Tag Archives: economist

Perhaps doping in sports should be allowed

With the Tour de France just over and the Olympics now underway, doping in sports is a topical issue. You don’t often hear the argument for doping, but this article from The Economist argues well that doping shouldn’t be cheating.

Why should doping be cheating? There are two arguments against allowing athletes to enhance their abilities by doping:

Fairness. Athletes go to all sorts of lengths in the quest for a little extra performance – why is doping any more unfair than some of those measures? Why is doping cheating when complex nutritional compounds are not? Why isn’t the new Speedo swimwear that offers a significant advantage unfair? Modern athletes routinely go to great and unnatural lengths to excel – why should doping be any different?
Safety. The far more compelling argument against allowing doping is on the grounds of safety. Many think that doping is unsafe and in many cases it may be. Unsafe doping should be banned, but if doping were opened up it could be better regulated. Athletes would be required to list exactly what substances are being used thus making regulation easier – and doping safer.

Doping should be allowed or not based on safeness – and there is a case to be made that opening up doping could make it safer for athletes. Interesting.

Americans shouldn’t worry much about the rise of China

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Sad america According to this article from The Economist Americans are apparently unhappy with the state of their country in general. According to the article 80% of Americans think the country is going the wrong way.

The article lists several reasons that the national mood is low – the war on terror and the economy are the major categories. The rising China also seems to be freaking the Americans out pretty badly – let’s see how they react when China wins more medals in the Olympics.

America has gotten into sullen moods before and recovered. But:
“Still, countries, like people, behave dangerously when their mood turns dark. If America fails to distinguish between what it needs to change and what it needs to accept, it risks hurting not just allies and trading partners, but also itself.”

There are things that do need to be changed. For instance: education, health, the war on terror and Guantánamo Bay. However, it is an attitude adjustment that is required when it comes to the rise of Asia and China.

There are two reasons not to worry about the rise of China:

“Even at its present growth rate, China’s GDP will take a quarter of a century to catch up with America’s; and the internal tensions that China’s rapidly changing economy has caused may well lead it to stumble before then”
“Even if Asia’s rise continues unabated, it is wrong-and profoundly un-American-to regard this as a problem. Economic growth, like trade, is not a zero-sum game. The faster China and India grow, the more American goods they buy”

I like the last paragraph:
“Everybody goes through bad times. Some learn from the problems they have caused themselves, and come back stronger. Some blame others, lash out and damage themselves further. America has had the wisdom to take the first course many times before. Let’s hope it does so again.”

The Economist on the stupid American skilled immigration policy

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The Economist has an article about how those silly Americans are shooting themselves in the foot by preventing talented immigrants from getting in. This is something that I have personally encountered and I have to agree with The Economist – it’s pretty dumb.

America is in the enviable position of being the goal destination for thousands of the world’s most talented people. That is a position that other countries would love to be in. Indeed America’s restrictive laws and the efforts of Europe, Canada, and Australia are starting to suck talent and companies out of America.

Each year only 85,000 H1B visas for highly skilled and company sponsored immigrants are allowed. This is so far below the demand that they are all gone on the first day. Remember that these are people who would really add to the American economy:

Almost 25% of American Nobel prize winners are immigrants
Great American companies like Google and Intel had immigrants among their founders
40% of America’s science and engineering PhDs go to immigrants
Bill Gates (and several economists) have calculated that on average each foreigner who receives an H1B visa creates jobs for 5 Americans

So why do American politicians shoot their country in the foot like this? Because those politicians are elected by a largely ignorant and isolationist public. These guys think that allowing some of the most talented and skilled workers to add to their economy is a bad idea.

Will Morgan Tsvangirai give back the farms stolen by Mugabe?

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Bob Mugabe is a bad guy. He has really brought Zimbabwe to it’s knees and almost anything or anyone would be better than him. And it is starting to look like Zim may soon be rid of him, but how much do we know about the new guy, Morgan Tsvangirai?

That is a question asked in a recent Economist article. Nobody really knows what he will do, but The Economist does have some information on his plans:

He plans to focus on saving the economy. Stop printing money (to slow inflation), scrap price and foreign exchange controls and bring back market forces
Farms confiscated from white farmers by Mugabe’s cronies will not all be given back, but farmers will supposedly be reasonably compensated. It’s not entirely clear what will happen on this crucial issue
The MDC want to amend or replace the constitution in order to limit presidential powers

He would undoubtedly be an improvement on Mugabe, but would Tsvangirai be a good president? The Economist also lists a few worrying points:

Tsvangirai does also have an autocratic bent. In 2005 he flouted a decision by his party and did his own thing causing a split in the party
He has also been criticized for ignoring violence within the ranks of the MDC

We don’t know what Tsvangirai will be like – but it seems certain he will be an improvement on Bob

From The Economist to lightning balls to 1930s comics to World War 2 fighter pilots to UFOs to Dave Grohl to the Foo Fighters

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I recently read an unusual article in The Economist about a controversial phenomenon known as ball lightning. Basically ball lightning is a rare and unpredictable phenomenon where lightning forms a glowing ball which can persist and move around for several seconds rather than the normal flash.

Ball lightning appears to be inconsistent in color (pale blue, yellow, green, red and white), size (pea sized to several meters) and behavior (dropping form the sky, moving along the ground, and sometimes nailing people).

Yeah it sounds like bull, but they have been seen thousands of times by thousands of witnesses over the last few centuries. Several scientific groups are working on explaining ball lightning. Hell, even The Economist (normally very skeptical) has written a detailed article about the studies attempting to explain them.

