Tom Corbett, Privateer

“I'm all about privatization,” says Pennsylvania's Governor Tom Corbett. In case that wasn't clear, his chief of staff Kevin Harley adds, “The governor is a proponent of bold privatization. That has been his consistent position from day one—and it hasn't changed.”

Yesterday, Gov. Corbett announced his plan to sell or auction off the state liquor store system and expand the number of outlets permitted to sell liquor, wine and beer. He optimistically claims this will raise a one-time windfall of over $1 billion as follows:

• $575 million from the sale of liquor licenses.
• $224 million from auctioning off the 1200 state liquor stores.
• $107 million for new wine and beer licenses.
• $112.5 million for licenses allowing beer distributors to sell liquor.

Apparently, the governor is not confident that this proposal will survive on its own merit, so he has tied it to the more popular cause of education. The $1 billion will be used to fund block grants for school districts, to be targeted to four areas: safety, early education, individualized learning, and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) programs.

Gov. Corbett claims the new system will be “revenue neutral” in the long term, but the numbers don't appear to add up. Currently, since the state owns the liquor stores, they take in revenue from both profits (the difference between wholesale and retail liquor prices) and taxes on liquor sales. If they are going to give up the profits, they are going to have to sell a lot more booze (at higher prices?) to make up for those lost profits with additional tax money. Maybe he is indirectly asking Pennsylvania residents to get drunk more often “for the sake of the children.”

Less than three weeks ago, the governor announced the sale of the Pennsylvania state lottery to Camelot, a British firm that promises to increase gambling revenue, so Pennsylvanians are already being asked to throw more of their money away for the sake of our senior citizens.

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Gov. Corbett also supports expanding our reliance on charter schools, another form of privatization. We should not necessarily assume that all of the $1 billion will go to public schools, since local school districts are required to pay charter school tuition for students in their districts. And what exactly does the governor mean by “individualized instruction?”

Blackmail is usually defined as threatening “to make a gain or cause a loss to another unless a demand is met.” In his first two years in office, the governor has cut back sharply in state funding for public schools. Apparently, to get some of that money back, Pennsylvanians must agree to his liquor privatization plan.

Mike Crossey, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the public school teachers' union, commented, “It's nice that the governor has acknowledged that he created a school funding crisis, but our students shouldn't have to count on liquor being available on every corner in order to have properly funded schools.”

Appeal to an Unlikely Scenario

I mentioned in a previous post that I am currently taking an online course in critical thinking through Coursera. This week, one of our topics is fallacies of relevance. A fallacy of relevance is an argument in which the premises are of questionable relevance to the conclusion. An example is an appeal to an unlikely scenario.

Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Senator Dianne Feinstein's (D-CA) proposal to reinstate the ban on assault weapons and to ban high capacity magazines (clips holding more than ten rounds). Most of the media attention went to two celebrities who testified, former Representative Gabrielle Giffords and NRA president Wayne LaPierre. All three witnesses who argued against the bill maintained that assault weapons are needed by law-abiding citizens for self-defense in the event of an attack by armed criminals. However, as Senator Sheldon Whitehead (D-RI) pointed out, none of the anecdotes of successful self-defense involved an assault weapon or high-capacity magazine. They all utilized traditional weapons such as pistols or shotguns, access to which is not threatened by the legislation.

However, the pro-gun lobby's imagination is not constrained by reality, so one of the witnesses, Gayle Trotter of the Independent Women's Forum, entertained the Senators with the following hypothetical scenario:

An assault weapon in the hands of a young woman defending her babies in her home becomes a defense weapon. And the peace of mind that a woman has as she's facing three, four, five violent attackers, intruders in her home, with her children screaming in the background, the peace of mind that she has knowing that she has a scary-looking gun gives her more courage when she's fighting hardened, violent criminals. If we ban these weapons, you are putting women at a great disadvantage . . .

Appeals to unlikely scenarios should be evaluated by assessing the positive or negative consequences put forward in the scenario, weighted by their probability of occurrence—which in an unlikely scenario is low. They are compared to the positive or negative consequences of the alternative course of action, in this case, not banning assault weapons, weighted by their probability of occurrence. The conclusion is obvious.

