Quick hits (part I)
January 14, 2023 4 Comments
1) Some good background on the gas stove issue:
On Wednesday, the commission’s chair said it would not ban gas stoves, but was researching health risks of gas stoves and possible increases to safety standards.“I am not looking to ban gas stoves and the CPSC has no proceeding to do so,” said Alexander Hoehn-Saric, the chair of the commission, in a statement.
Some cities — including Los Angeles, Seattle and New York — have already moved to ban gas stoves in certain new homes and apartments. Kathy Hochul (D), the governor of New York, has also proposed banning gas hookups, including for gas stoves, in new buildings in the entire state.
All cooking creates some form of air pollution. But gas stoves are burning natural gas, a mix of methane and other chemicals. That means that when a gas stove is on, it releases not only fine pieces of particulate matter that can invade the lungs, but also nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and formaldehyde — all of which have been linked to various health risks.
Scientists have identified nitrogen dioxide, for example, as contributing to childhood onset of asthma and worsening asthma symptoms. According to one study, children living in a household with gas stoves have a 42 percent increased likelihood of already having asthma and a 24 percent increased risk of developing asthma at some point in their lifetime. Last week, scientists from the clean energy think tank RMI estimated in a peer-reviewed study that 12.7 percent of childhood asthmas could be attributed to living in a household with a gas stove. Some scientists have compared the risks of gas stove use to having a smoker in the home.The Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t have the power to regulate indoor air quality, and homes with gas stoves can often have nitrogen dioxide levels far in excess of EPA outdoor guidelines. The European Union, meanwhile, is currently urging lawmakers to establish indoor air quality regulations across the bloc.
Forgot all the stupid culture war politics over this, but one thing I damn sure learned during the pandemic is that we should be taking indoor air quality way more seriously in this country.
2) Any Lowrey on encouraging trends in the economy:
Inequality is easing
A decade ago, President Barack Obama called economic inequality “the defining challenge of our time,” arguing that “the next few years will determine whether or not our children will grow up in an America where opportunity is real.” At the time, data showed the middle class shrinking, average wages stagnating, and the wealthy eating up all the gains from economic growth. Rising inequality was paralyzing Washington and fraying the country’s politics. Yet around the time of Obama’s speech, inequality stopped rising. In the past three years, the country has become more equal, at least by some measures…
We bent the cost curve in health care
Fourteen years ago, analysts at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services thought that health spending would be roughly 22 percent of GDP in 2022. The real share was 18.3 percent. Government actuaries spent years overestimating the number of dollars Americans would spend in hospitals and doctor’s offices—a decade-plus ago, they thought we would be spending about $700 billion more on an annual basis than we are today—and the share of the economy devoted to health care. That is because the “cost curve” bent…
But for the past 15 years, health-care spending growth has been subdued, leaving aside the catastrophic early years of the pandemic. As a result, CMS anticipates that health spending as a share of GDP should be stable over the next decade at roughly 20 percent. And the CBO sees Medicare spending rising from 5.8 percent of GDP to just 6.8 percent of GDP 10 years from now—a reasonable amount, given the rising share of older Americans…
We bounced back after the COVID recession
It took 76 months for the economy to recover every single job it shed in the Great Recession. It took 30 months for it to recover every job it lost during the pandemic. And in this most recent recession, the labor market gained back the majority of jobs it lost in less than a year—far faster than after the housing crash.
3) Birthdays and hockey was such a fascinating part of “Outliers.” Good stuff in the Athletic, “Why a player’s birthday can matter so much for college, NBA success”
This means that if you were a five-star who turned 19 before Jan. 1 of your freshman year, you had a 56.6 percent chance of making the NBA, and if you were a five-star who turned 19 after Jan. 1, you had a 76 percent chance of making it…
The lesson to be learned from this is age should definitely matter in evaluation. NBA teams in the modern era place a lot of value in age and upside, although sometimes, the Eastern Conference assistant GM says, years in college instead of actual age is weighted too much…
“A 21-year-old senior gets perceived as being older than he really is, because a lot of seniors are 23,” he says. “But when there’s a 21-year-old senior like Desmond Bane (June 25 birthday), with some people, there’s a bias because he’s a senior, like, ‘Oh, he’s old. He’s fully developed.’ But 21 is pretty young.”
