Category: Books

Increasing the Illumination “of Everyday Hardship”

History records much more on the lives of the rich, powerful, and articulate, than on the lives of ordinary citizens. But if we want to deeply understand what happened in the past, and how far we have come, we need to tease out evidence of the lives of ordinary citizens. Gabriel Zucktriegel makes the case that the ruins of Pompeii provide us some evidence. The volcano did not care if you were rich, powerful, articulate or ordinary–it buried everyone who did not escape in time. And more importantly, it buried the artifacts and settings of everyone.

(p. C11) After lying inert beneath volcanic ash for nearly 17 centuries, the Roman city of Pompeii, near Naples, is today a site of continuous change. New discoveries emerge constantly, even as conservators struggle to protect what’s been found from damage by weather, looters and crowds. Articles and books about these findings have steadily appeared as excavations expand into parts of the town that remain buried.

In 2021 Gabriel Zuchtriegel, a German classicist then in his late 30s, was given the enormous task of directing this dynamic site.

. . .

“Pompeii is like a rip in the screen, through which we have the opportunity to take a peek behind the official version of history,” writes Mr. Zuchtriegel. He describes in vivid detail his 2021 discovery of a small room containing the remains of three beds and other quotidian objects. Perhaps it was the dwelling, as well as the workspace, of slaves. A newspaper described the discovery as “the rarity of the everyday,” and Mr. Zuchtriegel takes the phrase as a rallying cry. “The ‘rarity of the everyday’ could also be the title for my personal access to archaeology and Pompeii,” he writes.

“What we found here was different, precisely because it wasn’t a temple, grave or palace,” says Mr. Zuchtriegel, just some 50 square feet “of everyday hardship.” He recounts how he noticed a nail on the wall for hanging an oil lamp and, beneath it, a white painted rectangle designed to reflect the lamplight and increase illumination. Moved by this simple effort to lighten a dark existence, he ponders how the room’s occupants, who no doubt lacked paint and brushes, got that rectangle made. It’s one of many instances where he reimagines the lives of Rome’s downtrodden.

. . .

“The Buried City,” translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch, offers many such glimpses of common Pompeians, some of whom stand before us today in the form of plaster casts made from cavities in the ash where their bodies decayed. Mr. Zuchtriegel is deeply moved by these casts, the phantoms of those who were trying to hide or flee when a searingly hot blast of dust and ash swept in. As he contemplates them, he tells us, “the academic in me switches off.”

For the full review see:

James Romm. “An Ordinary Day in Pompeii.” The Wall Street Journal (Sunday, June 28, 2025): C11.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 27, 2025, and has the title “‘The Buried City’: Pompeii on Display.”)

The book under review is:

Zuchtriegel, Gabriel. The Buried City: Unearthing the Real Pompeii. Translated by Jamie Bulloch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025.

Gram and Boudreaux Present Data to Refute Myths About the History of Capitalism

Donald Boudreaux makes the case for economic freedom more clearly, effectively, and persistently than almost anyone. I have not yet read his book with former senator Phil Gram, but I look forward to doing so.

(p. A13) . . . if you control the historical narrative surrounding economic questions, you are more than halfway toward winning the policy battles. This is the insight Phil Gramm and Donald J. Boudreaux bring to “The Triumph of Economic Freedom.”

. . .

In eight chapters, Messrs. Gramm and Boudreaux tackle seven longstanding historical myths about American capitalism that still influence economic discussion today. In each case, they are careful not to caricature the conventional wisdom they challenge.

But having given their opponents’ positions more than a fair shake, Messrs. Gramm and Boudreaux turn to extensive rebuttals. These are supported by detailed attention to data sets. The authors also outline alternative explanations for the path taken by American manufacturing since the 1970s, and for the state of poverty in America today.

For the full review see:

Samuel Gregg. “Bookshelf; A Few Lessons From History.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, June 17, 2025): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 16, 2025, and has the title “Bookshelf; ‘The Triumph of Economic Freedom’: A Few Lessons From History.”)

The book under review is:

Gramm, Phil, and Donald J. Boudreaux. The Triumph of Economic Freedom: Debunking the Seven Great Myths of American Capitalism. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2025.

