The explosive growth of molecular sequence data has made it possible to estimate species divergence times under relaxed-clock models using genome-scale datasets with many gene loci. In order both to improve model realism and to best extract information about relative divergence times in the sequence data, it is important to account for the heterogeneity in the evolutionary process across genes or genomic regions. Partitioning is a commonly used approach to achieve those goals. We group sites that have similar evolutionary characteristics into the same partition and those with different characteristics into different partitions, and then use different models or different values of model parameters for different partitions to account for the among-partition heterogeneity. However, how to partition data in practical phylogenetic analysis, and in particular in relaxed-clock dating analysis, is more art than science. Here, we use computer simulation and real data analysis to study the impact of the partition scheme on divergence time estimation. The partition schemes had relatively minor effects on the accuracy of posterior time estimates when the prior assumptions were correct and the clock was not seriously violated, but showed large differences when the clock was seriously violated, when the fossil calibrations were in conflict or incorrect, or when the rate prior was mis-specified. Concatenation produced the widest posterior intervals with the least precision. Use of many partitions increased the precision, as predicted by the infinite-sites theory, but the posterior intervals might fail to include the true ages because of the conflicting fossil calibrations or mis-specified rate priors. We analyzed a dataset of 78 plastid genes from 15 plant species with serious clock violation and showed that time estimates differed significantly among partition schemes, irrespective of the rate drift model used. Multiple and precise fossil calibrations reduced the differences among partition schemes and were important to improving the precision of divergence time estimates. While the use of many partitions is an important approach to reducing the uncertainty in posterior time estimates, we do not recommend its general use for the present, given the limitations of current models of rate drift for partitioned data and the challenges of interpreting the fossil evidence to construct accurate and informative calibrations.

The paper illustrates the recent trends in the use of contract staff and in staff turnover in the Italian education system, traditionally plagued by high levels of job insecurity and turnover. The system has been affected by the extraordinary scheme for hiring permanent teachers in 2015 and a mobility and reallocation plan the following year. The number of people on the national list of untenured teachers (frozen about 10 years ago) shrank from 124,000 to 47,000 (to which we should, however, add another 34,000 teachers added to a reserve list following a judgment by the State Council). The use of contract staff remained largely unchanged: the number of annual job contracts rose from 118,000 to 126,000, and fell from 14.6 to 14.4% as a share of total staff, the numbers of which have grown in the meantime. The share of those on the local lists of supply teachers (yet not required to follow a postgraduate internship program) increased among teachers with a yearly contract, who are on average younger than before. Staff mobility and turnover rose sharply, regardless of problems with implementation which led to a considerable rise in staff reassignment in the last school year.

<span class="paragraphSection"><div class="boxTitle">Abstract</div>Herpes simplex viruses 1 and 2 (HSV-1 and HSV-2) are seen as close relatives but also unambiguously considered as evolutionary independent units. Here, we sequenced the genomes of 18 HSV-2 isolates characterized by divergent UL30 gene sequences to further elucidate the evolutionary history of this virus. Surprisingly, genome-wide recombination analyses showed that all HSV-2 genomes sequenced to date contain HSV-1 fragments. Using phylogenomic analyses, we could also show that two main HSV-2 lineages exist. One lineage is mostly restricted to sub-Saharan Africa while the other has reached a global distribution. Interestingly, only the worldwide lineage is characterized by ancient recombination events with HSV-1. Our findings highlight the complexity of HSV-2 evolution, a virus of putative zoonotic origin which later recombined with its human-adapted relative. They also suggest that co-infections with HSV-1 and 2 may have genomic and potentially functional consequences and should therefore be monitored more closely.</span>

<span class="paragraphSection"><div class="boxTitle">Abstract</div>Phylogenomics, the use of large-scale data matrices in phylogenetic analyses, has been viewed as the ultimate solution to the problem of resolving difficult nodes in the tree of life. However, it has become clear that analyses of these large genomic datasets can also result in conflicting estimates of phylogeny. Here we use the early divergences in Neoaves, the largest clade of extant birds, as a ‘model system’ to understand the basis for incongruence among phylogenomic trees. We were motivated by the observation that trees from two recent avian phylogenomic studies exhibit conflicts. Those studies used different strategies: 1) collecting many characters [∼42 mega base pairs (Mbp) of sequence data] from 48 birds, sometimes including only one taxon for each major clade; and 2) collecting fewer characters (∼0.4 Mbp) from 198 birds, selected to subdivide long branches. However, the studies also used different data types: the taxon-poor data matrix comprised 68% non-coding sequences whereas coding exons dominated the taxon-rich data matrix. This difference raises the question of whether the primary reason for incongruence is the number of sites, the number of taxa, or the data type. To test among these alternative hypotheses we assembled a novel, large-scale data matrix comprising 90% non-coding sequences from 235 bird species. Although increased taxon sampling appeared to have a positive impact on phylogenetic analyses the most important variable was data type. Indeed, by analyzing different subsets of the taxa in our data matrix we found that increased taxon sampling actually resulted in increased congruence with the tree from the previous taxon-poor study (which had a majority of non-coding data) instead of the taxon-rich study (which largely used coding data). We suggest that the observed differences in the estimates of topology for these studies reflect data-type effects due to violations of the models used in phylogenetic analyses, some of which may be difficult to detect. If incongruence among trees estimated using phylogenomic methods largely reflects problems with model fit developing more ‘biologically-realistic’ models is likely to be critical for efforts to reconstruct the tree of life.</span>

Metropolis algorithms for approximate sampling of probability measures on infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces are considered and a generalization of the preconditioned Crank-Nicolson (pCN) proposal is introduced. The new proposal is able to incorporate information of the measure of interest. A numerical simulation of a Bayesian inverse problem indicates that a Metropolis algorithm with such a proposal performs independent of the state space dimension and the variance of the observational noise. Moreover, a qualitative convergence result is provided by a comparison argument for spectral gaps. In particular, it is shown that the generalization inherits geometric ergodicity from the Metropolis algorithm with pCN proposal.

We count the number of alignments of $N \ge 1$ sequences when match-up types are from a specified set $S\subseteq \mathbb{N}^N$. Equivalently, we count the number of nonnegative integer matrices whose rows sum to a given fixed vector and each of whose columns lie in $S$. We provide a new asymptotic formula for the case $S=\{(s_1,\ldots,s_N) \:|\: 1\le s_i\le 2\}$.

We all know that homeopathy is a complete scam. Its conceptual basis alone renders it at once laughable and scary, while studies of its efficacy always show nothing above placebo effects. And yet the stuff is sold where apparently intelligent people shop, including Whole Foods and the Davis, California Food Coop, a place I used to shop as a postdoc. The homeopathic “remedies” in those places also make health claims, something that I always thought was illegal.