Across the board, talent evaluators would benefit from paying closer attention to age. At the high school level, they do a pretty good job of identifying the phenoms early. You’ll notice above there are more five-star All-Stars than those who weren’t five-stars, and the other pool is a larger group of players. But a look at the five-stars in the last three high school classes who were draft eligible (2019-2021) shows the age bias still exists.
4) I like this, “Life Is an Accident of Space and Time: Even if life existed on every planet that could support it, living matter in the universe would amount to only a few grains of sand in the Gobi Desert.”
Considering the billions of planets in our galaxy, and the billions of galaxies in the observable universe, few scientists believe that our planet is the only habitat with life. Nonetheless, finding definite evidence of living things elsewhere in the cosmos would have deep emotional and psychological import, as well as philosophical and theological meaning. Such a finding would force us humans to reconsider some of our fundamental beliefs: How do we define “life”? What are the possible varieties of life? Where did we living things come from? Is there some kind of cosmic community?
In fact, recent scientific research suggests that life in the universe is rare. A few years ago, using results from the Kepler satellite to estimate the fraction of stars with possibly habitable planets, I calculated that, even if all potentially habitable planets do in fact harbor life, the fraction of matter in the universe in living form is exceedingly small: about one-billionth of one-billionth. That’s like a few grains of sand on the Gobi Desert. Evidently, we living things are a very special arrangement of atoms and molecules.
Life may be even rarer than that. In the mid-1970s, the Australian physicist Brandon Carter pointed out that our universe seems particularly fine-tuned for the emergence of life. For example, if the nuclear force holding the centers of atoms together were a little weaker, then the complex atoms needed for life could never form. If it were a little stronger, all of the hydrogen in the infant universe would have fused to become helium. Without hydrogen, water (H2O) would not exist, and most biologists believe that water is necessary for life. As another example of fine-tuning: If the observed “dark energy” that fills the cosmos, discovered in 1998, were a little larger than it actually is, the universe would have expanded so rapidly that matter could never have pulled itself together to make stars, the essential nursery for all the complex atoms thought necessary for life. But with a slightly smaller value of dark energy, the universe would have expanded and recollapsed so quickly that stars wouldn’t have had time to form.
Carter’s observation that our universe is finely tuned for the emergence of life has been called the anthropic principle. A profound question raised by the principle is: Why? Why should the universe care whether it contains animate matter? The theological answer to this question is a cosmic form of intelligent design: Our universe was created by an all-powerful and purposeful being, who wanted it to have life. Another explanation, more scientific, is that our universe is but one of a huge number of universes, called the multiverse, which have a wide range of values for the strength of the nuclear force, the amount of dark energy, and many other fundamental parameters. In most of those universes, these values would not lie within the narrow range permitting life to emerge. We live in one of the life-friendly universes because otherwise we wouldn’t be here to ask the question. Our existence, and our universe itself, is simply an accident, one throw of the cosmic dice.
A similar line of thinking could explain why planet Earth has such favorable conditions for life: liquid water, moderate temperatures (at the moment), plentiful oxygen for higher-level metabolism. The obvious explanation is that there are many planets, even in our own solar system, that do not have liquid water or pleasant temperatures or oxygen atmospheres. Those planets do not harbor life. We are here, to build houses and write novels and ask questions about our own existence, because we live on one of the small fraction of planets that have the right conditions for life. In sum, animate matter is not only rare in our particular universe, but seems to be nonexistent in most possible universes.
5) Good stuff from Cathy Young, “Perils to Free Speech from Woke and Anti-Woke”
One should not, of course, generalize from the Hamline University fiasco. Many professors continue to show Muhammad images in class without incident. Omid Safi, a professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, told the New York Times that “he regularly shows images of the Prophet Muhammad in class and without Dr. López Prater’s opt-out mechanisms” and that part of his goal is to make students grapple with how images once considered pious can be later redefined as blasphemous and forbidden. But a chilling effect, at least for untenured faculty and especially adjuncts, is quite likely.
