Month: January 2022

A new study was released today that says if you give poor mothers extra money, their babies have slightly improved brain development. Brendan Nyhan is skeptical:

I really hope this is true but it's one paper, p=.02 with largest outcome added after preregistration, main result uses a post hoc combination of measures, and acknowledged sensitivity of results to differences between groups. Let's wait and see. https://t.co/uOUXLz8VnN

— Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan) January 24, 2022

OK, sure, but there's already a long literature showing a correlation between poverty and infant brain development, so this paper's result isn't very surprising. You might even wonder why anyone bothered with this particular bit of research.

There are two reasons. First, instead of just measuring poverty it makes use of "giving people money," which is a hot topic in lefty circles these days. Second, and more important, it doesn't use mere survey or test data. It involved hooking up babies to EEG machines and measuring their brainwaves, which is much more sciencey.

This surprised me because I had never heard of it before, but it turns out that we've been hooking up babies to EEGs for a long time and measuring various Greek letters:

Childhood EEG-based brain activity demonstrates a specific developmental pattern....For example, more absolute power in mid- to high- (i.e., alpha, beta, and gamma) frequency bands has been associated with higher language, cognitive, and social-emotional scores, whereas more absolute or relative low-frequency (i.e., theta) power has been associated with the development of behavioral, attention, or learning problems.

This sounds vaguely new-agey, but I guess it's accepted science: beta and gamma are good; alpha is mixed; and theta is bad.¹ Here's a chart from the paper showing what happens to the children of mothers who were given the extra money:

Sure enough, the kids who got the extra money have higher beta and gamma responses. For now, then, let's assume these measurements were correctly done. The key question is whether increased EEG activity in the beta and gamma bands is truly correlated with stronger cognitive development later in life. The entire study hinges on this.

So I took a look. The first problem I ran into is that most of the infant brainwave studies are related to autism research. Apparently peak alpha activity is associated with symptoms of autism, and research into this is ongoing.

That's obviously not germane to poverty, so I had to restrict my search to studies that weren't about autism. There weren't many longitudinal studies that tested kids beyond about two years old, but here's one that went out to seven years old:

Meh. The sample size is tiny; the trendline looks awfully dependent on one outlier kid with an IQ of 140; and there are hardly any kids with an IQ below 100, which suggests this was not a very random sample.

There are other studies that measure a variety of things, but I couldn't find any that measured medium-term life outcomes against infant EEG results. There's a fair amount of evidence that EEG results are correlated with improved cognitive skills at around age two, but not much beyond that.

At least, that's my horseback conclusion. I might have missed some studies. For now, though, I'd advise skepticism until someone does a rigorous longitudinal study, which would obviously take a long time.

In the meantime, it's probably true that poverty is associated with poor brain development. This new study doesn't offer much that's new on that score.

¹The reason this surprised me is that apparently EEG studies of infants have been going on for a long time, but we nonetheless haven't been inundated with sketchy books about "how to improve your baby's gamma waves" or Dr. Oz segments about dietary supplements that will depress alpha waves. Where are the cranks and crackpots in all this?

This is the Apple store at the Grove shopping center in Los Angeles. The entire ceiling is mirrored so that you can more easily admire the sublime beauty of every product created by the legendary designers from Cupertino.

Here's the latest estimate of the percentage of Americans who lack health insurance:

Starting in 2018 the number of uninsured started to creep up, but starting in 2021 it began to creep back down and is now at about the same level as it was during the Obama years. Next up: Finally insuring that last 10%.

Check out this chart from the Wall Street Journal:

This is paired with a story about how grocery store shelves are practically empty, but look at the black line. It's pretty much flat at 90%. The amount of stuff on shelves hasn't changed at all.

Even if you look just at food ("all edibles"), in-stock levels have dropped from 90% to about 87%. This does not quite sound like crisis territory, does it?

The metaverse is all over the news these days, thanks to the fact that Mark Zuckerberg decided it was a better name than "virtual reality," and this has prompted folks to recommend books by Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and other stars of VR science fiction.

