One Way to Defend Free Trade (in Honor of Reagan’s Birthday)

(p. A9) Baldrige also knew how to use humor to deflate tense moments, as when the U.S. toy balloon industry petitioned for protection against cheap Mexican imports. Baldrige was opposed, but after debate the entire cabinet favored sanctions. Sensing this was not where the president wanted to go, Baldrige pulled from his pocket a dozen toy balloons and tossed them on the cabinet table. As the room filled with laughter, he said, “This is what we are talking about.” Reagan denied the sanctions.

For the full review, see:
CLARK S. JUDGE. “BOOKSHELF; The Cowboy At Commerce; During tense talks over steel imports, Baldrige insisted the tired Europeans work through lunch. He’d hidden snacks for his team nearby.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Jan. 5, 2016): A9.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 4, 2016, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; The Cowboy At Commerce; During tense talks over steel imports, Baldrige insisted the tired Europeans work through lunch. He’d hidden snacks for his team nearby.”)

The book under review, is:
Black, Chris, and B. Jay Cooper. Mac Baldrige: The Cowboy in Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet. Lanham, MD: Lyons Press, 2015.

Innovation Brought Rise of Middle Class and Decline of Aristocracy

(p. C7) Mr. Evans claims that “master narratives” have fallen into disrepute, and he does not aspire to provide one. But he returns repeatedly to such themes as the growth of “public space” as Europe urbanized and communications improved. He likewise describes the “shifting contours of inequality” as the middle classes burgeoned and benefited from the hastening pace of scientific innovation while the aristocracy slowly declined in status (albeit not in creature comforts).
Similarly, Mr. Evans offers an interesting discussion of how various forms of serfdom disappeared, even as the essence of rural immiseration generally did not. He conveys the degradation of existence for the emergent working class of the cities with controlled pathos yet without acknowledging the improvements in living standards that took place in advanced countries during the last decades of the century. He adduces evidence to show that the benefits of improved sanitation and hygiene, health and nutrition, consumer products and home conveniences, as well as longer life expectancy, went at first disproportionately to the urban middle and professional classes, strata that tripled as a fraction of the population in leading countries. Thus even in comparatively prosperous England, well-off adolescents at midcentury stood almost 9 inches taller than their proletarian contemporaries and by 1900 enjoyed a life expectancy 14 years longer.

For the full review, see:
STEPHEN A. SCHUKER. “The European Century.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 3, 2016): C7.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 2, 2016, and has the title “A Long Century of Peace.”)

The book under review, is:
Evans, Richard J. The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914. New York: Viking, 2016.

Double-Blind Trials Are Not the Only Source of Sound Knowledge

(p. 1) . . . while all doctors agree about the importance of gauging the quality of evidence, many feel that a hierarchy of methods is simplistic. As the doctor Mark Tonelli has argued, distinct forms of knowledge can’t be judged by the same standards: what a patient prefers on the basis of personal experience; what a doctor thinks on the basis of clinical experience; and what clinical research has discovered — each of these is valuable in its own way. While scientists concur that randomized trials are ideal for evaluating the average effects of treatments, such precision isn’t necessary when the benefits are obvious or clear from other data.
Clinical expertise and rigorous evaluation also differ in their utility at different stages of scientific inquiry. For discovery and explanation, as the clinical epidemiologist Jan Vandenbroucke has argued, practitioners’ instincts, observations and case studies are most useful, whereas randomized controlled trials are least useful. Expertise and systematic evaluation are partners, not rivals.
Distrusting expertise makes it easy to confuse an absence of randomized evaluations with an absence of knowledge. And this leads to the false belief that knowledge of what works in social policy, education or fighting terrorism can come only from randomized evaluations. But by that logic (as a spoof scientific article claimed), we don’t know if parachutes really work because we have no randomized controlled trials of them.

For the full commentary, see:
PAGAN KENNEDY. “The Thin Gene.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., NOV. 27, 2016): 1 & 6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date NOV. 25, 2016.)

The academic article calling for double-blind randomized trials to establish the efficacy of parachutes, is:
Smith, Gordon C. S., and Jill P. Pell. “Parachute Use to Prevent Death and Major Trauma Related to Gravitational Challenge: Systematic Review of Randomised Controlled Trials.” BMJ 327, no. 7429 (Dec. 18, 2003): 1459-61.

Elephant Poaching Boosts Lion Population

(p. A7) In Mozambique, the number of people living inside the country’s gigantic Niassa Reserve grew to around 35,000 in 2012 from about 21,000 in 2001, and those people are increasingly clashing with the park’s lions–catching them in snares or hunting them when they attack livestock, said Alastair Nelson, the country director for New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society. In a strange sense of how out-of-whack the area has become, the park’s lion population has risen because of a jump in elephant poaching for ivory that has created a multitude of carcasses for the lions to feed on, Mr. Nelson said.”