There is also the larger chilling effect of a large percentage of American educators—and students—embracing the “social justice” dogma which holds that disagreement equals harm or even violence, at least when it comes to claims of trauma, discrimination, or bigotry made by members of presumptively oppressed groups. Pressures to censor or abridge “harmful” speech are unlikely to remain confined to college campuses. In a 2019 Knight Foundation survey of college students, over 40 percent said that “hate speech” (which, as the Hamline University incident shows, can be very broadly defined) should not be protected by the First Amendment. At the Hamline forum, CAIR’s Hussein said that “if somebody wants to teach some controversial stuff about Islam, go teach it at the local library.” But if “controversial stuff about Islam”—in this case, a view endorsed by many Muslims themselves—is off-limits at a college that strives to be inclusive, it’s hard to see how a public library that wants all community members to feel welcome would avoid the same pressures. And what happens if and when students trained to believe that assertions based on “trauma” and “lived experience” are off-limits to debate graduate and go on to take jobs in the media, in government, or in other spheres that involve public discourse?
It goes without saying that the fixation on “harm” from contentious speech does no favors to people or communities affected by discrimination and prejudice (as many American Muslims certainly have been). Social justice dogma can stifle discussion and promote groupthink in those communities themselves, designating people with the approved viewpoint as their only legitimate representatives. Amna Khaled, an associate professor of history at Minnesota’s Carleton College, makes this point in a Chronicle of Higher Education piece, writing that she is offended by the Hamline administrators’ stance as a Muslim:
In choosing to label this image of Muhammad as Islamophobic, in endorsing the view that figurative representations of the Prophet are prohibited in Islam, Hamline has privileged a most extreme and conservative Muslim point of view.
Ironically, in the social justice framework, this extreme conservatism passes for a progressive defense of a marginalized group.
However limited in scope, the Hamline University incident does confirm that a problem with speech- and idea-policing on the left exists—whether you want to call it “cancel culture,” “political correctness,” “wokeness,” or any of the other buzzwords applied to this phenomenon. And while there is a large segment of progressive opinion in which all talk of a left-wing “cancel culture” is met with derision and spin, it is also true that, as Bulwark editor Jonathan V. Last pointed out yesterday, the very existence of a New York Times story clearly critical of the school’s actions shows the left policing its own. It’s also worth noting that PEN America, a liberal organization, has condemned the school’s handling of the controversy and defended academic freedom in the strongest terms.
Last is also correct to note that the Times’s effort to “police their own side” stands in contrast to how the mainstream conservative media respond to “cancel culture” on the right—that is, to right-wing moves to police speech and ideas. That such moves are happening is not in question.
Take a recent story by progressive blogger Judd Legum about an Escambia County, Florida schoolteacher named Vicki Baggett who is using the so-called “Stop WOKE Act,” signed into law by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis last April, to go after school library books. Baggett’s latest target: When Wilma Rudolph Played Basketball, a kids’ book about the childhood of sprinter Wilma Rudolph, who won three Olympic gold medals in 1960. Rudolph grew up in segregated Tennessee in the 1940s and had to deal with poverty and racism while growing up. At one point, the book has Rudolph, whose mother worked as a maid for a white family, reflecting that it isn’t right that “white folks got all the luxury, and we black folks got the dirty work.”
Baggett says that the book “trashes and puts down those who are not black” and that white students in particular are “white-shamed” by it. Look who’s being a snowflake now.
6) I’m not much of a horror fan guy, but I really, really like Barbarian (on HBO Max).
7) This is good, “The House spectacle highlights a key difference between the parties”
As political scientists Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins wrote in their 2016 book, “Asymmetric Politics”: “While the Democratic Party is fundamentally a group coalition, the Republican Party can be most accurately characterized as the vehicle of an ideological movement.” Group coalitions can be managed through transactional politics — so long as some of the groups’ priorities are advanced, they will stick together to deliver for the other groups in the coalition.
