The high cost of childbirth in the U.S. is the product of a mix of private- and public-sector decisions, not a straight-out result of government policy. But it nonetheless got a few of my HBR colleagues and me thinking about what strange and not-so-strange economic incentives Americans face relative to citizens of other nations. So here is a mostly unscientific Independence Day list — compiled with lots of help from the databases of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a.k.a. the OECD, a.k.a. the rich nations' club — of what sort of behaviors we're collectively encouraging and discouraging.
Obama's new national security advisor has sharp elbows, a tart tongue, and a taste for the shadows.
After four and a half years of playing the diplomat, Rice finally has a job that fits her sharp-elbowed personality. She'll no longer need to pay so much attention to the public niceties of diplomatic life. She won't have to worry as much about awkward leaks from loose-lipped foreign colleagues. And she'll have greater freedom to unlock her inner bulldozer as the president's head-knocker in chief.
Just after the PRISM scandal broke, Tyler Cowen offered a wonderful, wonderful tweet:
I’d heard about this for years, from “nuts,” and always assumed it was true.
There is a model of social knowledge embedded in this tweet. It implies a set of things that one believes to be true, a set of things one can admit to believing without being a “nut”, and an inconsistency between the two. Why the divergence? Oughtn’t it be true that people of integrity should simply own up to what they believe? Can a “marketplace of ideas” function without that?
BY THE time Edward Snowden is finished with us, we won't know our elbows from our posteriors. Yesterday the Man from PRISM left the US government biting on a diplomatic dispute with Hong Kong, with mutual recriminations flying over America's mishandling of the case and Hong Kong's failure to honour extradition treaties, as he waltzed off to Moscow. This morning he followed up by dekeing a planeful of journalists from Moscow clear to Havana.
One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.
What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.
[...]
After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.
Increasingly, those digital subscribers are turning to mobile devices for their news. The shift from print to tablet isn’t enormous, but the phone is a different thing entirely. And so, of course, there’s a company trying to change the way we read news on our smartphones.
In the aftermath of the 2011 Libya intervention, the White House’s recent decision to step up aid to the Syrian uprising, and the appointment by President Obama of two so-called “humanitarian hawks” to high-level positions, the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) is on the lips of lawmakers, NGOs, and commentators more than usual these days. || The latest issue of the American Interestfeatures two essays that explain the origins, limitations, and pitfalls of R2P. Any readers interested in better understanding some of the concepts that have shaped US foreign policy in recent years—and where they could take us in the near future—should read these essays by Rajan Menon and Seyom Brown and Ronald E. Neumann .
American military aid should be limited, escalated gradually and used as a lever to increase the chances of a diplomatic settlement. If Idris makes headway, his forces should also receive sophisticated anti-tank weapons. Anti-aircraft missiles, however, should remain off the table. The risk of jihadists obtaining them is too high.
If Idris fails to make headway, Washington should decrease its support. Syria's rebels, not American troops, must change the military balance on the ground.
In “Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century,” published by Basic Books, Caryl takes an in-depth look at five consequential events that have had lasting effects: both the revolution in Iran and the armed rebellion in Afghanistan, which gave life to political Islam; Margaret Thatcher’s electoral triumph in Great Britain, which helped steer Western politics rightward; the election of Pope John Paul II (in late 1978), which spu
In what may some day be termed a landmark speech in modern urban history, Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City proposed this afternoon an aggressive, long-term plan to protect the city against the ravages of climate change and forestall a future Hurricane Sandy. The elaborate climate fortification program, spelled out in a 400-page report, has elements ranging from public assistance to protect buildings and harden critical infrastructure to far-out concepts for construction of both permanent and temporary seawalls to protect both waterfront and the creeks and canals that can be "back door" gateways to flood waters. The total cost of the program comes to about US $19 billion, which is roughly equivalent—perhaps not coincidentally—to the estimated cost of Sandy.
Coincident with the NSA privacy flap, Bloomberg News ran a story this week on how many U.S. state health organizations are selling supposedly “anonymous” patient information to pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and researchers that can, using other publicly available data and well-known analytical techniques, personally re-identify those patients. [...] Given all the personal information publicly available for sale—the medical information databases join readily-available commercial databases for driver license information and web surfing habits and location data, to name just two—the NSA flap looks almost tame in comparison.
