Month: September 2016

Precautionary Principle Slows Cloning Innovation

(p. A8) Dolly the Sheep started her life in a test tube in 1996 and died just six years later. When she was only a year old, there was evidence that she might have been physically older. At five, she was diagnosed with osteoarthritis. And at six, a CT scan revealed tumors growing in her lungs, likely the result of an incurable infectious disease. Rather than let Dolly suffer, the vets put her to rest.
Poor Dolly never stood a chance. Or did she?
Meet Daisy, Diana, Debbie and Denise. “They’re old ladies. They’re very healthy for their age,” said Kevin Sinclair, a developmental biologist who, with his colleagues at the University of Nottingham in Britain, has answered a longstanding question about whether cloned animals like Dolly age prematurely.
In a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, the scientists tested these four sheep, created from the same cell line as Dolly, and nine other cloned sheep, finding that, contrary to popular belief, cloned animals appear to age normally.
. . .
Not only did many countries, including Canada and Australia, ban reproductive cloning in animals, but the United Nations banned all kinds of cloning in humans in 2005. Last year the European Union made importing food from cloned animals or their offspring illegal.
. . .
Now, based on results of this new study, researchers have confirmed what most scientists believed years ago: Cloning does not lead to premature aging.
. . .
Many scientists hope that changes in perception will lead to advances in reproductive technology that will enable us to provide food for a growing global population, save endangered species and develop advanced therapies.

For the full story, see:
JOANNA KLEIN. “Dolly’s Fellow Clones, Enjoying the Golden Years.” The New York Times (Weds., JULY 27, 2016): A8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JULY 26, 2016, and has the title “Dolly the Sheep’s Fellow Clones, Enjoying Their Golden Years.”)

When Minimum Wage Rises, So Does Crime

(p. A13) By significantly reducing the available stock of job opportunities at the bottom end of the career ladder, a higher minimum wage increases the likelihood that unemployed teens will seek income elsewhere. A 2013 study by economists at Boston College analyzed increases in state and federal minimum-wage levels between 1997 and 2010. It found that low-skill workers affected by minimum-wage hikes were more likely to lose their jobs, become idle and commit crime. The authors warn that their results “point to the dangers both to the individual and to society from policies that restrict the already limited employment options of this group.”

For the full commentary, see:
MARK J. PERRY and MICHAEL SALTSMAN. “The Fight for $15 Will Hit North Philly Hard; Not far from Democrats’ soiree, teen unemployment is at 42%. What if the minimum wage doubles?” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., July 27, 2016): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 26, 2016.)

The 2013 study by Boston College economists, mentioned above, was published in 2014. The published version is:
Beauchamp, Andrew, and Stacey Chan. “The Minimum Wage and Crime.” B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy 14, no. 3 (July 2014): 1213-35.

American Indians Suffer from Lack of Property Rights

(p. A15) There are almost no private businesses or entrepreneurs on Indian reservations because there are no property rights. Reservation land is held in trust by the federal government and most is also owned communally by the tribe. It’s almost impossible for tribe members to get a mortgage, let alone borrow against their property to start a business. The Bureau of Indian Affairs regulates just about every aspect of commerce on reservations.
Instead of giving Indians more control over their own land–allowing them to develop natural resources or use land as collateral to start businesses–the federal government has offered them what you might call a loophole economy. Washington carves out a sector of the economy, giving tribes a regulatory or tax advantage over non-Indians. But within a few years the government takes it away, in many cases leaving Indian tribes as impoverished and more disheartened than they were before.
. . .
What American Indians need first is less regulation. There is a reason that Native Americans say BIA, the initials for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, really stands for “Bossing Indians Around.”

For the full commentary, see:
NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY. “The Loophole Economy Is No Jackpot for Indians; Running casinos or selling tax-free cigarettes can’t substitute for what tribes truly need: property rights.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., July 28, 2016): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 27, 2016.)

The above commentary by Riley is related to her book, which is:
Riley, Naomi Schaefer. The New Trail of Tears: How Washington Is Destroying American Indians. New York: Encounter Books, 2016.

