The “categorical imperative” means something quite different, but it does sound like the right term for the self-protective psychological urge that drove Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869), creator of the Thesaurus, to classify and categorize all manner of things over a long lifetime. Madness did not just run in his family; it galloped, sped, sprinted, dashed and made haste. If the title of Joshua Kendall’s fine new biography of Roget has a clinical Oliver Sacks feel, the material pretty much justifies it. “The Man Who Made Lists” outlines the “chronic mental instability” of Roget’s maternal grandmother; the “psychotic trance” in which his mother spent her last days after a life of neurotic “neediness”; the breakdowns undergone by Roget’s sister and daughter (he married late and was widowed early); and the grief-driven, throat-slashing suicide of his uncle, the great British civil libertarian Samuel Romilly, who expired in Roget’s blood-soaked arms.

more from the NYT Book Review here.

I don’t buy his argument, but here’s Moisés Naím with a “yes, but…” in Foreign Policy:

The middle class will almost double in the poor countries where sustained economic growth is lifting people above the poverty line fast. For example, by 2025, China will have the world’s largest middle class, while India’s will be 10 times larger than it is today.

While this is, of course, good news, it also means humanity will have to adjust to unprecedented pressures. The rise of a new global middle class is already having repercussions. Last January, 10,000 people took to the streets in Jakarta to protest skyrocketing soybean prices. And Indonesians were not the only people angry about the rising cost of food. In 2007, higher pasta prices sparked street protests in Milan. Mexicans marched against the price of tortillas. Senegalese protested the price of rice, and Indians took up banners against the price of onions. Many governments, including those in Argentina, China, Egypt, and Russia, have imposed controls on food prices in an attempt to contain a public backlash.

These protesters are the most vociferous manifestations of a global trend: We are all paying more for bread, milk, and chocolate, to name just a few items. The new consumers of the emerging global middle class are driving up food prices everywhere. The food-price index compiled by The Economist since 1845 is now at an all-time high; it increased 30 percent in 2007 alone. Milk prices were up more than 29 percent last year, while wheat and soybeans increased by almost 80 and 90 percent, respectively. Many other grains, like rice and maize, reached record highs. Prices are soaring not because there is less food (in 2007, the world produced more grains than ever before), but because some grains are now being used as fuel and because more people can afford to eat more. The average consumption of meat in China, for example, has more than doubled since the mid-1980s.

The impact of a fast-growing middle class will soon be felt in the price of other resources.

Bob Thompson in The Washington Post (via bookforum):

Chinua Achebe has been asked to consider a simple thought experiment:

Suppose someone had told him, 50 years ago, that his first novel soon would be known all over the world? That “Things Fall Apart,” published in 1958, would go on to sell around 11 million copies in something like 45 languages? That at the dawn of the 21st century, his own daughter would be teaching it to American college students?

What would he have said?

“I don’t think there was anybody who would have thought that up,” he replies. “If anyone did, I would say they were out of their mind.”

At this, the writer who changed the way the world looked at Africa throws back his head and laughs.

Achebe is sitting in the living room of his modest, wheelchair-friendly house on the campus of Bard College. Silver-haired and frail at 77, 18 years removed from the Nigerian car accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down, he speaks in a voice so quiet that a tape recorder at times has trouble picking it up.

But his laugh — infectious and accompanied by a wide grin — comes through every time.

Paul Krugman in a 30-year-old paper (via Pure Pedantry):

This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest rates on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved …

Interstellar trade, by contrast, involves wholly novel considerations. The most important of these are the problem of evaluating capital costs on goods in transit when the time taken to ship them depends on the observer’s reference frame; and the proper modelling of arbitrage in interstellar capital markets where — or when (which comes to the same thing) — simultaneity ceases to have an unambiguous meaning …

This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.

More here.

Am I the only economist who does not read The Economist?  Well maybe the first one to confess to it. 

No, it is not because I am too busy and don’t have the time.  It is a deliberate decision.  Call it a one-man boycott of ideology that masquerades too often as journalism. 

Dani Rodrik’s admission starts an interblog discussion (the article is positive on some shifts in the magazine).  Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber adds:

Dani does note in the magazine’s defence that he was recently told to look at an Economist piece which quotes him, and which was in his opinion quite good on the complicated relationship between institutions and economic growth.

