Month: October 2013

The History of the Nobel Prize

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From The Washington Post:

• Nobel prizes have been awarded to people from 72 different countries. But more than half all Nobel laureates come from only three countries: the United States, Britain and Germany.

• More than one in every three Nobel laureates is from the United States. Put another way, the United States has 4 percent of the world’s population and 34 percent of its Nobel laureates.

• All of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East combined have only 104 Nobel laureates. These regions hold 81 percent of the world’s population but only 10 percent of its Nobel laureates.

• 82 percent of Nobel laureates are from Western countries (Western Europe, North America, Australia or New Zealand). If you add in Eastern Europe, it’s 90 percent.

• Just over half of all Nobel laureates are from Europe: 54 percent. Of those, most are from Western Europe, which has had 45 percent of all laureates. You can see this in the giant swathe of green in the circle chart above.

• About half of the world’s Nobel laureates are from the Anglosphere: Britain, United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

• The second most common native language among Nobel laureates is German; 152 laureates are from German-speaking countries.

• The region with the fewest Nobel laureates per capita is Africa. There is one African Nobel prize per 62 million Africans alive today. By comparison, there is one American Nobel prize per 900,000 Americans alive today.

• The Middle East has had 20 Nobel laureates: 12 Israelis, four Egyptians, one Palestinian, one Iranian, one Turk and one Yemeni. Ironically, it also has the largest proportion of peace prize winners: eight of the 20 Middle Eastern laureates are peace-prize winners.

• The top 10 countries with the most Nobel laureates, in order. Pay attention to how top-heavy this list is; the numbers drop precipitously:

1. United States (347 Nobel laureates)
2. Britain (120)
3. Germany (104)
4. France (65)
5. Sweden (30)
6. Russia (27)
7. Switzerland (26)
8. Canada (23)
9. Austria (22)
10. Italy (20)

What isn’t mentioned is the amount of Jewish recipients: “At least 193 Jews and people of half- or three-quarters-Jewish ancestry have been awarded the Nobel Prize, accounting for 23% of all individual recipients worldwide between 1901 and 2013, and constituting 37% of all US recipients during the same period.”

This is pretty fascinating. Or should I be disturbed with the unequal distribution of Nobel Prizes?

Krugman Blames Republicans For Everything, Part 947

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Paul-Krugman-with-Cat

Paul Krugman has taken to his soapbox again to lambast Republicans for engaging in “crisis driven” fiscal policy, citing a report which says such policy has cost the nation $700 billion and over a million jobs.

Krugman then openly admits the report he cites relies on shaky research, so he dumps it quickly (I’m sure the “shaky research” claim comes because it states very clearly that government spending is out of control), but states that, unreliable or not, we can still use it to blame the GOP, which he explains has done plenty of unnecessary damage to the US economy in its quest to… destroy America? I don’t know. To back the damages claim, since he only needed the report to set the table before pulling out the knives, he mentions a few things Republicans have done or had a hand in:

1. Discretionary government spending has fallen, which any good Keynesian knows harms economic growth and employment.

2. Allowing payroll taxes to rise.

3. Reducing aid to the unemployed.

Let’s examine these each in turn.

First: I can’t comment much on this because it’s a matter of economic theory, which I don’t know enough about. I do know, however, that Krugman slyly mentions the reduction in discretionary spending in the context of blaming Republicans and quoting the year “2010” as the start of the fall of that spending, allowing his readers to draw the implied conclusion without actually backing it up. Clever.

Second: Ever the paragon of intellectual dishonesty, Krugman frames the declination of Congress to extend Social Security payroll tax cuts as a part of the previous fiscal cliff dealings as a tax hike. In reality, both sides of the aisle agreed on letting the tax cut expire, though at the time Democrats did a decent job of blaming Republicans for “raising taxes on the middle class” because Democrats’ counteroffer was to raise taxes on the rich, which, unfortunately, it seems wouldn’t have made up for the shortfall produced by the payroll tax cuts in the first place (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/10/07/obama-s-stealthy-payroll-tax-plan-raise-rich-people-s-taxes.html). This was a thinly veiled attempt by the left to engineer a policy of tax-driven wealth redistribution from rich to poor, entrenching sizeable tax cuts for the middle and lower classes and significantly and raising them for the rest. Republicans, naturally, refused to go along with it. Whether or not you agree that the largest weight of the tax burden should further shift permanently toward the wealthy, and whether or not you believe the income gap is a problem, and whether or not you think such policy is the best way to reduce it, you have to agree that the Republicans were only doing what they’ve been asked to do.

Third: I may actually agree with Krugman on this one, to a degree. While I don’t know enough about the efficiency and effect of unemployment insurance to make an informed judgment, it does seem reasonable to me that in a time of high unemployment and recession, extra help in keeping the unemployed out of the mire of poverty is a good thing–so long as it’s been done right. That said, from the source Krugman gives, the reduction in aid put an additional 1 million people below the poverty line–a figure which, I’m not entirely convinced, given that some of those people would have gone there with or without help, and that it counts wage-earners as well as non-wage-earners, would make a major impact on the economy.

