The end of public health?

This is Joseph.

In a sense, this one is just too easy to parody:

There’s a certain sort of Republican who likes to talk about the problems of big government.  The basic problem with these guys is that when you ask them for examples of how we could reduce the size of government, the best they can think of is hand-washing.  Not the drug war, not mass surveillance, not the prison system, not police abusing suspects, not the bloated defense budget, but hand-washing.

The worst thing you can say about mandating those “Employees must wash hands” signs is that anyone sensible would post those signs anyway.  That’s the absolute worst thing you can say about that rule.

There are a lot of things that infringe upon a person's liberty.  It is a precondition of living in a society that you need to be able to make trade-offs between absolute freedom and the benefit of numbers.  Even very libertarian societies (think of Vikings, with the personal enforcement of legal judgments and interesting ideas like "outlaw" status) had a framework to handle disputes and to enforce the acceptable code of conduct between people. 

But these sorts of rules (that reduce the risk of infection via a passive reminder system) really do seem to be a low priority.  There are some regulations that really harm small businesses, and they are worth talking about.  But this sort of reform seems to be a very low priority area, even if you did think that the signs were a bad idea. 

[and this is a non-partisan comment on my part, it is easy for any group to set poor priorities and focus on the small and inconsequential]

Intellectual Property

This is Joseph and I read over Mark's latest post with a great deal of interest.  One issue that was quite interesting was how many of the properties that he is talking about are ancient.  But they are highly profitable for companies because they remain under protection.  This applies not just to trademarked characters, but even to the original properties (which can make it harder to preserve them). 

Matthew Yglesias points out that this very fate is happening to Star Wars:

The ridiculous thing about the situation isn't that Lucas doesn't want to make the cut of the film that I want to watch. It's that it was illegal for Harmy to make it. And it was illegal for me to download it. And it would be illegal for me to make it available for download from Vox.com or even to put a link on this page that would let you go get it. It's illegal because of the ways that, over the years, Congress has extended and expanded the scope of copyright law in ways that have become perverse and destructive to human culture.

Of course it would be difficult to have a thriving commercial culture if films like Star Wars didn't enjoy some copyright protection.

But how many years of exclusive right to profit off a hit film do creators need to make production worthwhile? Five? Ten? Fifteen? Thirty? I'm not sure exactly what the right answer is. But obviously Star Wars made more than enough money in its first three decades of existence to satisfy any sane human being. The additional decades of copyright protection it enjoys do nothing to create meaningful financial incentives for creators. Even worse, Congress has gotten in the habit of retroactively extending copyright terms, so that in practice nothing ever loses copyright protection anymore.

With Star Wars, I am going to go out on a limb and note that it is exceedingly unlikely that the original film moving out of copyright (now) to allow fan versions would not have influenced the creators to not make the film in the first place. 

This also has a negative effect in other media.  The Kindle has been amazing for making very old books available -- I've read several histories from the 1800's which have been exceedingly useful in understanding how social norms have evolved.  But once the era of copyright enters, very few older yet obscure properties are around. 

What makes this annoying is that it is the reverse result of what copyright was intended to do.  It was supposed to spur creative work by making it financially rewarding.  But a book from the 1950's that has been out of print for decades is not making anybody money.  Instead, it makes it harder to preserve the intellectual history of some key areas, that might not be popular right now but could become so in the future. 

And, for the record, retroactive copyright cannot possibly induce more creative work because people judge risk/reward ratios on what the laws are and not what the laws might one day become. 

Anti-militarism

From Alex at Marginal Revolution:

Today the patriotic brand of anti-militarism, the brand that sees skepticism about the military and the promotion of peace and commerce as specifically American, is largely forgotten.

In the comments, people seem to focus on the question of just how historical is this viewpoint, anyway.  There are some obvious historical advocates (President Eisenhower, for example) but it may or may not have been widespread and people's views may have evolved.

However, I think this falls into the "is/ought" fallacy, in the sense that (even if it was not especially widespread as a view) there is no reason that this could not be a valid expression of patriotism.  The question of why a country with a history of isolationism, small standing armies, and a tradition of innovation/commerce could not focus on the economic parts of being American is unclear.