RFID Tags Can Enable Process Innovations

(p. A11) The numbers don’t look good: Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that worker productivity dropped 0.5% in the second quarter of 2016–the third quarterly decline in a row. Productivity growth, a key driver of improved living standards, has averaged only 1.3% a year over the past decade, compared with 2.9% from mid-1995 through the end of 2005.
Why the slowdown? One theory is that markets have already wrung the easy efficiencies out of current technology. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen noted in June that some economists “believe that the low-hanging fruit of innovation largely has been picked and that there is simply less scope for further gains.”
Count me in the optimistic camp. Low-cost wireless technologies are only beginning to break down the wall between the physical and digital worlds, and early-adopting companies are already achieving astounding productivity gains.
. . .
Employees can take inventory by waving an RFID reader over a shelf or a rack. A 2009 study by the University of Arkansas found scanning 10,000 items took 53 hours using bar codes, but only two hours with RFID. That efficiency allows Macy’s to inventory items every month rather than once or twice annually. Pam Sweeney, Macy’s senior vice president of logistics systems, tells me that RFID has pushed inventory accuracy in these departments to 95%.
. . .
As the cost of RFID tags falls to only cents apiece, the applications widen. Imagine checking out at the grocery store one day simply by running your cart through a scanner in a few seconds–no bar codes required. How many hours a year would that save consumers and employees both? If you want a million minuscule reasons to be bullish about productivity, look no further than tiny RFID tags.

For the full commentary, see:
MARK ROBERTI. “How Tiny Wireless Tech Makes Workers More Productive; Macy’s and Delta are using cheap RFID tags to blend the physical and digital.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Aug. 17, 2016): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 16, 2016.)

Venezuelans Revel in Socialist Paradise of Plenty

SearchForFoodInLootedCumanaGroceryStore2016-07-11.jpg“A man searched for food last week at a grocery store in Cumaná that had been looted.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) CUMANÁ, Venezuela — With delivery trucks under constant attack, the nation’s food is now transported under armed guard. Soldiers stand watch over bakeries. The police fire rubber bullets at desperate mobs storming grocery stores, pharmacies and butcher shops. A 4-year-old girl was shot to death as street gangs fought over food.
Venezuela is convulsing from hunger.
Hundreds of people here in the city of Cumaná, home to one of the region’s independence heroes, marched on a supermarket in recent days, screaming for food. They forced open a large metal gate and poured inside. They snatched water, flour, cornmeal, salt, sugar, potatoes, anything they could find, leaving behind only broken freezers and overturned shelves.
And they showed that even in a country with the largest oil reserves in the world, it is possible for people to riot because there is not enough food.
In the last two weeks alone, more than 50 food riots, protests and mass looting have erupted around the country. Scores of businesses have been stripped bare or destroyed. At least five people have been killed.
. . .
(p. A3) It has not always been clear what provokes the riots. Is it hunger alone? Or is it some larger anger that has built up in a country that has crumbled?
Inés Rodríguez was not sure. She remembered calling out to the crowd of people who had come to sack her restaurant on Tuesday night [June 14, 2016], offering them all the chicken and rice the restaurant had if they would only leave the furniture and cash register behind. They balked at the offer and simply pushed her aside, Ms. Rodríguez said.
“It is the meeting of hunger and crime now,” she said.

For the full story, see:
NICHOLAS CASEY. “Pillaging by Venezuelans Reveals Depth of Hunger.” The New York Times (Mon., JUNE 20, 2016): A1 & A3.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JUNE 19, 2016, and has the title “Venezuelans Ransack Stores as Hunger Grips the Nation.”)

87% of Billionaires Inherited Less than Half of Wealth

(p. C6) Billionaires controlled 3.9% of the world’s total household wealth in 2015, slightly down from 4% in 2014, according to Wealth-X, a consulting group that uses public records and research staff to manually track the habits of ultra-high-net-worth individuals, or people valued at more than $30 million.
. . .
For most billionaires, however, it takes more than an inheritance to join the so-called three-comma club, according to the census; 87% of billionaires, up from 81% in 2014, made the majority of their fortunes themselves.
Todd Morgan, senior managing director at Bel Air Investment Advisors LLC in Los Angeles, says several of his billionaire clients are entrepreneurs and they are “very driven” and typically opt to keep working long after they’ve made their fortune.
“It’s not, ‘I’m worth a billion, now I’m going to sit on a beach and relax.’ It’s more of, ‘What can I create or achieve next?'” he says.