Ideological movements are less flexible. There’s pressure for alignment among members — and even when members are mostly aligned, remaining differences may seem all the more significant. (McCarthy’s move rightward hasn’t done much to shore up his position with his opponents.)
Since “Asymmetric Politics” was published, Democrats have grown increasingly ideological, and the ideological emphases of the GOP have changed. Yet it’s still the case that “the Democratic Party — in the electorate, as an organizational network, and in government — is organized around group interests.” The party’s “self-conscious” constituent groups include, for example, indebted college graduates, intellectuals and the expert class, government-employee unions, and the organized civil-rights apparatus (which itself includes many independent interests).
Democrats tend to argue for specific policies, Grossmann and Hopkins observed, on the grounds that they will help a specific group they see as part of their coalition — women, unions, universities. Republicans, meanwhile, are more likely to appeal to “general concepts and principles … frequently emphasizing the need to limit the scope of government or preserve traditional American society.” A coalition that makes ideology its lodestar is stronger in some respects — but as the House GOP fractiousness has shown, weaker in others.
Business might have once been a group interest within the GOP. Corporations are amenable to transactional politics and have historically expected benefits under Republican governance. But in the Trump years, big business and the Republican Party drifted apart, both because of corporate discomfort with populism and the GOP’s discomfort with business’s growing social liberalism. The gap widened after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot. The Republican-business rift has left the House GOP even less constrained by interest groups’ needs, and more driven by ideological goals.
8) I actually enjoyed this Washington Post profile of Yglesias, but, it was quite too ready to embrace the leftist critiques of Yglesias which pretty much ignore the fact that virtually all his policy preferences are solidly left of center.
9) I was surprised to learn this about the vaccines in Katelyn Jetelina’s latest (and always excellent) newsletter:
Moderna is doing better
New info: Another study confirmed that Moderna induced a better first defense (protection against infection). In addition (and for the first time) we see that it alsogenerated a larger T-cell response (i.e. secondary defense) than Pfizer. This likely impacts downstream outcomes, like duration and strength of protection against severe disease.
Why does this matter? Given this study and previous ones, there should be a preferential recommendation for those over age 50 to get Moderna over Pfizer. This is particularly important for older adults, as they have weaker immune systems.
Lots of other good stuff in there, too.
10) Good stuff on over-hyping new variants by doling out names like Kraken:
The WHO isn’t alone in objecting. For Stephen Goldstein, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Utah, the new names are not just unnecessary but potentially harmful. “It’s absolutely crazy that we’re having random people on Twitter name variants,” he told me. For Goldstein, dressing up each new subvariant with an ominous monster name overplays the differences between the mutations and feeds into the panic that comes every time the coronavirus shifts form. In this view, distinguishing one Omicron sublineage from another is less like distinguishing a wolf from a cow and more like distinguishing a white-footed mouse from a deer mouse: important to a rodentologist but not really to anyone else. To go as far as naming lineages after terrifying mythical beasts, he said, “seems obviously intended to scare the shit out of people … It’s hard to understand what broader goal there is here other than this very self-serving clout chasing.”
11) Derek Thompson with a nice summary of recent research on whether science is becoming less disruptive:
We should be living in a golden age of creativity in science and technology. We know more about the universe and ourselves than we did in any other period in history, and with easy access to superior research tools, our pace of discovery should be accelerating. But, as I wrote in the first edition of this newsletter, America is running out of new ideas.
“Everywhere we look we find that ideas … are getting harder to find,” a group of researchers from Stanford University and MIT famously concluded in a 2020 paper. Another paper found that “scientific knowledge has been in clear secular decline since the early 1970s,” and yet another concluded that “new ideas no longer fuel economic growth the way they once did.”
In the past year, I’ve traced the decline of scientific breakthroughs and entrepreneurship, warned that some markets can strangle novelty, and investigated the domination of old movies and songs in the film and music industries. This year, a new study titled “Papers and Patents Are Becoming Less Disruptive Over Time” inches us closer to an explanation for why the pace of knowledge has declined. The upshot is that any given paper today is much less likely to become influential than a paper in the same field from several decades ago. “Our study is the first to show that progress is slowing down, not just in one or two places, but across many domains of science and technology,” Michael Park, a co-author and professor at the University of Minnesota, told me.
