Entries from October 2008 ↓

Writes Megan McArdle: Robert Frank points to something that I haven’t seen a lot of commentary on: the financial crisis is going to achieve one long-sought political goal, that of reducing inequality.

1. In general, people who truly care about inequality are not stupid. They understand that crying victory at this juncture would be a P.R. mistake. They understand that saying they’re happy because traders are losing their 500-dollar shirts while everyone else only loses a 15-dollar short would be a total mistake.

2. The rest of those who say they care about inequality, don’t truly care about inequality per se. This is the large majority. Their goal is to “re-distribute.” Talking about inequality dresses their concerns in a more respectable political philosophy, avoids having to face questions about the economic effects of their policies, but their policy goal is to try increase the welfare of the middle-class by taking from the wealthy.

From the ongoing series I sometimes drink the Robin Hanson Cool Aid:

1. The NY Times reports that Half of all American doctors responding to a nationwide survey say they regularly prescribe placebos to patients. [...] The most common placebos the American doctors reported using were headache pills and vitamins, but a significant number also reported prescribing antibiotics and sedatives.

2. I’m all for the prescription of placebos: they’re cheaper and have less side effects than real medication, but prescribing anti-biotics when not needed is just wrong.

3. Anti-biotics are the single class of medication where we have a strong public-good argument for limiting their availability for cases where it’s not strictly needed. Overuse of anti-biotics is a major cause of anti-biotic resistance. So, we give doctors the power to decide who takes them (and who doesn’t).

4. All evidence points to doctors abusing that power and giving anti-biotics to get people out of their offices.

Like most people I think that we are in a recession which is likely to get worse but we need to remind ourselves that recessions are normal. What is not normal is the current level of panic.

(Alex Tabarrok)

n Benin, Africa, some very interesting research was done into what would make people buy a latrine. Mothers, who didn’t have a latrine, could see that their kids were getting sick every week with diarrhoea. They were spending money on medicine, and their kids weren’t going to school, but they still wouldn’t buy a latrine.

(Rose George, author of The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, a book about shit).

David Balan attributes the mother’s attitude to laziness in the face of high stakes, but I think that cultural conformity is the real reason: we are, almost invariably, very wary of doing things that are not commonly done by the people around us. In general, it’s a pretty good heuristic. Here, it’s catastrophic.

From the ongoing series this sometimes seems like a libertarian blog:

From the Atlantic:

Medical supplies, such as saline solution for contact-lens cleaning, don’t fall under the TSA’s three-ounce rule.

“What’s allowed?” I asked. “Saline solution, or bottles labeled saline solution?”

“Bottles labeled saline solution. They won’t check what’s in it, trust me.”

[...]

The ID triangle: before a passenger boards a commercial flight, he interacts with his airline or the government three times—when he purchases his ticket; when he passes through airport security; and finally at the gate, when he presents his boarding pass to an airline agent. It is at the first point of contact, when the ticket is purchased, that a passenger’s name is checked against the government’s no-fly list. It is not checked again, and for this reason, Schnei­er argued, the process is merely another form of security theater.

“The goal is to make sure that this ID triangle represents one person,” he explained. “Here’s how you get around it. Let’s assume you’re a terrorist and you believe your name is on the watch list.” It’s easy for a terrorist to check whether the government has cottoned on to his existence, Schnei­er said; he simply has to submit his name online to the new, privately run CLEAR program, which is meant to fast-pass approved travelers through security. If the terrorist is rejected, then he knows he’s on the watch list.

I once had a plane ticket with a mis-spelling of my name (the university services messed up). It did not match my ID. I complained when I checked-in. They said “Oh, don’t worry. It’s similar enough.” I boarded six planes with a boarding pass that did not match my ID. Security never even asked me about it. They did make sure I did not have a bottle of water on me, though.

It’s a sham. A sham which costs $7 billion dollars per year and inconveniences millions everyday (making some of them prefer to drive and causing more deaths in the in the process).

From the previously quoted study:

Conservatives have a lower proportion of overt support [for an African-American President], but a higher proportion of true support than liberals.

From Science Magazine:

Brian McCabe and Jennifer Heerwig, sociology students at New York University in New York City, used statistical tools to unmask covert attitudes. They asked their control group of 500 people point blank whether they would vote for an African-American president, and 84% said yes—a lower percentage than other polls. McCabe and Heerwig attribute the difference to greater privacy: Their survey was taken over the Internet. They asked the second group three questions unrelated to race, such as whether presidential campaigns are too costly. The third group was asked those same three questions, plus a fourth about whether they’d vote for an African-American candidate. McCabe and Heerwig [asked] only how many statements the respondents in those two groups agreed with, not which ones. “If you have a socially undesirable answer, you can hide it,” says McCabe. With some statistical analysis, they determined that assuming the three groups were similar, 14% of their first cohort lied, and in truth just 70% would support an African-American. Democrats were much more likely to be dishonest than Republicans, proffering up the socially desirable answer, as were those with less education.

Very nice work. I agree with the authors on their assertion that this might not matter that much for the actual election in a month, so this gets the tag Science and not Politics.

Here’s the original paper. Here’s an interview with the author of the paper.

From the ongoing series this sometimes seems like an open-source geek blog:

Open Office 3 is out. Finally, it includes native Mac OS X support.

Open office is an open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. It has the same advantages and dis-advantages as its better known version. It includes a simple feature that—I am told—is not yet a standard thing in MS Office: PDF export.

(I am personally waiting for Ubuntu to upgrade it automatically since I never manage anything on my computer unless I absolutely must, but Rita has been using the 3.0 previews for a while and she finds it improves over the old version).

Andrew Sullivan reports: New Yorkers are more polite than Londoners. In fact, they’re the most courteous in the world!

Going from Europe to NYC, one is amazed at American politeness. Going from non-NYC America to NYC, one is amazed at New York rudeness.

Any human legal system does embody some answer to the question “How many innocent people can we put in jail to get the guilty ones?”, even if the number isn’t written down.

Eliezer Yudkowsky