Government – Page 94 – artdiamondblog.com

Garfield’s Doctors “Basically Tortured Him to Death”

Source of book image: http://rsirving.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/destinyrepublic.jpeg

(p. 15) Had Garfield been left where he lay, he might well have survived; the bullet failed to hit his spine or penetrate any vital organs. Instead, he was given over to the care of doctors, who basically tortured him to death over the next 11 weeks. Two of them repeatedly probed his wound with their unsterilized fingers and instruments before having him carted back to the White House on a hay-and-horsehair mattress.

There, control of the president was seized by a quack with the incredible name of Dr. Doctor Willard Bliss. Dr. Doctor Bliss insisted on stuffing Garfield with heavy meals and alcohol, which brought on protracted waves of vomiting. He and his assistants went on probing the wound several times a day, causing infections that burrowed enormous tunnels of pus throughout the president’s body.
Garfield’s medical “care” is one of the most fascinating, if appalling, parts of Millard’s narrative. Joseph Lister had been demonstrating for years how his theories on the prevention of infection could save lives and limbs, but American doctors largely ignored his advice, not wanting to “go to all the trouble” of washing hands and instruments, Millard writes, enamored of the macho trappings of their profession, the pus and blood and what they referred to fondly as the “good old surgical stink” of the operating room.
Further undermining the president’s recovery was his sickroom in the White House — then a rotting, vermin-ridden structure with broken sewage pipes. Outside, Washington was a pestilential stink hole; besides the first lady, four White House servants and Guiteau himself had contracted malaria. Hoping to save Garfield from the same, Bliss fed him large doses of quinine, causing more intestinal cramping.
The people rallied around their president even as his doctors failed him. The great Western explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell helped design America’s first air-conditioning system to relieve Garfield’s agony. Alexander Graham Bell worked tirelessly to invent a device that could locate the bullet. (It failed when Dr. Bliss insisted he search only the wrong side of Garfield’s torso.) Two thousand people worked overnight to lay 3,200 feet of railroad track, so the president might be taken to a cottage on the Jersey Shore. When the engine couldn’t make the grade, hundreds of men stepped forward to push his train up the final hill.
The president endured everything with amazing fortitude and patience, even remarking near the end, when he learned a fund was being taken up for his family: “How kind and thoughtful! What a generous people!”
“General Garfield died from malpractice,” Guiteau claimed, defending himself at his spectacle of a trial. This was true, but not enough to save Guiteau from the gallows.

For the full review, see:
KEVIN BAKER. “Death of a President.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., October 2, 2011): 14-15.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date September 30, 2011, and has the title “The Doctors Who Killed a President.”)

The full reference for the book under review, is:
Millard, Candice. Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President. New York: Doubleday, 2011.

The Precautionary Principle Would Have Blocked Many Great Innovations

(p. 351) The intense aversion to trading increased risk for some other advantage plays out on a grand scale in the laws and regulations governing risk. This trend is especially strong in Europe where the precautionary principle, which prohibits any action that might cause harm, is a widely accepted doctrine. In the regulatory context, the precautionary principle imposes the entire burden of proving safety on anyone who undertakes actions that might harm people or the environment. Multiple international bodies have specified that the absence of scientific evidence of potential damage is not sufficient justification for taking risks. As the jurist Cass Sunstein points out, the precautionary principle is costly, and when interpreted strictly it can be paralyzing. He mentions an impressive list of innovations that would not have passed the test, including “airplanes, air conditioning, antibiotics, automobiles, chlorine, the measles vaccine, open-heart surgery, radio, refrigeration, smallpox vaccine, and X-rays.” The strong version of the precautionary principle is obviously untenable. But enhanced loss aversion is embedded in a strong and widely shared moral intuition; it originates in System 1. The dilemma between intensely loss-averse moral attitudes and efficient risk management does not have a simple and compelling solution.

Source:
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
(Note: italics in original.)