During Covid-19 “Bureaucratic Authorities Erred in Pretending . . . Certainty”

(p. A13) Adam Kucharski, a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, takes the reader on a fascinating tour of the history of what has counted as proof.

. . .

What should we do, . . ., when a mathematical proof of truth is unavailable, but we must nonetheless act?

This leads us to a discussion of probability and statistics, and of pioneers such as William Gosset, a brewer at Guinness who figured out how to quantify random errors in experiments, and Janet Lane-Claypon, an English scientist who first thought to investigate confounding factors while analyzing children’s health. Some innovations, though, have hardened into unhelpful dogma. The scientific notion of “statistical significance” relies, Mr. Kucharski explains, on a wholly arbitrary cutoff, which incentivizes researchers to massage their data. Such issues, he says, can be hard for scientists, let alone the laity, to understand.

Mr. Kucharski speaks from experience, since he was one of the experts first called upon by the British government for advice on the Covid-19 pandemic. He explains brilliantly the fragmentary and confusing nature of the data then available, and the provisional conclusions they led to. As a public face of this effort, Mr. Kucharski was bombarded daily with abusive and threatening messages from angry citizens who simply didn’t believe what they were being told.

The lesson Mr. Kucharski draws isn’t that he and his colleagues were right (though they largely were), but that bureaucratic authorities erred in pretending there was certainty when all that was possible at the time was messy and provisional. Notoriously, in March 2020 the World Health Organization tweeted “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airbone.” (As it turns out, it was, and it is.) The author regrets, too, that politicians claimed to be “following the science,” because science can never tell you what you should do.

For the full review see:

Steven Poole. “Bookshelf; Finding Truth In Numbers.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, June 6, 2025): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 5, 2025, and has the title “Bookshelf; ‘Proof’: Finding Truth in Numbers.”)

The book under review is:

Kucharski, Adam. Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty. New York: Basic Books, 2025.

How Did Ed Smylie and His Team Create the Kludge That Saved the Crew of Apollo 13?

Gary Klein in Seeing What Others Don’t analyzed cases of innovation, and sought their sources. One source he came up with was necessity. His compelling example was the firefighter Wag Dodge who, with maybe 60 seconds until he would be engulfed in flame, lit a match to the grass around him, and then laid down in the still-hot embers. The roaring fire bypassed the patch he pre-burned, and his life was saved. The story is well-told in Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire.

Pondering more cases of necessity might be useful to help us understand, and encourage, future innovation. One candidate might be the kludge that Ed Smylie and his engineers put together to save the Apollo 13 crew from suffocating after an explosion blew up their command capsule oxygen tank.

Necessity may be part of it, but cannot be the whole story. Humanity needed to fly for thousands of years, but it took Wilbur Wright to make it happen. (This point is made in Kevin Ashton’s fine and fun How to Fly a Horse.)

I have ordered the book co-authored by Lovell, and mentioned in a passage quoted below, in case it contains insight on how the Apollo 13 kludge was devised.

(p. B11) Ed Smylie, the NASA official who led a team of engineers that cobbled together an apparatus made of cardboard, plastic bags and duct tape that saved the Apollo 13 crew in 1970 after an explosion crippled the spacecraft as it sped toward the moon, died on April 21 [2025] in Crossville, Tenn. He was 95.

. . .

Soft-spoken, with an accent that revealed his Mississippi upbringing, Mr. Smylie was relaxing at home in Houston on the evening of April 13 when Mr. Lovell radioed mission control with his famous (and frequently misquoted) line: “Uh, Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

An oxygen tank had exploded, crippling the spacecraft’s command module.

Mr. Smylie, . . ., saw the news on television and called the crew systems office, according to the 1994 book “Lost Moon,” by Mr. Lovell and the journalist Jeffrey Kluger. The desk operator said the astronauts were retreating to the lunar excursion module, which was supposed to shuttle two crew members to the moon.

“I’m coming in,” Mr. Smylie said.

Mr. Smylie knew there was a problem with this plan: The lunar module was equipped to safely handle air flow for only two astronauts. Three humans would generate lethal levels of carbon dioxide.

