Category Archives: Culture

Rational Optimism

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The%20Rational%20Optimist.jpgMatt Ridley supplies a dose of good end-of-the-week vibes with this article based on his new book, The Rational Optimist (Harper 2010):

When I set out to write a book about the material progress of the human race, now published at The Rational Optimist, I was only dimly aware of how much better my life is now than it would have been if I had been born 50 years before. I knew that I have novel technologies at my disposal from synthetic fleeces and discount airlines to Facebook and satellite navigation. I knew that I could rely on advances in vaccines, transplants and sleeping pills. I knew that I could experience cleaner air and cleaner water at least in my own country. I knew that for Chinese and Japanese people life had grown much more wealthy. But I did not know the numbers.

Do you know the numbers? In 2005, compared with 1955, the average human being on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her children and could expect to live one-third longer. All this during a half-century when the world population has more than doubled, so that far from being rationed by population pressure, the goods and services available to the people of the world have expanded. It is, by any standard, an astonishing human achievement.

We invent new technologies that decrease the amount of time that it takes to supply each otherís needs. The great theme of human history is that we increasingly work for each other. We exchange our own specialised and highly efficient fragments of production for everybody elseís. The ëdivision of labourí Adam Smith called it, and it is still spreading. When a self-sufficient peasant moves to town and gets a job, supplying his own needs by buying them from others with the wages from his job, he can raise his standard of living and those he supplies with what he produces. [.  .  .]

So ask yourself this: with so much improvement behind us, why are we to expect only deterioration before us? I am quoting from an essay by Thomas Macaulay written in 1830, when pessimists were already promising doom:

ìThey were wrong then, and I think they are wrong now.î

What motivates us

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Dan Pink presents thoughts on how to motivate people (H/T Political Calculations).

How important is knowing your Father?

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pandas_zoom2 Maybe pretty darn important, according to University of Texas researchers Karen Clark, Elizabeth Marquardt and Norval D. Glenn:

Each year, an estimated 30,000-60,000 children are born in this country via artificial insemination, but the number is only an educated guess. Neither the fertility industry nor any other entity is required to report on these statistics. The practice is not regulated, and the childrenís health and well-being are not tracked.

In adoption, prospective parents go through a painstaking, systematic review, including home visits and detailed questions about their relationship, finances, even their sex life. With donor conception, the state requires absolutely none of that, and the effects of such a system on the people conceived this way have been largely unknown.

We set out to change that. We teamed up .   .   . to design and field a survey with a sample drawn from more than 1 million American households.

Our study, released this month by the Commission on Parenthoodís Future, focused on how young-adult donor offspring ó and comparison samples of young adults who were raised by adoptive or biological parents ó make sense of their identities and family experiences, how they approach reproductive technologies more generally and how they are faring on key outcomes. The study of 18- to 45-year-olds includes 485 who were conceived via sperm donation, 562 adopted as infants and 563 raised by their biological parents.

The results are surprising. While adoption is often the center of controversy, it turns out that sperm donation raises a host of different but equally complex issues.

Two-thirds of adult donor offspring agree with the statement ìMy sperm donor is half of who I am.î Nearly half are disturbed that money was involved in their conception. About two-thirds affirm the right of donor offspring to know the truth about their origins.

Regardless of socioeconomic status, donor offspring are twice as likely as those raised by biological parents to report problems with the law before age 25. They are more than twice as likely to report having struggled with substance abuse. And they are about 1.5 times as likely to report depression or other mental health problems.

As a group, the donor offspring in our study are suffering more than those who were adopted: hurting more, feeling more confused and feeling more isolated from their families. (And our study found that the adoptees on average are struggling more than those raised by their biological parents.)

Some feel like a ìfreak of natureî or a ìlab experiment.î Others speak of the searching for their biological father in crowds, wondering if a man who resembles them could be ìthe one.î Still others speak of complicated emotional journeys and lost or damaged relationships with their families when they grow up.

Life is complicated.