It's an idea that should get more attention. 

Before the age of the fan

The following is pulled from a much longer Mark Evanier piece on a notoriously unsuccessful attempt at bringing Archie and the Riverside gang to prime time television in the Seventies. TV buffs should read the whole thing (particularly the big reveal at the end), but as a business and marketing guy, this passage seemed especially interesting.

This one first ran on this blog on September 27, 2003 and it's about two pilots that were done in the seventies by the company for which I was writing Welcome Back, Kotter. Contrary to what has been reported elsewhere, I was not a writer on either, though I turned down an offer to work on the second. I was an unbilled consultant on the first. What happened was that the Komack Company had obtained the rights to do these special-pilots and Jimmie Komack had this odd notion of how to approach doing an adaptation of an existing property. His view was that it should be done by writers and producers who were completely unfamiliar with the source material so their minds were uncluttered by what had been done before.

While I was working there, he also did a pilot that brought back the not-dissimilar character of Dobie Gillis. Dobie's creator Max Shulman had co-written a pilot script for the revival — a real good one, I thought, that updated the property but still captured what was great about the old series. ABC assigned the project to Komack's company and Komack used the Shulman script to attract the necessary actors from the original version — Dwayne Hickman, Bob Denver, Frank Faylen and Sheila James. Then, once they were committed, he tossed out the Shulman script and had a new one written by two writers who'd never seen the original show. (If you think I'm making this up, read Dwayne Hickman's autobiography. [Hickman went on to become a CBS programming executive from '77 to '88, so Komack may have come to regret pissing him off on this one.-- MP])

Jimmie took a similar approach to turning Archie into a TV show. The creative staff he engaged were not totally unfamiliar with the property but he urged them not to read the old comics and to instead work from a rough outline someone had written about who they were. This did not sit well with John Goldwater, who ran and co-owned the Archie company and who regarded himself as the creator of the feature. One day, Komack called me in and said, "You know all about comic books, don't you?" I said I did. He said, "Archie Comics?" I said I did. Later that day, he brought me into a meeting with Mr. Goldwater, who was visiting from New York, and introduced me as his resident Archie expert and consultant.

I suspect that Komack's attitude was fairly representative. Fan culture was still in a fairly embryonic state in the Seventies. Other than the occasional opportunity to mine for camp, adaptations of popular pulp and nostalgia properties largely ignored the source material. The idea of sending A-list stars to woo the crowds at Comic-Con was decades away. These days, studios are extraordinarily concerned with winning the support of the fan base, even on bubble gum properties like Archie. It's almost impossible to imagine a producer instructing writers not to read the comics they were adapting.

What changed? For starters, the fan grew, both in number and economic clout. In the early Seventies, the San Diego Comic-Con was attracting a few hundred attendees. These days it exceeds 130,000 with tickets selling out within a couple of hours.

More importantly, Hollywood realized there was even more money to be made in straight adaptations than from the camp versions of the Sixties (though it should be remembered that the Adam West Batman was a massive hit for its first season). The 1978 Superman made 300 million on a budget of 55 million. The 1989 Batman cost seven million less and broke 400 million. Recently, Iron Man, the Avengers and company, though generally falling a bit short of those films on ROI, have opened up the possibility of unequaled potential franchise profits. Superheroes are the biggest thing to hit the movie industry since the big budget musicals of the Sixties (Sound of Music had a budget of just eight million and made almost 300 million. Along with other hits like Mary Poppins and Oliver!, this box office success inspired Hollywood to pour more and more money into big budget musicals. The trend did not end well).

Is this new emphasis on the fan a good thing? So, is the rise of the fan a good thing or a bad thing?Probably, a little bit of both. Certainly, the cross fertilization with many talented writers moving easily back-and-forth from the different media is a good thing. Lots of talented people were going underutilized as were many excellent, and as time has shown, highly profitable ideas.

However, we should remember that most of these ideas are disturbingly old. Fans have a tremendous fondness for properties with lots of history. That has been a dangerous combination with media consolidation, spiraling budgets and regulatory capture of the copyright process. Billions of dollars are going to the constant rebooting of aging franchises owned by a handful of companies while start-ups with fresh ideas struggle.