Well, according to both DeadState and BuzzFeed (the latter is apparently getting more serious), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the US is set to take some regulatory action. The BuzzFeed piece, by Dan Vergano (who used to be my editor at USA Today), is actually quite good, giving, along with the news, a history of homeopathy and the evidence that it doesn’t work. An excerpt:

Homeopathic drugs are not subject to much regulatory scrutiny. The FDA ensures that their manufacturing facilities are clean, but the products are not evaluated for their health claims. (This is even less regulation than what’s required for dietary supplements, vitamins, herbs, and minerals, which face some limits on the health claims they can make.)

But that may change. This month, both the FDA, which oversees drug safety, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which oversees drug ads, will end lengthy public comment periods that followed hearings on homeopathy. The FTC [Federal Trade Commission] smacked its sister drug-safety agency in public comments in August, calling for the FDA to crack down on homeopathic products, which “may harm consumers.”

About damn time! The harm is not just that they sometimes contain stuff that can actually harm people (like high levels of ethanol, or, in teething tablets, toxic levels of belladonna), but also that they can eat up time when sick people resort to ineffective homeopathic nostrums instead of scientific cures. (I’ve described already how a French friend with salivary-gland cancer tried to treat it homeopathically, but it got worse and he finally needed an operation. He appears to be okay now, thank Ceiling Cat).

But of course the quackery has its defenders, as always:

Still, homeopathy’s supporters say these remedies have a much better safety record than conventional drugs, along with millions of satisfied customers.

“We believe they are proven to be effective and extremely safe,” Ronald Whitmont, an internist at the New York Medical College and president of the American Institute of Homeopathy, told BuzzFeed News. The institute has been around since 1844 (longer than the American Medical Association), publishes its own research journal, and has certified dozens of physicians as “homeotherapeutics” specialists.

. . . But both Whitmont and Mark Land, president of the American Association of Homeopathic Pharmacists, support FDA and FTC moves to change the labels on homeopathic drugs and advertising to acknowledge they haven’t been tested for efficacy, similar to dietary supplements.

That would still keep homeopathic drugs on pharmacy shelves, however. Homeopathy “historically relies on recommendations from highly satisfied customers to influence sales,” Land told BuzzFeed News by email. “It’s an outstanding example of the U.S. free market.”

No, it’s an outstanding example of how unethical companies take example of people’s ignorance and credulity. It’s time to remove all claims of efficacy from these “drugs”, slap big warning labels on them, or, best yet, just remove them from pharmacy shelves. Companies like Whole Foods that sell homeopathic remedies should be ashamed of themselves.

h/t: Barry

For a long time I’ve thought that many of the senior science writers of the New York Times have outlived their usefulness. It might not be a function of age, but simply poor quality journalism. Regardless, the Times could use a serious shake-up in its science section.

Happily, one of their senior writers, Nicholas Wade, retired in 2012, but he still writes occasionally for the paper, and he recently published a shamefully bigoted and ignorant book on human races, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (see the critical reviews in the Times itself, as well as in the New York Review of Books by my first student, Allen Orr).

And in the December 22 Wall Street Journal, Wade once again shows his failure to grasp my own field in a review of Bill Nye’s new book on the evidence for evolution, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation.  Wade’s review, called “Bill Nye, the Darwin Guy“, is deficient on a number of counts. I’ll highlight three (Wade’s piece is short):

1. What Wade considers the “most direct” and “most undeniable” evidence for evolution is dubious.  Curiously, Wade touts that evidence as some molecular data on gene substitutions:

Mr. Nye writes briskly and accessibly. He favors short, sound-bitey sentences. He is good on the geological and fossil evidence for evolution, reflecting his background in the physical sciences, but devotes less attention to changes in DNA, which furnish the most direct evidence of evolution. A recent paper in the journal PLOS Genetics, for instance, describes the seven DNA mutations that occurred over the past 90 million years in the gene that specifies the light-detecting protein of the retina. These mutations shifted the protein’s sensitivity from ultraviolet to blue, the first step in adapting a nocturnal animal to daytime vision and in generating the three-color vision of the human eye. Such insights into nature’s actual programming language are surely the most undeniable part of evolution at work.

I haven’t read the PLoS Genetics paper, but I’ve been told that it involves using mutation-making technology to alter visual proteins, and then seeing which amino acids that have changed also alter the perception of different wavelengths of light.

But that kind of stuff has been going on for a long time, and it’s hardly “direct”. While it does support natural selection, it’s somewhat inferential and, more important, could be dismissed by creationists as simply showing “microevolution.” If you want direct evidence of natural selection producing microevolution, why not use the many observations we have of selection operating in the wild, most famously the Grants’ work on the Galápagos finches? Isn’t that actually more direct than looking at protein changes that have occurred over millions of time. Or how about the formation of new species of plants that we’ve seen occur in the last 50 years? Or the changes in lactose tolerance that have occurred in pastoral populations (those that keep animals for milk) in the last 10,000 years? What, exactly, does Wade mean by “direct”?

Further, why aren’t changes in fossils, showing both trait changes and the evolution of new “kinds” (e.g., amphibians from fish, birds from dinosaurs, land-dwelling artiodactyls into whales, etc. etc. etc.) just as direct as (and even more undeniable than) looking at historical changes in proteins? Or all the evidence from embryology, vestigial organs, and biogeography that I adduce in WEIT? Why isn’t that just as direct  and undeniable as looking at changes in molecules that separate species? In fact, one could make the case that showing adaptive difference in protein function among species, as the PLoS Genetics authors probably did, don’t really count as decisive evidence for evolution. After all, couldn’t those protein differences have been put there by God? We weren’t there to see them happen, after all.

But one can’t make such a Goddy explanation for evidence like the fossil record or biogeography, and that’s why I downplayed protein-sequence evidence in my book. I was looking for the more undeniable evidence—stuff that creationists couldn’t easily counter. At any rate, Wade, excited by molecular biology, fails to realize that the case he cites might not be the most undeniable and direct evidence for evolution after all—and it could even be said to comport with creationism.

2. Wade sees a serious scientific problem in the supposedly short time during which life originated.  

Mr. Nye’s analysis also glosses over bristling perplexity. He says that there are a billion years between the Earth’s formation 4.5 billion years ago and the first fossil evidence of life, plenty of time for the chemical evolution of the first living cells. But this fact is long outdated. A heavy meteorite bombardment some 3.9 billion years ago probably sterilized the planet, yet the first possible chemical evidence of life appears in rocks some 3.8 billion years old. This leaves startlingly little time for the first living cells to have evolved. Reconstruction of the chemical steps by which they did so is a daunting and so far unsolved problem. Mr. Nye might have done better to concede as much.

