Evil Pharmaceutical Companies and Drugs for Profit

"Profits over people! Mwahaha!"
“Profits over people! Mwahaha!”

Many cannot seem to wrap their heads around the high costs of pharmaceuticals. The typical claim is that pharmaceutical companies are evil and greedy, plundering the pockets of those sick and desperate and exploiting the misery of others. While there are numerous reasons for the expensiveness of drugs, very few seem to realize that one of the major contributors is the actual science. Thankfully, Scientific American has published two articles on the subject by chemist Ashutosh Jogalekar: “Why Drugs Are Expensive: It’s the Science, Stupid” and “Why Drug Discovery Is Hard – Part 2: Easter Island, Pit Vipers; Where Do Drugs Come From?” The articles go very well with the following ReasonTV video (from 2009) on medical innovation. Worth thinking about.

The Dark Side of EI

Wheaton professor Adam Grant has an interesting article in The Atlantic on “The Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence.” Psychologist and author Daniel Goleman has popularized the term since the 1990s (along with social intelligence). Goleman’s research helped establish that traits other than IQ can lead to success in organizations and individual lives. But just as impressive cognitive abilities can be used for immoral purposes, so can a strong handle on emotions. Grant points to emerging research that found “when a leader gave an inspiring speech filled with emotion, the audience was less likely to scrutinize the message and remembered less of the content. Ironically, audience members were so moved by the speech that they claimed to recall more of it.” Futhermore, “when people have self-serving motives, emotional intelligence becomes a weapon for manipulating others.” Other experts found “emotional intelligence helps people disguise one set of emotions while expressing another for personal gain.” While these findings may not be surprising, a comprehensive analysis of emotional intelligence literature revealed something that might be:

In jobs that required extensive attention to emotions, higher emotional intelligence translated into better performance…However, in jobs that involved fewer emotional demands, the results reversed. The more emotionally intelligent employees were, the lower their job performance. For mechanics, scientists, and accountants, emotional intelligence was a liability rather than an asset. Although more research is needed to unpack these results, one promising explanation is that these employees were paying attention to emotions when they should have been focusing on their tasks.

Grant concludes, “Thanks to more rigorous research methods, there is growing recognition that emotional intelligence—like any skill—can be used for good or evil. So if we’re going to teach emotional intelligence in schools and develop it at work, we need to consider the values that go along with it and where it’s actually useful.”

Family Structure & The Great Gatsby Curve

Scott Winship and Donald Schneider have a recent piece at the Manhattan Institute’s e21 on the widely-cited Great Gatsby Curve. Their detailed analysis demonstrates that income inequality (of various sorts) has little statistical relation to economic mobility. What does, however, is single motherhood.

Each dot represents a "commuting zone," i.e. "metropolitan areas or county groupings in rural parts of the country—think of them as local job markets." Inequality increasing from left to right; Immobility (not mobility) rising as from bottom to top.
Each dot represents a “commuting zone,” i.e. “metropolitan areas or county groupings in rural parts of the country—think of them as local job markets.” Inequality increasing from left to right; immobility (not mobility) rising from bottom to top.

As Nathaniel wrote elsewhere, “This strongly correlates with the idea (discussed here previously) that…the ultra-wealthy are not (intrinsically) the problem. The problem is a fracturing of society that is evident not at the extremes, but closer to the middle, where the functional and dysfunctional sides of America are slowly pulling apart.”

Book Review: Darwin

Paul Johnson, Darwin: Portrait of a Genius (New York: Viking, 2012).

Popular historian Paul Johnson’s slim biography/analysis of Charles Darwin and his theory is a surprisingly satisfying read in light of its relatively short length (clocking in under 200 pages). While likely of passing interest to scholars and those already well-acquainted with Darwin’s life, Johnson’s brief, but informative overview will be of value to the general reader. Johnson does a fine job of accurately describing what Darwin actually wrote and distinguishing it from those things that are often placed in his mouth. While he engages in a bit of pop psychology to support some of his sweeping statements, Johnson is nonetheless fresh and thoughtful in his writing. Most important, Johnson is able to paint a vivid picture of the broader context from which Darwin’s ideas emerged. This is consistent with one of Johnson’s major themes: ideas matter and often take on a life of their own. Thus, Darwin’s Malthusian interpretation of the evidence viewed evolutionary life as a vicious, violent struggle for existence. This outlook in turn aided other ideologies and movements that sought to use Darwinism to bolster their own worldviews, including eugenics, Nazism, and Communism. It is this latter portion on which some negative reviewers have focused their attention, despite the fact that it consists of only one chapter (Ch. 7 “Evils of Social Darwinism”). Mark Stern at Slate writes that Johnson’s “discussion of the world’s reaction to The Origin of Species” is “admittedly engaging.” Furthermore, he sees “Johnson’s overview of Darwin’s theory of evolution” as “clear, rich, and accurate.” Yet, the majority of his review is dedicated to explaining that there is “intellectual harm, historical harm, and moral harm” in linking Darwin to any of the 20th-century atrocities. The review’s subtitle describes the book as “the latest effort to smear evolution by natural selection.” Of course, Stern explains that such a book obviously comes from “a conservative, family-values-promoting British intellectual” who “has spoken out against divorce, liberation theology, unions, atheism, the Enlightenment, and even the Beatles.” Another (albeit shorter) review in the New Scientist bluntly states that Johnson’s book is nothing more than “a vendetta, an agenda-driven hatchet-job.” There is some truth to these criticisms. Johnson does emphasize that Darwin was a “poor anthropologist” who “did not bring to his observation of humans the same care, objectivity, acute notation, and calmness he always showed when studying birds and sea creatures, insects, plants, and animals” (pg. 29). For example, Johnson points to Darwin’s opinions of the Fuegan “savages” during his voyage on the Beagle as evidence of his lacking in anthropology. While an important factor, I’m reminded of another scholar’s take on the matter:

When incautious scholars or blinkered fundamentalists accuse Darwin or [German Darwinist Ernst] Haeckel of racism, they simply reveal to an astonished world that these thinkers lived in the nineteenth century.