Dsquared had some sharp words a while back (I can’t remember where) for people who made the grievous error of confusing an acquaintance with the contents of the Economist with real understanding of what is happening in other countries. There is, even so, an underlying truth in the Friedman piece. The Economist succeeds in part by delivering a particular party line that accords well with the prejudices of many of its readers (Friedman quotes an acquaintance as saying that he loves the ‘unpredictability’ of the Economist which is quite odd; by the time I gave up on it, I could tell nine times out of ten what the magazine was going to say on a topic by looking at what the topic was). But it also serves as a kind of aspirational good.

YouNotSneaky’s guide to reading the Economist:

Before one decides on whether to read anything one must know the proper way to read it. So I’m here to help out. Here’s how I read The Economist:

1. Skip the entire US section.

2. Look in Europe section. Anything about Eastern Europe (which also includes the Balkans and Turkey)?
If so read it, if not skip it.

Via Cosmic Variance:

From The Guardian:

An atmosphere of moral panic surrounds religion. Viewed not so long ago as a relic of superstition whose role in society was steadily declining, it is now demonised as the cause of many of the world’s worst evils. As a result, there has been a sudden explosion in the literature of proselytising atheism. A few years ago, it was difficult to persuade commercial publishers even to think of bringing out books on religion. Today, tracts against religion can be enormous money-spinners, with Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great selling in the hundreds of thousands. For the first time in generations, scientists and philosophers, high-profile novelists and journalists are debating whether religion has a future. The intellectual traffic is not all one-way. There have been counterblasts for believers, such as The Dawkins Delusion? by the British theologian Alister McGrath and The Secular Age by the Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor. On the whole, however, the anti-God squad has dominated the sales charts, and it is worth asking why.

More here.

Garrison Keillor in The New York Times:

AGAINST HAPPINESS: In Praise of Melancholy.

By Eric G. Wilson.

It’s a good old-fashioned broadside against American optimism — the mass of men lead lives of shallow happiness, the superior man exults in his gloom.

The author is a gloomy man who tried jogging, yoga, tai chi, Frank Capra movies, smiling, good grooming and eating salads, and finally decided to embrace his gloominess. This makes him an odd duck in America, a land of “crazed and compulsive hopefulness,” settled by seekers of utopia, a Promised Land that quickly became a shopping mall where “the typical American, the American bent on discovering happiness through securing stuff,” consumes Paxil and Prozac, Ambien and Botox, while seeking the instant gratification of the cellphone, the BlackBerry, the Internet, smiley faces, churches that are “happiness companies,” hugging and yearning for “up with no down.”

It’s only right that the tide of inspirational books should yield to the occasional depressional one — for every humorist, a dishumorist, a man who runs his nails down the blackboard and makes everyone’s hair stand up, though we humorists would note that you have to work hard to get a laugh and that dishumor is tyrannical: you need only say out loud, “How can you people stand around here and enjoy yourselves while the world is falling apart?” and all conversation ends.

More here.

..
The Boy in the Bubble
Paul Simon

It was a slow day
And the sun was beating
On the soldiers by the side of the road
There was a bright light
A shattering of shop windows
The bomb in the baby carriage
Was wired to the radio

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry

It was a dry wind
And it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth
And the dead sand
Falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers
And the automatic earth

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in the corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry

It’s a turn-around jump shot
It’s everybody jump start
It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
The Boy in the Bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart

And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry

..

Jim Holt at the New York Times:

Evolutionary psychologists have come up with four plausible Darwinian reasons for altruism. First, there is “kinship selection,” which is supposed to lurk behind the sacrifices you make for your biological family. It’s based on the percentage of genetic overlap. One biologist, when asked if he would lay down his life for his brother, quipped, no, but he would for two brothers or eight cousins.

Second, there is “reciprocal altruism,” which doesn’t depend on shared genes. Here, the basic idea is: You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Reciprocal altruism is seen not just in humans but in some animal species. Vampire bats, for instance, benefit one another by sharing meals of regurgitated blood.

Kinship and reciprocation are, as Richard Dawkins has written, the “twin pillars of altruism in a Darwinian world.” Neither, however, would appear to be of much use in explaining philanthropy. Bill Gates has no special genetic relationship to the beneficiaries of his foundation. Nor does he expect them to reciprocate by purchasing the next release of Windows.

A third explanation for altruism, the Darwinian advantage of having a reputation for generosity, might look more promising. Nineteenth-century “robber barons” like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie had ample reason to amend their reputations by generous benefactions.

More here.

Sean Carrol in Cosmic Variance:

Never let it be said that we ignore the Republicans! Seeking to further highlight distinctions between the parties, presumptive nominee John McCain has been on something of an anti-science tear lately. First, he dined and spoke with the Discovery Institute in Seattle — not a huge red flag by itself (there were many co-presenters, and one can’t always choose one’s lunch companions), but telling in light of his many flip-flops on teaching intelligent design in schools. (Like any good postmodern conservative, he has staked out firm positions on both sides of a wide variety of issues.)