Unfortunately for Ms. Trotter, she agreed to be interviewed on The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell last night. He effectively deconstructed her argument and made her look quite silly.

Another example of the mischief done by appeals to unlikely scenarios is the defense of torture which asks us to imagine that we have captured a terrorist who refuses to tell us the location of a bomb which will kill a large number of people. Given limited time, would we not torture him to find the bomb? One of the reason people find these unlikely scenarios to be plausible is that they are often presented in fictional films and television programs, and we later remember these stories as having been true.

Play It Again, Sam

Last week, a letter to the editor in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette attributed the Newtown, CT massacre to the Supreme Court's ban of state-sponsored prayer in public schools. It elicited the following reply, which I think is worth repeating:

Where was God?

Gloria Thibault's Jan. 22 letter “Pray Instead” implies that putting God back in schools would protect children from violence. If this is true, why hasn't God protected children from predators and pedophiles in churches?

Kenneth L. Kaufman

Bethel Park

The Open and Closed Mind

More than three years after Sarah Palin made the false claim that the Affordable Care Act included “death panels” that would decide whether people would receive life-saving medical treatment, 40% of Americans still believe it. A new experiment by Brendan Nyhan, Jason Reifman and Peter Ubel considers the death panel myth in the context of the perseverance effect, a cognitive error in which people's beliefs about reality persist even though the evidence on which they were based has been discredited.

In one perseverance study, participants tried to distinguish between real and fake suicide notes. In fact, regardless of what they said, half the people were told they were right most of the time (the “success” condition), while the others were usually told they were wrong (the “failure” condition). Later, the participants were debriefed. It was explained that the feedback was false and that they had been randomly assigned to success and failure conditions. Even though they understood the debriefing, the “successful” people still believed they were better at the task than those who had “failed” thought they were.

Perseverance affects people's reactions to scientific studies that support or contradict their beliefs. Another experiment involved students with contrasting attitudes, some who believed that capital punishment was a deterrent to murder and others who rejected this claim. People in both groups read summaries of two fictitious studies, one which supported the deterrence hypothesis and one which didn't. You might think reading mixed evidence would lead people to moderate their beliefs. However, both pro- and anti-deterrence participants became more convinced of their original beliefs—a backfire effect. The two groups' beliefs became more polarized.

Perseverance studies seem to suggest that fact-checking politically biased claims is a losing effort. Recent research suggests that more educated and well-informed people show greater perseverance, since having more information allows them to explain away contradictory findings more easily. The Nyhan study is in that tradition. Here is Dr. Ubel explaining the study.

The chart below shows the results. On the left are the low knowledge participants. Without the correction, those who liked Palin believed the death panel myth, but the rebuttal was effective in disabusing them of this belief. However, the high knowledge Palin supporters believed the death panel myth more with the correction than without it. The correction backfired.

Just a word of caution. I was fully prepared to believe this study; however, the more I thought about it, the more I sympathized with the high information Palin supporters. The rebuttal to Palin's claim read (in its entirely) as follows:

However, non-partisan health care experts have concluded that Palin is wrong. The bill in the House of Representatives would require Medicare to pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling sessions, but there is no panel in any of the health care bills in Congress that judges a person's “level of productivity in society” to determine whether they are “worthy” of health care.

Should a well-informed Republican really be satisfied with this rebuttal? If I were in their shoes, I might want to ask some additional questions. Who are these “non-partisan experts?” The correction addresses Palin's claim about end-of-life counseling, but what about the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, which is charged with evaluating the effectiveness of medical treatments, and the Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board, which is supposed to refuse to pay for expensive but ineffective treatments? How much indirect control will they have over the treatment patients actually receive? I personally hope these groups will help to eliminate wasteful procedures, but since they haven't met yet, we don't really know.

I'm not questioning the existence of perseverance, or that it makes researchers' lives a lot more difficult. However, another way to read this study is that well-informed people may require more detailed counterarguments than these authors provided.