“Education Bubble”: “A Spurious Inflation of the Credentials Required for Many Jobs”

Source of book image: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-N1hV093ckVc/T8YmCXE2sQI/AAAAAAAAAYc/1B5hWDeXbzQ/s1600/basement.jpg

(p. 17) In June 2008, The Atlantic published an essay by an adjunct instructor of English, identified only as “Professor X,” whose job filled him with despair. Although the courses he taught were introductory, success was beyond many of his students, who, he wrote, were “in some cases barely literate.” X found giving F’s to be excruciating — “I am the man who has to lower the hammer,” he lamented — in part because he identified with his older students, who seemed to have lost their way in their careers much as X himself had.
. . .
. . . X’s function, in the ecology of the colleges where he teaches, is gatekeeper — most students who fail his classes will drop out — and he articulates the ethical challenge before him this way: “What grade does one give a college student who progresses from a 6th- to a 10th-grade level of achievement?” X gives F’s.
. . .
X and his wife got snookered in the housing bubble, and he wonders if the misery in his classroom might result from a similar education bubble. In 1940, there were 1.5 million college students in America; in 2006, there were 20.5 million. In X’s opinion, a glut of degrees has led to a spurious inflation of the credentials required for many jobs. Tuitions are rising, and two-thirds of college graduates now leave school with debt, owing on average about $24,000. A four-year degree is said to increase wages about $450,000 over the course of a lifetime, but X doubts the real value of degrees further down on the hierarchy of prestige. To him, the human cost is more conspicuous.
. . .
Professor X can be caustic about the euphemism and somewhat willed optimism that sometimes befog discussion of how to teach unprepared students. To relieve his and his students’ unhappiness, he proposes that employers stop demanding unnecessary degrees: a laudable suggestion, unlikely to be realized until the degree glut has dried up.

For the full review, see:
CALEB CRAIN. “Lost in the Meritocracy.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., May 1, 2011): 17.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 29, 2011.)

The full reference for the book under review, is:
X, Professor. In the Basement of the Ivory Tower: Confessions of an Accidental Academic. New York: Viking, 2011.

The Mockingjay as Symbol and Reality

A burning Mockingjay symbol appears on this movie poster for “The Hunger Games.” Source of poster: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D4) “They’re funny birds and something of a slap in the face to the Capitol,” Katniss explains in the first book. And the nature of that slap in face is a new twist on the great fear about genetic engineering, that modified organisms or their genes will escape into the wild and wreak havoc. The mockingjay is just such an unintended consequence, resulting from a failed creation of the government, what Katniss means when she refers to “the Capitol.” But rather than being a disaster, the bird is a much-loved reminder of the limits of totalitarian control.
. . .
I asked Joan Slonczewski, a microbiologist and science fiction writer at Kenyon College in Ohio, about her take on the mockingjay. Dr. Slonczewski, whose recent books include a text and a novel, “The Highest Frontier,” teaches a course called “Biology in Science Fiction.” The tools needed to modify organisms are already widely dispersed in industry and beyond. “Now anybody can do a start-up,” she said.
That’s no exaggeration. Do-it-yourself biology is growing. The technology to copy pieces of DNA can be bought on eBay for a few hundred dollars, as Carl Zimmer reported in The New York Times in March. As to where D.I.Y. biology may lead, Freeman Dyson, a thinker at the Institute for Advanced Study known for his provocative ideas, presented one view in 2007 in The New York Review of Books. He envisioned the tools of biotechnology spreading to everyone, including pet breeders and children, and leading to “an explosion of diversity of new living creatures.”
Eventually, he wrote, the mixing of genes by humans will initiate a new stage in evolution. Along the way, if he is right, the world may have more than its share of do-it-yourself mockingjays.

For the full story, see:
JAMES GORMAN. “SIDE EFFECTS; D.I.Y. Biology, on the Wings of the Mockingjay.” The New York Times (Tues., May 15, 2012): D4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date May 10, 2012.)