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2013: The Best Year in Human History (w/ Graphs)

Over at Think Progress, five major reasons are provided as to why “2013 was, in fact, the best year on the planet for humankind”:

1. Fewer people are dying young, and more are living longer

2. Fewer people suffer from extreme poverty, and the world is getting happier

3. War is becoming rarer and less deadly

4. Rates of murder and other violent crimes are in free-fall

5. There’s less racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination in the world

There is more that could be said (and I’m not sure that the final graph really captures the full impact of its headline, though it does demonstrate a major softening in the public’s view on homosexuals). I’m not entirely surprised that globalization and the spread of capitalism were barely mentioned as major reasons for these trends (yes, even same-sex marriage). Nonetheless, just another example of how the world is largely getting better. I could almost title this “Good News, Pope Francis: Part II.”

Teen Abortion & Pregnancy Rates

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Alex Berezow, scientist and founding editor of RealClearScience, provided the chart above representing teenagers aged 15-19. The following are the teenage pregnancy rates: (1) White – less than 1 in 20, (2) Blacks – more than 1 in 9, and (3) Hispanics – almost exactly 1 in 10. “In other words,” writes Berezow, “both black and Hispanic teens are more than twice as likely to become pregnant as their white cohorts. Strikingly, the abortion rate among black teens (41.1 per 1,000) is almost equal to the pregnancy rate among white teens.” Research shows again and again how detrimental broken families (including single motherhood) are to economic vitality and social mobility. “Therefore,” concludes Berezow, “any discussion about how to close the enormous racial wealth gap in America must address the large discrepancy in teenage pregnancy rates between the races.”

This reminds me of something economist Jennifer Roback Morse wrote about “social justice”:

Young people are often the most idealistic and zealous proponents of new social movements. So, I offer this challenge especially to the young: if you want to do something to help the poor, quit idealizing unmarried sexual activity. Some sexual lifestyle decisions you can get away with. But those very same choices would be a disaster for the poor.

So I challenge college students and young adults to ask yourself this question when you are making your decisions about sex: If a high-school drop-out did this, would it be good for her or not?

If the answer is no, don’t do it! Or at least, have the decency to keep your mouth shut about social justice.

Race and the LDS Priesthood Ban: A Brief Personal History

"You must unlearn what you have learned." - Spencer W. Kimball: Jedi Master
“You must unlearn what you have learned.” – Spencer W. Kimball: Jedi Master

When I was in the LDS Missionary Training Center (MTC) in Utah preparing for my two year, I struggled with answering specific questions about Church history and past practices. One question in particular revolved around blacks and the priesthood ban. For most of the LDS Church’s life, black Africans were not allowed to hold priesthood or participate in temple endowments/marriage. The ban was lifted by President Spencer W. Kimball in 1978. One of my MTC teachers attempted to skirt around the issue until I point blank asked him what answer he would give as to the reason for the ban. He simply said, “I don’t know why.”

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Inequality and Demographics

 

The above chart (as its title says) provides the details of U.S. households by income quintile. Economist Mark Perry summarizes some of the key differences between households (as of 2012):

1. On average, there are more income earners per household in the top quintile than in the lowest-income households.

2. Over 60% of the lowest-income households have no income earners, whereas the top quintile households have only 3% with no earners.

3. Over 75% of top quintile households are married couples, while this applies to only 17% of the lowest quintile households.

4. Nearly 80% of top quintile households fall within the prime earning ages of 35-64. Those in the bottom quintile are 1.6x more likely to be under 35 years of age and more than 5x more likely to be over 65 years old.

5. Nearly 80% of top quintile households include at least one adult working full-time compared to only 18.2% of those in lowest-income households.

6. Over 75% of those in the top quintile households have college degrees, while only about 13% of the lowest-income households.

As Perry summarizes,

Specifically, high-income households have a greater average number of income-earners than households in lower-income quintiles, and individuals in high income households are far more likely than individuals in low-income households to be well-educated, married, working full-time, and in their prime earning years. In contrast, individuals in lower-income households are far more likely than their counterparts in higher-income households to be less-educated, working part-time, either very young (under 35 years) or very old (over 65 years), and living in single-parent households.

The good news is that the key demographic factors that explain differences in household income are not fixed over our lifetimes and are largely under our control (e.g. staying in school, getting and staying married,etc.), which means that individuals and households are not destined to remain in a single income quintile forever.

The Passing of Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013

Nelson Mandela died today at 95. There is an excellent interactive piece in The New York Times documenting Mandela’s life and achievements. Another NYT article provides a moving quote from President Obama:

His commitment to transfer power and reconcile with those who jailed him set an example that all humanity should aspire to,” a grim President Obama said Thursday evening, describing Mr. Mandela as an “influential, courageous and profoundly good” man who inspired millions — including himself — to a spirit of reconciliation.

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