As we’ll see below, Wade almost seems to feel that there is something problematic in the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution that might render it wrong. Abiogenesis—the origin of life from nonlife—is something that he, along with creationists, sees as such a problem. But the paragraph above is misleading. “Sterilizing the planet” means “killing everything alive on Earth.” While that might have happened, it didn’t mean that the chemical precursors of life would be eradicated. Also, there is controversy about whether that meteorite bombardment had the effects he said it did, or even when it occurred. We know that indubitable evidence for life appears about 3.5 billion years ago (I don’t trust his 3.8-billion-year figure), so that gives about half a billion years for the first cell (a bacterium) to appear. Is that really “startlingly little time”? Has Wade made any models that show it’s an unrealistic time? It’s 500,000,000 years, which is pretty long, and if the precursor chemicals were there beforehand, the time for the origin of life becomes even longer.

Wade also doesn’t mention that the “living cells” he mentions are prokaryotic cells like bacteria, lacking a nucleus and much of the chemical and structural complexity of “true” eukaryotic cells, which didn’t appear until 1.6 billion years ago—2.3 billion years after the “sterilization”. What Wade sees as a daunting problem isn’t an unsuperable problem. Yes, it’s unsolved, but there are many things about evolution that we don’t understand, like what proto-bats looked like. What does Wade want Nye to concede: that we don’t yet understand the origin of life? Fine, then, concede it, but add that we’re making great strides in solving that problem.

3. Wade suggests a compromise between evolutionists and creationists which is simply insane. This is the most infuriating part of his review. Here’s what Wade says will bring amity between the two groups (my emphasis):

Mr. Nye’s fusillade of facts won’t budge them an inch. Isn’t there some more effective way of persuading fundamentalists to desist from opposing the teaching of evolution? If the two sides were willing to negotiate, it would be easy enough to devise a treaty that each could interpret as it wished. In the case of teaching evolution in schools, scientists would concede that evolution is a theory, which indeed it is. Fundamentalists might then be willing to let their children be taught evolution, telling them it is “just a theory.” Evolution, of course, is no casual surmise but a theory in the solemn scientific sense, a grand explanatory system that accounts for a vast range of phenomena and is in turn supported by them. Like all scientific theories, however, it is not an absolute, final truth because theories are always subject to change and emendation.

Yeah, like that suggestion is going to get fundamentalists to agree to the teaching of evolution! Note to Wade: creationists aren’t stupid enough to buy your little plan. They don’t want evolution taught as the only theory that explains the origin and diversity of life, however that theory is characterized.

Further, scientists have already “conceded” (as Wade puts it) that evolution is a theory. But it’s not only a theory, for it’s so well supported by the data that, as I show in WEIT, it’s also regarded as a fact. (What I mean by “evolution” here are these five tenets: genetic change over time, populational change that is not instantaneous, speciation, common ancestry of all species, and natural selection as the cause of apparent design.)  Will creationists really allow the scientific notion of “theory”, as well as a summary of the mountains of evidence that show evolution to be not just a theory but a scientific truth, to be taught to their kids?

Yes, there are some conceivable observations that could invalidate evolution, but we’ve had over 150 years to find them, with creationists working furiously on that job, and no such observations have appeared. To say that evolution is “always subject to change and emendation” is like saying that “the fact that DNA is a double helix, viruses cause Ebola, the Earth goes around the Sun, and the formula of water is H₂O” are all theories “subject to change and emendation”. The fact is that some “theories” are highly unlikely to change because the evidence supporting them is wickedly strong, and to claim that they are somehow shaky or dubious is misleading. I would never countenance saying that any of these scientific notions are “just theories,” for the word “just,” as Wade knows well, implies that the evidence supporting them is somehow shaky.

Wade goes on to fulminate about the dogmatism of evolutionists, and touts the uncertainty of evolutionary biology by using the example of group selection, which, he says, is undecided and therefore makes all of evolution appear as “just a theory.” But group selection is a modern add-on to evolutionary biology, and it’s an unsubstantiated hypothesis. Group selection is not a theory in Wade’s sense, something “that accounts for a vast range of phenomena and is in turn supported by them.” It accounts for no phenomena and there are no observations that require us to accept group selection. To say that evolution is “just a theory” because we haven’t settled the question of group selection is like saying that modern particle physics is “just a theory” because string theory is sitting out there as an unresolved problem.

At the end, Wade reiterates his brilliant suggestion for a pact between evolutionists and creationists:

If popularizers like Mr. Nye could allow that the theory of evolution is a theory, not an absolute truth or dogma, they might stand a better chance of getting the fundamentalists out of the science classroom.

Sorry, Mr. Wade, but we already allow that. No observation in science is an “absolute truth or dogma,” but some things are so likely to be true that you’d bet your house on them. One of those things is evolution. In any vernacular sense of the word, evolution is simply true—as true as the fact that DNA is normally a double helix and a normal water molecule has two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen.

Wade’s suggestion is ludicrous and, in the end, shows that he really doesn’t understand the nature of science and scientific truth. Nor does he have the slightest idea of how creationists really behave. They’ll no sooner accept his compromise then they’ll admit that there’s no God. After this piece, and Wade’s egregious book A Troublesome Inheritance, the man’s Official Science Writer™ Card should be revoked.

In October, 2011, as part of the Fukushima Health Management Survey, Fukushima prefecture implemented a thyroid ultrasound examination programme for all children younger than 18 years to “ensure early identification and treatment of thyroid cancer in children.” The Fukushima prefecture collected baseline thyroid cancer prevalence data until March, 2014, assuming “no excess occurrence [of thyroid cancer] in the first three years [after the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear accident in March 2011]”. Regular thyroid examinations began in April, 2014, and will be compared with these baseline data.

Surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has been established as a powerful tool to detect very low-concentration bio-molecules. One of the challenging problems is to have reliable and robust SERS substrate. Here, we report on a simple method to grow coherently embedded (endotaxial) silver nanostructures in silicon substrates, analyze their three-dimensional shape by scanning transmission electron microscopy tomography and demonstrate their use as a highly reproducible and stable substrate for SERS measurements. Bi-layers consisting of Ag and GeOx thin films were grown on native oxide covered silicon substrate using a physical vapor deposition method. Followed by annealing at 800C under ambient conditions, this resulted in the formation of endotaxial Ag nanostructures of specific shape depending upon the substrate orientation. These structures are utilized for detection of Crystal Violet molecules of 5 1010M concentrations. These are expected to be one of the highly robust, reusable and novel substrates for single molecule detection.

Scientific Reports 4 doi: 10.1038/srep04633

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium trade model with comparative advantage, heterogeneous firms, heterogeneous workers and endogenous firm entry to study wage inequality during the adjustment after trade liberalization. We find that trade liberalization increases wage inequality both in the short run and in the long run. In the short run, wage inequality is mainly driven by an increase in inter-sectoral wage inequality, while in the medium to long run, wage inequality is driven by an increase in the skill premium. Incorporating worker training in the model considerably reduces the effects of trade liberalization on wage inequality. The effects on wage inequality are much more adverse when trade liberalization is unilateral instead of bilateral or restricted to specific sectors instead of including all sectors

Computers are an important part of modern education, yet many schoolchildren lack access to a computer at home. We test whether this impedes educational achievement by conducting the largest-ever field experiment that randomly provides free home computers to students. Although computer ownership and use increased substantially, we find no effects on any educational outcomes, including grades, test scores, credits earned, attendance and disciplinary actions. Our estimates are precise enough to rule out even modestly-sized positive or negative impacts. The estimated null effect is consistent with survey evidence showing no change in homework time or other "intermediate" inputs in education.

