Category: Government

Gene Therapy Again Showing Promise

(p. B2) Biotechnology startup Spark Therapeutics Inc. said its experimental gene therapy improved vision among patients with hereditary vision impairment in a clinical trial, without the serious safety problems that have dogged the emerging field of gene therapy in the past.
. . .
Spark said it plans to seek U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to market its treatment next year, which could make it the first gene therapy to reach the U.S. market if regulators approve it for sale. . . .
Gene therapy involves the injection of genetic material into a person’s cells to treat or prevent a disease. The research stalled after some study participants died or developed cancer after receiving gene therapies in the late 1990s and 2000s.
But gene therapy is gaining ground again. In 2012, the European Commission approved the Western world’s first gene therapy, UniQure NV’s Glybera, for the treatment of patients with a rare enzyme deficiency. The therapy hasn’t been approved for sale in the U.S.

For the full story, see:
PETER LOFTUS. “Eye Gene Therapy Shows Promise.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Oct. 6, 2015): B2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Oct. 5, 2015, and has the title “Gene Therapy for Visually Impaired Shows Promise.” Where there were minor differences between the print and online versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

“America Represents Wilderness and Freedom, and Also a Big House”

(p. A1) JACKSON HOLE, China — Yearning to breathe untainted air, the band of harried urbanites flocked to this parched, wild land, bringing along their dreams of a free and uncomplicated life.
But unlike the bedraggled pioneers who settled the American West, the first inhabitants of Jackson Hole, a resort community on the outskirts of the Chinese capital, arrived by Audi and Land Rover, their trunks filled with French wine and their bank accounts flush with cash.
Over the past decade, more than a thousand families have settled into timber-frame houses with generous backyards, on streets with names like Aspen, Moose and Route 66. On Sundays, some worship at a clapboard church that anchors the genteel town square, outfitted with bronze cowboys and a giant Victrola that sprays water.
“America represents wilderness and freedom, and also a big house,” said Qin You, 42, who works in private equity and owns a six-bedroom home that features a koi pond, a year-round (p. A8) Christmas tree and what he proudly described as “American-style” electric baseboard heating. His parents live in the house and he goes there on weekends. “The United States is cool,” he says.
. . .
. . . , Communist Party edicts and conservative commentators have sought to demonize so-called Western values like human rights and democracy as existential threats. Even if the menace is seldom identified by name, the purveyor of such threats is widely understood to be the United States.
. . .
Gao Zi, 60, a retired military employee who organizes an oil painting club for Jackson Hole residents, said that “we accepted the propaganda” back in the 1950s, when China was a closed society. “But now people have the opportunity to travel abroad and see the truth for ourselves.”
Like Ms. Gao, Mr. Qin, the investment executive, has never been to the United States but he has long admired American ideals like personal liberty and blind justice. Five years ago, after his wife gave birth to their second child, Mr. Qin says the government fined him nearly $30,000 for violating the country’s population-control policies. “This is not freedom,” he said, before continuing a tour of his expansive back patio.

For the full story, see:
ANDREW JACOBS. “JACKSON HOLE JOURNAL; Living a Frontier Dream on Beijing’s Outskirts.” The New York Times (Fri., DEC. 11, 2015): A1 & A8.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 8, 2015, and has the title “JACKSON HOLE JOURNAL; Living a Frontier Dream on the Outskirts of China’s Capital.”)

Some Heroes Are Punished for Doing What Is Right

At some point in the last few months watched, and jotted a few notes, on a C-SPAN presentation by Ralph Peters related to his historical novel Valley of the Shadow, that I caught part of. C-SPAN lists the show as first airing on June 23, 2015. My attention was drawn when Peters started talking about Lew Wallace. I had a minor curiosity about Lew Wallace for two obscure reasons. The first is that in young adulthood my favorite actor was Charlton Heston, one of whose most notable movies was Ben Hur, which was based on a novel by Lew Wallace. The other was that as an adult Lew Wallace lived in Crawfordsville, Indiana where there is still a small museum in his old study, a museum that holds memorabilia related to the Heston Ben Hur movie. The reason I know about the museum is that I graduated from Wabash College, which is also located in Crawfordsville, Indiana.
Peters said that he was fascinated by forgotten figures and that one of these was Lew Wallace. According to Peters, Lew Wallace saved the union during the Civil War. A confederate general named Jubal Early would have seized Washington, D.C., if Wallace and an officer named Jim Ricketts had not taken the initiative to lead a force to stop Early. For doing what had to be done, Wallace risked court martial, and Wallace was indeed fired from the army. After Ricketts gave a full account of what had happened, Wallace was re-instated, but Lincoln did not approve of his receiving a new command. Peters said that this was because Wallace was unpopular with some powerful Indiana Republicans, and that Lincoln was facing an election in which he needed to win Indiana.
The above is a rough summary of Peters’s account. I don’t know if any of it is disputed by other experts. But it is a good story, and I hope that it is true.