For the full story, see:
VERONICA DAGHER. “Ranks of Billionaires Grow, and They’re Getting Richer.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Aug. 8, 2016): C6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the title “The Rich Get Richer as Billionaires Increase in Number.” There are minor differences in wording between the online and print versions. The sentences quoted above, follow the online version.)

Mather and Boylston Risked Much to Fight Smallpox

I enjoyed reading the book reviewed below. From the title, and from reviews, I had the impression that it would mostly be about the smallpox epidemic and the innoculation conflict. I was surprised that of equal, or greater, importance in the book is the role of James Franklin’s newspaper in laying the intellectual groundwork for the American Revolution. I learned from that part of the book too, but some might feel misled from the title about what the book was mainly about. (I think “fever” in the title is intended as a double entendre, referring both to a fever from smallpox, and a fever from the ideas of liberty.)

(p. A11) Inoculation was proposed by Cotton Mather, a figure much diminished in the 30 years since Salem. He had suffered a terrible sequence of tragedies, losing his wife and 10 of his children to accidents and epidemic disease. He had also been marginalized within the religious community by quarrels and scandals. But he had become an assiduous student of science, corresponding with the Royal Society in London and learning from its “Transactions” that inoculation against smallpox had long been practiced in Constantinople. Mr. Coss shows how Mather’s investigations led him to consult a source closer to home. His slave Onesimus, when asked whether he had ever had smallpox, replied “both Yes, and No”: He had been inoculated as a child in Africa, receiving a mild infection and subsequent immunity.

Inoculation was commonplace across swaths of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, Mr. Coss explains, but this inclined the doctors of Enlightenment-era Europe to regard it as a primitive superstition. Such was the view of William Douglass, the only man in Boston with the letters “M.D.” after his name, who was convinced that “infusing such malignant filth” in a healthy subject was lethal folly. The only person Mather could persuade to perform the operation was a surgeon, Zabdiel Boylston, whose frontier upbringing made him sympathetic to native medicine and who was already pockmarked from a near-fatal case of the disease.
“Given that attempting inoculation constituted an almost complete leap of faith for Boylston,” Mr. Coss writes, “he spent surprisingly little time agonizing over it.” He knew personally just how savage the toll could be. On June 26, 1721, just as the epidemic began to rage in earnest, Boyston filled a quill with the fluid from an infected blister and scratched it into the skin of two family slaves and his own young son.
News of the experiment was greeted with public fury and terror that it would spread the contagion. A town-hall meeting was convened, at Dr. Douglass’s instigation, at which inoculation was condemned and banned. Mather’s house was firebombed with an incendiary device to which a note was attached: “I will inoculate you with this.”

For the full review, see:
MIKE JAY. “‘BOOKSHELF; An Ounce of Prevention; When Cotton Mather advocated inoculation during a smallpox outbreak, young Benjamin Franklin helped foment outrage against him.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., March 3, 2016): A11.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 2, 2016, and has the title “‘BOOKSHELF; When Ben Franklin Was Against Vaccines; When Cotton Mather advocated inoculation during a smallpox outbreak, young Benjamin Franklin helped foment outrage against him.”)

The book under review, is:
Coss, Stephen. The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic That Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016.

GE Replaces Annual Performance Review with Frequent Feedback

(p. B8) General Electric Co. is getting rid of ratings.
The industrial giant’s salaried employees will no longer be given one of five labels–ranging from “role model” to “unsatisfactory”–as part of their annual performance review. The changes, to be announced to employees Tuesday, breaks with a system GE has used in some form or another for the last 40 years.
Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt is undertaking a bid to refocus on the company’s core industrial business. To spur these efforts, GE has spent the past few years reimagining the way its 310,000 employees work, placing new emphasis on experimentation and risk-taking. A new performance-management system asks employees and managers to exchange frequent feedback via a mobile app called PD@GE, in person or by phone. The messages are compiled into a performance summary at the end of the year.

For the full story, see:
RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN. “GE Scraps Staff Ratings to Spur Feedback.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., July 27, 2016): B8.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 26, 2016, and has the title “GE Does Away With Employee Ratings.”)