In the time it took you to read the last paragraph some 48-year old was laid off by The Village Voice, and they're smarter than you and have lived ten times what you've lived and can write so much better than you I actually almost feel bad for you, and now they're on the same job market trying to scramble for the same shitty 10-cents-a-word gig recapping a show about couponing for the AV Club in the hopes that they can bang out some soul-destroying tedious bullshit so that a pack of talentless losers in the comments can pick their words apart from the safety of their beige plastic cubicles as they try to distract themselves with pop culture for long enough to keep their all-devouring self-hatred at bay. You might get that gig over them but if so it's only because you're young and cheap and stupid and the scuzzy editor thinks he might be able to fuck you after the Christmas party.
For 75 years, Finland's expectant mothers have been given a box by the state. It's like a starter kit of clothes, sheets and toys that can even be used as a bed. And some say it helped Finland achieve one of the world's lowest infant mortality rates.
It's a tradition that dates back to the 1930s and it's designed to give all children in Finland, no matter what background they're from, an equal start in life.
The maternity package - a gift from the government - is available to all expectant mothers.
SALF [Swedish Atheistic Liberation Front], and the atheists they claim to represent, believe that there is no god, agnostics believe that there may not be a god. To outsiders, this difference in doctrine seems almost irrelevant; to believers it is a question of life or death. Therefore, such a small difference in doctrine can create such explosive hatreds, divisions and violence.
The British journal The Tablet, which I find very useful for what goes on in the Roman Catholic Church, came out with a “Pentecost edition” on May 18, 2013). [...] Pentecost was the event recounted in the Book of Acts, when the Holy Spirit was poured out over a gathering in Jerusalem of disciples of Jesus several weeks after his disappearance from this world; the three stories in the Tablet issue deal with people who believe that this outpouring, with all the miraculous signs reported in the New Testament, is continuing with great force today.
There’s very little public discussion of utilities or utility regulations, especially relative to sexier topics like fracking or electric cars. That’s mainly because the subject is excruciatingly boring, a thicket of obscure institutions and processes, opaque jargon, and acronyms out the wazoo. Whether PURPA allows IOUs to customize RFPs for low-carbon QFs is actually quite important, but you, dear reader, don’t know it, because you fell asleep halfway through this sentence. Utilities are shielded by a force field of tedium.
It’s is an unfortunate state of affairs, because this is going to be the century of electricity. Everything that can be electrified will be. (This point calls for its own post, but mark my words: transportation, heat, even lots of industrial work is going to shift to electricity.) So the question of how best to manage electricity is key to both economic competitiveness and ecological sustainability.
A cheap regimen of vitamins in use for decades is seen by scientists as a way to delay the start of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, a goal that prescription drugs have failed to achieve. / Drugmakers including Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., Pfizer Inc. (PFE) and Eli Lilly & Co. (LLY) have spent billions of dollars on ineffective therapies in a so-far fruitless effort to come up with a treatment for dementia and Alzheimer’s. / Now, in the latest of a steady drumbeat of research that suggests diet, exercise and socializing remain patients’ best hope, a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that vitamins B6 and B12 combined with folic acid slowed atrophy of gray matter in brain areas affected by Alzheimer’s disease.
Even by the standards of the TED conference, Henry Markram’s 2009 TEDGlobal talk was a mind-bender. He took the stage of the Oxford Playhouse, clad in the requisite dress shirt and blue jeans, and announced a plan that—if it panned out—would deliver a fully sentient hologram within a decade. He dedicated himself to wiping out all mental disorders and creating a self-aware artificial intelligence. And the South African–born neuroscientist pronounced that he would accomplish all this through an insanely ambitious attempt to build a complete model of a human brain—from synapses to hemispheres—and simulate it on a supercomputer. Markram was proposing a project that has bedeviled AI researchers for decades, that most had presumed was impossible. He wanted to build a working mind from the ground up. [...] And now Markram has funding almost as outsized as his ideas. On January 28, 2013, the European Commission—the governing body of the European Union—awarded him 1 billion euros ($1.3 billion). For decades, neuroscientists and computer scientists have debated whether a computer brain could ever be endowed with the intelligence of a human. It’s not a hypothetical debate anymore. Markram is building it. Will he replicate consciousness? The EU has bet $1.3 billion on it.