Who Owns the Code of Life?

Washington control of genetic data would send us down the road to medical serfdom.

A vast amount of valuable biochemical know-how is embedded in genes and in the complex biochemical webs that they create and control. Does the fact that nature invented it mean that it’s up for grabs? Lots of people are eager to grab it, Washington’s aspiring managers of our health-care economy now prominent among them.

At issue in the Myriad Genetics case decided by the Supreme Court in June were patent claims involving two genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2. Myriad has spent $500 million analyzing thousands of samples submitted by doctors and patients in search of BRCA mutations that sharply increase a woman’s risk of developing breast or ovarian cancer. Whenever the company found a mutation that it hadn’t seen before, it offered free testing to the patient’s relatives in exchange for information about their cancer history. As a result, Myriad can now predict the likely effects of about 97 percent of the BRCA mutations that it receives for analysis, up from about 60 percent 17 years ago.

In Myriad, all nine justices agreed that merely being the first to isolate a “naturally occurring” gene or other “product of nature” doesn’t entitle you to a patent. That came as no surprise. A year earlier, in Mayo v. Prometheus Labs, the Court had rejected a patent for a way to prescribe appropriate doses of certain drugs by tracking their metabolites in the patient’s blood, reaffirming long-standing rules that patents may not lay claim to a “law of nature,” “natural phenomenon,” or “abstract idea.” Previous rulings by the federal circuit court that decides patent appeals had reached similar conclusions in addressing attempts to patent all drugs that might be designed to control specific biochemical pathways. A description of a biological “mechanism of action” without a description of a new device or method to exploit it in some useful way is merely a “hunting license” for inventions not yet developed. A patent must describe “a complete and final invention”—a drug, for example, together with a description of the disorder that it can cure.

But very often, much of the cost of inventing the patentable cure is incurred working out the non-patentable molecular mechanics of the disease because all innovation in molecular medicine must in some way mimic or mirror molecular mechanisms of action already invented by nature. And spurred by the enormous promise of precisely targeted molecular medicine, a substantial part of our health-care economy is now engaged in working out the molecular mechanics of diseases. Washington is funding genomic research projects. Drug companies are heavily involved, joined by a rapidly growing number of diagnostic service companies. Doctors are gathering reams of new molecular data, patient by patient. Hospitals are mining their records for internal use and for sale to outsiders. Device manufacturers are racing to provide molecular diagnostic capabilities directly to consumers. Private insurance companies are mining the information they receive when claims are filed. And there are many signs that Washington intends to take charge of all of the above, as it tightens its grip on diagnostic devices and tests, what doctors diagnose, which diagnoses insurers cover at what price, and how the information acquired is distributed and used.

The patentability of genes is thus only one piece of a much broader debate about who will own and control the torrents of information that we have recently begun to extract from the most free, fecund, competitive, dynamic, intelligent, and valuable repository of know-how on the planet—life itself. That the private sector is already actively engaged in the extraction and analysis is a promising sign, but getting it fully engaged will require robust intellectual property rights, framed for a unique environment in which every fundamentally new invention must be anchored in a new understanding of some aspect of molecular biology. Individual gene patents are out of the picture now, but other forms of intellectual property already provide some protection. We should reaffirm and expand them. And we should view Washington’s plans to take charge instead for what they are: the most ambitious attempt to control the flow of information that the world has ever seen.

Drug companies began systematically exploring the molecular mechanics of diseases more than 30 years ago. Sometimes a gene itself is the essence of the cure. The insulin used by diabetics was extracted from pigs and cows until Genentech and Eli Lilly inserted the human insulin gene into a bacterium and brought “humulin” to market in 1982. Other therapies use viruses to insert into the patient’s cells a gene that codes for a healthy form of a flawed or missing protein. Recent “cancer immunotherapy” trials have shown great promise: the patient is treated with his or her own immune-system cells, genetically modified to induce them to attack their cancerous siblings. More often, a drug is designed to target a protein associated with a specific gene. “Structure-based” drug design and the biochemical wizardry used to produce monoclonal antibodies allow biochemists to craft molecules precisely matched to a target protein that plays a key role in, say, replicating HIV or a cancer cell. An FDA official recently estimated that 10 percent to 50 percent of drugs in pharmaceutical companies’ pipelines involve targeted therapies, and about one-third of new drugs approved by the FDA last year included genetic patient-selection criteria.

The development and use of all such therapies hinge, however, on understanding the roles that genes and proteins play in causing medically significant clinical effects. And as Myriad’s huge database illustrates, what looks like a single disorder to the clinician can often be caused by many different variations in genes that may interact in complex ways and that sometimes change on the fly, as they do in fast-mutating cancer cells or viruses like HIV. The molecular-to-clinical links are still more complex when drugs are added to modulate one or more of the patient-side molecules and unintended side effects enter the picture.

The databases and sophisticated analytical engines that must be developed to unravel these causal connections usually go far beyond “abstract ideas” or what any scientist would call a “law of nature.” To guide the prescription of HIV drug cocktails, Europe’s EuResist Network draws on data from tens of thousands of patients involving more than 100,000 treatment regimens associated with more than a million records of viral genetic sequences, viral loads, and white blood cell counts. Oncologists now speak of treatment “algorithms”—sets of rules for selecting and combining multiple drugs in cocktails that must often be adjusted during the course of treatment, as mutating cancer cells become resistant to some drugs and susceptible to others. IBM recently announced the arrival of a system to guide the prescription of cancer drugs, developed in partnership with WellPoint and Memorial Sloan-Kettering and powered by the supercomputer that won the engine-versus-experts challenge on Jeopardy. It has the power to sift through more than a million patient records representing decades of cancer-treatment history, and it will continue to add records and learn on the job.

Other companies are vying to combine efficient DNA-sequencing systems with interpretive engines that can analyze large numbers of genes and the clinical data needed to reveal their medical implications at prices that rival what Myriad is charging to analyze just two genes. Last year, 23andMe, a company founded to provide consumer genetic-sequencing services, announced that it would let other providers develop applications that would interact with data entrusted to 23andMe by its customers. Hundreds soon did. Their interests, Wired reported, included “integrating genetic data with electronic health records for studies at major research centers and . . . building consumer-health applications focused on diet, nutrition and sleep.” For individuals, 23andMe’s platform will, in the words of the company’s director of engineering, serve as “an operating system for your genome, a way that you can authorize what happens with your genome online.” Numerous websites are already coordinating ad hoc “crowd-sourced” studies of how patients respond to treatments for various diseases. The not-for-profit Cancer Commons is pursuing an “open science initiative linking cancer patients, physicians, and scientists in rapid learning communities.”