For the full story, see:
HEIDI VOGT. “Humans, Lions Struggle to Co-Exist.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Aug. 8, 2015): A7.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Aug. 7, 2015, and has the title “Human-Population Boom Remains Largest Threat to Africa’s Lions in Wake of Cecil’s Killing.”)

Science Can Learn Much from Outliers “Who Are Naturally Different”

(p. 1) Abby Solomon suffers from a one-in-a-billion genetic syndrome: After just about an hour without food, she begins to starve. She sleeps in snatches. In her dreams she gorges on French fries. But as soon as she wakes up and nibbles a few bites, she feels full, so she ends up consuming very few calories. At 5 feet 10 inches tall, she weighs 99 pounds.
Now 21 years old, she is one of the few people in the world to survive into adulthood with neonatal progeroid syndrome, a condition that results from damage to the FBN1 gene.
. . .
(p. 6) Dr. Chopra told me that, as far as medical science is concerned, Abby Solomon is worth thousands of the rest of us.
. . .
“Nothing comes close to starting with people who are naturally different,” he said. This is why he searches out patients at the extreme ends of the spectrum — those who are wired to weigh 80 pounds or 380 pounds. He said, “We have the opportunity to help a bigger swath of humanity when we learn from these outliers.”
In 2013, after hearing about Ms. Solomon’s unusual condition from another patient, he asked her to visit his clinic. Ms. Solomon warned him that she would be able to carry on a conversation for only 15 minutes before she needed to snack on chips or a cookie. That remark inspired a revelation. Dr. Chopra realized that “she had to eat small, sugary meals all day to stay alive, because her body was constantly running out of glucose,” he said.
The clue led Dr. Chopra and his colleagues to their discovery of the blood-sugar-regulating hormone, which they named asprosin. Ms. Solomon’s natural asprosin deficiency keeps her on the brink of starvation, but Dr. Chopra’s hope is that an artificial compound that blocks asprosin could be used as a treatment for obesity. He and his team have already tested such a compound on mice, and found that it can reverse insulin resistance and weight gain.

For the full commentary, see:
PAGAN KENNEDY. “The Thin Gene.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., NOV. 27, 2016): 1 & 6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date NOV. 25, 2016.)

Not All Old Ideas Should Be Recycled

(p. C16) “What is true in the consumer tech industry is true in science and other fields of thinking,” Mr. Poole elaborates. “The story of human understanding is not a gradual, stately accumulation of facts” but rather “a wild roller-coaster ride full of loops and switchbacks.”
Horses, for example, are once again being used in warfare in the Middle East. Vinyl records are back after losing out to digital CDs and internet streaming. Leeches, whose use was once considered a barbaric medieval practice, are now an FDA-approved “medical device” for cleaning wounds. Bicycles are making a comeback as a popular and efficient means of moving about in large, crowded cities. Blimps are starting to compete with helicopters for moving heavy cargo.
. . .
To understand this process of rediscovery–“old is the new new”–we need to abandon the myth of progress as something that results from a rejection of all that is old.
Still, not all old ideas will return reconfigured into new and useful ones, and it is here where readers may find room for disagreement, despite Mr. Poole’s many caveats.
. . .
That there are many unsolved mysteries in science does not always mean that we should turn to the past for insight. Sometimes–usually, in fact–the bad ideas rejected by science belong in the graveyard. Phlogiston, miasma, spontaneous generation, the luminiferous aether–wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong.
Nevertheless, those notions–and many others that Mr. Poole surveys in this thought-provoking book–were wrong in ways that led scientists toward a better understanding, and the middle chapters of “Rethink” elegantly recount these stories. Going forward, Mr. Poole ends by suggesting that we adopt a “view from tomorrow” in which we “try to consider an idea free of the moral weight that attaches to it in particular historical circumstances” and that “we could try to get into the habit of deferring judgments about ideas more generally” in order to keep an open mind. On the flip side, skeptics should not rush to dismiss a consensus idea as wrong just because consensus science is not always right. Most of today’s ideas gained consensus in the first place for a very good reason: evidence. Do you know what we call alternative science with evidence? Science.

For the full review, see:

MICHAEL SHERMER. “Everything Old Is New Again.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 10, 2016): C16.

(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 9, 2016, and has the title “Electric Cars Are Old News.”)

The book under review, is:
Poole, Steven. Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas. New York: Scribner, 2016.