Month: January 2009

Does Innovation Require Markets?

Seth Roberts4 Comments

Andrew Gelman's table

Andrew Gelman writes:

The article [about economics professor David Galenson] then quotes art professor Michael Rushton as saying that in science or art, “innovation really requires a market.” Huh? Wha?? Tell that to my friend Seth, who spent 10 years self-experimentation. Heck, tell that to the cave painters. Or check out the American Visionary Art Museum.

I agree. I was able to do self-experimentation for 10 years because I didn’t have to sell, i.e., publish it. Not having to sell — I mean publish — it gave me the freedom to do and think whatever I wanted for as long as I wanted.

Innovation benefits not from markets but from subsidies, which provide time to experiment. In my case, I was a professor at Berkeley — subsidized by the State of California. I had tenure and free time. Sometimes the subsidies aren’t obvious. Part of my theory of human evolution is that gifts, ceremonies, holidays, fashion, and connoisseurs, not to mention love of art, subsidized artists and artisans by providing a desire for work that — in the absence of gifts, etc. — would be much harder to make a living from. Helping artists and artisans make a living helped them advance their technology. Cave paintings may have been part of a holiday observance — the artists took time off from hunting. Before trade, Thorstein Veblen’s Instinct of Workmanship motivated innovation. Andrew himself built the table in the above photo for reasons that had nothing to do with markets.

But at least an economics professor is studying innovation. A few years ago in the Berkeley Public Library I picked up an introductory economics textbook. Six or seven hundred pages. Half a page on innovation!

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts5 Comments
  1. Self-experiment on short-term memory announcement
  2. Why the Chinese government censors the Internet. James Fallows was able to figure out why they blocked the NY Times website for a few days (an article about suppression of rebellion).
  3. Nassim Taleb on iatrogenesis. “They never consider that “nothing” may be better than the best model.”
  4. The Lost Art of Walking by Geoff Nicholson.
  5. Best journalism of the year. More lists like this! One reason Spy was so good, I think, was that they covered stuff, especially New York publishing, that they knew about from personal experience. Like scientists writing about science.
  6. Six ballsiest scientific frauds.

Thanks to Dave Lull and Tyler Cowen.

Folic Acid and Birth Defects

Seth Roberts1 Comment

The researchers who discovered that too little folic acid causes birth defects haven’t gotten a Nobel Prize (and probably never will) but they should, as this article explains:

After 3 decades of epidemiologic research reporting an association between neural tube defects and maternal use of folic acid, public health organizations developed recommendations and supported interventions to increase folic acid intake among women of reproductive age. In 1992, the US Public Health Service recommended that all women of childbearing age who are capable of becoming pregnant should consume 400 µg of folic acid daily.

. . . In 2005, after the National Campaign and mandatory fortification, approximately 33% of women reported taking a daily supplement of folic acid, only a modest increase from the 25% reported in 1995. However, median blood folate levels among women of childbearing age increased from 4.8 to 13.0 ng/mL between 1994 and 2000, with a more recent study reporting median blood folate levels at least 2 times the levels prior to fortification.

To evaluate the impact of this public health intervention, 4 study groups have conducted time trend analyses among the US population, and all have reported a decline of neural tube defects after the introduction of mandatory folic acid fortification. Specifically, these studies reported an 11%—20% reduction in occurrence of anencephaly and a 21%—34% reduction in occurrence of spina bifida when comparing pre- versus postfortification rates. Similarly, the occurrence of anencephaly and spina bifida was observed to reduce 38% and 53%, respectively, in Canada and 46% and 51%, respectively, in Chile following folic acid fortification.

Here is the first article on the subject. As the dean of a school of public health put it, this discovery by itself justifies all the money ever spent on schools of public health.

The End of Newspapers As We Know Them

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Michael Wolff, author of the excellent Burn Rate, writes:

Throughout the Tribune world—the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Hartford Courant, among others—everybody knows life as it’s been has ended. . . . You have to understand that this is the most momentous, and transformative, time in the news business—as significant as this moment is to the automotive and financial industries. There will be, practically speaking, no newspaper industry after this is done. A nobody-gets-out of-here-alive sort of thing.

A friend of mine who works for one of these newspapers said that the end has been coming for a long time. In the early 1990s, if I remember correctly, the audience started to shrink. At the time, and for a long time thereafter, this was ignored. Had the problem been recognized back then it might have been possible, given a lot of time to experiment, to find a solution, a way to survive much longer. But now it is too late.