Old-Fashioned Racism

A new study published by Michael Tesler in the Journal of Politics suggests that, for the first time in many years, old-fashioned racism is having an effect on party preference and voting behavior in the United States. Specifically, old-fashioned racists are more likely to be Republicans and vote for Republican candidates.

Old-fashioned racism (OFR) refers to the endorsement of statements that are obviously and blatantly racist, such as the belief that blacks are genetically inferior to whites, that blacks and whites should be segregated and maintain social distance from one another. OFR has declined steadily in this country since World War II. The most likely reason is that OFR has always been positively related to age. Old-fashioned racists have not changed their attitudes; they have died. Another contributing factor in the decline of OFR is that it has become less socially acceptable to state obviously prejudiced attitudes in a survey.

Sometimes the mass media present the decline of OFR as evidence that prejudice is no longer a problem in this country. However, OFR has been gradually replaced by modern (or symbolic) racism (also known as racial resentment). Modern racism is prejudice revealed in subtle, indirect ways, such as the claim that blacks do not respect traditional American values, or in opposition to social policies perceived to help black people. It allows people to express beliefs and endorse policies that are harmful to African-Americans, but still deny being prejudiced. Modern racism has been related to voting behavior and party preference ever since the civil rights era. Richard Nixon's “Southern strategy” was designed to help the Republican party to take advantage of racial resentment, and the strategy remains successful today.

Tesler begins his article by noting that OFR has never been related to white Americans' partisan preferences in the post-civil rights era. Although modern racists have tended to vote Republican, old-fashioned racists have been evenly distibuted among the two parties. However, that appears to have changed since Barack Obama became president in 2008. To make this point, Tesler presents three studies.

The first study looked at the effect of OFR on candidate preference in the 2008 election. Tesler reanalyzed data collected by the Pew Research Center in early 2008. In this study, OFR was measured by endorsement of items stating that whites and blacks should not date or intermarry, an undeniably racist belief still held by about half the white population. The study asked participants their preferences in two hypothetical presidential contests, John McCain vs. Hilary Clinton, and John McCain vs. Barack Obama. Results showed that OFR had a significantly greater effect on the McCain-Obama contest than the McCain-Clinton matchup. The difference between those highest and lowest in OFR was 10% on the McCain-Clinton question, but 35% on the McCain-Obama question. This difference was statistically reliable even after controlling for the effects of party preference, political ideology and modern racism.

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The remaining two studies looked at the spillover effect, sometimes referred to as the racialization of politics. It refers to the possibility that racial attitudes will affect political behavior in contexts having nothing obviously to do with race. For example, since President Obama is associated with health care reform, the spillover effect predicts that old-fashioned racists will oppose the Affordable Care Act, even after controlling for the influences of party preference, political ideology and modern racism. 

In Study 2, the Pew data were used to examine the relationship between OFR and party preference from 1987 through 2009. From 1987 through 2007, there was no significant relationship between OFR and partisanship. However, in 2009, there was a significant association between OFR and self-identification as a Republican. Further analysis showed that, consistent with the spillover hypothesis, this relationship is mediated by attitudes toward President Obama. That is, when the effect of evaluation of President Obama is statistically removed, the association between OFR and partisanship disappears. (See my earlier post for a more thorough explanation of mediation.)

Finally, Tesler did a survey of his own in which respondents were asked to state their preference for candidates for the House of Representatives in the midterm election of 2010. This study contained a manipulation designed to test the spillover hypothesis. Before stating their voting preference, a randomly selected half of the respondents were reminded that President Obama had been campaigning for Democratic candidates in the midterm election and asked whether this affected their preference. This reminder, called the “Obama prime,” was omitted for the other participants. Without the Obama prime, OFR had no effect on voting intentions in the midterm election. However, with the Obama prime, those highest in OFR were 13% less likely to prefer the Democatic candidate than those lowest in OFR.

