The 2024 World Happiness Report was released yesterday, and it showed the youth of America becoming steadily unhappier.
Wait. No it didn't. Happiness among the young actually ticked up a bit in the latest report. But no matter:
Dr Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general...described the report findings as a “red flag that young people are really struggling in the US and now increasingly around the world”. He said he was still waiting to see data that proved social media platforms were safe for children and adolescents, and called for international action to improve real-life social connections for young people.
Murthy added that the failure of governments to regulate social media better was “insane.” Since the report was sitting right in front of me, this got me curious. Does social media make people unhappy? I decided to take a crude look by comparing happiness to internet penetration in every country covered by the report. Here it is:
Hmm. More internet = more happiness. But what about young people specifically?
Same thing. But of course this doesn't tell us much. Rich countries have higher internet penetration, so all this says is that rich countries tend to be happier. So what if we restrict ourselves only to rich countries?
The regression line isn't as steep, but it still shows the same thing: more internet = more happiness.
Don't take any of this too seriously. Internet penetration is only a passable proxy for social media use, and I'm not sure how much I trust the happiness figures either. Nevertheless, to the extent the happiness report tells us anything, it doesn't tell us that internet use leads to unhappy kids. It might, but as usual there's not much real evidence to back it up.
What causes cavities? Lots of things, it turns out, but mainly sugar, just like you learned in grade school. However, sugar doesn't directly produce cavities. As with all things in biochemistry, the actual mechanism of cavity production is pretty complex.
But let's simplify. The main culprit in the conversion of sugar into cavities is a mouth bacteria called S. mutans. It does two things. First, it eats sucrose (table sugar) and produces a sticky biofilm that protects teeth. If you feed it enough sucrose this biofilm becomes quite thick and we call it plaque. Second, S. mutans binds to the sticky plaque and metabolizes any kind of sugar into lactic acid. If you provide enough sugar, S. mutans will produce more and more acid at its binding site. This acid eats away tooth enamel and creates cavities.
Wasn't that interesting? But why the lesson? It's because I recently heard about a product that modifies S. mutans and prevents cavities. All it takes is a single swab and you're more or less cavity free for the rest of your life. So why don't we have access to this? According to a widely cited piece by Scott Alexander, it's because of blinkered government obstruction:
The FDA demanded a study of 100 subjects, all of whom had to be “age 18-30, with removable dentures, living alone and far from school zones”.... The FDA wouldn’t budge from requiring this impossible trial.
As near as I can tell, this isn't really true. Here's the story.
It starts 50 years ago with Jeffrey Hillman, a professor at the University of Florida. He began examining S. mutans to see if it could be modified so it didn't produce lactic acid. That turned out to be possible, but S. mutans didn't survive the process. So then he replaced the gene sequences that produced lactic acid with gene sequences from Mexican beer that produced alcohol. Bingo! He had a strain of S. mutans that created tiny amounts of alcohol, which is harmless to teeth.
But that's not all. Hillman's strain also produced an antibiotic that killed competing strains. Shortly after you apply the new strain, it kills off all the ordinary S. mutans and colonizes your mouth forever.
In 1996 Hillman started a company called Oragenics to commercialize his discovery, which he called SMaRT (S. Mutans Associated Replacement Therapy). But there was an obvious problem. It was the product of recombinant DNA, a true transgenic that combined the genes of two different species. Not only that, it was specifically designed to kill off the original strain. If it escaped, it had the potential to kill off ordinary S. mutans everywhere, with unknown consequences.
This is why the FDA moved so slowly. Finally, though, after several years of lab and animal trials, Hillman got permission in 2004 for a safety trial on humans. First, though, he was required to create a special strain that died unless it was fed a specific amino acid daily. That way, if it escaped it would die of its own accord.
This is why the first trial involved people with dentures. It wasn't to test cavity fighting, it was solely to find out if Hillman's strain was safe. If anything went wrong, denture wearers could just bleach their dentures and stop applying the special amino acid.
This was a tiny trial—the actual size is a little unclear, but it was somewhere between two and a dozen volunteers under age 55—and it was apparently a success. Three years later Hillman got permission to try his new strain on people with real teeth, though the volunteers would be required to spend a week in biocontainment.
This is where the story trickles to a stop. In 2011 Oragenics finally announced the new trial, but I can't find any evidence that it ever took place. It's not in the FDA's database and Oragenics never announced any results.