There are also risks associated with focusing too much on any segment of the audience, be it teenagers, critics, industry types or hardcore fans. As someone who's in the dangerous middle -- enough of a pop-culture geek to get the jokes but not enough of one to enjoy them -- I may be overly sensitive to nerd-pandering, particularly to self-reference, but I don't think I'm entirely unrepresentative.  J. J. Abrams has put me off Star Trek and probably Star Wars for life (If I ever hear another actor say "I'm a doctor, not a..." it will be too soon). Even in Skyfall, a movie I greatly enjoyed, the allusions to exploding pens and Aston-Martins were a distraction on first viewing and have gotten more annoying since.

Another indication of this influence can be found in the coverage of TV programs and movies that inhabit well-known fictional universes. PR is still the most valuable form of advertising and one of the most effective ways for these shows to generate that attention is reveal some connection to that universe.

For example, there was a great deal of coverage around the revelation that the characters played by Chloe Bennet and Kyle MacLachlan were a couple of fairly minor Marvel characters, though MacLachlan's has been bouncing around for a long time now. For serious fans, this was a big deal, but for most viewers, the connection meant nothing. If the name "Calvin Zabo" doesn't mean anything to you, you are not the target audience.

Eventually, the strategy of making most of the audience sit through allusions and in-jokes they don't get will inevitably have a negative impact on the ratings and the box office. This makes an already unstable trend even less sustainable. We are seeing lots of records being set on the revenue side, but far more on the other side of the ledger.

Take a look at this list of the most expensive films adjusted for inflation. If we exclude the 1978 Superman (the budget of which was meant to cover the sequel as well and which barely made the list anyway), the only movie less that twenty years old to break 200 million in today's dollars was the notorious Cleopatra and that only comes in at number 17. Hollywood has been burned before when hot genres petered out, but it has never stood to lose this much.

"Every Tech Commercial"

College Humor does some very good work, particularly when compared with its overproduced, underwritten competition at Funny or Die. The following clip is a sharp parody of an all-too-familiar advertising genre. It is also a reminder of of how much of the marketing of technology is driven by play on associations, and how little relies on the actual functionality of the products.

Electronic voting

Another problem with single point of failure solutions (and another video from the same author, who seems to be paranoid about trusting people as a personal vocation):

The idea of "trust nobody" is probably a wise decision in voting matters.  After all, we worry about voter fraud at the individual level (thus the new laws on ID being required to vote) but an electronic system gives a very targeted intervention a much better chance of success. 

What's the big deal about an indictment?

I am a regular reader of Esquire's political blogger Charles Pierce but I am always cautious about citing him on our blog. Pierce is openly and aggressively inflammatory. He is also smart, funny and clear-eyed. He is largely immune to the groupthink that afflicts most of his colleagues accross the political spectrum and, in a profession where most have lost their stomach for calling a spade a spade, Pierce goes out of his way to point out naked emperors. 

I may not agree with all of the specifics in the following passage, but the main points about lack of proportionality and the dangers of naive cynicism are extraordinarily important and get nowhere near the attention they deserve.

I have made light of the fact that, of the putative Republican frontrunners on their "deep bench," two of them are under criminal investigation (Walker and Chris Christie), while one of them, the guy that Costa assures us has learned from his mistakes in 2008 and who is now bringing energy to his public appearances (which is true) is actually under indictment. Now, I grew up in the Commonwealth (god save it!), where once people re-elected James Michael Curley when Himself was in prison, so I have no illusions about the traditional American taste for rogues and mountebanks in our politics. But this is also an era in which the elite political press makes every candidate jump through countless biographical and intellectual hoops to qualify as a "serious" contender. (If you don't believe me, watch what happens 30 seconds after Hillary Clinton announces.) You can be disqualified from the "top tier" if, for example, 20 years ago, you underreported your maid on your income taxes, even if you made good on it later. You can be disqualified from political life and your government job if you once voiced the opinion that the Bush Administration hid a great deal of what it knew about the circumstances surrounding the 9/11 attacks. The fact that you wind-surf, god help us, can be discussed endlessly on the campaign trail. We've got people taking Mike Huckabee's bad-mouthing of Beyonce seriously. But the fact that three of the prime cuts from the GOP have the law on their heels is somehow disappeared from relevance almost entirely. 'Ees a puzzlement, and IOKIYAR doesn't begin to explain it.