To survive, the astronauts would somehow need to refresh the canisters of lithium hydroxide that would absorb the poisonous gases in the lunar excursion module. There were extra canisters in the command module, but they were square; the lunar module ones were round.

“You can’t put a square peg in a round hole, and that’s what we had,” Mr. Smylie said in the documentary “XIII” (2021).

He and about 60 other engineers had less than two days to invent a solution using materials already onboard the spacecraft.

. . .

In reality, the engineers printed a supply list of the equipment that was onboard. Their ingenious solution: an adapter made of two lithium hydroxide canisters from the command module, plastic bags used for garments, cardboard from the cover of the flight plan, a spacesuit hose and a roll of gray duct tape.

“If you’re a Southern boy, if it moves and it’s not supposed to, you use duct tape,” Mr. Smylie said in the documentary. “That’s where we were. We had duct tape, and we had to tape it in a way that we could hook the environmental control system hose to the command module canister.”

Mission control commanders provided step-by-step instructions to the astronauts for locating materials and building the adapter.

. . .

The adapter worked. The astronauts were able to breathe safely in the lunar module for two days as they awaited the appropriate trajectory to fly the hobbled command module home.

. . .

Mr. Smylie always played down his ingenuity and his role in saving the Apollo 13 crew.

“It was pretty straightforward, even though we got a lot of publicity for it and Nixon even mentioned our names,” he said in the oral history. “I said a mechanical engineering sophomore in college could have come up with it.”

For the full obituary, see:

Michael S. Rosenwald. “Ed Smylie Dies at 95; His Team of Engineers Saved Apollo 13 Crew.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 20, 2025): B11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated May 18, 2025, and has the title “Ed Smylie, Who Saved the Apollo 13 Crew With Duct Tape, Dies at 95.”)

Klein’s book that I praise in my introductory comments is:

Klein, Gary A. Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights. Philadelphia, PA: PublicAffairs, 2013.

Maclean’s book that I praise in my introductory comments is:

Maclean, Norman. Young Men and Fire. new ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Ashton’s book that I praise in my introductory comments is:

Ashton, Kevin. How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery. New York: Doubleday, 2015.

The book co-authored by Lovell and mentioned above is:

Lovell, Jim, and Jeffrey Kluger. Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

Do Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs” Thrive in Innovative Dynamism?

Last week I participated in a panel on “Freedom and Abundance” with Bri Wolf at an I.H.S. Symposium on “The Future of Liberalism.” As a small part of my presentation (and also in my Openness book), I claim that innovative dynamism creates more jobs than it destroys, and that the new jobs are generally better jobs than the old jobs.

After the panel Bri asked me how I respond to David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs. I vaguely remembered hearing of the book, and told her I would look into it. What follows is my brief, quick, edited response.

Graeber claimed that a large number of jobs in the for-profit sector are purposeless, demoralizing “bullshit” jobs. I do think that there are some bullshit jobs, but think that they are much more common in the government and non-profit sectors than in the for-profit sector. There are some in the for-profit sector, but I would argue that the number is diminishing, and many of them are due to labor unions and government regulations, that protect bullshit jobs from being eliminated.

Where innovative dynamism is allowed to function unbound, the trend is toward more meaningful jobs. Two of the important technological innovations of the last several decades have been computers and the internet. Erik Brynjolfsson and co-authors wrote a few papers showing that an important effect has been to flatten the hierarchy at a great many firms. This eliminates much of the middle management that Graeber identifies as one main location of bullshit jobs.

I also looked the book up on Wikipedia and noticed that a couple of empirical papers have been written that raise doubts about some of the claims in the book.

The book seems to have gotten enough attention to justify a longer more serious critique than I am giving it in this blog entry. But I humor myself that I have bigger fish to fry, namely my mission to see if I can help nudge the healthcare mess more toward being a system of innovative dynamism.

Some of Erik Brynjolfsson’s relevant co-authored articles, alluded to above, are:

Bresnahan, Timothy F., Erik Brynjolfsson, and Lorin M. Hitt. “Information Technology, Workplace Organization and the Demand for Skilled Labor: Firm-Level Evidence.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 117, no. 1 (2002): 339-76.

Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Lorin M. Hitt. “Beyond Computation: Information Technology, Organizational Transformation and Business Performance.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 23-48.

Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Lorin M. Hitt. “Computing Productivity: Firm-Level Evidence.” Review of Economics and Statistics 85, no. 4 (Nov. 2003): 793-808.

David Graeber’s book is:

Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

My book is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

If Universities Disbanded Would Learning and Discovery Cease?

The university is a medieval institution that in many ways in recent decades has become less efficient and less supportive of diversity of ideas. some analysts are calling for fundamental change in universities, maybe even the defunding of universities and the creation of alternative institutions to carry out the legitimate functions of universities. See Richard Vedder’s recent book Let Colleges Fail.

What are those functions? The two most important are 1) educate and 2) create new knowledge. Some, e.g., Christensen and Eyring in The Innovative University, identify a third function as providing a memorable and enjoyable early-adulthood experience of peer-camaraderie.

If universities were disbanded, could these functions be well-done by other institutions? Philip Hamburger in a passage quoted below points out that a huge store of diverse knowledge is now available on through the internet. Some of it is especially designed to help teach a variety of subjects at a variety of levels. With a basic knowledge of reading and of how to access the internet, the dedicated autodidact is not limited in what he can learn.

If universities were disbanded, could the creation of new knowledge continue? Here there is even greater uncertainty, but we have some proofs of concept of how alternative institutions and activities might fill the gap. In the early days of the Royal Society many of the members were not associated with any university. Many members pursued science in their spare time, with their own funds.

New forms of peer review could be tried that might allow anyone the chance to participate as citizen scientists. The new Journal of the Academy of Public Health will publish peer review comments along with the original article. Many scholars and citizen scientists are finding Substack a fruitful platform for publishing their ideas. Substack calls itself “a new economic engine for culture.”

Much science has been done, and can still be done, in entrepreneurial ventures and in industry. Terence Kealey documented the history and made the case. More science would be done by those seeking practical applications, and less by those seeking useless, but pretty, theory. Milton Friedman condemned NSF funding of economics, because it made economics too mathematical.

Science would be more highly valued and would produce more value.

(p. A15) Academic institutions think they have a problem and that its name is Donald Trump. But he’s only the beginning of their problems. The difficulties are systemic, not only legal or political, and that means it’s time to reconsider what higher education should look like.

. . .

. . ., although today the immediate threat comes from the Trump administration, academic institutions are fragile because knowledge is now available through the internet and artificial intelligence. For balanced inquiry, even academics increasingly look outside their universities.

For the full commentary see:

Philip Hamburger. “Don’t Just Fix Higher Education, Reconstitute It.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., June 3, 2025): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 2, 2025, and has the same title as the print version.)

The sources mentioned in my comments are:

Christensen, Clayton M., and Henry J. Eyring. The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the inside Out. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2011.

Friedman, Milton. “An Open Letter on Grants” Newsweek, May 18, 1981, 99.

Kealey, Terence. The Economic Laws of Scientific Research. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

Vedder, Richard. Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education. Oakland, CA: Independent Institute, 2025.

The Chicago School of Economics Was Once Uniquely Focused on Real World Problems

The Chicago School of Economics, most associated with Milton Friedman and George Stigler, saw itself as different from all the other top graduate programs in economics. At Chicago, the priority was solving applied problems, and only as much mathematics and theory should be used as was necessary to solve them. The other schools prioritized mathematical puzzle-solving and mathematical rigor and sophistication.

For those who might suspect Chicago was full of itself, the non-Chicago economists Arjo Klamar and David Colander dispelled the suspicion in their The Making of an Economist. After thorough interviewing and surveying of graduate students at the five or six top graduate programs, they concluded that graduate students at all but Chicago were cynically discouraged to realize that they were being trained to solve mathematical puzzles, while only those at Chicago still felt that they were being trained to matter in the real world.

I noticed that a recent obituary for the economist Stanley Fischer quotes Fischer as stating some diplomatic confirmation of the Klamar and Colander conclusion:

After earning his Ph.D. at M.I.T. in 1969, Mr. Fischer moved to the University of Chicago as a postdoctoral researcher and assistant professor. “At M.I.T. you did the mathematical work,” he told The New York Times in 1998, “and at Chicago you asked the question of how this applies to the real world” (Hagerty 2025, p. A17).