Why? In 2014 the CEO of Oragenics said they had shelved it due to "regulatory concerns and patent issues," without specifying what those were. But that's probably not the whole story. In the intervening years the S. mutans project had spun off some research lines that turned out to be more promising than the original cavity-fighting research. SMaRT was most likely abandoned simply because Oragenics had better things to do with its limited resources.
In any case, Oragenics secured a patent in 2016 and then did nothing more until last year, when it licensed its patent to a company called Lantern Bioworks. Lantern has a twofold strategy. First, they're selling SMaRT in Próspera, a libertarian charter city on an island off Honduras that allows consensual testing of just about anything. Second, they're hoping to reclassify SMaRT as a probiotic, which has a simpler approval process.
Does SMaRT work? As far as I can tell there's no clinical testing to prove it. But one thing I find telling is that I dredged up a couple of articles about the prospects of using oral bacteria to fight cavities. One was from 2012 and doesn't mention SMaRT at all even though Hillman is quoted. The other is a journal review from 2019 that mentions a bunch of different ways S. mutans could be targeted to reduce cavities, but conspicuously doesn't mention genetic engineering to eliminate lactic acid production.
So that's that. Hillman retired from Oragenics in 2012, presumably after the decision to focus on different projects. As for the fears of Hillman's strain escaping and causing havoc, I can't say. It sounds like a reasonable concern in general, but I have no idea whether the FDA went overboard. I guess we're going to find out.
It's too bad Southern California is so hazy. This is a lovely picture of a sailboat cruising serenely off Dana Point, but it's a bit ruined by the orangeish smear at the horizon. Oh well.
Today brings a limited but interesting decision from the Supreme Court. It involves Yonas Fikre, a US citizen from Sudan, who was placed on the no-fly list 15 years ago. Here's the summary:
Mr. Fikre alleged that he traveled from his home in Portland, Oregon to Sudan in 2009 to pursue business opportunities there. At a visit to the U. S. embassy, two FBI agents informed Mr. Fikre that he could not return to the United States because the government had placed him on the No Fly List. The agents questioned him extensively about the Portland mosque he attended, and they offered to take steps to remove him from the No Fly List if he agreed to become an FBI informant and to report on other members of his religious community. Mr. Fikre refused.
The whole affair is even worse than this: Fikre informed the US embassy of his business plans when he entered Sudan and was subsequently invited to lunch—where he was told he couldn't return to the US. A few weeks later he traveled to the UAE, where he was held and tortured for months at the instigation of the US. Fikre then ended up in Sweden, where he filed suit, and eventually returned to Portland years later on a private jet. After Fikre sued, the government took him off the no-fly list and then argued that the case was moot and should be dismissed.
This went back and forth for several years, and the Supreme Court's decision today was a limited one. All it says is that the government can't moot its own case and prevent judgment by the simple expedient of withdrawing:
Were the rule more forgiving, a defendant might suspend its challenged conduct after being sued, win dismissal, and later pick up where it left off; it might even repeat “this cycle” as necessary until it achieves all of its allegedly “unlawful ends.” A live case or controversy cannot be so easily disguised, and a federal court’s constitutional authority cannot be so readily manipulated.
The ruling was unanimous, but it doesn't mean Fikre has won on the merits of this case. It only means that he'll have his day in court—where the government will undoubtedly insist that national security would be devastated if it explained the reasons Fikre was placed on the no-fly list in the first place. The Supreme Court has been generally receptive to this argument, so there's no telling how the case will pan out.
The secret no-fly list is like civil asset forfeiture: something I flatly don't understand. It's inexplicable to me that the government can routinely strand citizens overseas without having to explain itself in any way, just as it's inexplicable that the government can seize assets just because it suspects they're adjacent to a crime. Neither of these things seem even remotely compatible with the notion of due process or the truism that you're innocent until proven guilty. I am gobsmacked that either of them has been allowed to continue.
The Guttmacher Institute released numbers today for abortion in 2023. They're from a new monthly survey that isn't as precise as Guttmacher's usual annual abortion count, but probably still pretty close. The figures are startling:
If the 2023 numbers are accurate, they suggest that the Dobbs decision had little or no effect on the abortion rate. Abortion rates went down in some states but rose in others, and medication abortions became more widely used in states where abortion has been banned.
Aside from Dobbs, these numbers raise another question: Why did the long decline in the abortion rate suddenly turn around at the start of the Trump era in 2017? The number of annual abortions has increased 19% since then. It doesn't seem likely this has anything to do with Trump, but......
The uninsured rate was up slightly in Q3 of last year, but still down considerably from 2021, when President Biden's subsidy expansion went into effect.