Amazing Ukulele

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The remarkable Jake Shimabukuro: “One of the things I love about being a ukulele player is that no matter where I go in the world to play, the audience has such low expectations. [This is] a huge plus for sure.”

Michael Shermer on Self-Deception

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Stick with this interesting lecture to the end.

The state of cancer research

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cancer-ribbon Following on these recent posts on the state of cancer research, John Goodman provides this timely and lucid post on the problems with ñ as well as the direction of – cancer research:

Why so little progress [in cancer research despite the large amount of money spent on  it]?

Some researchers believe we have been using the wrong model. Weíve been trying to combat cancer the way we fight an infection initiated by the common cold. But cancer is very different from ordinary infections and colds.

Suppose you have strep throat. Your doctor prescribes an antibiotic and the drug immediately goes to work fighting it. Letís say the antibiotic manages to kill 95% of the germs. Thatís enough damage to allow your bodyís natural defenses (white corpuscles) to take over and complete the clean-up job.

Now suppose we try to fight a cancerous tumor the same way. Letís say that through chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy, doctors manage to kill 95% of the cancer cells. In this case, the white corpuscles wonít be able to pull off the clean-up, however. Once cancer cells multiply and become lethal, itís an all-or-nothing proposition. As long as even a single cancer cell remains, it will eventually multiply again. And it will continue multiplying until the fight must be initiated all over again. Eventually the cancer will metastasize (spread all over your whole body), which is a virtual death sentence.

Unlike ordinary germs, therefore, in fighting a carcinogenic tumor you have to kill (or remove) every single cell. If even one cell survives, the cancer will return and become lethal again.

Strange as it may seem, cancer appears to disable the human immune system in much the same way as a fertilized egg in a womanís womb. Why doesnít the bodyís immune system treat a fertilized egg as a foreign invader and try to attack and kill it? Because somehow the immune system is turned off. Cancer cells are able to do much the same thing. Although the ability of women to carry a fertilized egg is pro-life and cancer is anti-life, it seems likely that both phenomena act in the same biochemical way.

Somehow, cancer turns off our bodyís natural defenses. Many researchers believe the most promising response, therefore, is to find a way to turn those defenses back on. By way of encouragement, consider that ìnearly everyone by middle-age or older is riddled withÖcancer cells and precancerous cellsî that do not develop into large tumors. Somehow our bodyís natural defenses are keeping them at bay. Could those same defenses be employed to take on more challenging tasks?

That is a good way of thinking about the two new drugs that were announced last week. Rather than fight cancer the way we fight ordinary infections, fighting cancer by liberating the bodyís natural immune system seems to have much greater promise.

By the way, in case you missed it, U.S. News & World Reportís annual survey of U.S. hospitals recently ranked the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houstonís Texas Medical Center as the no. 1 cancer hospital in the country. Texas Childrenís Hospital, which is literally across the street from M.D. Anderson in the Medical Center, is ranked as the no. 5 pediatric cancer hospital in the nation.

On Leadership

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drking2 If you read just one article this week, make it this one (H/T Mike at Crime & Federalism)  ñ William Deresiewiczís lecture to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point last year. A snippet:

Thatís really the great mystery about bureaucracies. Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running thingsóthe leadersóare the mediocrities?

Because excellence isnít usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until itís time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why theyíre done. Just keeping the routine going.

I tell you this to forewarn you, because I promise you that you will meet these people and you will find yourself in environments where what is rewarded above all is conformity. I tell you so you can decide to be a different kind of leader. And I tell you for one other reason.

As I thought about these things and put all these pieces togetheróthe kind of students I had, the kind of leadership they were being trained for, the kind of leaders I saw in my own institutionóI realized that this is a national problem. We have a crisis of leadership in this country, in every institution. Not just in government. Look at what happened to American corporations in recent decades, as all the old dinosaurs like General Motors or TWA or U.S. Steel fell apart. Look at what happened to Wall Street in just the last couple of years. [.  .   .]

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but donít know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but donít know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether theyíre worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we donít have are leaders.

What we donít have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Armyóa new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.