It is important to note that Tesler is not saying that OFR has increased in recent years. As far as I know, it is still slowly declining. However, prior to 2008, old-fashioned racists were randomly distributed among the two political parties. Since many of them are what are euphemistically called “low information voters,” some of them self-identified as independents. The effect of the Obama presidency and related changes in the political culture, such as the rise of the Tea Party, has been to drive these folks into the Republican party. Thus, being a Republican is now associated not only with modern racism but with OFR as well. Since party identification tends to persist throughout the life cycle, this realignment may affect our politics long after Obama's presidency. Tesler also predicts an increase in overtly racist rhetoric, since it is now useful in mobilizing the Republican base.

Legalized Bribery

Ever wonder why health care costs so much in this country, and why we get such poor outcomes in return? Here's a small piece of the puzzle.

The New York Times reports that an obscure paragraph in the recent “fiscal cliff” bill extends a delay in implementation of Medicare price controls on Sensipar, a drug used by kidney dialysis patients, for two years. The drug is manufactured by Amgen. The delay will cost Medicare—and ultimately taxpayers—$500 million. The section of the bill (Section 762) is not tranparent and does not mention Amgen by name. It's one of many examples of pork that are buried in a bill that was supposed to reduce the deficit.

Here are the details. Currently, Medicare pays for dialysis drugs individually. They determined that this created an incentive to overprescribe medication that was useless and possibly harmful. The change, now postponed, was that Medicare would pay a single, bundled rate for dialysis treatment.  That was a threat to Amgen's profits.

According to the Times, this decision was made by Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), the ranking Republican on the committee. It was subsequently approved by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Vice President Joe Biden, who negotiated the “fiscal cliff” agreement. Amgen has made over $5 million in political contributions since 2007, including $67,750 to Senator Baucus, $59,000 to Senator Hatch, $73,000 to Senator McConnell, and $141,000 to President Obama's two presidential campaigns.

Sen. Mitch McConnell
(or possibly a turtle)

The Times quotes aides to Senators Baucus and Hatch and an Amgen spokesperson as saying that the delay was justified because it would “give Medicare and health care providers the time they need to accommodate complicated changes in federal reimbursement for kidney care.” The price restraints were originally scheduled to begin in 2012. Congress granted Amgen a two year delay until 2014. The “fiscal cliff” bill extends that delay until 2016. How much time do they need?

An aide to Senator Baucus added that, “What is the best policy for Montanans and people across the country is at the heart of every decision Chairman Baucus makes.” But none of the people contacted attempted to justify the decision on medical grounds.

Amgen is the world's largest biotech corporation, with $15.6 billion in revenue in 2011. It has 74 lobbyists in Washington, including former chiefs of staff of both Senators Baucus and McConnell. Senator Hatch's leading staff member on health care policy is a former Amgen employee.

On December 19, Amgen pleaded guilty to illegally marketing Aranesp, an anti-anemia drug, for purposes the FDA had explicitly not approved. The $762 million settlement was a new record for a biotech company.

I think incidents like this pose a serious threat for single-payer advocates. One of the major arguments against single payer, which resonates strongly with the general public, is that the federal government can't be trusted to run a health care system that will provide quality medical care at a reasonable price. We usually try to counter that argument by pointing out that all other countries with single-payer systems achieve better health outcomes than we do at lower cost.

However, the United States is not like other industrialized countries. It's possible that our level of political corruption is so much higher than other countries as to make us not comparable to them. If so, it's impossible to predict how single payer would fare in this country. Of course, despite our corruption, Medicare is still cheaper than private insurance. However, if Congress ever passes a single payer bill, it is important that it contain safeguards that insulate the system from corporate and political interference.

Update (1/31/13)

The liberal organization Progressives United has latched onto this story and is asking people to sign a petition to the CEO of Amgen asking him to give back the $500 million. (Good luck on that!) The petition can be found here.

Coursera

You should be aware of a valuable resource that you can take advantage of free of charge on the internet. Coursera describes itself as a “social entrepreneurship company,” which makes college courses available online. They are offering 214 courses (so far) in virtually all academic fields, taught by professors at 33 universities.