Ice Melts too Slowly for Obama Backed Arctic Oil Project

Source of map: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B1) Royal Dutch Shell . . . is spending billions of dollars to drill the first oil wells in U.S. Arctic waters in 20 years, backed by an Obama administration eager to show it wasn’t opposed to offshore exploration.

But the closely watched project isn’t going the way the company or the government hoped–illustrating the continuing challenge of plumbing for natural riches in one of the world’s most unforgiving locations.
Sea ice in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off the northern Alaska coast was slow to break up this year, leaving the drilling areas inaccessible much later than anticipated.

For the full story, see:
TOM FOWLER. “Shell Races the Ice in Alaska; Delays Put $4.5 Billion Arctic Drilling Plan in Danger of Missing Window Before Next Freeze.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., August 20, 2012): B1-B2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date August 19, 2012.)

EU Is “Infused with the Spirit of Yesterday’s Future”

“Mrs. Thatcher at a Conservative Party Conference in 1982.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ commentary quoted and cited below.

(p. C2) . . . , it was Mrs. Thatcher . . . , a couple of years after she left office, who identified the problem with European construction. It was, she said, “infused with the spirit of yesterday’s future.” It made the “central intellectual mistake” of assuming that “the model for future government was that of a centralized bureaucracy.” As she concluded, “The day of the artificially constructed megastate is gone.”

For the full commentary, see:
CHARLES MOORE. “What Would The Iron Lady Do? She preached a gospel of self-discipline, free enterprise and national autonomy. As Europe implodes and the West’s economic woes mount, it’s time to re-examine Margaret Thatcher’s ambiguous legacy, writes Charles Moore.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 17, 2011): C1-C2.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Raising Minimum Wage Hurts Working Poor

(p. 592) Using data drawn from the March Current Population Survey, we find that state and federal minimum wage increases between 2003 and 2007 had no effect on state poverty rates. When we then simulate the effects of a proposed federal minimum wage increase from $7.25 to $9.50 per hour, we find that such an increase will be even more poorly targeted to the working poor than was the last federal increase from $5.15 to $7.25 per hour. Assuming no negative employment effects, only 11.3% of workers who will gain live in poor households, compared to 15.8% from the last increase. When we allow for negative employment effects, we find that the working poor face a disproportionate share of the job losses. Our results suggest that raising the federal minimum wage continues to be an inadequate way to help the working poor.

For the full article, from which the above abstract is quoted, see:
Sabia, Joseph J., and Richard V. Burkhauser. “Minimum Wages and Poverty: Will a $9.50 Federal Minimum Wage Really Help the Working Poor?” Southern Economic Journal 76, no. 3 (Jan. 2010): 592-623.

How Politics Trumps Peer Review in Medical Research

Abstract

The U.S. public biomedical research system is renowned for its peer review process that awards federal funds to meritorious research performers. Although congressional appropriators do not earmark federal funds for biomedical research performers, I argue that they support allocations for those research fields that are most likely to benefit performers in their constituencies. Such disguised transfers mitigate the reputational penalties to appropriators of interfering with a merit‐driven system. I use data on all peer‐reviewed grants by the National Institutes of Health during the years 1984-2003 and find that performers in the states of certain House Appropriations Committee members receive 5.9-10.3 percent more research funds than those at unrepresented institutions. The returns to representation are concentrated in state universities and small businesses. Members support funding for the projects of represented performers in fields in which they are relatively weak and counteract the distributive effect of the peer review process.

Source:
Hegde, Deepak. “Political Influence Behind the Veil of Peer Review: An Analysis of Public Biomedical Research Funding in the United States.” Journal of Law and Economics 52, no. 4 (Nov. 2009): 665-90.

Macaulay Argues that a Limited Government that Protects Property Will Promote Economic Growth

Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price, industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by defending property, by diminishing the price of law, and by observing strict economy in every department of the state. Let the Government do this: the People will assuredly do the rest.

