What Do Intelligent Design and Climate Change Denial Have in Common?

What do Intelligent Design (ID) and Climate Change Denial have in common? They are different topics but proponents use the same arguments and are part of the same right-wing agenda. The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has taken on the ID controversy and won in court. The next battle is with the climate change deniers. The objective is to keep junk science out of US classrooms. Good luck!

Intellectual Dishonesty at NCCAM?

NCCAM is the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (here) and it is the US Federal Government's lead agency for scientific research on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). A recent investigation by the Chicago Tribune (here) concluded that "...precious research dollars could be better spent elsewhere." The types of studies funded by NCCAM have included inhalation of lavender and lemon to heal a wound (it didn't), coffee enemas for cancer (no effect), mind-body therapies (yoga, massage and acupuncture, the later found no better than sham acupuncture), energy healing, distant prayer, qigong (manipulation of a universal energy or life force), ginko biloba, saw palmetto (no benefit over placebo), etc.

In this post, I will look at one of the NCCAM studies (Sherman et. al 2011) funded to determine "whether yoga is more effective than conventional stretching exercises or a self-care book for primary care patients with chronic low back pain." In a press release, NCCAM concluded For Low-Back Pain, Yoga More Effective Than Self-Care But Not Stretching (the original study in the Archives of Internal Medicine is here). The study is of interest for a number of technical-statistical reasons which I will explore in my Random Variation blog (here). In this post, I'm just going to make a simple observation: the presented data do not seem to support the conclusions!

If you look carefully at the graphs from the article (presented above and discussed in a note below) you will notice that the error bars (confidence intervals) at the study's end point (week 26) overlap. Just eye-balling the graph, it would seem that self-care (the red line) will eventually be completely equal to either yoga or stretching which are clearly not different. What if they had run the study out to 32 weeks? To be fair to the authors, they based their conclusions on probability values (p-values), a commonly accepted approach to reporting significant results. Without getting into statistical details, p-values do not say anything about whether we are looking at an important difference in treatment and control effects. Differences of 1 point in the RDQ (Roland-Morris Disability Questionnaire) would seem to be of of questionable importance against 2 point confidence interval spreads (read more on expected values for the RDQ here).

From the standpoint of NCCAMs mission which is ambiguous (can they really conclude alternative medicine is a sham and expect continued funding?), the study certainly doesn't support the underlying theory (presented in the causal diagram above, click to enlarge). Yoga is supposed to be superior due to the "mental enhancement" of meditation. Since Yoga was no better than stretching, it seems for sure that the "mind-body" aspect of the trial was a failure.

However, the researchers go on to conclude that Yoga is safe and should be recommended by physicians for patients with low back pain. I don't follow these conclusions especially when there is anecdotal evidence of How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body. The researchers neither mention nor test these issues and I'm not sure why they would continue to recommend Yoga. And, in a related editorial in the same journal, Timothy S. Carey, MD, MPH, concludes that "The study by Sherman et. al. in this issue is an excellent example of a pragmatic comparative effectiveness trial (p. 2027)". The developing concensus about Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) is important because it is a cornerstone of attempts to reform the US health care system. I will never have time to review all the CER studies, but I'm getting a little queasy feeling in my lower intestinal tract over CER and whether people will actually be treated based on CER studies let alone CAM.

NOTE: The four graphs above present two of the study outcome measures, the RDQ score and the Bothersome score (How bothersome was your back pain?). The left panel displays the raw scores and the right panel displays the adjusted scores to equalize initial conditions. Notice that no confidence intervals were provided for baseline. Statistically, I'm guessing that the initial conditions were not different. Any adjustment without expanding the end-point confidence intervals to reflect the uncertainty of the initial conditions seems questionable to me.

Is 5% Growth Just A Matter of Business Leadership or Sustainability?

In the video clip above, CNBC Contributor Jack Welch, toward the end of the clip, takes on Prof. Kenneth Rogoff over the question of how rapidly the US economy can grow and the sources of that growth. Rogoff recently wrote two pieces for Project Syndicate titled Rethinking the Growth Imperative and Is Modern Capitalism Sustainable? You are probably familiar with Ken Rogoff since he wrote, with Carmen Reinhart, the prescient book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. You are also probably familiar with Jack Welch because he was chairman and CEO of General Electric. You might also be familiar with the interviewer, Andrew Ross Sorkin, who wrote the book Too Big To Fail. A face off between Welch and Rogoff would be pretty interesting TV on CNBC. Until that happens, we'll have to speculate on how the argument might go from their comments and writings.

Let's start out with Jack Welch who makes a pretty good case in the video above for the conventional wisdom surrounding economic growth. He is basically saying that he and other elites in his position want growth regardless of what some Harvard professor that writes academic articles might think. Obviously, growth has been good for Jack Welch and for CEOs like him. Does he show any concern for sustainability? No. Does he show any understanding of growth and income inequality? Not really, even though he says that he doesn't want to think about other social classes and gives a "rising tide" argument (the tide must have gone out during the last 20 years). Does he mention financial bubbles? No.