And that's fine. Those guys write great stuff. But I'm a little bit surprised that I haven't seen any recommendations for Tad Williams' Otherland epic. It was written back in 1998 (!) but nonetheless captures the possibilities of the metaverse as well as any book I've read.

Now, it also has a plot and characters and all the usual accoutrements of fiction, and in the end the bad guys all get their comeuppance. The story may or may not be to your taste. And it is 3,000 pages long. But if you want to read a pretty good fictional treatment of the metaverse and all its possibilities, you might want to give it a try.

A few days ago I  wondered aloud about how good various kinds of masks are. Since then several people have sent me versions of something you may have seen: a matrix that provides a set of numbers—sometimes filter efficiency, sometimes estimates of how long they protect you—that depend on the type of mask you're wearing and the type of mask other people are wearing.

As it happens, that matrix is what started me thinking about this in the first place. And after a bit of investigation I've come to a couple of conclusions.

First, the old conventional wisdom is that masks reduce the number of virus particles you exhale, therefore helping keep the air clean for others, but they don't do much to protect you. That, however, turns out to be the old hotness. The new hotness is that masks do indeed protect both you and other people. So I stand corrected on that.

Second, I began to wonder where that matrix came from. Long story short, the earliest version I can find comes from Simon Smith, a Canadian expert in respirator filters. However, his matrix is labeled as a "sample calculation," which suggests it's something of a guess—though certainly an educated one.

So I started to look around for other estimates. In the end, I found four: Duncan, Smith, the EPA, and Koh. Their results are not always easy to summarize, but here's my best shot:

These numbers represent the percentage of virus-carrying aerosol droplets that the mask blocks, with the average shown in the first column. All of them are based on indoor settings with average ventilation. For example, if everyone else is unmasked, a typical cloth mask reduces your exposure by 31% compared to what you'd get if you wander around barefaced. That's not much. Conversely, a well-fitted N95 mask blocks 95% of the particles.

It works in the other direction too. If you do nothing but everyone else is wearing cloth masks, it reduces your exposure by 31% compared to what it would be if everyone else was also maskless.

The widest disagreement comes with the N95 masks. On the one hand, Duncan provides a spectacular estimate that a fitted N95 mask blocks 99.4% of all virus particles. Conversely, Koh is a skeptic because he believes the public is hopeless about wearing them properly. In real life, he thinks a surgical mask is probably better than an N95.

(And what does "well fitted" mean? Technically it has two parts. The first part is an annual test that takes about 20 minutes. Once you find a mask that passes, you are expected to wear exactly that kind of mask forever. The second part is a user fit test, which you do every time you put on the mask. We ordinary folks never do the first part, and it's unclear how much we do the second part. That's where the disagreement over effectiveness comes from.)

Anyway, I can't adjudicate the different estimates, so I just averaged them all. If we then assume that masks are equally effective at both inward and outward protection,¹ you get the famous matrix. Here's my version based on the averages above:

Take this for what it's worth. What it tells you, in theory, is that if you and everyone else are wearing surgical masks, it reduces particle volume by 79% compared to wearing nothing. That's about a 5x improvement. If you're wearing a non-fitted N95 and everyone else is wearing surgical masks, particle volume is reduced by 87%, an 8x improvement.

Here's another way of looking at the same data:

If you're wearing a surgical mask and everyone else is wearing cloth masks, it provides about 3x the protection of doing nothing.

Just generally, I'd beware of the N95 numbers. You should probably assume that even if you're being careful, your spiffy N95 mask isn't all that well fitted. The "N95 non-fitted" line is probably the most accurate for real life.

This is the best I could come up with doing a non-expert review of the literature. Don't take it as gospel, but as a rough estimate. If better data comes my way, I'll let you know.

¹I don't know if this is a reasonable assumption. Simon Smith uses it in his example, and he's an expert. Koh actually tests in both directions and produces a wide range of results. However, at a rough eyeball guess, his results suggest that inward and outward protection are roughly in the same ballpark.

This may seem like it's a little out of the blue, but I have some advice for everyone.

For most of my life I've suffered from chronic, mild depression. It's not debilitating, and it comes and goes. Sometimes I feel worse, sometimes I feel a little better. These days I take an antidepressant, and it helps, but only a little bit.

