas Professor of History and Anthropology at Columbia, that the British malignantly transformed diverse local Indian customs into the suffocating system of caste that we know today.
Now, though, Reich’s genetic evidence shows that caste has controlled who married whom in India for thousands of years:
Rather than inventions of colonialism as Dirks suggested, long-term endogamy as embodied in India today in the institution of caste has been overwhelmingly important for millennia.
This is in harmony with economic historian Gregory Clark’s recent discovery in his book of surname analysis, The Son Also Rises (Clark loves Hemingway puns), that economic mobility across the generations is not only lower than expected in most of the world, but it is virtually nonexistent in India.
Steve Sailer, “Reich’s Laboratory”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-03-28.
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September 3, 2018
Montreal to host urban combat
… oh, sorry, that should be that Montreal will be hosting an experiment involving new technologies for urban combat:
Defence scientists from a number of countries will be in Montreal in mid-September to participate in an experiment to look at new technologies for fighting and conducting operations in cities.
The Contested Urban Environment 2018 experiment will take place from September 10 to 21, and involve Canadian defence scientists and Canadian Forces personnel conducting a series of technology research experiments in the city. They will be joined by participants from nations including Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. The experiment is being conducted in support of advancing research around how to best conduct military operations in what is being called “complex urban environments,” according to the Department of National Defence.
Postmedia reported last year that Canada will contribute to specific areas of expertise in this field, including technologies in intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, communications and small arms.
Canada participated in a similar experiment last year in Australia. Approximately 80 scientists from the U.S, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK took part in that experiment, which began Nov. 20 and ended Dec. 1. The Canadian contingent consisted of 10 staff from Defence Research and Development Canada. In addition, around 100 personnel from the Australian Defence Force were involved.
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August 12, 2018
1918 Flu Pandemic – The Forgotten Plague – Extra History – #6
Extra Credits
Published on 11 Aug 2018Why did everyone forget about the flu pandemic so fast? Partly because its effects were intermingled with the death and depression of World War I, and partly because we chose to forget.
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August 2, 2018
1918 Flu Pandemic – Fighting the Ghost – Extra History – #4
Extra Credits
Published on 28 Jul 2018Philadelphia gets hit the hardest. New York fares somewhat better, but everyone is trying to keep hush-hush about a pandemic that still found its way into a children’s rhyme: influenza.
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July 28, 2018
Pellagra – A Medical Mystery – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 26 Jul 2018Pellagra can cause depression, dementia, and diarrhea, eventually leading to death. Dr. Joseph Goldberger was put on the case to crack it.
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May 25, 2018
Progressives: “Gender is a social construct!” Science: “Wait just a second there…”
Toby Young wonders why a woman can’t be more like a man:
A fascinating paper about sex differences in the human brain was published last week in the scientific journal Cerebral Cortex. It’s the largest single-sample study of structural and functional sex differences in the human brain ever undertaken, involving over 5,000 participants (2,466 male and 2,750 female). The study has been attracting attention for more than a year (see this preview in Science, for instance), but only now has it been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
For those who believe that gender is a social construct, and there are no differences between men and women’s brains, this paper is something of a reality check. The team of researchers from Edinburgh University, led by Stuart Ritchie, author of Intelligence: All That Matters, found that men’s brains are generally larger in volume and surface area, while women’s brains, on average, have thicker cortices. ‘The differences were substantial: in some cases, such as total brain volume, more than a standard deviation,’ they write. This is not a new finding – it has been known for some time that the total volume of men’s brains is, in general, larger than that of women’s, even when adjusted for men’s larger average body size – but all the studies before now have involved much smaller sample sizes.
Does this paper have any implications when it comes to men and women’s intellectual abilities? The answer is yes, but they’re not clear cut.
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April 20, 2018
April 19, 2018
Freedom of speech and scientific inquiry
Adam Perkins on the critical importance of free speech in the scientific world:
A quick Google search suggests that free speech is a regarded as an important virtue for a functional, enlightened society. For example, according to George Orwell: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Likewise, Ayaan Hirsi Ali remarked: “Free speech is the bedrock of liberty and a free society, and yes, it includes the right to blaspheme and offend.” In a similar vein, Bill Hicks declared: “Freedom of speech means you support the right of people to say exactly those ideas which you do not agree with”.