One of the factors in play unquestionably is the fact that over 40 years of empowered hatred toward government has had the very much intended consequence of cresting generally a belief that all government is not only oppressive and incompetent, but also corrupt. Along with that, a more modern variation has been created whereby, if everything is political, then any investigation of a politician must needs be political, too. This began, I believe, with the delegitimization of Lawrence Walsh's probe into the crimes of Iran-Contra. (Side note: I know I'm a one-note piano on this subject but, dammit, so much of what's wrong in our politics goes back to those days, and those people, and the crimes with which they got away. Ollie North arranged the sale of missiles to a terrorist-sponsoring state. He got to be a hero. The country went bad wrong.) It got worse when the Republicans determined to use the actual criminal investigative techniques that Walsh conducted to pursue Bill Clinton on charges that actually were purely political, at least prior to those used in the impeachment kabuki, which was such a farce that it soured all but the most virulent souls on any investigations at all. Which is how we lost the special prosecutor status, and why the Bush administration was so cavalier about stonewalling Congress in the latter's pursuit of what was being done in the name of the country all over the world. The redefining of any investigation into government corruption as essentially political has so deprived any such investigation of widespread public credibility as to delegitimize any such investigation almost from jump.

That's pretty bad when it comes to our functioning as a self-governing republic, but it's halfway understandable. People have lives and problems of their own. But the elite political media has no such excuse. This is their job. That a man under criminal indictment can zip around the country, selling T-shirts off his own alleged wrongdoing, and do so full in the knowledge that his criminal indictment is treated in the coverage as less important than the fact that he wears glasses now, is a dreadful verdict on journalistic malpractice. The fact that Scott Walker is under investigation (again) for crimes in (another) office really ought to count more than the fact that he's learned how to yell at people on the stump.

Great man theory of history: a counter example

One of the persistent ideas that shows up again and again in history (and even in debate about modern social construction) is the idea of the great man.  Somebody (like Napolean, for example), who can transform a nation or who enable a group to do exceedingly remarkable things.  The competing, albeit wildly unpopular, alternative is attributing these things to institutions.  In the era of anti-government mania, this isn't an overwhelmingly popular view. 

But one good example from history about how these two things worked together is Hannibal.  Rome was famous for good institutions and for people holding exceedingly temporary appointments (consul, for example, was a one year post but was the key post in Roman governance). 

Razib Khan has a nice discussion of these issues:

 As you may know Hannibal was the general who led the armies of Carthage in the Italian peninsula during the Second Punic War, to great effect. In fact, until the battle of Zama in North Africa, during the last phases of the war, Hannibal did not lose to a Roman army. And yet despite his record of victory in tactical engagements, he was strategically bested by the Romans and lost the war. Unsurprisingly if there is one figure who looms large in the narrative of The Fall of Carthage it is Hannibal. This is striking because almost all of what we know about these wars comes down to us thanks to the Romans, so our perceptions are coloured by their biases, and he was their great antagonist. And yet it is undeniable that Hannibal’s raw tactical genius won grudging admiration and respect from the Romans. He was a singular figure, with no equivalent among the Romans of his era, with all due apologies to Scipio Africanus. And yet Rome won, and Carthage lost.

This has a lot to do with modern theories of governance.  Should the emphasis be on inspiring leaders (like the current president) or on the institutions of the state (or corporation or university . . . ), if one wants to improve outcomes?  This is an important data point on the side of improving institutions.

[and, yes, it is always possible that the answer is both]

What if Google forgot about passwords?

This was an interesting thought experiment

I thought it made a rather good point about just how interconnected everything on the web is becoming and how important large players can become to the overall ecosystem.  It's also a good engineering principle that one should avoid single points of failure when possible, because what could fail will eventually fail.   