This has taught me a lesson: I need to always be keenly aware of my emotions. If I feel like the world is doomed and everything is hopeless, it's probably not because that's actually true. More likely, my depression has just temporarily kicked up a notch.

Needless to say, there's more to this than just brain chemistry. If I'm tired or stressed out, my mood worsens. This is precisely when I need to be most careful about making decisions or concluding that everything is, in fact, hopeless.

The combination of COVID-19 and the Trumpian takeover of American politics is obviously something that's produced a lot of tiredness and stress. So beware of your feelings. It's likely that democracy isn't really doomed; that America isn't sliding down a rat hole; that Russia and China aren't poised to take over the world; and that conservatives won't rule the country forever. It may feel that way sometimes, but that's just your downtrodden brain chemistry talking. Things are probably better than you think.

Or maybe not. But you should at least give it serious consideration.

Today is the 49th—and possibly last?—anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and that got me a little curious about how Roe was treated at the time it was handed down.

First I looked at the New York Times for January 23, 1973. On their front page they ran a straight news piece about the decision plus a short reax piece. The Times reported that reaction was "predictable," quoting a couple of Catholic cardinals who were shocked and a mainstream Protestant official who thought it was just fine. The word evangelical was never mentioned.

In the following week, the decision wasn't revisited on the front page. The only follow-up was a pair of short Sunday op-ed pieces, and over the course of the next few months there was almost nothing aside from some routine blurbs on inside pages. In other words, Roe was important but not all that important.

Time reported the ruling in their Law section and quoted the usual Catholics and right-to-lifers in opposition. They added that a Methodist bishop warned "more mildly" that it might be a step backward if the ruling led to more promiscuity. Again, the word evangelical was never mentioned.

Over the course of the decade abortion became a major cultural flashpoint, but it was eight years before Time gave it the cover treatment. They finally did in 1981 and Walter Isaacson wrote this:

Isaacson reports that although the Catholic church remained active in opposition to Roe, the anti-abortion movement "quickly secularized." The biggest anti-abortion group included Protestants, Jews, Catholics, liberals, and conservatives.

In a 5,000-word piece written in 1981 there's still no mention of evangelicals. The word is used only once, in an aside about an anti-abortion PAC that is "allied" with evangelical Christian groups. Anti-abortion sentiment is attributed mainly to the "New Right," and to Paul Weyrich in particular.

This isn't a deep dive or anything, but it was still kind of interesting. Mainly I was surprised at how little evangelicals were treated as major players in the anti-abortion movement, even in 1981 after they had become famous as one of the linchpins of Ronald Reagan's presidential victory. I'm not sure if that's because they weren't major players or because the press remained blind to their influence. Isaacson has gone on to bigger and better things, but I wonder how he sees his piece with the benefit of hindsight?

Despite the fact that Omicron is milder than Delta, hospitalizations are still at a record high in the US:

Why is this so if Omicron is less severe than Delta? Partly it shows just how transmissible Omicron is: So many people are catching it that there are more hospitalizations even if the percentage of people with serious cases is down.

But there's also this:

For Omicron, the rate of vaccination doesn't really matter. The usual two-shot vaccination provides only modest protection after a few months. It's the booster shot that provides meaningful protection, up in the 90+% range. And when it comes to booster shots, we are way behind the curve of the rest of the world, even more so than we are in ordinary vaccinations.

I'm not quite sure why this is. We're obviously nowhere near the point where we run into resistance from anti-vaxxers. Is it lack of marketing? Or what?

According to the Census Bureau, median earnings since 1980 look like this:

Overall income is up 53% since 1980, but that's driven by wildly different growth rates among men (+19%) and women (+102%).

There are plenty of other ways to slice and dice this. You can look at household income. You can look at income by race. You can look at income by age group. Take your pick, depending on what you're interested in.

It's worth noting that Census income, which is basically just cash wages, is about the same at the median as CBO income, which includes taxes and government benefits. The median earner has benefited a little bit from lower taxes since 1980, but that's all. Government benefits go almost entirely to workers below the median.