Alas, I fear that what was once true, is true no longer. I fear that if Klamar and Colander were to repeat their study today, they would find that Chicago has joined the other top programs in prioritizing mathematical puzzle-solving and mathematical rigor and sophistication.

The obituary of Stanley Fischer, quoted above, is:

James R. Hagerty. “Stanley Fischer, 81, Economist Who Helped Defuse Crises, Dies.” The New York Times (Mon., June 2, 2025): A17.

(Note: the online version of the Steve Lohr article was updated June 10, 2025, and has the title “Stanley Fischer, Who Helped Defuse Financial Crises, Dies at 81.”)

The Klamar and Colander book mentioned above is:

Klamer, Arjo, and David Colander. The Making of an Economist. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990.

Puzzling Studies Claim Economic Downturns Encourage Innovation

A recent paper co-authored by Talay joins several other studies (e.g., Anthony 2009 and Field 2011) in claiming that economic downturns encourage economic innovation.

I have always found these studies deeply puzzling. When I acquire infinite time, I plan to hunker down and try to figure out what is going on.

My initial hypothesis is that downturns do not actually help innovators, but that those entrepreneurs who persist in bringing new goods to market during a downturn either have higher levels of perseverance or else have better new goods.

In other words the puzzling results are due to a selection issue–other things are not equal, and downturns do not encourage innovation.

The WSJ article that summarizes the recent paper is:

Lisa Ward. “When a Recession Helps Product Launch.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., June 17, 2025): B6.

(Note: the online version of the WSJ article has the date June 12, 2025, and has the title “Yes or No: It’s Smart to Launch a New Product in a Recession.”)

The recent academic published paper co-authored by Talay and summarized in The Wall Street Journal article mentioned and cited above is:

Talay, M. Berk, Koen Pauwels, and Steven H. Seggie. “Why and When to Launch New Products During a Recession: An Empirical Investigation of the U.K. FMCG Industry and the U.S. Automobile Industry.” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science 52, no. 2 (March 2024): 576-98.

The two books cited above that support the claim that downturns encourage innovation are:

Anthony, Scott D. The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2009.

Field, Alexander J. A Great Leap Forward: 1930s Depression and U.S. Economic Growth, Yale Series in Economic and Financial History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.

Avoiding a Market Test Reduces Efficiency and Innovation in Higher Education

Deirdre McCloskey argues that to flourish we need market-tested innovation. Ivy League universities are increasingly funded through semi-automatic government funding, avoiding a market test, and allowing the growth of administrative bloat, the monopolization of faculties by the ideological left, and the canceling of any surviving voices that are insufficiently politically correct and woke.

(p. A15) A social-media post last month from the Trump administration triggered fainting spells throughout the academy. The National Institutes of Health, which funds biomedical research, announced that it is reducing the amount of money the government pays grant recipients for overhead costs.

. . .

The labor economist Richard Vedder thinks this is exactly the shock to the system that higher education needs. “Of course the universities with heavy research grants are going crazy over this,” he told me. “But if you talk to anyone at a university, you know that those overhead costs are vastly inflated compared with the true marginal cost, or extra cost, to the university doing the research.” He added that many schools collect so much overhead money that they give some of it back to researchers as an incentive to apply for more research grants. “It’s kind of a con game, all based on false assumptions and faulty economics,” Mr. Vedder says. A nonnegotiable uniform rate would be far more efficient.

In a . . . book, “Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education,” Mr. Vedder argues that one of the biggest problems with higher ed today is that colleges aren’t sufficiently disciplined by market forces. The result is too much administrative bloat subsidized by the government. His subtitle is a reference to the free-market economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), who described capitalism as a process of “creative destruction” whereby markets reallocate resources from unproductive to productive uses. “It’s worked pretty well for American business,” Mr. Vedder said. “Why don’t we have it for higher ed?”

One problem, the book explains, is that universities are essentially wards of the state. “Colleges and universities are dominated by people operating outside of the normal profit-oriented private market economy,” Mr. Vedder writes. By his calculations, the productivity of university employees over the past 50 years has declined not only in comparison with the average U.S. worker but also in absolute terms. It took more faculty and staff to educate a college student in 2021 than it did in 1972.