The researchers relied on a metric called the Consolidation-Disruption Index—or CD Index—which measures the influence of new research. For example, if I write a crummy literature review and no scientist ever mentions my work because it’s so basic, my CD Index will be extremely low. If I publish a paradigm-shifting study and future scientists exclusively cite my work over the research I rendered irrelevant, my CD Index will be very high.
This new paper found that the CD Index of just about every academic domain today is in full-on mayday! mayday! descent. Across broad landscapes of science and technology, the past is eating the present, progress is plunging, and truly disruptive work is hard to come by. Despite an enormous increase in scientists and papers since the middle of the 20th century, the number of highly disruptive studies each year hasn’t increased.
Lots of interesting theories discussed. From my perch in social science, it’s pretty clear that there’s way too many simply mediocre papers published (guilty!) because that’s what most of us are rewarded for.
12) Good stuff from Gallup on the latest in party and ideological identification. Their charts are hard to cut and paste, so go check it out. Of note, among Democrats, whites and college grads are way more liberal.
13) I loved learning that NC State is now working on “microbiome engineering.” So much potential here.
14) America’s obsession with guns just completely sucks, part one million (via Kaiser )
Firearms recently became the number one cause of death for children in the United States, surpassing motor vehicle deaths and those caused by other injuries.
15) Brian Beutler on classified documents and both sidesism:
The other story at least grazes against the public interest. That is, it didn’t become a news story by dint of error and propaganda, and it bears ongoing-if-not-so-breathless scrutiny. But it grew into a major news story, and now a special counsel investigation, via the same failed incentive that gave us EMAILS in 2016: The notion that the newsworthiness of anything should correlate to how angry one party (almost always the Republican Party) pretends to be about it.
Reporters don’t have to read minds to know Republicans are pretending. They know through experience that Republican fixation on information security is entirely situational and unprincipled. They know that Republicans are lying openly about the facts at issue with the classified documents filed in Joe Biden’s vice presidential records. They know that the aim of the sensationalism is to create the perception that the Justice Department is holding Joe Biden and Donald Trump to different standards—or worse, that Biden is the real crook, and Trump the victim of a frame-up—and they know that perception is false.
Not only is it false, it’s fully backward. The voluntary and cooperative conduct of Biden’s personal and White House lawyers throws Trump’s criminal offenses (stealing and hiding state secrets) into stark relief. And in fairness, most mainstream news outlets have made some effort to emphasize this distinction.
But if there’s no apparent intentional wrongdoing here, no effort to conceal or stonewall, and no sense in which the Biden case should affect the disposition of the Trump case, why hyperventilate about it at all? Why reward Republican propaganda by characterizing the effect it has on the public as an “optics problem” for Democrats or Merrick Garland or whoever else. Nothing bad would happen if media outlets refused to succumb to manipulative tactics, and news consumers would be better informed.
Simply treating the Biden records as a smaller and separate story would be a huge improvement, but it wouldn’t actually capture the full state of affairs. It’s not just that there’s no reason to pretend to believe liars when they’re pretending to believe something is scandalous; the very fact that they’re lying, to manipulate the press and mislead the public, is an important story in its own right.
Six years after setting the country on a course to ruin with its EMAILS obsession, we should doubt it’s a story the press will ever choose to tell.
16) Quite randomly came across this research on high school start times:
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that U.S. secondary schools begin after 8:30 a.m. to better align with the circadian rhythms of adolescents. Yet due to economic and logistic considerations, the vast majority of high schools begin the school day considerably earlier. We leverage a quasi-natural experiment in which five comprehensive high schools in one of the nation’s largest school systems moved start times forty minutes earlier to better coordinate with earlier-start high schools. Here, disruption effects should exacerbate any harmful consequences. We report on the effect of earlier start times on a broad range of outcomes, including mandatory ACT test scores, absenteeism, on-time progress in high school, and college-going. While we fail to find evidence of harmful effects on test scores, we do see a rise in absenteeism and tardiness rates, as well as higher rates of dropping out of high school. These results suggest that the harmful effects of early start times may not be well captured by considering test scores alone.