What is a "personal record" under the Presidential Records Act? The definition in the act is relatively short and simple, so here's the entire, unabridged text:
(3) The term "personal records" means all documentary materials, or any reasonably segregable portion thereof, of a purely private or nonpublic character which do not relate to or have an effect upon the carrying out of the constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President. Such term includes—
(A) diaries, journals, or other personal notes serving as the functional equivalent of a diary or journal which are not prepared or utilized for, or circulated or communicated in the course of, transacting Government business;
(B) materials relating to private political associations, and having no relation to or direct effect upon the carrying out of constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President; and
(C) materials relating exclusively to the President’s own election to the office of the Presidency; and materials directly relating to the election of a particular individual or individuals to Federal, State, or local office, which have no relation to or direct effect upon the carrying out of constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President.
This isn't complicated. Personal records are things that have no relation to official presidential business. Period. There's nothing more to it.
Donald Trump has claimed that the president has sole and unreviewable authority to decide if a record is personal. You don't need to be a lawyer to see that the PRA says no such thing. It says only that materials should be designated as personal "upon their creation" and then "filed separately." There's nothing about the president's decision being absolute or about declaring records to be personal after leaving office. What's more, the PRA doesn't cover classified records at all.
Why the history lesson? Because today judge Aileen Cannon, who's presiding over Trump's classified documents case, issued a bizarre order asking lawyers for both sides to submit hypothetical sets of jury instructions. One set has to assume the jury decides, as a matter of fact, which records are personal. The second set has to assume that if the president says they're personal, that's it. They're personal.
What is possibly the point of this? The second scenario is entirely groundless and accomplishes nothing except to chew up the lawyers' time. So is that all this is? An amateurish attempt to once again delay things? It makes no sense as anything else.
A few months ago I took a look at remote learning during the COVID pandemic and concluded that it hadn't made much difference. States that kept schools open did about as well as states that closed schools. The results internationally were similar.
But that was based on partial data and a specific measure of school openness. Today the New York Times points to a study done about a year ago which concludes that school closures did have an effect. Here's the key chart from the study:
There is a difference, but it's surprisingly small: about a tenth of a grade level between the highest and lowest quintiles of school openness.¹ What's more, the variance is huge, which suggests that the results are pretty sensitive to the precise metrics and controls.
Even more interesting is this:
Unfortunately, the authors presented this only for math, but if I'm parsing their tables correctly the effect is even stronger for reading. What it shows is that among white students, remote learning made virtually no difference: a few percentage points with a lot of noise. Nearly all of the effect of remote learning comes from Black and Hispanic students.
Why would remote learning only affect minority students? The same effect is evident when you look at poor students, so the obvious answer is that it's neither race nor remote learning per se that causes problems, but remote learning in places where kids have less access to computers and parental supervision. Here's a chart that shows this:
Remote learning has an impact, but % FRPL (free lunch students) has the biggest effect of all. There's also a large independent effect from "COVID-19 Disruption," which measures the general social disruption from the pandemic.
Taken together, the evidence suggests that remote learning probably had a negative impact, but it was pretty negligible among middle-class students. They did about the same regardless. However, among poorer students the impact was more noticeable.
These results are, of course, politically charged. Conservatives have been blasting liberals for a long time over school closures, so they're eager for any evidence that they were right. And generally speaking, I think they were. However, if you're going to cite the evidence, you need to cite all of it:
Among middle-class students, remote learning had very little negative effect. Multiple lines of evidence point this way.
Among poor students the impact was significant.
Regardless, it doesn't appear that there would have been any harm in keeping schools open since infection rates didn't change much between places that kept schools open and those that closed them. Keeping schools open would have helped some kids and certainly would have vastly reduced the stress on working parents who had no ready way to take care of house-bound children.
That appears to be the current state of our knowledge about this.
¹The difference in math was larger: about a fifth of a grade level between the top and bottom quintiles.
Do snakes yawn? This one does. It's a cape cobra at the Los Angeles Zoo, and it was slithering along in its normal snakey way when it stopped, yawned, and then continued on its travels.
But snakes don't yawn because they're tired. They yawn after meals to realign their jaws.
March 3, 2024 — Los Angeles Zoo, Los Angeles, California
Hmm. More internet = more happiness. But what about young people specifically?
Same thing. But of course this doesn't tell us much. Rich countries have higher internet penetration, so all this says is that rich countries tend to be happier. So what if we restrict ourselves only to rich countries?
The regression line isn't as steep, but it still shows the same thing: more internet = more happiness.