Wikipedia has a detailed article on lightning balls which mentions that they were often sighted by fighter pilots during World War 2. Now we need a little aside: early in the war poorly trained Japanese pilots often flew erratic trajectories and the Allied pilots developed a derogatory term for them – foo fighters. The name came from a comic strip popular at the time, Smokey Stover, which often made use of the nonsense word foo.

So when the pilots repeatedly saw the erratically moving balls of fire they became known as foo fighters. Because lightning balls (foo fighters) were/are largely unexplained a lot of people think that they are UFOs (rubbish). Someone who is fascinated by UFOs is Dave Grohl who therefore chose the name for his band the Foo Fighters.

It’s like the whole 6 degrees idea but for concepts instead of people. Awesome.

The Economist on private education

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The Economist recently published an article on private schools. It focuses on schools and data from Britain, but I think that a lot of what is said is generally applicable.

The first part of the article discusses how extremely expensive private schools are getting (this is something that is true in South Africa too). However in Britain it seems that there are good returns on paying for private education:

Those who left private schools earned on average 35% more than those who left public schools
Only about half of this gain was attributed to a better background (contacts, intelligence, etc)

The researchers used some more analysis and research to figure out how private schools achieve this benefit: better exam results. When they compared graduates from private and public schools with equal exam results their earnings were the same!

So it seems that if you can get your kids to achieve good exam results, it doesn’t really matter what school they went to. Perhaps there is a cheaper way of achieving those results?

The end of the article discusses a survey of parents who sent their bright kids to ordinary schools with excellent results:

The more average schools paid special attention to their talented students, going out of their way to extend and assist them
However, this result does appear to depend on parents playing an active part in their children’s education

People are less rational when they’re hungry

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The Economist has this article about a study recently published showing that when blood sugar levels are low, people use more intuition to make decisions. You know, when you have been thinking hard about something for a while and then there is one last decision that you just can’t be bothered with? That is what the scientists were studying.

The scientists got a bunch of students to do a mentally taxing task and then gave half of them lemonade with sugar and half lemonade with another sweetener. Using a psychological trick (read about it in the article if you want) the scientists were able to show that those who had been mentally worked and not given sugar were more likely to make decisions using intuition instead of reason.

So it turns out that you really should take food into exams and that you really shouldn’t make important decisions on an empty stomach…

Arthur C. Clarke quotes

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Arthur C. Clarke was a very well known science fiction writer who died on March 18 at 90 years old. The Economist always has superb obituary articles (probably my favorite section of the magazine) and this week the obit was about Clarke. It is an interesting read, but I enjoyed the quotes that were dropped in – some I had heard, some I had not.

Asked if extra-terrestrials exist: “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying”
Asked about UFOs: “They tell us absolutely nothing about intelligence elsewhere in the universe, but they do prove how rare it is on Earth”
Probably his most famous quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”
His self-penned epitaph: “He never grew up; but he never stopped growing”

Price really does impact enjoyment

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The Economist recently ran an interesting article on the impact of price on our perceptions of quality. It seems obvious that price would have an impact on the expectations of quality.

However, a recent paper has used brain scans to show that people really do enjoy wine more when they think it is expensive.

Experiment

Volunteers were asked to rate 5 wines of differing prices (from $5 to $90 a bottle)
What the volunteers didn’t know is that there were actually only 3 different wines – 2 of which were served twice at different prices
While tasting the part of the brain responsible for registering pleasant experiences was scanned

Results

The wines tasted twice at different prices were rated as better when served at a higher price
The brain scans showed that people really did enjoy a wine more when they thought it was more expensive

A follow up blindfolded experiment was done where volunteers weren’t given the prices. In that case they rated a wine tasted twice as the same both times. This shows that it is the price that substantially impacts enjoyment.

So the ideal is to have a situation where you are paying for a medium quality product but you believe it is worth a lot more. The key is making sure that you actually believe it is worth more.

Nuclear power is good – it has an unfair reputation

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Humans need a lot of energy. We consume energy for light, heat, transport, food… Basically everything we do requires energy. The problem is that using energy in it’s popular forms is doing some serious damage to our environment.

Currently most of the energy we use comes from fossil fuels (oil, natural gas and coal) which we burn to create energy. Unfortunately burning those fossil fuels also pollutes the air and drives global warming. Global warming = bad.

So we need to change our habits (waste less energy) and we could change our energy sources (to those less damaging). There are renewable sources like solar and wind power which basically make use of the copious amounts of energy the sun beams down to earth every day. However, these sources are expensive, inconsistent, and chew up large amounts of space.

Nothing is ideal, but you should be rational and not emotional in your decisions.

There is another great option, also not ideal, but the best (in my opinion) currently available. Nuclear power has an unfairly bad reputation. When used properly it is an excellent energy source – and it produces no air pollution! As the Economist says:

Nuclear power offers the possibility of large quantities of electricity that is cleaner than coal, more secure than gas and more reliable than wind. And if cars switch from oil to electricity, the demand for power generated from carbon-free sources will increase still further. The industry’s image is thus turning from black to green.

The Economist has articles here, here, here and here describing that:

Nuclear power is very clean as the graph below shows.
Nuclear power can be safely generated. Even taking into account Chernobyl (4,000 dead) and Three Mile Island (0 dead) nuclear power is extremely safe – and getting safer.
Nuclear power can be generated cheaply. Initial costs are extremely high, but over time it makes economic sense. This would be especially true were the negative environmental costs of fossil fuels built into their already high cost.
There are pretty good ways of storing the radioactive waste generated.
Many previous nuclear protesters and “greens” are changing their minds and advocating nuclear power.