Right now, I'm in my ninth week of a 12-week course, “Think Again: How to Reason and Argue,” taught by two philosophy professors, Walter Sinott-Armstrong of Duke University and Ram Neta of the University of North Carolina. There are three to nine video lectures each week. Each lecture is followed by an ungraded quiz. There are four graded tests, which determine whether you pass the course and get a certificate. If you flunk a test, you can retake an alternate version. There are discussion forums with other students. The textbook is optional, and I seem to be doing fine without it. Other courses are structured differently. Some require papers. The difficulty level seems to be comparable to a typical undergraduate course. I'm spending about an hour a day on average in this course.

There are several courses about health care policy. I'm planning to take “Health Policy and the Affordable Care Act,” taught by Ezekial Emanuel of the University of Pennsylvania. I'm also looking forward to “Introduction to Sustainability,” with Jonathan Tomkin of the University of Illinois.

Is anyone interested in social psychology? You could take “Social Psychology” with Scott Plous of Wesleyan University, or you could take “A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior,” taught by social psychologist Dan Ariely of Duke. I recommend both instructors. As a jazz fan, I'm intrigued by “Introduction to Improvisation,” by vibraphonist Gary Burton. Unfortunately, I don't play an instrument.

Lurking in the background is the question of how these “entrepreneurs” plan to make money out of this website. According to the New York Times, two possibilities are to charge colleges and universities for allowing their students to take these courses for credit, or to charge students whose universities will accept these courses as transfer credits. Of course, its also possible that they will start to charge their internet consumers directly. In the meantime, this is one of the greatest bargains on the web.

Once Upon a Time in the South

Quentin Tarantino's films are not just about characters and events. They are movies about other movies, drawing on Tarantino's broad familiarity with films of various genres, countries and time periods. Django Unchained is, among other things, a tribute to “spaghetti westerns,” and I love it in part because I'm a fan of that genre. (The Django Unchained entry on the Internet Movie Data Base contains a list of “connections” between it and previous films. It is incomplete.)

There were over 600 westerns made in Europe in the '60s and '70s, with mostly Italian casts and crews and Spanish locations. They differ fundamentally from American westerns in style and ideology. Stylistic differences include self-consciously artistic photography, crisp editing used to expand or compress time, and the stirring musical scores of Ennio Morricone and his imitators. Ideological differences include a greater willingness to address political themes, usually from a socialist perspective. (Some critics mistakenly claim that European westerns are more violent than the American variety. It's true that they usually have a higher body count, but the geysers of blood in Django Unchained are actually copied from American films such as Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969).)

One of the most internationally successful Italian westerns was Sergio Corbucci's Django (1966). Because the name was not copyrighted, it spawned over 30 “sequels,” the best being Django, Kill! and Django the Bastard, which was remade (without attribution) by Clint Eastwood as High Plains Drifter. Here's the Django Unchained trailer. The man who asks Django (Jamie Foxx) his name is the Italian actor Franco Nero, star of the original Django.

The opening title of Django Unchained says “1858—Two years before the Civil War.” Some people have assumed this was a blooper, but my interpretation is that Tarantino was warning us not to expect what follows to be literally true. But fiction can sometimes come closer to the abstract truth than an accurate presentation of historical events. I believe Django Unchained is a more accurate retelling of the end of slavery than Lincoln. Lincoln portrays African-Americans as passive beneficiaries of the actions of a white saviors. While Django clearly benefits from the help of “Dr. King” Schultz (Christoph Waltz), Tarantino's hero is a black gunslinger whose goal is to free his wife, and who frees other slaves along the way.

A major part of the appeal of Django Unchained is that Django takes violent revenge on his oppressors, which is why it is claimed that only a white director could have made this film. (Black director Spike Lee's most radical film was Bamboozled, which is about media portrayal of blacks. You haven't seen it? Surprise! It was buried by the studio that produced it.) We could argue about whether Tarantino was able to make this film because he is white or because he has a proven track record of success. It is clear that the Weinstein Company thought they could raise their middle finger to the South and still make money on this film. They were right.

There is one thing that makes me uncomfortable about Django Unchained—its relentlessly negative depiction of white Southerners of all social classes as outrageously prejudiced scumbags who treat black people with sadistic cruelty. Don't get me wrong. I believe this portrayal is basically true. I don't question Tarantino's claim that he could have filmed even more graphic real incidents of torture. It's also true that regional differences in racial attitudes still exist, and that they are the basis of the Republicans' Southern strategy that has poisoned our political culture for the last 50 years.