Infrastructure maintance and suburban development

One does not normally think of suburban developments as being financially bad ideas.  I often see these building patterns as contributing to urban sprawl (wiping out wildlife habitat), congestion on roads, and inequality but being a way to make housing affordable.  But this piece has a strong opinion on even the long term financial viability of this development pattern:

In each of these mechanisms, the local unit of government benefits from the enhanced revenues associated with new growth. But it also typically assumes the long-term liability for maintaining the new infrastructure. This exchange — a near-term cash advantage for a long-term financial obligation — is one element of a Ponzi scheme.

The other is the realization that the revenue collected does not come near to covering the costs of maintaining the infrastructure. In America, we have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates the cost at $5 trillion — but that's just for major infrastructure, not the minor streets, curbs, walks, and pipes that serve our homes.

The reason we have this gap is because the public yield from the suburban development pattern — the amount of tax revenue obtained per increment of liability assumed — is ridiculously low. Over a life cycle, a city frequently receives just a dime or two of revenue for each dollar of liability. The engineering profession will argue, as ASCE does, that we're simply not making the investments necessary to maintain this infrastructure. This is nonsense. We've simply built in a way that is not financially productive.

Interestingly, this hypothesis suggests that tax flight is more effective than one might think at protecting people from paying taxes (municipal taxes being the easiest to avoid by relocation) but that this has long term consequences in terms of infrastructure.  And, of course, this same mobility will let people leave an area after the infrastructure begins to decay and cannot easily be maintained.

While this does seem overly simplistic as a complete explanation for what is happening with US infrastructure, it certainly cannot be helping matters.  It's also pretty hard to decide what to do about.  My best bet is to make people bear more direct costs -- but congestion and mileage taxes don't strike me as especially politically palatable. 

But it does bear thinking about.

Double bonus false-equivalence points at the New York Times

Reading this David Leonhardt piece (Letter From the Editor: Marriage, and When Liberals Are Wrong) is like watching the Three Stooges working in a hardware store -- Here's where he steps on the rake. Here's where he drops the anvil on his foot. Here's where he walks into the buzz saw -- but with the crucial difference that the Stooges at least had some glimmer of awareness after the injury (even Curly would get up off of the stove when his pants started to smoke). Leonhardt doesn't seem to realize there's anything wrong.


The rake --  "[H]appiness research is a mess"

The safe thing for a journalist to say about these dueling views is that they’re both partly correct. And they are! Yet that’s also an incomplete statement. To be blunter, I’d say that family structure is an area where many liberals are putting more weight on their preconceptions (inequality is bad for society) than on the evidence (changes in family structure are both an effect and a cause of inequality).

My colleague Claire Cain Miller’s widely read piece this week on a new study of marriage is another reminder of this fact, I think. The researchers who wrote the paper set out to figure out whether marriage actually promotes happiness or whether married people are happier simply because happier people tend to get and stay married. The data point to the first conclusion: Marriage (or long-term partnership) causes a noticeable and lasting increase in life satisfaction, especially among people who consider their spouse to be their best friend.

There may be no single word in social science research that makes the statistically literate more cautious than "happiness."

It has no standard definition, let alone an operational one. It is difficult to measure, subject to all sorts of selection effects, and colored by expectations. The metrics are vulnerable to framing and other extraneous factors. The data are always confounded. Virtually all attempts at causal inference have to be buried in countless caveats and conditions.

(Dean Baker spells out some of these concerns here, particularly involving survivorship bias)

Even if everything that followed in the piece went well, any conclusions drawn from this data would still be suspect, and as mentioned earlier, what follows doesn't go well at all.


The Anvils (one for each foot)

Having started out with this questionable foundation and made some big causal leaps, Leonhardt then finds himself arguing that "liberals are wrong" on a position that no actual liberal seems to hold, at least none that the author can find. The best he can do is to argue that liberals blame many social problems on inequality and "Life satisfaction isn’t the same thing as inequality, but they’re related." Throw marriage equality into the discussion and the argument for liberals taking the marriage-does-not-lead-to-happiness position is even weaker.

Having smashed one toe, Leonhardt then goes looking for another anvil to knock over.

We should also be willing to say when we think liberals don’t have a claim on the evidence — such as when they argue that education is overrated (but still send their own children to expensive colleges)... 