The Peters historical novel discussed on C-SPAN, was:
Peters, Ralph. Valley of the Shadow: A Novel. New York: Forge Books, 2015.

Recording a Pain of “5” and Then Leaving Without Relieving

If health care was provided by free market companies whose success depended on voluntarily attracting customers, instead of by bureaucratic, hyper-regulated, CYA incentivized, and competition-insulated bureaucracies, would the surreal experience reported below be as common as it is?

(p. 11) A FRIEND was recently hospitalized after a bicycle accident. At one point a nursing student, together with a more senior nurse, rolled a computer on wheels into the room and asked my friend to rate her pain on a scale of 1 to 10.

She mumbled, “4 to 5.” The student put 5 into the computer — and then they left, without further inquiring about, or relieving, my friend’s pain.
This is not an anecdote about nurses not doing their jobs; it’s an illustration of what our jobs have become in the age of electronic health records. Computer documentation in health care is notoriously inefficient and unwieldy, but an even more serious problem is that it has morphed into more than an account of our work; it has replaced the work itself.
Our charting, rather than our care, is increasingly what we are evaluated on. When my hospital switched to bar code scanning for medication administration, not only were the nurses on my floor rated as “red,” “yellow” or “green” based on the percentage of meds we scanned, but those ratings were prominently and openly displayed on printouts left at the nurses’ station.
. . .
We need to streamline our records so that they serve just one master: the patient. We should focus on the most important information in guaranteeing accuracy of diagnosis, efficacy of treatment, continuity of care and patient safety. Otherwise the content of our care will be increasingly warped by the demands of our e-record systems — and patients like my poor friend will lie in hospital beds in pain, uncomforted by the knowledge that the electronic record of that pain is satisfyingly and exactingly complete.

For the full commentary, see:
THERESA BROWN. “Patients vs. Paperwork.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., DEC. 20, 2015): 11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date DEC. 19, 2015, and has the title “When Hospital Paperwork Crowds Out Hospital Care.”)

Anti-GMO Chipotle No Longer Wears Health Halo

(p. A13) . . . if you need an anecdote for how the year unfolded for the anti-GMO movement, look no further than Chipotle. Last spring the fast food company announced with great fanfare that it would take GMO ingredients off its menu. It was all downhill after that. As was quickly pointed out, Chipotle wasn’t being fully truthful, since its soft drinks and cheese contain genetically modified ingredients, and its meat comes from animals fed genetically modified grains. A lawsuit filed in California, which is pending, accused Chipotle of false advertising and deceptive marketing.
Then cases of food-borne illnesses hit Chipotle locations across the country. Supporters of traditional agriculture, who have felt maligned by the burrito company, started keeping a tally of the number of people sickened by Chipotle’s food (ongoing, but more than 300) versus the number sickened by GMOs (zero). As the year winds to a close, the company that once wore the restaurant industry’s health halo is apologizing, preparing for lawsuits, recentralizing its vegetable preparation and cutting locally sourced ingredients.

For the full commentary, see:
JULIE KELLY. “The March of Genetic Food Progress; ‘Farmaceuticals’ and other GM products are slowly being approved, despite political scare campaigns.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Dec. 30, 2015): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 29, 2015.)

In Poor Province, Chinese Communists Spend Over $400,000 Building Giant Golden Statue of Mao, Starver of Millions of the Proletariat

(p. B1) ZHUSHIGANG, China — Just two days after images of a giant gold-colored statue of Mao in the bare fields of Henan Province spread across the Internet, the statue was gone — torn down apparently on the orders of embarrassed local officials.
Villagers said demolition teams arrived on Thursday morning [January 7, 2016], and by Friday morning [January 8, 2016], only a pile of rubble remained.
The 120-foot-tall statue, which local media reports said cost $465,000, had been under construction for months and was nearing completion when it began to attract attention.
Some commenters on social media denounced the extravagance of the colossus in a poor, rural part of China, where the money might have been better spent on education or health care.
. . .
Others pointed out the historical irony of erecting the statue in one of the provinces worst hit by the famine caused by Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward.
. . .
Statues of Mao, the founder of the People’s Republic of China, were once ubiquitous in China, and many survive. President Xi Jinping has often praised Mao as a model for China today, saying Mao’s era was one when officials were selfless and honest.
But some of his policies were disastrous, including the forced agricultural collectivization and industrialization of the Great Leap Forward, which historians blame for a famine in which tens of millions of people died.

