Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Interview with Professor Rebecca Goldstein

  -Novelist, Philosopher, and Public Intellectual-

  I've known mathematical geniuses who are dunces when it comes to the kind of imaginative intelligence that goes into interpreting works of art--or, for that matter, interpreting people. I've met brilliant novelists whose deductive talents aren't sufficient to get them through an elementary course in symbolic logic. I have an appreciation for sundry forms of smartness, though there are characteristics other than smartness that I value far more in people. Too many people who are celebrated for their intellectual or artistic talents think that their gifts license them to be jerks. What I call "talentism," the conviction that those with extraordinary abilities matter more than other people, is as faulty a normative proposition as any other that regards some people as mattering more than others--such as sexism, racism, classism, ableism, lookism, ageism, nationalism, imperialism, and hetero-normativity.

• A science journalist takes a skeptical look at capital-S Skepticism

  Dear "Skeptics," Bash Homeopathy and Bigfoot Less, Mammograms and War More
  John Horgan (Scientific American blog) on May 16, 2016
  

  I'm a science journalist. I don't celebrate science, I criticize it, because science needs critics more than cheerleaders. I point out gaps between scientific hype and reality. That keeps me busy, because, as you know, most peer-reviewed scientific claims are wrong.
  ...
  Meanwhile, you neglect what I call hard targets. These are dubious and even harmful claims promoted by major scientists and institutions. In the rest of this talk, I'll give you examples of hard targets from physics, medicine and biology. I'll wrap up with a rant about war, the hardest target of all.

• Economists Are Blind to How Little They Know

  Jeffrey Snider - October 21, 2016

  It changes none of this emotion that central banks have already admitted implicitly that it was all a lie. If QE had been such a success establishing how all these warnings are misconstruing what are really good times, then why are central banks everywhere quietly but very seriously evaluating only other options? The answer is, for once, refreshingly simple: faith in central banks among market participants is at a low, while faith in central banks in the media and mainstream remains largely (but not totally) undaunted. Central bankers in their vanity care much about the latter, but for their survival are finally forced to deal with the former.
  ...
  What all these have in common is more than just interest rates or TED spreads, even global depression; it is the entire idea of technocracy itself. Since before Plato, people have dreamed of a utopia where enlightened, dispassionate philosophers would govern and guide messy, often awful human existence toward and into "optimum" outcomes. It took until "economics" in the latter half of the 20th century for such hubris to take literal hold; there is an entire branch of the "science" dedicated through statistics just so to determining both "optimal outcomes" as well as the duty to "nudge" people toward them using the power of government if need be.

• Truth and myth about the effects of openness to trade

  The Economist - Oct 1st 2016

  But China's accession to the WTO caused a big shock. The country's size, and the speed at which it conquered rich-world markets for low-cost manufacturing, makes it unique. By 2013 it had captured one-fifth of all manufacturing exports worldwide, compared with a share of only 2% in 1991.
  ...
  Still, when David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), David Dorn of the University of Zurich and Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego, looked into the job losses more closely, they found something worrying. At least one-fifth of the drop in factory jobs during that period was the direct result of competition from China.
  ...
  Still, some rich countries, such as Germany, Britain and Canada, have done rather better than America at keeping prime-age men in work, though others, including France, Italy and Spain, have done even worse. That is partly a matter of policy. Members of the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, set aside an average of 0.6% of GDP a year for "active labour-market policies"--job centres, retraining schemes and employment subsidies--to ease the transition to new types of work. America spends just 0.1% of GDP. By neglecting those whose jobs have been swallowed by technology or imports, America's policymakers have fuelled some of the anger about freer trade.
  ...
  A study by Pablo Fajgelbaum of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Amit Khandelwal, of Columbia University, suggests that in an average country, people on high incomes would lose 28% of their purchasing power if borders were closed to trade. But the poorest 10% of consumers would lose 63% of their spending power, because they buy relatively more imported goods. The authors find a bias of trade in favour of poorer people in all 40 countries in their study, which included 13 developing countries.

• Calcium supplements may not be heart healthy

  New research suggests that dietary calcium in the form of supplements, but not calcium-rich foods, might have a harmful impact on the heart.
  ...
  "But our study adds to the body of evidence that excess calcium in the form of supplements may harm the heart and vascular system," Michos said in a news release from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.