Are Republicans to blame, at least in part, for the sluggish recovery? Undoubtedly. Have their political ploys and obstructionism cost the economy money? I’m sure they have. But if we’re going to pass out blame, let’s at least be willing to find the actual problems, uncover their sources and address them no matter which side they fall on.

Lesson: Krugman is as partisan as they come and he’s willing to muddy the water to make the other side look bad. Don’t take his statements at face value.

Scientifically Literate Tea Partiers?

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2013-10-17 Tea Party Scientific Literacy

That’s the conclusion, according to a Yale professor. It’s really not big news, honestly. The Tea Party is already known to be slightly wealthier and more college educated than the average public, so it’s no surprise to find that they are also slightly more scientifically literate.

But it’s still a sharp contrast with the way they are portrayed in the media. As Professor Kahan put it:

I’ve got to confess, though, I found this result surprising. As I pushed the button to run the analysis on my computer, I fully expected I’d be shown a modest negative correlation between identifying with the Tea Party and science comprehension.

But then again, I don’t know a single person who identifies with the Tea Party. All my impressions come from watching cable tv — & I don’t watch Fox News very often — and reading the “paper” (New York Times daily, plus a variety of politics-focused internet sites like Huffington Post & Politico).

The large difference between the image universally presented by the media and the reality is much more interesting than the small difference between scientific literacy for the Tea Party and the public at large.

Time to Push Back: Stop Enabling Predators

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2013-10-17 Yoffe Piece

The attacks on so-called “rape apologists” have reached levels of recklessness and insanity that call for a direct and forceful repudiation. I am sick and disgusted of “feminists” who attack those offering sound, reasonable, and moderate advice to help keep women safe.

Let me give you a very, very clear example of this.

Emily Yoffe, who writes the Dear Prudence column for Slate, wrote a short column with a simple message: College Women: Stop Getting Drunk. Her message is very clear and absolutely incontestable: when women get drunk they place themselves in danger. She also took great pains not to place blame on women, however, writing:

Let’s be totally clear: Perpetrators are the ones responsible for committing their crimes, and they should be brought to justice. But we are failing to let women know that when they render themselves defenseless, terrible things can be done to them.

I can’t think of a more sane, reasonable approach to this problem. And if the topic were anything other than rape this advice would be considered not only reasonable, but sort of obvious. No one thinks that when you tell college kids that they should lock up their bikes that are you some kind of bike-thief apologist. If I tell my son or daughter to lock their car doors when they park on the street, I don’t think I would be accused of perpetuating “burglary culture”. When gyms post signs advising clients to lock the lockers where they leave their stuff, we don’t get some bizarre outcry about teaching children not to steal instead of teaching them to protect their belongings. In no other area of human life do I see any difficulty at all holding these two concepts in our brains at the one time:

1. People who do bad things are bad. And they shouldn’t do them.

2. In addition to urging people not to do bad things and punishing those who do, it’s a good idea to take simple, practical steps to make yourself less likely to become a victim. (Please note: “in addition” isn’t the same thing as “instead of”.)

I can’t believe we actually have to argue about this, but apparently we do.

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When do children learn right from wrong?

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Inspired by the recent arrests of two teens for bullying a girl until she committed suicide and remembering that I have read articles describing a shift in the brain at 8 years old that allows for moral judgement as well as different learning abilities (of course I can not find those now!), I stumbled across this article about moral development in children.

development

There’s lots of interesting things in here that present a very complicated picture of kids who do terrible things but who have not matured. What do you do with them? How do you hold them responsible? How do you get them to mature?  What do we do about a cycle of immature children having children?

I particularly thought this was interesting (forgive the 90s rhetoric):

Drug abuse delays development, Farrow says, because, “If kids are high all the time . . . they’re not very future oriented; they tend to stay concrete, and not see the consequences of their actions.”

Dropping out of school and hanging out with “deadheads going nowhere,” he says, means children don’t get any intellectual challenge. That means that, although their brains are ready to develop the capacity for critical thinking, they don’t get trained to do so.

Maybe We Should Take Bitcoins Seriously…

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Bitcoin

Bitcoins are a little hard to explain. The idea of fiat currency is that dollars (or pounds, yen, whatever) have value more or less because the government says so. There’s no intrinsic value to the money. Same basic idea with Bitcoins, except that instead of being backed by a government they are backed by… nobody.

But they are set up in such a way that you can’t really forge them. You have to get your computer to solve a really, really complex problem (taking months of computing time) in order to “mine” a Bitcoin, and there will only ever be 21 million in existence. They are divisible down to 8 decimal places, however, so 21 million will be plenty for the foreseeable future.