For the full story, see:
DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW. “An Outcry Helps Topple a Mao Statue 120 Feet Tall.” The New York Times (Sat., JAN. 9, 2016): A4.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed dates, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 8, 2016, and has the title “Golden Mao Statue in China, Nearly Finished, Is Brought Down by Criticism.”)

Madison Revised Notes to Aid Jefferson’s Attack on Hamilton

C-SPAN Book TV today played an extended interview with Mary Sarah Bilder about her book on James Madison’s notes on the constitutional convention. Madison revised his notes to share with Jefferson, who had not been present during the convention. Chernow, in his biography of Hamilton, reports how Jefferson criticized Hamilton for aristocratic tendencies. What is most surprising about Bilder’s comments is that Madison had made comments at the convention similar to Hamilton’s discussing whether there might be merits to monarchy. But in his revision of the notes, he deleted those comments before passing the notes to Jefferson, presumably as part of his desire to ally himself more closely with Jefferson and to join in Jefferson’s vilification of Hamilton.
This is not an earth-shattering finding, but it adds support to Chernow’s defense of Hamilton. Jefferson was the slave-holding aristocrat in practice, while Hamilton opposed slavery, and Hamilton’s intellectual speculations on the best form of government were not notably monarchist within the context of the time.

The book discussed on C-SPAN, was:
Bilder, Mary Sarah. Madison’s Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

The Chernow book I mention above, is:
Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.

North Dakota Plans a Drone Silicon Valley

For many years state governments and universities have been trying to plan the creation of new Silicon Valleys in their own backyards. Success has been elusive. Now North Dakota is tying to create a drone Silicon Valley. My take: Silicon Valleys cannot be planned, though they can be encouraged by low taxes and limited regulations.

(p. A1) FARGO, N.D. — “California and New York want what we’ve got,” said Shawn Muehler, a 30-year-old Fargo resident, gazing at a horizon of empty fields, silos, windbreak trees and hardly any people. A winged craft traces the air, mapping a field with pinpoint accuracy for his start-up, a drone software company called Botlink. “They like drones, but they’ve got a steep learning curve ahead.”

For years, entrepreneurs have come here to farm and to drill for oil and natural gas. Now a new, tech-savvy generation is grabbing a piece of the growing market for drone technology and officials want to help them do it here, where there is plenty of open space and — unlike in other sparsely populated states — lots of expertise already in place.
Silicon Valley has the big money and know-how, Mr. Muehler and others say, but North Dakota can take unmanned aerial vehicles, as the officials prefer to call drones, from a fast-growing hobby to an industry. And just as Silicon Valley got its start with military contracts, entrepreneurs and cooperative universities, they believe they can do the same with drones.
“The potential up here is tremendous,” said Jack Dalrymple, the state’s governor. “It’s not about supporting a company or two; it’s creating the leading edge of an industry.”
North Dakota has spent about (p. B7) $34 million fostering the state’s unmanned aerial vehicle business, most notably with a civilian industrial park for drones near Grand Forks Air Force Base. The base, a former Cold War installation, now flies nothing but robot aircraft for the United States military and Customs and Border Protection.

For the full story, see:
QUENTIN HARDY. “A Silicon Valley for Drone Craft in Great Plains.” The New York Times (Sat., DEC. 26, 2015): A1 & B7.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 25, 2015, and has the title “A Silicon Valley for Drones, in North Dakota.”)

Entrepreneurs Who Pay Taxes “Expect Services–Like Justice”