How much protection, if any, these databases, online services, and analytical engines will receive from our intellectual property laws remains to be seen. Indeed, where Myriad leaves the thousands of gene patents already granted is unclear—it will take years of further litigation to find out. Genes themselves or their biochemical logic are routinely incorporated into a wide variety of medical diagnostic tests and therapies; other sectors of the economy use genetically engineered cells, plants, and live organisms. Most such applications of genetic know-how will probably remain patentable because the constituent parts of an innovative product or process need not be patentable in themselves. Innovative methods for sequencing genes or analyzing their clinical implications will also remain patentable. What does seem clear is that in Myriad, the Court went out of its way to reaffirm and even broaden the scope of its earlier Mayo decision: a claim involving nothing more than the mechanistic science or an empirical correlation that links molecular causes to clinical effects isn’t patentable.

From the innovator’s perspective, however, patents that cover biological know-how only insofar as it is incorporated into an innovative drug or a diagnostic device provide little, if any, practical protection for what is often a large component of the ingenuity and cost of the invention. The successful development of a pioneering drug reveals key information about the molecular mechanics of a disease and a good strategy for controlling it. Armed with that knowledge, competitors can then modify the drug’s chemistry just enough to dodge the pioneer’s patent and rush in with slightly different drugs developed at much lower cost. In the end, the pioneer can easily be the only player that fails to profit from its own pathbreaking work. A Japanese researcher extracted the first statin from a fungus and discovered that it inhibits an enzyme that plays a key role in cholesterol synthesis; a colleague established its efficacy in limited human trials in the late 1970s. Following that lead, others quickly found or synthesized slightly different statins that worked better and had fewer side effects. Pfizer’s Lipitor, which was licensed two decades later, became the most lucrative drug in history.

“Repurposing” presents the flip side of the same problem. Nature often uses the same or very similar molecules to perform different functions at different points in our bodies. These molecules may then be involved in what used to be viewed as different diseases, and the same drug can then be used to treat them all. But when independent researchers or practicing doctors discover the new use, they usually lack the resources to conduct the clinical trials needed to get the drug’s license amended to cover it and can’t, in any event, market the drug for the new use so long as the patent on its chemistry lasts. And for both independent researchers and drug companies themselves, there is no profit in searching for new uses for an old drug unless there is a profitable market ahead that will cover the cost of the search. The new use may be entitled to what is called a “method” patent, but the patent will easily be dodged if the original patent has expired and cheap generic copies of the drug are readily available for doctors to prescribe.

Similar valuable spillovers occur as drug companies and others catalog the genes that determine how drugs interact with molecular bystanders. Countless patients owe a large debt to those who established that genetic variations in one group of enzymes cause some people to metabolize antidepressants, anticoagulants, and about 30 other types of drugs too quickly, before the drugs have a chance to work, and cause others to metabolize them too slowly, allowing the drugs to accumulate to toxic levels. The discovery of a new drug-modulating gene will often help improve the prescription of other drugs, too. Here again, only a fraction of the value of working out the link between variations in a particular gene and a drug’s performance will be captured by the company that discovers the link and incorporates that information into a first drug’s label.

Innovative diagnostic services are particularly vulnerable to free riders because their sole purpose is to convey information. Soon after it became clear that the Supreme Court would probably invalidate Myriad’s gene patents, two academic researchers teamed up with a gene-testing company and a venture-capital firm to buy clinical records from doctors who have treated patients using reports supplied by Myriad. A website set up on the day that the Supreme Court released its Myriad ruling invites patients to give away the same data instead. Neither scheme will create any new know-how; to the extent that they succeed, both will simply replicate Myriad’s database.

Washington is now hatching plans to free all the biological information that (in Washington’s view) deserves to be free. It’s also trying to make sure that we don’t misunderstand or even bother collecting the information that doesn’t.

To facilitate the development of “a new taxonomy of human diseases based on molecular biology,” a 2011 report commissioned by the National Institutes of Health recommends creation of a broadly accessible “Knowledge Network” that will aggregate data spanning all the molecular, clinical, and environmental factors that can affect our health. Last June, the NIH expressed strong support for a plan to standardize the collection, analysis, and sharing of genomic and clinical data across 41 countries. The 2011 report endorses government-funded pilot programs; the curtailment of at least some existing intellectual property rights (though “guidelines for intellectual property need to be clarified and concerns about loss of intellectual property rights addressed”); and “strong incentives” to promote participation by payers and providers. Indeed, the government may “ultimately need to require participation in such Knowledge Networks for reimbursement of health care expenses.” And data-sharing standards must be framed to discourage “proprietary databases for commercial intent.”

Somewhat paradoxically, the report hastens to add that its proposals extend only to the “pre-competitive” phase of research, presumably to leave some room for intellectual property rights directly tied to diagnostic devices and drugs. But there is no such phase—in pursuit of better products and services, the private sector is already competing to do most everything that the report describes. And a new molecular taxonomy of disease is already emerging: a steadily growing number of yesterday’s diseases now come with prefixes or suffixes that designate some biochemical detail to distinguish different forms—for example, “ER+,” for “estrogen-receptor-positive,” in front of “breast cancer.”

Meanwhile, Washington’s paymasters are busy solidifying their control of much of the data gathering and sharing. The Preventive Services Task Force decides which screening tests must be fully covered for which classes of patients by all private insurance policies, and which should be skipped for either medical or cost reasons. What insurers may charge is regulated, too, so more money spent complying with screening mandates will inevitably mean less spent on disfavored tests and associated treatments. Washington also has ambitious plans to take charge of pooling and analyzing the data that emerge. A new national network, overseen by a national coordinator for health information technology, will funnel medical data from providers and patients to designated scientists, statisticians, and other public and private providers and insurers.

For its part, the FDA has made clear that it intends to maintain tight control of the diagnostic services and devices that enable individuals to read their own molecular scripts. In 2010, Walgreens abruptly canceled plans to sell a test kit called Insight when informed by the FDA that the kit lacked a license. The mail-in saliva-collection kit would have told you what your genes might have to say about dozens of things, among them Alzheimer’s, breast cancer, diabetes, blood disorders, kidney disease, heart attacks, high blood pressure, leukemia, lung cancer, multiple sclerosis, obesity, psoriasis, cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs, and going blind—and also how your body might respond to caffeine, cholesterol drugs, blood thinners, and other prescription drugs. Invoking its authority to license every diagnostic “contrivance,” “in vitro agent,” or “other similar or related article,” the FDA announced a crackdown on all companies that attempted to sell such things to the public without the agency’s permission. The agency is determined to protect consumers from what it considers to be “unsupported clinical interpretations” supplied by providers or medically inappropriate responses to diagnostic reports by consumers themselves.