But why do we specifically need free speech in science? Surely we just take measurements and publish our data? No chit chat required. We need free speech in science because science is not really about microscopes, or pipettes, or test tubes, or even Large Hadron Colliders. These are merely tools that help us to accomplish a far greater mission, which is to choose between rival narratives, in the vicious, no-holds-barred battle of ideas that we call “science”.
For example, stomach problems such as gastritis and ulcers were historically viewed as the products of stress. This opinion was challenged in the late 1970s by the Australian doctors Robin Warren and Barry Marshall, who suspected that stomach problems were caused by infection with the bacteria Helicobacter pylori. Frustrated by skepticism from the medical establishment and by difficulties publishing his academic papers, in 1984, Barry Marshall appointed himself his own experimental subject and drank a Petri dish full of H. pylori culture. He promptly developed gastritis which was then cured with antibiotics, suggesting that H. pylori has a causal role in this type of illness. You would have thought that given this clear-cut evidence supporting Warren and Marshall’s opinion, their opponents would immediately concede defeat. But scientists are only human and opposition to Warren and Marshall persisted. In the end it was two decades before their crucial work on H. pylori gained the recognition it deserved, with the award of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
From this episode we can see that even in situations where laboratory experiments can provide clear evidence in favour of a particular scientific opinion, opponents will typically refuse to accept it. Instead scientists tend cling so stubbornly to their pet theories that no amount of evidence will change their minds and only death can bring an end to the argument, as famously observed by Max Planck:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
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April 1, 2018
When science itself becomes politically incorrect
Andrew Sullivan discusses the unwelcome discoveries of geneticists:
Last weekend, a rather seismic op-ed appeared in the New York Times, and it was for a while one of the most popular pieces in the newspaper. It’s by David Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard, who carefully advanced the case that there are genetic variations between subpopulations of humans, that these are caused, as in every other species, by natural selection, and that some of these variations are not entirely superficial and do indeed overlap with our idea of race. This argument should not be so controversial — every species is subject to these variations — and yet it is. For many on the academic and journalistic left, genetics are deemed largely irrelevant when it comes to humans. Our large brains and the societies we have constructed with them, many argue, swamp almost all genetic influences.
Humans, in this view, are the only species on Earth largely unaffected by recent (or ancient) evolution, the only species where, for example, the natural division of labor between male and female has no salience at all, the only species, in fact, where natural variations are almost entirely social constructions, subject to reinvention. We are, in this worldview, alone on the planet, born as blank slates, to be written on solely by culture. All differences between men and women are a function of this social effect; as are all differences between the races. If, in the aggregate, any differences in outcome between groups emerge, it is entirely because of oppression, patriarchy, white supremacy, etc. And it is a matter of great urgency that we use whatever power we have to combat these inequalities.
Reich simply points out that this utopian fiction is in danger of collapse because it is not true and because genetic research is increasingly proving it untrue. On the male-female divide, for example, Reich cites profound differences, “reflecting more than 100 million years of evolution and adaptation.” On race, he is both agnostic about what we will eventually find out with respect to the scale of genetic differences, and also insistent that genetic differences do exist: “You will sometimes hear that any biological differences among populations are likely to be small, because humans have diverged too recently from common ancestors for substantial differences to have arisen under the pressure of natural selection. This is not true. The ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of evolution to work.” Which means to say that the differences could be (and actually are) substantial.
This will lead to subtle variations in human brains, and thereby differences in intelligence tests, which will affect social and economic outcomes in the aggregate in a multiracial, capitalist, post-industrial society. The danger in actively suppressing and stigmatizing this inconvenient truth, he maintains, is that a responsible treatment of these genetic influences will be siloed in the academic field of genetics, will be rendered too toxic for public debate, and will thereby only leak out to people in the outside world via the worst kind of racists and bigots who will distort these truths to their own ends. If you don’t establish a reasonable forum for debate on this, Reich argues, if you don’t establish the principle is that we do not have to be afraid of any of this, it will be monopolized by truly unreasonable and indeed dangerous racists. And those racists will have the added prestige for their followers of revealing forbidden knowledge. And so there are two arguments against the suppression of this truth and the stigmatization of its defenders: that it’s intellectually dishonest and politically counterproductive.
