artdiamondblog.com – Page 487 – Art Diamond's web log

“We Need to Know What Works”

(p. A12) WASHINGTON–World Bank President Robert Zoellick challenged economists to take on tougher challenges in development economics and to consult a wider range of professionals in developing countries, opening a debate about how effectively economists have attacked problems in global poverty.

“Too often research economists seem not to start with the key knowledge gaps facing development practitioners, but rather search for questions they can answer with the industry’s currently favorite tools,” Mr. Zoellick said at Georgetown University.
. . .
“We need to know what works: we need a research agenda that focuses on results,” he said.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence, who led a commission on economic growth, said Mr. Zoellick’s comments are “generally not only in the right direction, but very useful.” Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, who favors a stronger government hand in development, also praised the World Bank president. “The speech hits all the right notes: the need for economists to demonstrate humility, eschew blueprints…and focus on evaluation but not at the expense of the big questions,” Mr. Rodrik said.

For the full story, see:
BOB DAVIS. “World Bank Chief Ignites a Debate.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., SEPTEMBER 30, 2010): A12.
(Note: first two ellipses added; ellipsis in last quoted paragraph is in original.)

“Pumping Your Own Gas Is Illegal in New Jersey” and Oregon

“Will Corcoran pumps gas at Tim’s Westview in Ridgefield Park. Pumping your own gas has been illegal in New Jersey for 61 years.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) RIDGEFIELD PARK, N.J.–People in New Jersey pick their own strawberries. They chop down their own Christmas trees. They check themselves in at airports and check themselves out at supermarkets. Lately, a few New Jerseyans have been wondering whether it isn’t about time they were allowed to pump their own gas.

Pumping your own gas is illegal in New Jersey. It has been for 61 years. It’s also illegal in Oregon, and in the New York town of Huntington, on Long Island. Just about everywhere else, self-serving Americans do it themselves. As paying at the pump gets easier, the gas station attendant is fast going the way of the elevator operator.
Don’t tell Will Corcoran. When you pull into Tim’s Westview, a Gulf station across from the train tracks in this north Jersey town, you’ll sit in your car while he fills your tank.
Under a cold rain one weekday, he stood at the driver’s window of a Chevy, bent over, yakking. He wore blue. His cap had Gulf Oil’s orange disk on it. After his customer signed the credit slip (Tim’s pumps don’t process cards), Mr. Corcoran, 42 years old, shook hands and saluted like a gas jockey in an old commercial.

For the full story, see:

BARRY NEWMAN. “Self-Service Nation Ends at Garden State Gas Pumps; Changing Law May or May Not Lower Prices; ‘New Jersey Is Heaven!’.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., NOVEMBER 27, 2010): A1 & A14.

“The Most Important Invention of the Industrial Revolution Was Invention Itself”

(p. 103) Alfred North Whitehead famously wrote that the most important invention of the Industrial Revolution was invention itself.

Source:
Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

Rockefeller Is Vilified Despite His Entrepreneurial Genius and His Philanthropic Generosity

Source of book image: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/512M5Z648JL.jpg

(p. C7) . . . as Suzanne Loebl rightly emphasizes in “America’s Medicis,” the Rockefellers’ patronage has been notable not only for its generosity but also for its deliberativeness. By founding such diverse institutions as MoMA, Colonial Williamsburg, the Cloisters, Riverside Church and the Asia Society–as well as by commissioning the distinguished artworks that enliven the office complex at Rockefeller Center–various members of the family have been guided by a perception that a moral responsibility comes with the possession of great wealth.

John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (1839-1937), the founder and chairman of Standard Oil, was routinely vilified in the press as a ruthless monopolist who crushed competition the way a giant might crush a bug. . . . . . . yet he was not the cold-hearted miser that some supposed. A devout Baptist, he donated substantial sums every year to one or more of the congregations he attended, as well as to associated causes, such as the American Baptist Education Society, which founded the University of Chicago with his support in 1890.
. . .
Unfortunately, not everyone behaved well in the face of Rockefeller munificence. The Mexican painter Diego Rivera, commissioned to create a sprawling mural for the lobby of Rockefeller Center, chose to deviate from his preparatory drawings and place an enormous portrait of Lenin at the center of the finished composition. Refusing to amend this egregious provocation, Rivera was paid in full for his work, which was then duly destroyed. A predictable uproar ensued, garnering the artist abundant publicity, which may have been his objective all along.
. . .
Ms. Loebl’s account is well grounded both in the existing literature and in original archival research. She has striven to be comprehensive and done a good job of incorporating lesser-known Rockefeller projects, for example the charming Wendell Gilley Museum of carved birds, in Maine, funded by Nelson’s son Steven. But several worthy undertakings, such as Junior’s restoration of the châteaux of Versailles and Fontainebleau, receive scant attention–as do Laurance Rockefeller’s extensive gifts for the purpose of creating and expanding our national parks.