There is much reason to doubt, however, that Washington is qualified to teach the rest of the country how to gather or analyze biological know-how. For the last 50 years, the FDA, by scripting the clinical trials required to get drugs licensed, has controlled how those trials investigate the molecular factors that determine how well different patients respond to the same drug. The trials have, in fact, investigated appallingly little, because the agency still clings to testing protocols developed long before the advent of modern molecular medicine (see “Curing Diversity,” Autumn 2008). A report released in September 2012 by President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) urges the FDA to adopt “modern statistical designs” to handle new types of trials that would gather far more information about the molecular biology that controls the development of the disease and its response to drugs. In a speech given last May, Janet Woodcock, head of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, acknowledged the need to “turn the clinical trial paradigm on its head.”

More generally, Washington has been a persistent (and often inept) laggard in moving its supervisory, transactional, and information-gathering and dissemination operations into the digital age. The FDA’s “incompatible” and “outdated” information-technology systems, the PCAST report notes, are “woefully inadequate.” The agency lacks the “ability to integrate, manage, and analyze data . . . across offices and divisions,” and the processing of a new drug submission may thus involve “significant manual data manipulation.” Other parts of Washington launched plans to push digital technology into the rest of the health-care arena around 2005, encouraged by a RAND Corporation estimate that doing so would save the United States at least $81 billion a year. A follow-up report released early this year concluded, in the words of one of its authors, that “we’ve not achieved the productivity and quality benefits that are unquestionably there for the taking.”

Washington launched the modern era of comprehensive genetic mapping when it started funding the Human Genome Project in the late 1980s. Rarely has the federal government found a better way to spend $3 billion of taxpayer money. But far more mapping has been done since then with private funds, and finishing the job is going to cost trillions, not billions—far more than Washington can pay. In a welcoming environment, Wall Street, venture capitalists, monster drug companies, small biotechs, research hospitals, and many others would be pouring intellect and money into this process. The biosphere offers unlimited opportunity for valuable innovation. The technology is new, fantastically powerful, and constantly improving; the demand for what it can supply is insatiable. But Washington’s heavy-handed control of both the science and the economics of the data acquisition, analysis, and distribution will drive much of the private money out of the market. We should instead give the market the property rights and pricing flexibility that will get the private money fully engaged and leading the way.

As the Supreme Court has recognized, a property right that curtails the use of basic science may foreclose too much innovation by others later on. The discovery of a promising target, for example, shouldn’t be allowed to halt all competitive development of molecules that can detect or modulate it. Instead, we need rights that will simultaneously promote private investment in the expensive process of reverse-engineering nature and the broad distribution of the know-how thus acquired, so as to launch a broad range of follow-up research and innovation and allow front-end costs to be spread efficiently across future beneficiaries.

Models for property rights framed to strike such a balance already exist. As it happens, federal law already grants drug companies a copyright of sorts: a “data exclusivity” right that, for periods up to 12 years, bars the manufacturers of generic drugs from hitching a free ride through the FDA by citing the successful clinical trials already conducted by the pioneer. Data exclusivity rights could easily be extended to cover the development of biological know-how as well, enabling the market to spread the cost of developing such knowledge across the broad base of future beneficiaries. The rights should be narrowly tailored to specific diseases, but they should also last a long time.

The agency that issues data exclusivity rights should also have the authority to oversee a compulsory licensing process analogous to the one that allows singers to perform songs composed by others—or to the government’s “march-in” right to license patents for inventions developed with government funding to “reasonable applicants” if the patent holder has failed to take “effective steps to achieve practical application of the subject invention” or, more broadly, as needed to address the public’s “health and safety needs.” Licensing fees should be modest, and total licensing fees collected might be capped at a level commensurate with the cost of developing the biological know-how and its role in creating new value thereafter.

In addition to mobilizing private capital to develop know-how, well-crafted property rights promote its broad and economically efficient distribution. To begin with, they make the know-how immediately available—though not exploitable for profit—to researchers and competitors. Copyrights require publication of the protected content; patents require a description complete enough to enable others in the field to exploit the “full scope” of the claimed invention. Going forward, Myriad and companies like it will instead treat their discoveries and databases as trade secrets and frame contracts to forbid disclosure of their data by the doctors and patients who use their services.

As entertainment and digital software and hardware markets have also demonstrated, markets protected by the right forms of intellectual property usually find ways to develop tiered pricing schemes that allow widespread distribution of information at economically efficient prices while the rights last. By contrast, current policies in the health-care arena load most of the cost of developing biological know-how onto the shoulders of the patients who buy the pioneering drug or device while its patent lasts. The market will develop more pioneer drugs—and government paymasters will be more willing to accept them—if one important component of the know-how costs can be spread efficiently across many more products, services, and patients.

The emergence of a robust market for molecular and clinical information will also draw an important new competitor into drug markets: the independent researcher or company that develops the biological science needed to select the most promising targets and to design successful clinical trials for new drugs. Drug companies will inevitably continue to play a large role in the search for patient-side information. But for much the same reason that software companies welcome advances in digital hardware, drug companies should welcome the rise of independent companies with expertise in connecting molecular effects to clinical ones in human bodies. Independent companies are permitted to interact much more freely with doctors and patients. And by accelerating the development and wider distribution of information about the molecular roots of health and disease, companies that specialize in predictive molecular diagnosis will help mobilize demand for the expeditious delivery of drugs.

Finally, private markets have established that we do not need a government takeover to maximize the value of information by consolidating it efficiently in large databases. For well over a century, competing companies have been pooling their patents and interconnecting their telegraph, phone, and data networks, online reservation systems, and countless other information conduits and repositories. Aggregators buy up portfolios of patents and licenses for songs, movies, TV shows, and electronic books, and then offer access in many different, economically efficient, ways to all comers. The global financial network depends on instant data sharing among cooperating competitors. Many online commercial services today hinge on the market’s willingness to interconnect and exchange information stored in secure, proprietary databases.

With appropriate property rights in place, the economics of the market for clinical data will, in all likelihood, be largely self-regulating. The accumulation of new data points steadily dilutes the value of the old, though their aggregate value continues to grow. New data can be acquired every time a patient is diagnosed or treated. The best way to accelerate the process that makes information ubiquitously and cheaply available is to begin with economic incentives that reward those who develop new information faster and come up with ways to distribute it widely at economically efficient prices.

Conspicuous by its frequent absence in debates about who owns biological know-how is the patient’s right not to disclose information about his or her innards to anyone—the corollary of which should be a right to give it away, share it, sell it outright, or license it selectively, at whatever price the market will bear. The individual patient won’t often be interested in haggling over what a clinical record might be worth to a hospital or an insurance company. But emphatically reaffirming the private ownership of private information is the first, essential step in creating markets for those who would help collect and analyze the data. It would also help set the stage for some serious constitutional challenges to Washington’s attempts to displace them.