Just to be clear, the links indicate that Leonhardt is talking about college education. Liberal attitudes toward the role of K through 12 education are complex and you might be able to make at least an interesting argument for some of them underrating that part of the process but with college he runs into the same problem of not being able to come up with any liberals who hold what he suggests is the typical liberal position.

To appreciate fully the journalistic slapstick here, you need to follow the links. The first goes to a piece by EPI research associate Richard Rothstein, the second to another post by Leonhardt.
There are a couple of problems here: first, with no disrespect intended for Mr. Rothstein, if you are going to argue for a liberal consensus on an issue and you are only providing one example, it needs to be someone quite a bit more prominent; second, and more serious, Rothstein's position in no way contradicts Leonhardt's.

Here's the key paragraph from the Rothstein article:

Colleges and other educational institutions can influence which students get the more highly-skilled jobs that are available. But colleges and other educational institutions cannot, to a significant extent, affect the number of jobs that are available – highly skilled or otherwise.

And here are a couple of passages from Leonhardt's article.

A new set of income statistics answers those questions quite clearly: Yes, college is worth it, and it’s not even close. For all the struggles that many young college graduates face, a four-year degree has probably never been more valuable.

The pay gap between college graduates and everyone else reached a record high last year, according to the new data, which is based on an analysis of Labor Department statistics by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Americans with four-year college degrees made 98 percent more an hour on average in 2013 than people without a degree. That’s up from 89 percent five years earlier, 85 percent a decade earlier and 64 percent in the early 1980s. 

... 

I find the data from the Economic Policy Institute especially telling because the institute — a left-leaning research group — makes a point of arguing that education is not the solution to all of the economy’s problems. That is important, too. College graduates, like almost everyone else, are suffering from the economy’s weak growth and from the disproportionate share of this growth flowing to the very richest households.

Keep in mind, these aren't just some articles pulled from the archives; these are what Leonhardt himself links to as support for his contention that liberals claim that education is overrated despite the evidence.

And it gets worse. To find someone who actually espouses this "liberal" position, you need to follow through the links in Leonhardt's earlier article. Those will bring you to this:

"For an increasing number of kids, the extra time and money spent pursuing a college diploma will leave them worse off than they were before they set foot on campus," Megan McArdle concluded in a Newsweek cover story last fall. Peter Thiel, the billionaire PayPal co-founder, has been paying smart undergraduates to drop out and start working on something, anything, other than college.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, in this chain of articles, the two people who come closest to taking the "liberal" position are McArdle and Silicon Valley's favorite pro-monopoly, anti-suffrage Galt-wannabe.


The buzz saw -- offsetting penalties

There is no better way of setting up a gag been combining smug self-congratulation and utter cluelessness.

When we started The Upshot last year, we said that one of our goals would be to avoid false equivalence. When we thought one side of a debate had more claim on the evidence — even when that side didn’t have a complete claim on the evidence — we would say so. In recent years, there have been more than a few policy debates in which liberals have had this greater claim on the evidence — climate change, tax increases on the affluent, Federal Reserve policy or health care. As journalists, we should be willing to say so. We should also be willing to say when we think liberals don’t have a claim on the evidence — such as when they argue that education is overrated (but still send their own children to expensive colleges) or when they argue that marriage isn’t very important.

You have to wonder what definition Leonhardt is using here. For most of us, the expression "false equivalency" refers to the practice of falsely equating things that are dissimilar, particularly in magnitude. The most common form of this is the offsetting penalty. This occurs when journalists weasel out of blowback from a story that is critical of one side by finding something bad to say about the other. This allows the journalist to maintain an air of moral superiority and a reputation for taking tough stances while allowing the wrongdoers to almost completely evade any responsibility for their actions.

Leonhardt's whole piece is an exercise in false equivalence. The fact that he doesn't see that indicates that a level of arrogance and obliviousness that is remarkable even for the New York Times.

And that is a high bar to clear.

“Epidemiology and Biostatistics: competitive or complementary?”

From Andrew Gelman:

To return to epidemiology vs. biostatistics: it’s my impression that there’s a lot of forward causal inference and a lot of reverse causal inference in both fields. That is, researchers spend a lot of time trying to estimate particular causal effects (“forward causal inference”) and a lot of time trying to uncover the causes of phenomena (“reverse causal questioning”).