For the full review, see:
JONATHAN LOPEZ. “BOOKSHELF; The Splendid Spoils of Standard Oil; The Rockefeller family’s vast cultural legacy resulted from a sense of civic duty and a love of beautiful things.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., NOVEMBER 20, 2010): C7.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book being reviewed, is:
Loebl, Suzanne. America’s Medicis: The Rockefellers and Their Astonishing Cultural Legacy. New York: HarperCollins, 2010.

The Psychology of How Power Corrupts

(p. B1) Being in a position of power . . . may make people feel that they can do no wrong. In recent experiments, Dana Carney, a psychologist at Columbia University’s business school, has found that acquiring power makes people more comfortable committing acts they might otherwise be reluctant to commit, like lying or cheating. As people rise to a position of power, she has shown, their bodies generate more testosterone, a hormone associated with aggression and risk-taking, and less cortisol, a chemical that the body generates in response to stress.

“Having power changes you physiologically, reducing your body’s internal feedback that tells you which actions are good or bad,” says Prof. Carney. “Power temporarily intoxicates you.”

For the full commentary, see:
JASON ZWEIG. “THE INTELLIGENT INVESTOR; What Conflict of Interest? How Power Blinds Us to Our Flaws.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., OCTOBER 16, 2010): B1.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Measuring Inflation by Internet Prices

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

(p. A5) Economists Roberto Rigobon and Alberto Cavallo at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management have come up with a method to scour the Internet for online prices on millions of items and then use them to calculate inflation statistics for a dozen countries on a daily basis. The two have been collecting data for the project for more than three years, but only made their results public this week.
. . .
In countries where the apparatus for collecting prices is limited, or where officials have manipulated inflation data, the economists’ indexes might give a clearer view. In Argentina, for example, the government has been widely accused of massaging price figures to let it pay less interest to holders of inflation-indexed bonds. President Cristina Fernández has defended the government data. For September, the government’s measure of prices rose 11.1% from a year earlier. The economists’ measure in that period: up 19.7%.

For the full story, see:
JUSTIN LAHART. “A Way, Day by Day, of Gauging Prices.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., NOVEMBER 11, 2010): A5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated NOVEMBER 10, 2010.)

Science Can Contribute “Diligent Experimental Habits” to Technology

(p. 101) Nothing is more common in the history of science than independent discovery of the same phenomenon, unless it is a fight over priority. To this day, historians debate how much prior awareness of the theory of latent heat was in Watt’s possession, but they miss Black’s real contribution, which anyone can see by examining the columns of neat script that attest to Watt’s careful recording of experimental results. Watt didn’t discover the existence of latent heat from Black, at least not directly; but he rediscovered it entirely through exposure to the diligent experimental habits of professors such as Black, John Robison, and Robert Dick.

Source:
Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.

After Being “Nasty and Unruly for Decades” Henry Becomes a Father at Age 111

“TUATARA. The tuatara, scientists have learned, is in some ways a so-called living fossil.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D1) . . . the animal that may well be New Zealand’s most bizarrely instructive species at first glance looks surprisingly humdrum: the tuatara. A reptile about 16 inches long with bumpy, khaki-colored skin and a lizardly profile, the tuatara could easily be mistaken for an iguana. Appearances in this case are wildly deceptive. The tuatara — whose name comes from the Maori language and means “peaks on the back” — is not an iguana, is not a lizard, is not like any other reptile alive today.

In fact, as a series of recent studies suggest, it is not like any other vertebrate alive today. The tuatara, scientists have learned, is in some ways a so-called living fossil, its basic skeletal layout and skull shape almost identical to that of tuatara fossils dating back hundreds of millions of years, to before the rise of the dinosaurs. Cer-(p. D2)tain tuatara organs and traits also display the hallmarks of being, if not quite primitive, at least closer to evolutionary baseline than comparable structures in other animals.
. . .
Tuataras are living fossils in more than one sense of the term. Through long-term capture, tag and recapture studies that were begun right after World War II, researchers have found that tuataras match and possibly exceed in attainable life span that other Methuselah of the animal kingdom, the giant tortoise. “Tuataras routinely live to 100, and I couldn’t tell you they don’t live to 150, 200 years or even more,” said Dr. Daugherty.
They live, and live it up. “We know there are females that are still reproducing in their 80s,” said Dr. Daugherty. At the Southland Museum and Art Gallery in Invercargill, New Zealand, a captive male tuatara named Henry, a local celebrity that had been nasty and unruly for decades until a malignancy was removed from his genitals, mated with an 80-year-old female named Mildred, and last year became a first-time father — at the age of 111.