But the latest news is much worse, as McCain panders to crackpots who believe that vaccination causes autism.

At a town hall meeting Friday in Texas, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., declared that “there’s strong evidence” that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that was once in many childhood vaccines, is responsible for the increased diagnoses of autism in the U.S. — a position in stark contrast with the view of the medical establishment.

The main problem with such a claim is not that just it’s untrue — it’s complete rubbish, of course, but politicians say untrue things all the time. The problem is that, unlike unfortunate choices about NASA spending priorities, in this case the stupidity can cause people to die.

More here.

From CNN:

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

In the course of a five-month inquiry, the AP discovered that drugs have been detected in the drinking water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas — from Southern California to Northern New Jersey, from Detroit, Michigan, to Louisville, Kentucky.

More here.

In the BBC:

With just a string and a ruler you can quickly measure that pi must be just over three-and-an-eighth (3.125). With more precise measurements, you may be able to narrow it down to 3.14.

However, if you ask a typical maths nerd, you’ll get an earful of pi – 3.14159265 and so on. A surprising number of students have memorised 50 or even 100 digits after the decimal point.

The rough ratio of pi 3.14 gives us the date for Pi Day. March 14, or 3/14 in American dating style, makes sense for a celebration of this famous constant.

Coincidentally, Pi Day is also the birthday of Albert Einstein, who no doubt knew more than a little about pi. Pi Day celebrants, usually children with an enthusiastic teacher and a varying degree of personal interest in the subject, learn about pi, circles, and, if they’re lucky, eat baked pies of various sorts.

Ian Buruma over at Project Syndicate:

All totalitarian systems have one thing in common: by crushing all forms of political expression except adulation of the regime, they make everything political. There is no such thing in North Korea as non-political sports or culture. So there is no question that the invitation to the New York Philharmonic was meant to burnish the prestige of a regime, ruled by The Dear Leader, Kim Jong-Il, whose standing is so low – even in neighboring China – that it needs all the burnishing it can get.

Interviews with some of the musicians revealed an awareness of this. A violinist was quoted as saying that “a lot of us are…not buying into this party line that music transcends the political.” She was “sure that it [would] be used by Pyongyang and our own government in attempting to make political points.” The conductor, Lorin Maazel, who chose a program of Wagner, Dvorak, Gershwin, and Bernstein, was less cynical. The concert, he said, would “take on a momentum of its own,” and have a positive effect on North Korean society.

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? But could he possibly be right? No one, not even Maazel, pretends that one concert by a great Western orchestra can blow a dictatorship away, but authoritarians’ wariness of the subversive power of music dates back to Plato’s Republic . In Plato’s view, music, if not strictly controlled, inflames the passions and makes people unruly. He wanted to limit musical expression to sounds that were conducive to harmony and order.

Johnathan Zittrain in the Boston Review:

We need a strategy that addresses the emerging security troubles of today’s Internet and PCs without killing their openness to innovation. This is easier said than done, because our familiar legal tools are not particularly attuned to maintaining generativity. A simple regulatory intervention—say, banning the creation or distribution of deceptive or harmful code—will not work because it is hard to track the identities of sophisticated wrongdoers, and, even if found, many may not be in cooperative jurisdictions. Moreover, such intervention may have a badly chilling effect: much of the good code we have seen has come from unaccredited people sharing what they have made for fun, collaborating in ways that would make businesslike regulation of their activities burdensome for them. They might be dissuaded from sharing at all.

We can find a balance between needed change and undue restriction if we think about how to move generative approaches and solutions that work at one “layer” of the Internet—content, code, or technical—to another.

Recently a 3QD reader, Cris, wrote to me after reading my account of my cat Freddy’s illness. Her cat, Dada, has been diagnosed with Feline Infectious Peritonitus and is not so well. She wrote that:

Today I found out that my cat, Dada, has feline infectious peritonitis and i remembered i read about it on your blog a few months ago. Reading the article again was so helpful, because i also belong to the category of people who would do anything, try anything to save a little friend.

I found Dada an year and four months ago, she was a little stray cat, living in a really bad habitat. She was, I suppose, no older than a month. Me and my boyfriend took her home and took care of her. She is a very special and affectionate cat, we sometimes perceive her as a human.

From time to time she started feeling bad and having fever. The vet was treating her for different diseases, but in fact he had no idea what it was.