You can’t  buy a lot with Bitcoins these days ’cause most places don’t accept them, but some do. This got people all excited a while back and speculation led to a 60,000% increase in price (measured vs. good ole USD) and then a corresponding crash. But the market recovered. More recently, the FBI raided Silk Road (a black market that uses Bitcoins) and the market crashed again. But not that much. As Sam Volkering notes, the all-time high was $230 (for one Bitcoin), and the market was about $140 when the Feds shut down Silk Road. The price of Bitcoins fell, but not below $100.

Volkering’s point, and I think it’s a good one, is that if shuttering the #1 outlet for Bitcoins doesn’t totally devastate the value, they might have some real staying power. Of course, the Feds haven’t really targeted Bitcoins directly, and I’m not sure they would survive. There are a lot of advantages to digital currency, but the whole point of Bitcoins is that they are anonymous and untraceable. No government in the world is going to be comfortable with that proposition.

Higgs Calls Dawkins “A Fundamentalist”

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2013-10-11 Higgs Dawkins

This is an older article (Dec 2012) and at the time people figured Higgs was a contender for the Nobel. Now we know he got it. In any case, one of the greatest minds in theoretical physics points out what I’ve been saying for years: that the New Atheists (or at least Dawkins, one of their examplars) are the mirror image of the fundamentalists that they choose to focus their criticisms on. This remark came not long after Dawkins dropped another gem, saying that “Horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.”

I imagine his fans will continue to post his quotes and parrot his arguments for quite some time, but I think his credibility with most fair-minded people is pretty well shot at this point. It should be, at any rate.

Edit: In the first version of this post, I mistakenly attributed a summary of Dawkins comment to Dawkins. The summary read: “Raising a child in the Catholic church was worse than sex abuse dished out to youngsters by priests.” The actual quote is now included in the body above. HIggs’ statement is also more qualified than the headline suggest. He actually said “Dawkins in a way is almost a kind of fundamen- talist himself.”

Post on the Patriarchy: Where Do I Begin?

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2013-10-11 WalkingHomeAlone

So this article popped up in my Facebook news feed. It’s a post written by a young man who lives in my home town, is a dad to young kids, and is the sort of fellow who would go to a sci-fi book club. In other words: someone not unlike myself.

The similarities are deeper than that, however. He talks about the way he self-consciously parents to teach his children the meaning of consent with rules like:

While they are little, I’m trying to be the man who stops. If I am tickling my girls and they say the words “stop” or “no,” I stop. If they want me to start again, they have to tell me to. If they ask me to not hug or kiss them, I don’t. As they grow into teenagers, I want them to have an ingrained sense of what consent is and how people express it.

That’s almost an exact mirror image of decisions that I’ve made–probably for slightly but not entirely different reasons–as a father myself. I also stop tickling my kids whenever they say “Stop, please” and when my kids don’t want to give me a hug or a kiss I usually ask them very nicely, but don’t take one without their consent. I mean, I’m not weird about it, but I like them to have a balance of obedience (which I also emphasize) and autonomy.

So my setup is simple: this guy is a lot like me in a lot of ways. But when it comes to “the patriarchy”, everything goes completely off the rails. Here’s his story:

Recently, I was invited to join a science fiction book club that meets monthly at a pub about a mile from my house. Most of the folks in the group are parents, so we meet at 8:00 PM, allowing for family time after work. The night of the club, I helped put our youngest to bed and then told my wife, Kat, I was ready to walk over. She paused, clearly surprised that I would be walking–not because I rarely exercise,1 but because it was dark outside.

So, he gets to walk a mile on a dark city street. His wife doesn’t. That seems unfair, and it makes him mad. It makes me mad, too. It makes him mad at “the patriarchy.” It makes me mad at rapists. That discrepancy might not seem like such a problem at first glance, but it is a problem for me for two reasons. 

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Maryville Rape Case is Steubenville 2.0

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2013-10-14 Daisy Coleman

Slate has coverage of an infuriating new case of injustice, this time from Missouri. For those who don’t immediately get the reference, the title of this post refers to the Steubenville High School rape case in Ohio. In that case, a 16-year old who was too drunk to consent was raped by two members of the high school football team. The Maryville case is similar: a 14-year old girl who was also very drunk was raped by another high school football player.

This football player’s grandfather is a 4-term state representative while the girl’s family were newcomers to the community Despite ample evidence to move forward with prosecution (according to the sheriff), the charges were dropped by the prosecutor.

That’s basically what happened in Steubenville as well, where the community rallied around not the victimized young woman, but her victimizers. Eventually public outcry (including the questionable aid of Anonymous) led to a trial in Steubenville, and when the rapists were found guilty a CNN correspondent bemoaned their fate:

[It’s] incredibly difficult, even for an outsider like me, to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart.

Sucks to be a rapist, I guess?

So far, however, there has been no trial in Maryville. That needs to change.

(Note: You can read more about the story here. That is also where I found the photo of Daisy Coleman. I understand that usually the names of victims are kept confidential and I respect that. But in this case Daisy and her family are speaking publicly and voluntarily, so I used her name and photo as well.)