- Jane Jacobs vs. Robert Moses (excerpt from Ric Burn’s documentary New York)
- use of Adderall to treat kids without ADHD. Horrifying. I don’t even know if ADHD is caused by bad nutrition or if it reflects too-rigid teaching — that is, teaching all kids the same way. Roughly 99% of health care ignores the causes of things. I suppose that in a society, like ours, that pays little attention to finding out the causes of problems, the solutions to those problems will become, as the problem worsens, increasingly bizarre and dangerous.
- health benefits of kefir
- The discovery of Vitamin D
Thanks to Paul Nash.
That New York Times story about the drugging of America’s children is scary.
Drug companies and doctors already have saturated the adult market and turned countless millions of adults into drug addicts dependent on painkillers, antidepressants, and other strange chemicals.
So how can they keep growing their market? Expand the market by getting America’s children addicted, thus creating new generations of drug-consuming zombies.
You don’t need grades to be a billionaire in America.
I’d be interested to see if kids diagnosed with ADHD are more likely to be the younger ones in their class. I.e. if you have a summer birthday, are you more likely to be considered ADHD?
Should have googled first. Looks like it’s been studied and is the case:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9123519/Youngest-in-school-year-more-likely-to-be-diagnosed-with-ADHD-research.html
I also noticed a between-the-lines scare tactic used by the school admins: “Increase our funding, or your children are going to be medicated.”
Hi Seth.
Thanks for the blog. Keeps me learning.
I like the links posts, but can you give a bit more description (Jacobs v Roberts?) + set up the links to open in separate windows?
Easier to navigate your post while deciding whether to follow the link.
Barry Ritholz is a good example: https://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/10/10-tuesday-am-reads-42/
Seth: Thanks, I didn’t know about how to cause links to open in separate windows. Now I do.
Horrifying is the right word. This quote speaks volumes:
“We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.”
Seth: “As a society”? I wonder. Professors who can do research think it is higher-status to study high-tech stuff like drugs than low-tech stuff like food. (Curiously there is more money to study the high-status stuff, we’re taught that rarity increases status.) Maybe this is human nature (as Veblen argued), maybe it is promoted by science journalists who never call them on this. Since Veblen found the same pattern (less useful = higher status) in many societies and cultures, it isn’t clear it is a society’s “decision”.