However, this portrayal of Southern whites not-so-subtly suggests that slavery was a result of white people hating black people. This is a compositional fallacy, and is no more true than it would be to claim that the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003 because Americans hated Iraqis. It is misleading in two important ways.

• As implied by the theory of cognitive dissonance, dislike of African-Americans is more likely to be an effect of slavery than its cause. If you are going to treat human beings as property, you have to convince yourself that they deserve to suffer. You have to dehumanize them.

• It obscures the fact that the primary motive for slavery was economic. Slavery was as important part of the U. S. economy. It made the South the richest and most powerful region in the country. The brutality and torture portrayed in Django Unchained were intended primarily to ensure that production was not disrupted, which would have been bad for business.

Can Tarantino be blamed for not delivering an economic history lesson? Probably not. Interpersonal conflict is easier to portray in films than structural inequality, and audiences can be counted on to find it more interesting. In fact, it's hard to think of many films that have convincingly educated us about the deeper social and economic structures that automatically influence our behavior.

Enjoy!

Appendix

Like all film genres, spaghetti westerns include a few great films, many good ones, a majority that are mediocre, and some that are really bad. (Some of them were made so cheaply and quickly that they lack even the most basic continuity.) Most of the 600+ spaghetti westerns are not available on DVD in this country. Here are a dozen of them (actually 14) that you can probably find and should check out if you get a chance.

1. The Big Gundown (1966)--director, Sergio Sollima; actors, Lee Van Cleef, Tomas Milian.
2. A Bullet For the General (1966)--d. Damiano Damiani; Gian Maria Volonte, Lou Castel, Martine Beswick, Klaus Kinski.
3. Companeros (1970)--d. Sergio Corbucci; Franco Nero, Tomas Milian, Jack Palance.
4. Django (1966)--d. Sergio Corbucci; Franco Nero.
5. Django, Kill! (If You Live, Shoot) (1967)--d. Giulio Questi; Tomas Milian.
6. The Dollars Trilogy—d. Sergio Leone [A Fistful of Dollars (1964)--Clint Eastwood, Gian Maria Volonte; For a Few Dollars More (1965)--Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Gian Maria Volonte; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)--Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, Eli Wallach.]
7. Face to Face (1967)--d. Sergio Sollima—Gian Maria Volonte, Tomas Milian.
8. The Great Silence (1968)--d. Sergio Corbucci; Jean-Louis Trintignant, Klaus Kinski.
9. The Mercenary [aka, A Professsional Gun] (1968)--d. Sergio Corbucci; Franco Nero, Tony Musante, Jack Palance.
10. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)--d. Sergio Leone; Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, Jason Robards.
11. The Price of Power (1969)--d. Tonino Valerii; Giuliano Gemma.
12. Requiescant [aka, Kill and Pray] (1967)--d. Carlo Lizzani; Lou Castel, Mark Damon, Pier Paolo Pasolini.

For what it's worth, probably nothing, Once Upon a Time in the West is my all-time favorite film.

Get the Lead Out, Part 2

Part 1 of this post concerns the relationship between lead in the environment and the rate of violent crime. Please read it before continuing.

The lead hypothesis helps us to understand additional facts about violent crime. For example, the crime rate has been higher in urban areas, probably due to the greater concentration of motor vehicles in large cities. Now that lead has been removed from gasoline, the crime rates in big and small cities have converged. The lead hypothesis also sheds light on black-white differences in crime. Black children have blood lead levels that are on average 50% higher than white children, since African-Americans typically live in inner-city locations where traffic is dense and there is less pressure on slumlords to clean up the lead in their buildings.

Of course, there will be resistance to the lead hypothesis from the criminologists, who think of crime as a sociological rather than an ecological problem. The law enforcement establishment would like to claim that police procedures, such as those that follow from the broken windows hypothesis, or the fact that we are putting more people in jail for longer times are responsible for the change.