For the full commentary see:

Jason L. Riley. “How Trump Plans to Shake Up Higher Education.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, March 5, 2025): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 4, 2025, and has the title “Trump Plans to Shake Up Higher Education.”)

The Vedder book discussed by Riley is:

Macedo, Stephen, and Frances Lee. In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025.

McCloskey discusses market-tested innovation in:

McCloskey, Deirdre N. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital, Transformed the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

“Flaws in the Peer Review System”

The flaws in the scientific journal peer review system undermine the argument that the freedom of individual patients should be subordinated to the judgements of “science.” A substantial, and not only recent, literature exposes a variety of flaws of the system. A recent impactful example is the failure of major medical journals to act in a timely manner to retract many Alzheimer’s studies where fraudulent images have been documented.

This impactful example is documented in painful detail in Charles Piller’s Doctored. The impact is that approaches to Alzheimer’s besides the mainstream’s amyloid hypothesis, have been suppressed, which may have slowed alternative effective therapies against the dread disease.

(p. C4) Suspicion of science journals was supercharged during the Covid pandemic, when most of them broadly supported mandates and lockdowns. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, now the head of the National Institutes of Health, was among the most prominent critics of such policies. He gained attention as a co-author of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated letting Covid spread, conferring “herd immunity” on the population, only to see his work shunned by the major science journals.

. . .

The peer review system, in which a paper must go through scrutiny from experts, is intended as a form of quality control. But critics suggest that editors tilt the process toward papers that reflect their own favored results. In a May [2025] interview at the Hoover Institution, Bhattacharya said, “Folks think that if it is published in a top peer-reviewed journal, therefore it must be true, and that’s actually inaccurate.” In reality, he argued, “If I’m lucky the journal editor will send it out to two or three peer review editors, chosen by the editor. If they’re friendly with the editor, they’ll send it to friendly peer reviewers.”

Marty Makary, now the head of the Food and Drug Administration, was another prominent critic of science and medical journals during the pandemic. He said that some journals are captured by industry and others by groupthink. At NEJM and JAMA, “it’s clear that it was a group of like-minded friends, many of whom trained together or worked in the same hospital system,” Makary said. “Why should a small group of people be the gatekeepers of which research is read by most doctors in America?”

A 2023 paper in the journal PNAS on “scientific censorship by scientists” found flaws in the peer review system. A journal editor can quietly kill a submitted paper by sending it to hostile reviewers, who amplify minor methodological issues in order to reject a paper they disapprove of. “Many criteria that influence scientific decision-making, including novelty, interest, ‘fit,’ and even quality, are often ambiguous and subjective, which enables scholars to exaggerate flaws or make unreasonable demands to justify rejection of unpalatable findings,” the PNAS study found.

Often, part of what makes a paper “unpalatable” is its perceived politics. Science journals, like academia in general, have drawn increasing criticism for progressive bias. For example, in 2022 the journal Nature Human Behavior published an editorial stating that “considerations of harm can occasionally supersede the goal of seeking or sharing new knowledge,” including research that “may—inadvertently—stigmatize individuals or human groups” or be “discriminatory, racist, sexist, ableist or homophobic.”

“If anything gets published that doesn’t reflect the expected political view, then there is a public campaign to retract the paper,” said Luana Maroja, a professor of biology at Williams College. “Many times, they are successful.”

“I’ve received an anonymous peer review that said, ‘I’m afraid of what these findings will do for the laudable progressive moral agenda,’” said Cory Clark, a behavioral scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and lead author of the PNAS paper. Many researchers, she found, don’t bother asking questions that might lead to “wrong” answers, and if they do, they often don’t try to publish because they’ll only face resistance and blowback. Clark is now doing a study of journal editors, most of whom, she said, fear getting attacked or ostracized themselves.

. . .

Donald Trump’s campaign for president in 2016 spurred some science journals to make political endorsements for the first time. Nature, a U.K.-based journal, endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. Editorials in the Lancet referred to the first Trump administration as “anti-scientific” and called the 2020 election “a fight for the health of the nation.” In a pre-election editorial in 2020, the NEJM called the Trump administration “dangerously incompetent,” writing: “We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.”