Source:
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Lord. “Review of: Robert Southey’s “Sir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society”.” In Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to the Edinburgh Review. London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1830.
(Note: the quote above appeared on the back cover of The Cato Journal 30, no. 1 (Winter 2010); Macaulay’s full review, including the quote, can be viewed online at: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/macS1.html )
(Note: the online version does not give page numbers, but gives what I think are “screen” numbers. The passage quoted is all of “SC.96” which appears at the very end of the essay.)

Mitt Romney on Innovation and Creative Destruction

Source of book image: http://mittromneycentral.com/uploads/No-Apology1.jpg

(p. 108) Innovation and Creative Destruction

The key to increasing national prosperity is to promote good ideas and create the conditions that can lead them to be fully exploited–in existing businesses as well as new ones. Government is generally not the source of new ideas, although innovations from NASA and the military have provided frequent exceptions. Nor is government where innovation is commercially developed. But government policies do, in fact, have a major impact on the implementation of innovative ideas. The degree to which a nation makes itself productive, and thus how prosperous its citizens become, is determined in large measure by whether government adopts policies that stimulate innovation or that stifle it.
The government policy that has the greatest effect on innovation is simply whether or not the government will allow it. It’s sad but true: Government can and often does purposefully prevent innovation and the resulting improvement in productivity. Recall my hypothetical example of a society in which half the farming jobs were lost due to innovation in the use of a plow? Some nations accept and encourage such “creative destruction,” recognizing that in the long run it leads to greater productivity and wealth for its citizens. But other nations succumb to the objections of those in danger of becoming unemployed and prevent innovation that may reduce short-term employment.
Two centuries ago, more than three-quarters of our workforce actually did labor on farms. Over the succeeding decades, innovations like irrigation, fertilizer, and tractors were welcomed, and eventually large farming corporations were allowed to prosper, despite protests from family farmers and the often heart-wrenching dislocations that accompanied consolidation of farmlands. The result was the disappearance of millions of agricultural jobs and the large-scale migration of Americans from rural regions to our cities. Once there, they provided the labor that powered America’s new industrial age. And at the same time, because farming innovation and productivity were allowed to flourish, America became the leader in agriculture education, research, and industry. Innovations from these sources have enabled us to produce sufficient food to feed not only our growing population but other parts of the world as well.

Source:
Romney, Mitt. No Apology: The Case for American Greatness. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010.
(Note: bold in original.)

“People Were Being Infantilized and Made Dependent”

Mayor of London Boris Johnson. Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 16) While I was reading your book “Johnson’s Life of London,” in which you take readers on a tour of the city while discussing some of history’s most famous Londoners, I thought to myself, Being mayor of London can’t be that taxing if you could find time to write such a decent book.
The job of mayor of London is unbelievably taxing, particularly in the run-up to the Olympics. It just happens I write fast and always have done. Some people play the piano, some do Sudoku, some watch television, some people go out to dinner parties. I write books.
. . .
Do you remember the moment you knew that you were a Conservative?
When I was a 22- or 23-year-old reporter in a place called Wolverhampton. I got impatient with some of the stuff I saw going on about damp and mold, about who’s ultimately responsible for improving the ventilation in people’s houses. I felt that people were being infantilized and made dependent by the system and that the local Labour politicians had no interest in sorting it out, were content to harvest these people’s votes without improving their lives.
Wow. You were politically formed by mold.
It was the spores of damp, of mold forming on the walls in Wolverhampton.

For the full interview, see:
ANDREW GOLDMAN, interviewer. “TALK; Boris Johnson, Tory With an Attitude.” The New York Times Magazine (Sun., June 3, 2012): 16.
(Note: ellipsis added; bold in original.)

Johnson’s book is:
Johnson, Boris. Johnson’s Life of London: The People Who Made the City That Made the World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2012.