Although the amount of lead in the environment has dropped, we are far from rid of this toxic element. Lead paint can still be found around the windows of older homes. Where it is highly concentrated in the soil, it must be removed. Prevention is always superior to remediation, especially when the behavior in question causes significant human suffering. However, lead abatement is worth doing on economic grounds alone. Drum cites estimates that replacing old windows and cleaning up lead saturated soil would cost $20 billion per year for 20 years. He assumes that this would reduce crime an additional 10%, which would save $150 billion per year. He also adds $60 billion per year for the higher income children would have had their intelligence not been reduced by lead. These figures are speculative, but if correct, that's a net savings of almost $200 billion per year. To put that in perspective, President Obama's proposal to increase the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 would save the government $24 billion per year—although it would cost seniors at lot more, since they would have to buy private insurance.

As David Roberts has pointed out, the history of lead abatement is typical of how we deal with many other environmental pollutants. In this country, corporations are permitted to introduce potentially toxic substances into the environment without first proving that they are safe. In other words, we ignore the precautionary principle. Once the substance is in use, it is up to the public to prove that it is harmful in order to have it banned. The university scientists and public interest groups that might do the necessary research are typically underfunded, and the burden of proof that they must meet is extraordinarily high. Corporate polluters generate as much confusion as they can about the scientific evidence in order to forestall regulation, and exaggerate the economic costs of making necessary changes. Meanwhile, people are getting sick and dying. If the corporations are finally forced to remove the pollutant, the costs almost always turn out to be much lower than predicted, and the benefits much greater. As a final step, the corporations responsible for the pollution take out television ads congratulating themselves for making the changes that they so strongly resisted.

Hope and Change

I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over. I have done more than any other candidate in this race to take on the lobbyists—and won. They have not funded my campaign, they will not fund my White House, and they will not drown out the voices of the American people when I am President.

                                                                                       Barack Obama (2007)

Four years ago, President Obama talked about changing business as usual in Washington. Consistent with this pledge, he banned corporate and union contributions to his inauguration. He also published the names of individual donors and the amounts of their contributions. Individual gifts were limited to $50,000.

Change has come to the Obama administration. This year, the fundraising goal was $50 million, and the ban on corporate and union contributions was lifted. The upper limits for "sponsorship" are $250,000 for individuals and $1 million for institutions.  Corporations such as Exxon-Mobil, Microsoft, AT&T, Bank of America, and unions such as the American Federation of Government Employees, are paying to play. Many of them are federal contractors, or have immediate business pending with government agencies, i.e., United Therapeutics, which has a new drug awaiting FDA approval "within the next four years.". How much are they paying?  This year the donors are listed, but not the amounts of their gifts. 

Now there's a change you can believe in!

Get the Lead Out, Part 1

The rate of violent crime in this country has been declining for decades, and although there several plausible hypotheses, no one really knows why. Kevin Drum argues in the January Mother Jones that changes in lead emissions from automobiles have been the primary influence on violent crime in this country. Why didn't I think of that?

Here's the argument, in brief. Violent crime began to increase in the '60s, peaked in the early '90s, and has been declining ever since. Neither demographic changes, i.e., increases and decreases in the number of young men, nor changes in the economy can fully explain this pattern. Lead in the environment comes from two major sources: lead paint, which was gradually phased out during the last century, and gasoline. Following World War II, Americans began driving a lot more, and the oil companies added lead to gasoline, allegedly to improve engine performance. In the mid-'70s, due to evidence that lead exposure reduced I. Q., government forced the oil companies to switch to lead-free gasoline. Lead has its greatest influence on the developing brains of children. The results of lead on violent behavior becomes apparent when people are in their early twenties. Here are the data (originally compiled by by Rick Nevin) showing the relationship between the concentration of lead in the environment and the rate of violent crime 23 years later.

It's obvious that there is a correlation. But like many social scientists, I've spent my career telling students that “correlation does not mean causation.” Whenever a variable, A (lead), is correlated with another variable, B (violent crime), there are three possibilities: A causes B, B causes A, or some third variable, C, is responsible for the apparent relationship between them. Since no one is arguing that violent crime causes lead to be deposited in the environment, the real issue is whether confounding variables (Cs) have been ruled out.

