Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Different but Equal?

Here’s a fascinating recent article with the forbidding title of The landscape of sex-differential transcriptome and its consequent selection in human adults.  I’ll provide the abstract, and then a translation into English.  Here’s the abstract: Background The prevalence of several human morbid phenotypes is sometimes much higher than intuitively expected. This can directly arise from the presence […]

Not With a Bang, but a Whimper… Democratic Party Edition. An Op Ed.

A presidential candidate like Donald Trump should not be viable. Candidates he supports should not be viable. The existence of Donald Trump should be a boon for the Democrats. And, in fact, it has been. But it hasn’t been enough. Perhaps four (or eight?) years worth of results will tip the balance for Democrats, but […]

Terrorism, UK Today, France Yesterday

From a story in Daily Mail: Terror suspects including jihadis returning from fighting in Syria are to be offered taxpayer-funded homes, counselling and help finding jobs to stop them carrying out attacks in Britain. The top-secret Government strategy, codenamed Operation Constrain, could even allow fanatics to jump to the top of council house waiting lists. […]

Genetics as an Omitted Variable in Psychology and Social Science

Here’s the abstract of an article by Frank Schmidt in the Archives of Scientific Psychology: Governments often base social intervention programs on studies done by psychologists and other social scientists.Often these studies fail to mention other research suggesting that such interventions may have a limited chance of actually working. The omitted research that is not […]

When People will not be Judged by the Color of their Skin, But On Where Their Ancestors Were Judged by the Color of their Skin

The Wall Street Journal had a piece that made reference to this story in the Cornell Daily Sun: Martha E. Pollack, nearing the six-month mark of her presidency, is facing her first major test at Cornell after hundreds of black students, responding to the arrest of a student who may be charged with a hate crime, […]

The Sharing Economy – Including the @$$holes

A friend of mine who has made it into his sixth decade without ever sullying himself with gainful employment is now doing deliveries, shared-economy style. (Packages, not people via Uber or Lyft.) I thought he was going to rail against the system when he described what is new in his life, but his attitude surprised […]

On the Effect of the Gender Composition of the Editorial Boards for Top Economics Journals

Here’s the abstract of a discussion paper from the IZA Institute of Labor Economics by Felix Bransch and Michael Kvasnicka: Using data on articles published in the top-five economic journals in the period 1991 to 2010, we explore whether the gender composition of editorial boards is related to the publishing success of female authors and […]

Race is a Social Construct

Back to back on my to read list were two articles that made an odd juxtaposition. First up was Race Is a Social Construct, Scientists Argue in the once great Scientific American. Here’s a representative blurb: More than 100 years ago, American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois was concerned that race was being used as a […]

CRISPR Critters

The first applications of gene editing are (will be?) to fix deleterious mutations. Nobody, or almost nobody, will complain when previously horrible diseases get fixed before a child is born. But the practice won’t stop there. There will be a progression of editing services from muscular dystrophy to hairlip to more ahtleticism, and eventually, more […]