17) David Wallace-Wells on electric vehicles:
It is striking that in the same year that Tesla’s stock price dropped by about two-thirds, destroying more than $700 billion in market value, the global market for electric vehicles — which for so long the company seemed almost to embody — actually boomed.
Boom may not even adequately communicate what happened. Around the world, E.V. sales were projected to have grown 60 percent in 2022, according to a BloombergNEF report prepared ahead of the 2022 U.N. climate conference COP27, bringing total sales over 10 million. There are now almost 30 million electric vehicles on the road in total, up from just 10 million at the end of 2020. E.V. market share has also tripled since 2020.
The pandemic years can feel a bit like a vacuum, but there are almost three times as many E.V.s on the world’s roads now as there were when Covid vaccines were first approved, and what looked not that long ago like a climate pipe dream is now undeniably underway: a genuine transition away from fossil-fueled transportation. This week, the Biden administration released a blueprint toward a net zero transportation sector by 2050. It’s an ambitious goal, especially for such a car-intoxicated culture as ours. But it’s also one that, thanks to trends elsewhere in the world, is beginning to seem more and more plausible, at least on the E.V. front.
In Norway, electric vehicles now represent four out of every five new cars sold; the figure was just one in five as recently as 2016. In Germany, more than 55 percent of new cars registered in December were electric or hybrid. In China, where more electric vehicles are sold than everywhere else in the world combined, the rise is perhaps even more dramatic: from 3.5 percent of the market at the beginning of 2020 to 20.3 percent at the beginning of 2022. And growing, of course: Nearly twice as many electric vehicles were sold last year in China as in the year before. The country also exported $3.2 billion worth of E.V.s last November alone, more than double the exports of the previous November. Its largest single manufacturer, BYD, has surpassed Tesla for global market share — so perhaps it should not be so surprising that Tesla’s stock is dimming while the global outlook is so sunny.
This is not just eye-popping growth; it is also dramatically faster than most analysts were projecting just a few years ago. In 2020, the International Energy Agency projected that the global share of electric vehicle sales would not top 10 percent before 2030. It appears we’ve already crossed that bar eight years early, and BloombergNEF now projects that the market share of E.V.s will approach 40 percent by the end of the decade. (The I.E.A. is less bullish but has still roughly doubled its 2030 projection in just two years.) The underlying production capacity is perhaps even more encouraging. In the United States, investments in battery manufacturing reached a record $73 billion last year — three times as much as the previous record, set the year before. Globally, battery manufacturing capacity grew almost 40 percent last year, and is projected to grow fivefold by just 2025. By that year, lithium mining is expected to be triple what it was in 2021.
18) I had my colonoscopy back in the spring, my wife is having her’s next week. Thus, I was particularly intrigued by this, “Colonoscopies save lives. Why did a trial suggest they might not?”
A media frenzy followed, and headlines were blunt, declaring that colonoscopies might not be effective or prevent deaths at all. But when Dominitz dug deeper, the trial results reflected where and how the study was conducted and the complexity of the questions it was trying to answer. “It is really important to not just read the headline,” says Dominitz, who is also director of the colorectal-cancer screening programme run by the US Department of Veteran Affairs.
A closer look at the European study, on its own and in the context of other studies, shows that colonoscopies do in fact substantially reduce the risk of developing colorectal cancer and dying from it. They are still considered by many experts to be one of the best ways to screen for the disease. But for any screening procedure, there are trade-offs both for individuals and at the public-health level. As scientists are working out the details of which tests to recommend, the reaction to the study illustrates how difficult it is to interpret and communicate research on cancer screening.
“It’s really important to look at all the evidence in totality,” says Jennifer Croswell, a public-health researcher at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland, who specializes in cancer screening. “This was a complicated trial to sort through.”
Fully Myelinated 
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