Correlational arguments can be strong or weak. They are relatively strong if they have been replicated using several different data sets and research methods, and if alternative explanations can be ruled out. The two primary methods of determining whether a social policy, such as lead abatement, influences a behavioral variable are time series and comparison group designs. In a time series design, you look at whether a change in the policy is followed, at an appropriate interval, by a change in the behavior. Those are the data in the above graph.

In a comparison group design, you compare different spatial locations that have different levels of the presumed cause to see whether they also have different incidences of the presumed effect. The switch to unleaded gasoline was not uniform among the 50 states. Reyes found that states that switched to unleaded sooner saw their violent crime rate drop sooner. Nevin has examined the relationship between lead and crime in several countries, and has found that lead predicts differences in crime rates both within and between nations. Mielke has compared lead concentrations in various U. S. cities with the same results. Mielke has also measured lead concentration in New Orleans soil samples—which is quite unevenly distributed. He finds that it predicts crime rates at the neighborhood level. There are also data relating the crime rate to the distance one lives from a major highway.

Turning to alternative explanations, all these studies do a reasonable job of statistically controlling for confounding variables such as race, gender, socioeconomic status, family demographics, and unemployment rates. Of course, the number of possible alternative explanations is theoretically infinite, so you can never anticipate all of them. It is important to note that these researchers are not suggesting that lead is the only variable that influences violent crime, only that it is much more important than has been generally realized.

The relationship between lead and violent crime has been confirmed at the individual level in longitudinal studies. Researchers at the University of Cincinnati have followed a cohort of children for 30 years. Those with higher levels of lead in their bloodstreams as children are more likely to be arrested for violent crimes as adults. Lead exposure is also related to lower I. Q., attention deficit disorder, and higher rates of teen pregnancy.

Furthermore, plausible physiological mechanisms to explain the lead hypothesis have been proposed. The Cincinnati group compared the MRI brain scans of adults who had high or low lead exposure as children. Those exposed to more lead had less gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain associated with “executive function”—attention, verbal reasoning and impulse control. They also have a thinner myelin sheath around the synapses which connect adjacent neurons, suggesting that their communication channels within the brain are slower and less reliable.

Tomorrow:  Part 2

I'm Back

In August, I broke my hip—an injury I recommend that you all avoid, if possible. While the forced inactivity of recuperating from a broken hip might seem like an ideal time to blog, the injury had an unfortunate effect on my morale.

The experience hasn't been a total loss. I learned how unpleasant it is to be partially helpless. Being an invalid is at least a part-time job. My physical therapy routine takes a couple of hours each day, and routine tasks like showering and dressing were originally a chore. Most importantly, you need a lot of help and support. Thank you, Tina.

I also learned a few things about our health care system. I'm finding out how much everything costs. (Fortunately, it will almost all be covered.) I received a fair amount of overtreatment. Some of it can be attributed to an excess of caution, i.e., my hip was X-rayed far too many times. Other charges are simply bill-padding, i.e., the general practitioner who sticks his head in your hospital room for 15 seconds each morning to ask how you're feeling. Cost: $115 per day, $68.39 of which was actually paid ($54.71 by Medicare and $13.68 by me).

Finally, this was my first sustained experience with opiates and their side effects. While it's unrealistic to think I could have gotten through this injury without painkillers, at some point you have to stop taking the medication. I finally broke the habit due to a misunderstanding with my doctor. He implied that after I stopped taking the pills, he would allow me to drive. He didn't, but being able to feel my pain—and when it was going away—was a good thing at the time.

I've been driving for quite a while now, and I'm getting around pretty well with the aid of a cane, but when I go without it, I still walk with a limp. Full recovery is supposed to take 6 to 8 months, so I'll be seeing some of you in the Spring.

In addition to resuming Thinking Slowly, I'm also hoping to realize my intention of starting a blog about jazz and blues music. I call it Blues and the Abstract Truth, and  here's where you can find it. My posts may be intermittent for a while, but I hope to eventually get both blogs up to speed. Please bear with me.