Washington assures us that patient privacy will be protected when it pools medical records for analysis by Washington-approved researchers and statisticians—but its policies reflect the conviction that the patient’s privacy rights will be bought by whoever is paying for the care, whether Washington itself or a private insurance company operating under Washington’s thumb. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 does indeed require that records, before they are shared, must be redacted to ensure that they can’t be linked back to individual patients. But Washington’s guidelines on “de-identification” of private health-care data are naively optimistic about what that would require. In a paper published in Science last January, an MIT research team described how easily it had used a genealogy website and publicly available records to extract patients’ identities from ostensibly anonymous DNA data. Genetic profiles reveal gender, race, family connections, ethnic identity, and facial features; they correlate quite well with surnames. DNA fingerprinting following an arrest is now routine, and a close match with a relative’s DNA can provide an excellent lead to your identity. Further, state-run clinics and hospitals are exempt from the federal requirements, and some are already selling patient records to outsiders, sometimes neglecting to remove information such as age, zip codes, and admission and discharge dates.

Even if privacy were fully protected, a promise to “de-identify” data doesn’t give the government the right to seize and distribute private information in the first place. Washington, it appears, now aspires to create what is, for all practical purposes, a federal mandate to participate in an insurance system in which Washington minutely regulates which diagnostic tests are administered and which treatments are provided—and then requires the sharing of the data acquired in the course of treatment. It seems unlikely that such a system can withstand constitutional scrutiny. A government grab for information, whether direct or through private intermediaries, is subject to the Fourth Amendment, which places strict limits on such invasions of our privacy.

At the opposite pole, the FDA’s decision to protect the masses from unapproved clinical interpretations of molecular data, or to limit or bar access to the information on the ground that the masses aren’t smart enough to handle it wisely, also looks constitutionally vulnerable. Home-use diagnostic devices and services offer patients the absolute medical privacy that they are entitled to. And the Supreme Court has repeatedly concluded that freedom of speech includes a private right to listen, read, and study that is even broader than the right to speak, write, and teach. Enabling tools and technology—the printing press and ink that produce the newspaper, for example—enjoy the same constitutional protection. Lower courts have recently also affirmed the First Amendment right to discuss off-label drug prescriptions. A constitutional right to engage in officially unapproved discussion about what a drug might do to a patient’s body must surely also cover unapproved discussion about what the patient’s own genes and proteins might do.

If we let them, markets for biological know-how will do exactly what markets do best and deliver what molecular medicine most needs. Propelled as they are by dispersed initiative and private choice, free markets are uniquely good at extracting and synthesizing information that’s widely dispersed among innovators, investors, workers, and customers—“personal knowledge,” in the words of Michael Polanyi, the brilliant Hungarian-British chemist, economist, and philosopher. Nowhere could the free market’s information-extracting genius be more important than in a market for products whose value depends on their ability to mirror biochemical information inside the people who use them.

The Supreme Court’s Myriad ruling is a reasonable construction of the patent law as currently written. But that we now find ourselves pondering whether Washington should be taking full control of the private genetic and clinical data that individuals supply—and that private companies like Myriad are eager to collect and analyze—provides a chilling reminder of how rapidly we are slouching down the road to medical serfdom.

Peter W. Huber is a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and the author of the forthcoming The Cure in the Code: How 20th Century Law Is Undermining 21st Century Medicine.

This paper uses an innovative approach to evaluate educational performance of Spanish students in PISA 2009. Our purpose is to decompose their overall inefficiency between different components with a special focus on studying the differences between public and state subsidized private schools. We use a technique inspired by the non-parametric Free Disposal Hull (FDH) and the application of robust order-m models, which allow us to mitigate the influence of outliers and the curse of dimensionality. Subsequently, we adopt a metafrontier framework to assess each student relative to the own group best practice frontier (students in the same school) and to different frontiers constructed from the best practices of different types of schools. The results show that state-subsidised private schools outperform public schools, although the differences between them are significantly reduced once we control for the type of students enrolled in both type of centres.

This paper attempts to re-examine the notion of equality, going beyond the classic opposition in France between affirmative action and meritocratic equality. Hence, we propose shifting the French debate about equality of opportunities in education to the question of how to raise equality of capability. In this paper we propose an assessment based on the capability approach of a mentoring programme called 'Une grande école: pourquoi pas moi?' ('A top-level university: why not me?' (PQPM) launched in 2002 by a top French business school. The assessment of PQPM is based on the pairing of longitudinal data available for 324 PQPM students with national data. Results show that the 'adaptive preferences' of the PQPM students change through a process of empowerment. Students adopt new 'elitist' curricula but feel free to follow alternative paths.

We investigate the occurence of social learning among government officials in a context of decentralization of political responsibilities - the schooling decentralization reform of the state of São Paulo - and use it to analyze officials' motivations driving the adhesion to that program. We explore how the information exchange about the newly adopted tasks is configured and which aspects about the returns of decentralization are mostly valued by officials in their learning process. In particular, we try to determine to what extent the adhesion to the reform was due to electoral motivations or, rather, to concerns about the quality of public education provision. We present evidence that social learning configures a relevant factor in the reform implementation and find that mayors are more likely to adhere to the program upon the receipt of good news about the electoral returns of decentralization. On the other hand, experiences by information neighbors that turn out to be successful in improving the public provision seem to be ignored in mayors' decisions for decentralization. The argument for electoral motivations is further supported by evidence that officials tend to be more responsive to information transmitted by neighbors affiliated to the same party as their own.

This paper looks at the contribution of political leaders to enhance citizens' education and investigate how the educational attainment of the population is affected while a leader with higher education remains in office. For this purpose, we consider educational transitions of political leaders in office and find that the educational attainment of population increases when a more educated leader remains in office. Furthermore, we also observe that the educational attainment of the population is negatively impacted when a country transitions from an educated leader to a less educated one. This result may help to explain the previous finding that more educated political leaders favor economic growth.

The Daily Mail is involved in a dispute with Ed Miliband over a recent article in the paper that accused Miliband’s father Ralph, a Marxist academic, of hating Britain. Miliband says he disagrees with the views of his father, who died in 1994, but says his father loved Britain. Dalrymple has written a short but powerful article for the Telegraph that reminds readers of the troubling emotional and moral foundations of Marxists like Ralph Miliband. I should know, Dalrymple says, because my father was Marxist too:

I saw that his concern for the fate of humanity in general was inconsistent with his contempt for the actual people by whom he was surrounded, and his inability to support relations of equality with others. I concluded that the humanitarian protestations of Marxists were a mask for an urge to domination.

In addition to the emotional dishonesty of Marxism, I was impressed by its limitless resources of intellectual dishonesty. Having grown up with the Little Lenin Library and (God help us!) the Little Stalin Library, I quickly grasped that the dialectic could prove anything you wanted it to prove, for example, that killing whole categories of people was a requirement of elementary decency.