And, from my perspective (as elaborated in that paper with Guido), these two tasks are fundamentally different and are approached differently: forward causal inference is done via estimation within a model, whereas reverse causal questioning is an elaboration of model checking, exploring aspects of data that are not explained by existing theories.

It is an interesting question.  I have a very different opinion here (perhaps unsurprisingly) that what we really have is an emphasis on two different pieces of a hard problem.  Both disciplines are looking at the difficult problem of disease (or health) in humans -- where experiments are expensive, awkward, and often infeasible.  It is a very hard problem!

Usually, the practical difference I see is where the researchers starts with the questions.  As a generality, an epidemiologists seems to start by thinking about the disease while a biostatistician tries to think about how to do valid measures in a complex system.  Obviously, if you are ever going to solve these problems you are going to need both approaches.  The day of the very simple epidemiological intervention (John Snow) are likely long past. 

It's also the case that simple attempts to measure  interventions often fail.  Clinical trials use a placebo arm because selection into the trial makes the trial group non-comparable in exceedingly difficult to measure ways.  So you generally have to be good at both tasks for an observational study to be useful. 

But there is also a huge amount of epidemiology that is utterly non-causal.  Why?  Because you cannot come up with testable hypotheses without understanding how different elements relate to one another.  This is what we are doing with the classic case-control study, or at least where I see it as being the most useful.  If you have no idea what causes a rare cancer, looking at what makes the people with cancer different is where you start finding ideas. 

However, these descriptive analyses are not going to give great insight into the cause of the outcome.  For example, mortality has a u-shaped curve with body mass index (many wonderful papers on this phenomenon).  But it is utterly unclear that interventions would help.  Maybe the mortality with low BMI is due to wasting disease, so adding weight if you are thin (and not dying of a disease already) may have no benefit.  Similarly, we don't know what changing a BMI from 45 to 25 would do for a 35 year old.  But if we don't understand the patterns, we can't really target interventions and develop testable hypotheses that are likely to yield important answers. 

So I am often quite serious about looking for "associations" in a lot of contexts.  When we look at the correlated with cardiovascular disease (inflammation or coronary plaques), we are looking for things that you could use to develop a causal hypothesis.  In other contexts, I am interested in using the association as a proxy for a causal effect (unintended drug side effects fall in this category -- when I say warfarin is associated with bleeding, I am really thinking that warfarin causes bleeding). 

And people wonder why epidemiologists are often happy to be confused as "skin doctors".  :-) 

When a guy from College Humor does a TED talk... no, really

As far as I can tell, this is an actual TEDx Talk. I can understand why the compulsively trendy crowd behind these events would want to associate themselves with a hot website that's producing a steady flow of viral videos.  I can even see why they might be willing to risk being the target of the satire.

What I can't imagine is how anyone had the nerve to get up and deliver an actual TED Talk after this.

The War on Data Continues

Andrew Gelman and I wrote a piece for the ASA a while back called "The War on Data." It discussed what appears to be a disturbing trend of powerful interest groups trying to discredit and/or defund major sources of important, high-quality data, ranging from the Census Bureau to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Now we can add the CBO to the list. Jonathan Chait spells out the ugly details. You should read the whole thing but here are a few key paragraphs.

The Congressional Budget Office is a 40-year-old institution that has acquired enormous clout within Washington by virtue of its reputation for ideological neutrality. It furnishes Congress and the public with budgetary estimates that, if necessarily imperfect (as all predictions must be), are arrived at fairly. It is also a perfect modern expression of an old Progressive Era–ideal: that policymakers should be informed by the work of impartial experts. That the conservative majority has set out to corrupt this institution as one of its first major acts is, therefore, perfectly fitting.