Sorkin makes the point that businesses have made lots of money during periods of both high regulation (pre-Reagan embedded Liberalism) and the neoliberal period after Reagan. Jack says, basically, so what! If we focused on a 5% growth target, business could make even more money.

Now for Prof. Rogoff's article that Jack doesn't care about and probably hasn't read. Rogoff does some simple math with growth rates that is worth quoting here since it will set up my next point.

There is a certain absurdity to the obsession with maximizing long-term average income growth in perpetuity, to the neglect of other risks and considerations. Consider a simple thought experiment. Imagine that per capita national income (or some broader measure of welfare) is set to rise by 1% per year over the next couple of centuries. This is roughly the trend per capita growth rate in the advanced world in recent years. With annual income growth of 1%, a generation born 70 years from now will enjoy roughly double today’s average income. Over two centuries, income will grow eight-fold.

Now suppose that we lived in a much faster-growing economy, with per capita income rising at 2% annually. In that case, per capita income would double after only 35 years, and an eight-fold increase would take only a century.

Finally, ask yourself how much you really care if it takes 100, 200, or even 1,000 years for welfare to increase eight-fold. Wouldn’t it make more sense to worry about the long-term sustainability and durability of global growth? Wouldn’t it make more sense to worry whether conflict or global warming might produce a catastrophe that derails society for centuries or more?

Forecasts for US growth in 2012 (here) predict growth in the 1-2% range, not in the 5-8% that Jack Welch would like to see. The forecasts also make pretty clear that growth in the 2004-2007 period, while more like what Jack Welch would want, was really the result of a financial bubble. Prof. Rogoff's work on "Financial Folly" has sensitized him to the problem; Jack Welchs' time at GE hasn't. However, as Mr. Welch makes clear, he's going to win and the pressure for financial manipulations to create the next bubble will be intense and will be successful.

In the future, I will be doing GDP growth forecasts for as many countries in the world system as time permits (here). My guess would be that sustainable annualized growth of 1% would be far more the norm that the 5% growth target that dominated the thinking in the growth-and-collapse countries.

Ximo Tebar Sound Check

The soundcheck in the video above might not be to everyone's tastes ("just let them play") but it really shows off the creative process and the talents of Ximo Tebar on guitar and Grant Stewart on sax.

I have been listening a lot lately to Tebar, particularly his "Champs" album and just heard the Stanley Turrentine song "Sugar" again the other night on Jazz With Bob Parlocha. You can read a little more about Ximo Tebar here.

NOTE: Ximo Tebar, guitar, Grant Stewart, sax, Rob Bargad, piano & organ, Cesar Giner, bass, Nathaniel Townsley, drums. SOUNDCHECK & REHEARSAL - SAN JAVIER JAZZ FESTIVAL - JULY 2005

Wealth Tax: Both Left and Right Have It Wrong.

Today on CNBC (video above) and in an earlier piece in the Financial Times (here), Edmund Phelps presented a new and interesting view of financial crises. Phelps was specifically talking about the current EU Sovereign Debt Crisis but I also would argue that it is applicable to the entire late-2000 Financial Crisis.
I've simplified Phelps' argument in the causal diagram above. First consider the two negative feedback loops in the lower part of the graph that describe long-cycles in the economy (start reading on the bottom). In the outer loop, described explicitly by Phelps, economic growth increases income inequality (wealth) which reduces productivity (why work when you're wealthy) and thus decreases growth. I have added another loop to Phelps' argument, a loop I have talked about in more detail in an earlier post (here), and that is the effect of inequality on directly generating financial crises. To simplify, rich people have a lot of excess income seeking high rents in risky places. When the financial house of cards collapses, the effects on growth are negative.

Now, here is the interesting argument from Phelps. Before the financial crisis hits, the government needs to "unlock" the unproductive wealth and put the money to work through a wealth tax. Let's assume for the moment that the government knows what to do with that wealth in terms of improving the physical and social infrastructure that is undervalued by the private market (rather than using it, for example, to fight a foreign war).

Phelps' argument suggests that both the right and the left have it wrong. The right-wing home remedy for any crisis is to reduce taxes. This just makes matters worse because it increases inequality and locks up more wealth (since there is no aggregate demand, the surplus funds are saved rather than invested in productive activity that might create jobs).

The left also has it wrong when relying on deficit spending. As Keynesian economics argues, during a crisis it is necessary to increase government expenditure to make up for shortfalls in aggregate demand. Unfortunately what happens is that increasing the deficit increases borrowing costs which starts the deficit hawks clamoring for a reduction in government expenditure (they are usually successful as they were in the Recession of 1937-1938 in the US). Increases in the deficit can, at the same time (potentially) create the conditions for future inflation.

The shortcoming in Keynesian theory in my view (you can read Phelps' view here) has always been that it didn't really offer an explanation for why crises occur in the first place. It just offered a policy response that didn't make things worse by contracting aggregate demand further. Phelps seems to offer a better explanation of why crises occur in the first place and a policy response for preventing the development of a crisis in the first place. You can access more of Edmund Phelps academic work, if you're interested, from his website at http://www.columbia.edu/~esp2/.