After a few months, we went to another vet who said it was haemobartonella and treated her for it for a long time. Seeing that there was no improvement of her health condition, we went to another vet who told us today it is fip, in a dry form. I am aware it is an incurable disease, but i still hope to find a way to make her feel better, at least for a period of time.

What did you do with Freddy? How did you treat her? Our vet recommended us supportive treatment with prednisone and vitamins, but we are not sure it’s enough.

I told Cris that I believe that Freddy was probably misdiagnosed as having FIP (after a couple of other misdiagnoses by other vets–although she did have a blood test come back positive for FIP) and she just became better on her own. Cris wrote that:

I also hope there is a misdiagnoses, but the doctor said that other tests she had say the same thing. She has a high level of proteins in her blood, respiratory problems and a lot of white cells. 🙁 On the other hand, it’s hard to believe she resisted for so long with that terrible disease, I read on the internet that the life expectation is much lower.

If you are a vet, or know about such things, please leave your advice for Cris in the comments. Here are a couple of other pictures of Dada (she is partial to Julian Barnes, it seems!):

And Freddy says Hello!

…
Hospital
Marianne Boruch

It seems so—
I don’t know. It seems
as if the end of the world
has never happened in here.
No smoke, no
dizzy flaring except
those candles you can light
in the chapel for a quarter.
They last maybe an hour
before burning out.
                  And in this room
where we wait, I see
them pass, the surgical folk—
nurses, doctors, the guy who hangs up
the blood drop—ready for lunch,
their scrubs still starched into wrinkles,
a cheerful green or pale blue,
and the end of a joke, something
about a man who thought he could be—
what? I lose it
in their brief laughter.

..

From The Guardian:

Sylvia Plath was the first poet to write great poetry about childbirth. Her suicide at the age of 30 made her a legend, but she left a legacy far richer than the story of her tragic death. Her poetry is appalling but it is also exhilarating. She embodied a seismic shift in consciousness which enabled us to feel and think as we do today, and of which she was a supremely vulnerable and willing casualty. She changed our world.

In 1953, while still at college, she had a mental breakdown culminating in a suicide attempt and was treated with ECT, an experience which, like her father’s death, was to provide her with a store of images, and which she describes in her one novel, The Bell Jar. She recovered to make the fateful journey to England where, in Cambridge, she met Ted Hughes, whom she married in 1956. Their careers collided in a period of creativity and mutual inspiration; they were acknowledged as the stars of their generation. Their work was primal, visceral, intensely physical. Technically accomplished, both wrote from the body, not the head.

More here.

From Scientific American:

A new study may have been for (and about) the birds, but it also hints at how humans may have developed the ability to speak, potentially paving the way to one day to identifying the causes of speech deficiencies. Duke University scientists report in PLoS ONE this week that they attempted to pinpoint regions of the brain responsible for vocal skills by studying three types of birds (parrots, hummingbirds, and songbirds) capable of picking up new songs and utterances as well as birds (zebra finches and ringed turtle doves) that lack the ability. Their findings: vocal pathways are always nestled in the same areas of the brain that control body movement.

“The vocal learning system is embedded within [an] ancient pathway'” designed to handle motor function that, in birds, controls their wings and legs, says study co-author Erich Jarvis, an associate professor of neurobiology at Duke University. So how did some birds develop an ability to learn new sounds? Jarvis speculates that the ability evolved from motor function or, more specifically, that the original “wiring” in the pathway linked to limbs may have duplicated and connected to vocal organs in these birds. He believes that human language pathways may have developed in a similar fashion, given that our ability to speak is based on controlling movements in the larynx (voice box).

More here.

Over at the SSRC blog Knowledge Rules, Andrew Ross looks at the issue:

As universities are increasingly exposed to the rough justice of the market, their institutional life is distinguished more by the rate of change than by the observance of custom and tradition. Few examples illustrate this better than the rush, in recent years, to establish overseas programs and branch campuses. Since 9/11, the pace of offshoring has surged and is being pursued across the entire spectrum of institutions that populate the higher education landscape, from the ballooning for-profit sectors and online diploma mills to land grant universities to the most elite, ivied colleges. No single organization has attained the operational status of a global university, after the model of the global corporation, but it may only be a matter of time before we see the current infants of that species take their first, unaided steps.

The formidable projected growth in student enrollment internationally, combined with the expansion of technological capacity and the consolidation of English as a lingua franca have resulted in a bonanza-style environment for investors in offshore education. As with any other commodity good or service that is allowed to roam across borders, there has also been much hand-wringing about the potential lack of quality assurance.