(p. B3) ATHENS — Demetri Politopoulos, the founder of a midsize beer producer in northern Greece, says he nearly fainted when he heard the news late one night in October.
The Greek Parliament was planning to pass a law that would increase the tax he paid for each hectoliter of beer he sold by 50 percent.
Just like that, the microbrewery he started 17 years ago would go under, as his new tax bill of 1.6 million euros would wipe out his expected 1.45 million euros in profit for the year.
. . .
He started his business in 1998, but even as demand for his Vergina beer grew, his share of the market stayed in the low single-digits as the market leader did all in its power to prevent shops and restaurants from selling his product.
. . .
In 2005, Mr. Politopoulos took his case to the Hellenic Republic Competition Commission, citing numerous examples of what he said were unfair business practices by Heineken, from persuading retailers to not stock Vergina to more serious examples of bullying and intimidation.
But as is often the case in Greece, his petition went nowhere.
With Greece under unremitting pressure to find new revenue sources, the idea to close the gap between the way small and large brewers are taxed may have seemed a good idea.
That is, until Mr. Politopoulos took the floor in Parliament on Nov. 2.
“We are proud to pay taxes in Greece, but this is going to put us out of business,” he said. “And when we do pay our taxes, we expect services — like justice. Without justice in a society, there is nothing.”
His 10-minute declamation hit a cord. A video of the speech went viral and parliamentary members rallied to his cause.
Indeed, concerns are growing here that in a rush to raise much-needed revenue, Greece and its creditors are placing an unfair burden on an already decimated private sector.

For the full story, see:
LANDON THOMAS Jr. “A Greek Dvid Lands Some Big Punches.” The New York Times (Sat., DEC. 12, 2015): B3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 11, 2015, and has the title “In Greece, Brewer’s Woes Reflect Struggle of Business Owners.”)

The Filth, Slaughter and Disease, That Was Rome

McCloskey’s “Great Fact” says that life was very bad for tens of thousands of years until the capitalist industrial revolution started to make it better. The tens of thousands of years can be thought of as a horizontal hockey stick handle, with the capitalist industrial revolution represented by a sharply ascending blade. Rome was a bump on the hockey stick handle, but as the last paragraph quoted below suggests, not too much of a bump.

(p. C4) . . . Ms. Beard is competent and charming company. In “SPQR” she pulls off the difficult feat of deliberating at length on the largest intellectual and moral issues her subject presents (liberty, beauty, citizenship, power) while maintaining an intimate tone.

“In some ways, to explore ancient Rome from the 21st century is rather like walking on a tightrope, a very careful balancing act,” she writes. “If you look down on one side, everything seems reassuringly familiar: there are conversations going on that we almost join, about the nature of freedom or the problems of sex; there are buildings and monuments we recognize and family life lived out in ways we understand, with all their troublesome adolescents; and there are jokes that we ‘get.'”
“On the other side, it seems completely alien territory. That means not just the slavery, the filth (there was hardly any such thing as refuse collection in ancient Rome), the human slaughter in the arena and the death from illnesses whose cure we now take for granted; but also the newborn babies thrown away on rubbish heaps, the child brides and the flamboyant eunuch priests.”

For the full review, see:
DWIGHT GARNER. “Early Rome: Its Warts and Wonders.” The New York Times (Weds., Nov. 18, 2015): C1 & C4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 17, 2015, and has the title “Review: In ‘SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome,’ Mary Beard Tackles Myths and More.”)

The book under review, is:
Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2015.

On the hockey stick, see:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. “McCloskey’s Great Fact; Review of: McCloskey, Deirdre N. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World.” Journal of Entrepreneurship and Public Policy 1, no. 2 (2012): 200-05.

Behavioral Economists Ignore Biases and Irrationalities of Governments

(p. A4) . . . it is quite a leap between acknowledging markets sometimes fail and arguing they are inherently flawed. Policy makers who work from the second assumption risk overreaching, by seeing market failure where there is none and ignoring their own behavioral biases, in either case leaving people worse off, not better. Public trust in free markets hasn’t wavered notably in the U.S. or Britain from precrisis levels and even in the pope’s native Argentina, attitudes aren’t much more negative than in 2009.
. . .
. . . , consumers don’t seem irrational when they evaluate fuel economy; one study found changes in gasoline prices are closely reflected in the relative prices of less fuel-efficient used cars.
Besides, as Mr. Viscusi and Mr. Gayer note, the government has behavioral biases of its own. Courts and regulators assign more value to the potential harm of a new drug than its potential benefits. Politicians take actions out of proportion to the risks, for example by closing schools during the Ebola scare or imposing onerous airline-security checks to prevent terrorist hijackings.

For the full commentary, see:
GREG IP. “Market Critics Shouldn’t Overreach.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Sept. 24, 2015): A2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Sept. 23, 2015, and has the title “Critics of Free Market Shouldn’t Overreach.” Where there are minor differences between the print and online versions of the article, the sentences quoted above follow the online version.)

The Vicusi and Gayer paper mentioned above, is:
Viscusi, W. Kip, and Ted Gayer. “Behavioral Public Choice: The Behavioral Paradox of Government Policy.” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 38, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 973-1007.