For the full story, see:

NATALIE ANGIER. “Basics; Reptile’s Pet-Store Looks Belie Its Triassic Appeal.” The New York Times (Tues., November 23, 2010): D1 & D2.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated November 22, 2010.)

Harvard Economists Find that Spending Cuts Lead to Expansions and Tax Increases Lead to Recessions

(p. A19) Economic history shows that even large adjustments in fiscal policy, if based on well-targeted spending cuts, have often led to expansions, not recessions. Fiscal adjustments based on higher taxes, on the other hand, have generally been recessionary.

My colleague Silvia Ardagna and I recently co-authored a paper examining this pattern, as have many studies over the past 20 years. Our paper looks at the 107 large fiscal adjustments–defined as a cyclically adjusted deficit reduction of at least 1.5% in one year–that took place in 21 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries between 1970 and 2007.
. . .
Our results were striking: Over nearly 40 years, expansionary adjustments were based mostly on spending cuts, while recessionary adjustments were based mostly on tax increases. And these results would have been even stronger had our definition of an expansionary period been more lenient (extending, for example, to the top 50% of the OECD). In addition, adjustments based on spending cuts were accompanied by longer-lasting reductions in ratios of debt to GDP.
. . .
The evidence from the last 40 years suggests that spending increases meant to stimulate the economy and tax increases meant to reduce deficits are unlikely to achieve their goals. The opposite combination might.

For the full commentary, see:
ALBERTO ALESINA. “Tax Cuts vs. ‘Stimulus’: The Evidence Is In; A review of over 200 fiscal adjustments in 21 countries shows that spending discipline and tax cuts are the best ways to spur economic growth.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., November 23, 2010): A19.
(Note: ellipses added.)

A version of the Alesina and Ardagna paper that is downloadable online is:

Alesina, Alberto, and Silvia Ardagna. “Large Changes in Fiscal Policy: Taxes Versus Spending.” 2009.

The published version of the Alesina and Ardagna paper is:
Alesina, Alberto, and Silvia Ardagna. “Large Changes in Fiscal Policy: Taxes Versus Spending.” In Tax Policy and the Economy, edited by Jeffrey R. Brown. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 35-68.

Telomerase Can Reverse Aging Ills in Mice

“Two mice involved in an experiment on age-related degeneration. Mice whose telomerase gene was activated, left, showed notable improvements.” Source of caption: print version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below. Source of photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A3) Scientists have partially reversed age-related degeneration in mice, an achievement that suggests a new approach for tackling similar disorders in people.

By tweaking a gene, the researchers reversed brain disease and restored the sense of smell and fertility in prematurely aged mice. Previous experiments with calorie restriction and other methods have shown that aspects of aging can be slowed. This appears to be the first time that some age-related problems in animals have actually been reversed.
The study was published online Sunday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature.
“These mice were equivalent to 80-year-old humans and were about to pass away,” says Ronald DePinho, co-author of the paper and a scientist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. After the experiment, “they were the physiological equivalent of young adults.”

For the full story, see:
GAUTAM NAIK. “Aging Ills Reversed in Mice; Scientists Tweak a Gene and Rejuvenate Cells, Raising Hopes for Uses in Humans.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., NOVEMBER 29, 2010): A3.
(Note: online version of the article is dated NOVEMBER 28, 2010.)

Source of graphic: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

A Key to Scientific Truth: Nullius in Verba (“On No One’s Word”)

(p. 68) . . . scientific understanding didn’t progress by looking for truth; it did so by looking for mistakes.

This was new. In the cartoon version of the Scientific Revolution, science made its great advances in opposition to a heavy-handed Roman Catholic Church; but an even larger obstacle to progress in the understanding and manipulation of nature was the belief that Aristotle had already figured out all of physics and had observed all that biology had to offer, or that Galen was the last word in medicine. By this standard, the real revolutionary manifesto of the day was written not by Descartes, or Galileo, but by the seventeenth-century Italian poet and physician Francesco Redi, in his Experiments on the Generation of Insects, who wrote (as one of a hundred examples), “Aristotle asserts that cabbages produce caterpillars daily, but I have not been able to witness this remarkable reproduction, though I have seen many eggs laid by butterflies on the cabbage-stalks. . . .” Not for nothing was the motto of the Royal Society nullius in verba: “on no one’s word.”

Source:
Rosen, William. The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention. New York: Random House, 2010.
(Note: first ellipsis added; italics and second ellipsis, in original.)