Gordon Belot
Philosophy of Science, Volume 80, Issue 4, Page 483-503, October 2013.

Well, since the tussle about epigenetics involves Brits, they’re really too polite to engage in a “smackdown.” Let’s just call it a “kerfuffle.” Nevertheless, two scientists have an enlightening 25-minute discussion about epigenetics at the Guardian‘s weekly science podcast (click the link and listen from 24:30 to 49:10). If you’re science friendly and have an interest in this ‘controversy,’ by all means listen in. It’s a good debate about whether “Lamarckian” inheritance threatens to overturn the modern theory of evolution.

Readers know how I feel about the epigenetics “controversy.” “Epigenetics” was once a term used simply to mean “development,” that is, how the genes expressed themselves in a way that could construct an organism. More recently, the term has taken on the meaning of “environmental modifications of DNA,” usually involving methylation of DNA bases.  And that is important in development, too, for such methylation is critical in determining how genes work, as well as in how genes are differentially expressed when they come from the mother versus the father.

But epigenetics has now been suggested to show that neo-Darwinism is wrong: that environmental modifications of the DNA—I’m not referring to methylation that is actually itself coded in the DNA—can be passed on for many generations, forming a type of “Lamarckian” inheritance that has long been thought impossible.  I’ve discussed this claim in detail and have tried to show that environmentally-induced modifications of DNA are inevitably eroded away within one or a few generations, and therefore cannot form a stable basis for evolutionary adaptation.  Further, we have no evidence of any adaptations that are based on modifications of the DNA originally produced by the environment.

In the Guardian show, the “Coyne-ian” position is taken by Dr. George Davey Smith, a clinical epidemiologist at the University of Bristol.  The “epigenetics-will-revise-our-view-of-evolution” side is taken by Dr. Tim Spector, a genetic epidemiologist at King’s College. Smith makes many of the points that I’ve tried to make over the past few years, and I hope it’s not too self-aggrandizing to say that I think he gets the best of Spector, who can defend the position only that epigenetic modification is important within one generation (e.g., cancer) or at most between just two generations.

But listen for yourself. These guys are more up on the literature than I am, and I was glad to see that, given Smith’s unrebutted arguments, neo-Darwinism is still not in serious danger. (I have to say, though, that I’d like to think that if we found stable and environmentally induced inheritance that could cause adaptive changes in the genome, I’d be the first to admit it.)

h/t: Tony

We provide evidence that economic circumstances are a key intermediating variable for understanding the relationship between schooling and political protest. Using the World Values Survey data, we find that individuals with higher levels of schooling, but whose income outcomes fall short of that predicted by a comprehensive set of their observable characteristics, in turn display a greater propensity to engage in protest activities. We argue that this evidence is consistent with the idea that a decrease in the opportunity cost of the use of human capital in labor markets encourages its use in political activities instead, and is unlikely to be explained solely by either a pure grievance effect or by self-selection. We then show separate evidence that these forces appear to matter too at the country level: Rising education levels coupled with macroeconomic weakness are associated with increased incumbent turnover, as well as subsequent pressures toward democratization.

… is from Parker T. Moon’s 1928 volume, Imperialism and World Politics; it’s a passage quoted often by Tom Palmer – for example, on page 418 of Tom’s 1996 essay “Myths of Individualism,” which is reprinted in Toward Liberty (David Boaz, ed., 2002):

Language often obscures truth.  More than is ordinarily realized, our eyes are blinded to the facts of international relations by tricks of the tongue.  When one uses the simple monosyllable “France” one thinks of France as a unit, an entity.  When to avoid awkward repetition we use a personal pronoun in referring to a country – when for example we say “France sent her troops to conquer Tunis” – we impute not only unity but personality to the country.  The very words conceal the facts and make international relations a glamorous drama in which personalized nations are the actors, and all too easily we forget the flesh-and-blood men and women who are the true actors.  How different it would be if we had no such word as “France,” and had to say instead – thirty-eight million men, women and children of very diversified interests and beliefs, inhabiting 218,000 square miles of territory!  Then we should more accurately describe the Tunis expedition in some such way as this: “A few of these thirty-eight million persons sent thirty thousand others to conquer Tunis.”  This way of putting the fact immediately suggests a question, or rather a series of questions.  Who are the “few”?  Why did they send the thirty thousand to Tunis?  And why did these obey?

Moon’s point applies also, of course, to trade.  When we say, for example, that “America trades with China” we too easily overlook the fact that what’s going on is nothing other than some number of flesh-and-blood individuals living in, or citizens of, a geo-political region that we today conventionally call “America” voluntarily buy and sell with a number of flesh-and-blood individuals living in, or citizens of, a geo-political region that we today conventionally call “China.”

Nothing - nothing at all - about such exchanges differs in any economically relevant way from exchanges that take place exclusively among Americans or from exchanges that take place exclusively among the Chinese.  Any downsides or upsides that you might identify as a result of Americans trading with the Chinese exist when Americans trade with Americans or when the Chinese trade with the Chinese.  Yet personifying the collective masks this reality that all exchange is carried out by flesh-and-blood individuals, and that nothing about having those exchanges occur across man-drawn political boundaries is economically relevant.

A few thoughts.

1. Amazingly, there some who believe that Detroit’s problem were caused by too-little govt., or least something other than what it was
2. I think even the hard-core leftists at the federal level understand the moral-hazard disaster that would accompany a federal bailout of Detroit
3. I wish people wouldn’t refer to leftist/statists as “liberals”

Will’s column is excellent.

George F. Will: Detroit’s death by democracy – The Washington Post: uto industry executives, who often were invertebrate mediocrities, continually bought labor peace by mortgaging their companies’ futures in surrenders to union demands. Then city officials gave their employees — who have 47 unions, including one for crossing guards — pay scales comparable to those of autoworkers. Thus did private-sector decadence drive public-sector dysfunction — government negotiating with government-employees’ unions that are government organized as an interest group to lobby itself to do what it wants to do: Grow.

Related links:
A Look Inside Detroit, Bus Edition …

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” — George Orwell

LCBO’s new ‘simplified pricing formula’ gives diplomats, federal government 49% discount on booze | National Post: OTTAWA — Ontario’s liquor board has sweetened an already sweet deal for the federal government and foreign diplomats as it chops the prices they pay for beer, wine and booze almost in half. Late last month, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario began offering its products to federal departments and agencies at a 49% discount from the retail price that everyone else pays. The cut rate on alcoholic beverages is also available to foreign embassies, high commissions, consulates and trade missions, most of whom are located in the Ottawa area, within the LCBO’s jurisdiction. And the favoured buyers will be exempt from an LCBO policy dating from 2001 that sets minimum prices for products, under its “social responsibility” mandate.