The old methods CBO used to measure legislation would account for changes in behavior that a new law might create. (Say, higher cigarette taxes would lead to less smoking.) They did not attempt to measure legislation’s impact on the economy as a whole. This is because the two parties disagree completely over what policies make the economy grow faster. Democrats, for instance, believe that tax rates on the rich have little effect on economic growth, but that investing in public infrastructure or education has a lot. Republicans believe the opposite. Congress voted yesterday to require the CBO’s measurement of the budgetary cost of legislation to incorporate assumptions about how it will affect economic growth. Specifically, the GOP's assumptions.
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The whole reason the Republican Congress is instituting dynamic scoring comes as a response to its attempt to write a tax reform bill last year. The idea was to lower tax rates while eliminating loopholes and preferences. But Republicans discovered that, while lowering rates is easy, eliminating preferences is hard. After Representative Dave Camp produced a tax reform bill that failed to cut tax rates for high-income taxpayers enough for their liking, Republicans abandoned it en masse. Paul Ryan openly declared his plan to change the forecasting rules so that Republicans could cut tax rates without having to pay for every dollar by ending preferences. The first step was kicking out Douglas Elmendorf, the CBO director widely respected by both sides. The second step was yesterday’s vote.
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The new, “dynamic” CBO will be systematically biased to make conservative proposals appear misleadingly cheap and liberal proposals misleadingly costly to the public fisc. This would be true even if the Republicans were soliciting a fair range of forecasting perspectives. By its design, the dynamic scoring rule allows the party in power to game its effects. It applies “dynamic scoring” only to legislation affecting 0.25 percent of Gross Domestic Product. As Chye-Ching Huang and Paul Van de Water point out, congressional leaders can manipulate this requirement easily: They can break up large pieces of legislation into smaller bills to avoid dynamic scoring, or combine smaller pieces into a major bill, if needed to make their agenda appear more affordable. Dynamic scoring is subject to abuse by its very design.

“History of the memo”

I've been arguing for a while now that the shiny-object school of technology reporting isn't just annoying; it does real damage. We waste a tremendous amount of time talking about technology that will have a trivial impact or will probably never come to fruition at all. At the same time, genuinely important tech stories go all but unnoticed.

Shininess is a poor indicator of importance. Standardized shipping containers aren't glamorous, but you can make the case that the economic impact of containerization is greater than that of the combined output of Silicon Valley over the last decade.  

Paul Krugman has always been good at separating the real impact of technology from the gee-whiz aspect (I think he slightly overrates Paul David, but that's a small complaint and a topic for another post). Here's an excellent example.

Vox has a nice article about the origins of the business cubicle, which includes a discussion of filing cabinets – which is fine as far as it goes. But there is actually quite a lot more to say, as you’d know if you’d read a wonderful book (with a rather drab title), Control Through Communication, written by my friend JoAnne Yates of MIT’s Sloan School.

JoAnne’s book – which her husband calls “history of the memo” – is about the coevolution of information technology and the business world before the digital age. Of course, back then people didn’t talk about information technology – but IT did exist, indeed developed in fundamental ways, and changed everything. And filing cabinets are a window into those changes.
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Organizations have always needed a record of their communications. No doubt ancient Roman merchants had slaves making copies of letters, the way Tom Standage (in another great book) tells us aristocrats did, turning senatorial correspondence into a form of proto-Facebook. Much later, JoAnne tells us, some businesses used a pretty amazing system: outgoing letters would be dampened, placed between the pages of a big book, and squeezed with a screw press to create a sort of reprint.

Then came a revolution: carbon paper! Or actually carbon paper plus typewriters. Suddenly, everything was in triplicate, and keeping a record of all correspondence became easy.

The next question, however, was how to find the relevant correspondence. When damp letters and screw presses were the limits of technology, there was no choice: a chronological record, to flip through when needed, was it. Carbons offered new possibilities: copies could be filed by subject instead or as well. But how should they be filed?

Boxes or drawers were one possibility, but they still involved a lot of shuffling, and relevant letters could easily be overlooked. The answer? The vertical file, with a tab indicating the contents of each folder.

To complete the revolution, however, you needed a behavioral change. Previously, businessmen wrote letters, narratives that might touch on multiple subjects. With the coming of the filing cabinet, however, they had to be disciplined to write each individual document on one and only one subject, so that it could be filed properly. The memo was born.

I love this story on multiple levels. For one thing, I always love reminders that many of the technologies that made the modern world were humble and inconspicuous – one of the great things about Daniel Boorstin’s The Americans vol. 3 is its account of things like the invention of the flat-bottomed paper bag.