For the full story see:

Pamela Paul. “How Scientific Journals Became MAGA’s Latest Target.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., June 14, 2025): C1 & C4.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 13, 2025, and has the same title as the print version.)

The PNAS article briefly summarized in a passage quoted above is:

Clark, Cory J., Lee Jussim, Komi Frey, Sean T. Stevens, Musa al-Gharbi, Karl Aquino, J. Michael Bailey, Nicole Barbaro, Roy F. Baumeister, April Bleske-Rechek, David Buss, Stephen Ceci, Marco Del Giudice, Peter H. Ditto, Joseph P. Forgas, David C. Geary, Glenn Geher, Sarah Haider, Nathan Honeycutt, Hrishikesh Joshi, Anna I. Krylov, Elizabeth Loftus, Glenn Loury, Louise Lu, Michael Macy, Chris C. Martin, John McWhorter, Geoffrey Miller, Pamela Paresky, Steven Pinker, Wilfred Reilly, Catherine Salmon, Steve Stewart-Williams, Philip E. Tetlock, Wendy M. Williams, Anne E. Wilson, Bo M. Winegard, George Yancey, and William von Hippel. “Prosocial Motives Underlie Scientific Censorship by Scientists: A Perspective and Research Agenda.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 48 (Nov. 20, 2023): e2301642120.

Piller’s Doctored book that I mention in my introductory comments is:

Piller, Charles. Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer’s. New York: Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2025.

F.D.A. to Reduce Phase 3 Drug Trials from Two to One for Approval of Some Drugs

I have read and learned much from books by Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad, who are now high officials in the F.D.A.  I also have suggested that patient freedom and drug innovation would both be served if the F.D.A. cut back regulations to only regulate for drug safety and leave drug efficacy to the judgement of physicians and patients.

Makary and Prasad have now announced that the F.D.A. will only require one clinical trial to satisfy the Phase 3 stage, instead of the currently common two trials. This is a partial, not a full, step toward my suggestion, but it is a step in the right direction. A modest step is better than no step at all.

I also support their announcement of the increased use of A.I. I believe that will increase efficiency, but doubt that it will soon “radically increase efficiency,” as they claim.

(p. A1) The Food and Drug Administration is planning to use artificial intelligence to “radically increase efficiency” in deciding whether to approve new drugs and devices, one of several top priorities laid out in an article published Tuesday [June 10, 2025] in JAMA.

. . .  And officials want to speed up the final stages of making a drug or medical device approval decision to mere weeks, citing the success of Operation Warp Speed during the Covid pandemic when workers raced to curb a spiraling death count.

“The F.D.A. will be focused on delivering faster cures and meaningful treatments for patients, especially those with neglected and rare diseases, healthier food for children and common-sense approaches to rebuild the public trust,” Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner, and Dr. Vinay Prasad, who leads the division that oversees vaccines and gene therapy, wrote in the JAMA article.

. . .

(p. A16) For some cases, the F.D.A. officials proposed speeding major drug approvals by requiring only one major study in patients rather than two, a practice the agency has used in recent years. The pandemic provided a precedent, they said, for accelerating the process.

“We believe this is clear demonstration that rapid or instant reviews are possible,” Drs. Makary and Prasad wrote.

. . .

Last week, the agency introduced Elsa, an artificial intelligence large-language model similar to ChatGPT. The F.D.A. said it could be used to prioritize which food or drug facilities to inspect, to describe side effects in drug safety summaries and to perform other basic product-review tasks. The F.D.A. officials wrote that A.I. held the promise to “radically increase efficiency” in examining as many as 500,000 pages submitted for approval decisions.

For the full story see:

Christina Jewett. “F.D.A. to Seek Faster Process With A.I. Help.” The New York Times (Weds., June 11, 2025): A1 & A16.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 10, 2025, and has the title “F.D.A. to Use A.I. in Drug Approvals to ‘Radically Increase Efficiency’.”)

The JAMA article mentioned above is:

Makary, Martin A., and Vinay Prasad. “Priorities for a New FDA.” JAMA (2025) doi: 10.1001/jama.2025.10116.