Tonight (Wednesday) on Primetime (ABC), results from a recent repetition of Stanley Milgram’ s famous obedience experiment will be reported.
Month: January 2007
The Decline of Harvard
In high school, I learned a lot from Martin Gardner‘s Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. I read it at the Chicago Public Library on my way home from school while transferring from one bus line to another — thank heavens transfers were good for two hours. In college, it was long fact articles in The New Yorker. Now it’s Marginal Revolution, where I recently learned:
Harvard has also declined as a revolutionary science university from being the top Nobel-prize-winning institution for 40 years, to currently joint sixth position.
The full paper is here.
What should we make of this? Clayton Christensen, the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma (excellent) and a professor at the Harvard Business School, has been skeptical of Harvard’s ability to maintain its position as a top business school. He believes, based on his research and the facts of the matter, that it will gradually lose its position due to down-market competitors such as Motorola University and the University of Phoenix, just as Digital Equipment Corporation, once considered one of the best-run companies in the world, lost its position. A few years ago, in a talk, he described asking 100 of his MBA students if they agreed with his analysis. Only three did.
How would we know if Harvard was losing its luster? Christensen asked a student who strongly disagreed with him. Harvard business students (except Christensen’s) are taught to base their decisions on data. So Christensen put the question like this: If you were dean of the business school, what evidence would convince you that this was happening and it was time to take corrective action?
When the percentage of Harvard graduates among CEO’s of the top 1000 international companies goes down, said the student.
But by then it will be too late, said Christensen. His students agreed: By then it would be too late to reverse the decline.
Christensen’s research is related to mine, oddly enough — we both study innovation. For explicit connections, see the Discussion section of this article and the Reply to Commentators section of this one.
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Someone Has Been Reading This Blog
According to this USA Today article, “omega-3 is in”. That is, in many new food products to be introduced in 2007, such as a new orange juice. Omega-3, says the article, is “the hot ingredient” and “the miracle food.” The article delicately calls omega-3 a “fatty acid” rather than a fat. My many posts about omega-3 include this and this. More to come.
Is Drinking Olive Oil Healthy?
In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs wrote about an isolated North Carolina hamlet that her aunt visited in 1923:
One of my aunt’s tasks there was to see to construction of a church. . . One of the farmers donated, as a site, a beautiful knoll beside the river and my aunt suggested the building be made of fine large stones which were already quarried, as it were, needing little dressing, there for the taking in the creek and river beds. No, said the community elders, it was a pretty idea but not possible. . . . Entire walls and buildings of stone would not be safe.
These people came of a parent culture that had not only reared stone parish churches from time immemorial, but great cathedrals.
Likewise, nutritional wisdom is forgotten. Drinking olive oil now seems absurd to some people. But it was practiced in at least one place in the not-so-distant past:
In a mountain village in Crete, [Ancel] Keys saw old farmers working in the field who drank only a glass of olive oil for breakfast; he later verified that one of them was 106 years old.
From Todd Tucker, The Great Starvation Experiment, p. 204. There is a whole organization (Oldways) devoted to preserving ancient foodways and using them for nutritional guidance. The best practitioner of this approach has been Dr. Weston Price, a dentist, whose work is nicely summarized here. Dr. Price traveled the world looking for economically-primitive societies (“native peoples”) with ancient eating habits and excellent health. Their diets, especially the common elements, would suggest what a healthy diet must have.
Two of Dr. Price’s conclusions are relevant to the Shangri-La Diet:
1. “All native peoples studied made great efforts to obtain seafood.” This supports my comments about the importance of omega-3 fats, found much more in seafood than in other foods.
2. “The last major feature of native diets that Price found was that they were rich in fat, especially animal fat.” The animal fat in native diets would be high in omega-3 because the animals were eating grasses and other plants, not corn.
When I wrote my long paper on self-experimentation I divided it into two parts: one titled “Stone-Age Life Suits Us” (the common thread of the five examples), the other about weight control (the research behind SLD). The two parts struck me as quite different. Drinking sugar water to lose weight was definitely not a return to a Stone-Age lifestyle. But the big improvements in SLD since I wrote that paper — from sugar water to ELOO, and from ELOO to oils high in omega-3 — brought SLD much closer to the Stone-Age-Life-Suits-Us theme, I now see.