• Big cities healthier? How some cities make life better, study says

  Big cities healthier? Having sidewalks to walk on and access to parks and good public transport makes for happier city residents, a new survey says.

  With more opportunities to exercise, walk and stay outdoors, the report finds, residents also tend to smoke less and find the housing "ideal" for individuals and families alike. It's a trend that can be observed in a number of cities, such as Seattle and Minneapolis, where young families are choosing to forego suburbs for downtown housing despite having less space.

• How This Year's Nobel Laureates In Physics Changed The Game

  The fundamental reason why Haldane, Kosterlitz and Thouless needed to do what they did is that they're working in a subfield where the simple and straightforwardly reductionist approach that characterizes physics seems to run into trouble.
  ...
  One of the biggest of these is the subfield of "condensed matter," which tries to study the properties of vast assemblages of atoms making up solid or liquid systems. In condensed-matter systems you're worried about the collective behavior of many more particles than you have any hope of counting. As Phillip Anderson pointed out in a famous paper from 1972, these collective behaviors aren't necessarily obvious, even when the underlying rules governing the interactions between particles are simple and well-understood. More is different, in Anderson's phrase, but more importantly, more is difficult.

• Obamacare: What we didn't see coming
  Jonathan Gruber, 07/21/16
  

  An architect of the law reflects on its surprises and its future.

  Insurance premiums on the exchanges have also surprised me -- but not in the way that most readers would think. Most press coverage recently has focused on the high premium increases in exchange plans, and the exits of some insurers losing money on the exchanges, notably United Healthcare. But what those articles tend to ignore is that exchange premiums in 2014 came in much lower than expectations -- about 15 percent below what CBO projected. So even with recent increases, premiums are probably still lower than what would have been expected before the exchanges began. That gets overlooked.
  ...
  Employer-sponsored insurance was slowly declining before the ACA, and I expect that it will continue to slowly decline. But there is no evidence that the ACA is leading to its collapse. We see no large shift in the preferred mode of health care coverage for employees.
  ...
  The recent rise simply reflects a "catching up" after insurers initially set prices too low. After a few years of large premium increases, premium growth rates should settle back down to keep pace with the growth in health care spending.
  ...
  The fact is that exchanges in every state are well above the minimum scale required to function effectively. And the fear of "death spirals" from rapidly rising premiums is greatly exaggerated when the vast majority of exchange enrollees are subsidized, meaning they don't pay those higher premiums. This provides a stable base of enrollees, even as premiums rise.

• Single Payer Trouble

  Paul Krugman, January 28, 2016

  To be harsh but accurate: the Sanders health plan looks a little bit like a standard Republican tax-cut plan, which relies on fantasies about huge supply-side effects to make the numbers supposedly add up. Only a little bit: after all, this is a plan seeking to provide health care, not lavish windfalls on the rich -- and single-payer really does save money, whereas there's no evidence that tax cuts deliver growth. Still, it's not the kind of brave truth-telling the Sanders campaign pitch might have led you to expect.

• Life Expectancy and Infant Mortality are Unreliable Measures for Comparing the U.S. Health Care System to Others

  July 2006

  Life expectancy and infant mortality are wholly inadequate comparative measures for health care systems. Life expectancy is influenced by a host of factors other than a health care system, while infant mortality is measured inconsistently across nations. Neither of these measures provides the United States with conclusive guidance on health care policy, let alone serve as reliable evidence that a system of universal health care "should be implemented in the United States."

• Health Care's Continental Divide
  Jan 22, 2016
  

  Online print debate between Bloomberg view columnists Megan McArdle & Leonid Bershidsky about single-payer health care in the U.S.

  MM: We might like an American government that was better at technocracy (or we might not), but we don't have one. We have instead a messy, fractious democracy that offers interest groups almost unlimited veto points against legislation they don't like. Love it or hate it, these forces make our government extremely bad at controlling costs, which shows up not just in our health-care and education systems, but also in the price of building our infrastructure or providing various social services.

• A Single-Payer System Won't Make Health Care Cheap

  Megan McArdle, April 30, 2014

  The financing is impossible, in part because the politics is impossible. And the politics is impossible in part because the financial hit would be too big. Single-payer would have to be paid for at the extremely high prices that Americans pay, not the lower European prices that we'd rather have. And when you look at the taxes needed to finance a government takeover, you quickly realize that most people just aren't willing to pay the price