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February 12, 2018
QotD: Science on the brink
Present reality is that science is on the verge of a nervous breakdown. That’s the not-so-tongue-in-cheek message in Science on the Verge, a new book by European scientist Andrea Saltelli and seven other contributors. Science on the Verge is a 200-page indictment of what to the lay reader appears to be a monumental deterioration across all fields, from climate science to health research to economics. The mere idea that “most published research results are false” should be cause for alarm. But it is worse than that. The crisis runs through just about everything we take for granted in modern science, from the use of big data to computer models of major parts of our social, economic and natural environment and on to the often absurd uses of statistical methods to fish for predetermined conclusions.
Terence Corcoran, “Science is on the verge of a nervous breakdown”, Financial Post, 2016-06-13.
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February 1, 2018
Penn and Teller on Vaccinations
UltraMiraculous
Published on 20 Aug 2010
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December 10, 2017
QotD: Failures of scientific consensus
In past centuries, the greatest killer of women was fever following childbirth. One woman in six died of this fever. In 1795, Alexander Gordon of Aberdeen suggested that the fevers were infectious processes, and he was able to cure them. The consensus said no. In 1843, Oliver Wendell Holmes claimed puerperal fever was contagious, and presented compelling evidence. The consensus said no. In 1849, Semmelweiss demonstrated that sanitary techniques virtually eliminated puerperal fever in hospitals under his management. The consensus said he was a Jew, ignored him, and dismissed him from his post. There was in fact no agreement on puerperal fever until the start of the twentieth century. Thus the consensus took one hundred and twenty five years to arrive at the right conclusion despite the efforts of the prominent “skeptics” around the world, skeptics who were demeaned and ignored. And despite the constant ongoing deaths of women.
There is no shortage of other examples. In the 1920s in America, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor, were dying of a disease called pellagra. The consensus of scientists said it was infectious, and what was necessary was to find the “pellagra germ.” The US government asked a brilliant young investigator, Dr. Joseph Goldberger, to find the cause. Goldberger concluded that diet was the crucial factor. The consensus remained wedded to the germ theory. Goldberger demonstrated that he could induce the disease through diet. He demonstrated that the disease was not infectious by injecting the blood of a pellagra patient into himself, and his assistant. They and other volunteers swabbed their noses with swabs from pellagra patients, and swallowed capsules containing scabs from pellagra rashes in what were called “Goldberger’s filth parties.” Nobody contracted pellagra. The consensus continued to disagree with him. There was, in addition, a social factor — southern States disliked the idea of poor diet as the cause, because it meant that social reform was required. They continued to deny it until the 1920s. Result — despite a twentieth century epidemic, the consensus took years to see the light.
Probably every schoolchild notices that South America and Africa seem to fit together rather snugly, and Alfred Wegener proposed, in 1912, that the continents had in fact drifted apart. The consensus sneered at continental drift for fifty years. The theory was most vigorously denied by the great names of geology — until 1961, when it began to seem as if the sea floors were spreading. The result: it took the consensus fifty years to acknowledge what any schoolchild sees.
And shall we go on? The examples can be multiplied endlessly. Jenner and smallpox, Pasteur and germ theory. Saccharine, margarine, repressed memory, fiber and colon cancer, hormone replacement therapy. The list of consensus errors goes on and on.
Finally, I would remind you to notice where the claim of consensus is invoked. Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough. Nobody says the consensus of scientists agrees that E=mc2. Nobody says the consensus is that the sun is 93 million miles away. It would never occur to anyone to speak that way.
Michael Crichton, “Aliens Cause Global Warming”: the Caltech Michelin Lecture, 2003-01-17.
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