RESEARCH ON WHETHER POWER CORRUPTS. I posted here on Lord Acton’s observation that: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men….” Jonah Lehrer had an article in the Wall Street Journal (August 14-15) and here at his blog, The Frontal Cortex, on psychological research which seems to support Lord Acton. He cites studies which show that entering college freshmen with the highest scores on agreeableness and extroversion wind up at the top of their social hierarchy and says that studies of the military, corporations and politics give similar results. Then Lehrer cites Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at Berkeley on what happens after power has been achieved: “Mr. Keltner compares the feeling of power to brain damage, noting that people with lots of authority tend to behave like neurological patients with a damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area that’s crucial for empathy and decision-making.” It may be that one reason for the lack of empathy may be what is shown by Chekhov: servants are not seen. Lehrer says that people in positions of authority “spend much less time making eye contact, at least when a person without power is talking.”
Archive for the ‘Economics’ Category
RESEARCH ON WHETHER POWER CORRUPTS.
Saturday, August 28th, 2010COMMERCIALIZING ART MUSEUMS.
Thursday, August 19th, 2010COMMERCIALIZING ART MUSEUMS. When my brother Elmer was in law school, he met a girl at a party who was studying to be a museum curator. He wound up in an argument with her because it turned out that he favored bringing as many people to a museum as you could, while she believed that art should be reserved for people who cared about it and understood it. Elmer said that when he started to talk about how Bill Veeck got people to go to baseball games by having fireworks, he had given up on reaching any agreement with her. The controversy over the role of curators and the public is still alive. The article on the Detroit market researchers quotes an official with the Art Institute of Chicago on the subject of observing visitors: “Collections are hung at the discretion of the curators. They have a vision of how collections will be best presented to visitors.”
MARKET RESEARCH IN ART GALLERIES.
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010MARKET RESEARCH IN ART GALLERIES. The Wall Street Journal (August 18) has an article by Isaac Arnsdorf about observers in museums doing the kind of research that supermarkets do. The article focuses on the efforts of the Detroit Institute of Arts, which has six observers who collect data on how visitors use the galleries (rooms) in the museum. It’s been known from studies in the twenties that visitors like to turn right when they enter, just as people do in a supermarket. The Detroit observers record the amount of time a visitor spends looking at each item in a gallery. The article gives an example of a male visitor who is recorded as spending 1 minute and 5 seconds in the Rubens gallery. For me, they would record that I try to pick out one item in each room and spend time looking at just that item. (Our family record would be the two hours we spent looking at Van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece.) The Detroit studies have led to extensive redesigns of galleries and exhibitions.
MARKETS AND THE LIMITATION OF POWER.
Saturday, August 14th, 2010MARKETS AND THE LIMITATION OF POWER. Kids, in the John Kay article that I linked to yesterday, he identifies three elements in the success of markets as compared to centralized systems: (1) allocation of resources through prices; (2) innovation; and (3) diffusing economic and political power. Kay says that points (2) and (3) are relatively neglected. I touched on (2) yesterday. With respect to (3), Kay says that market economies are better at disposing of failed ideas, pointing out that “Honest feedback is not welcome in large bureaucracies.” I will add three related points.First, two (or more) private bureaucracies give a choice. Imagine if you could go to a competing Department of Motor Vehicles (to use the standard example). Second, sometimes inefficient bureaucracies go out of business. Third, a private bureaucracy can be sued for damages.
MARKETS AND CROWDSOURCING.
Friday, August 13th, 2010MARKETS AND CROWDSOURCING. An important argument for markets is that they draw upon the ideas of a large number of people. John Kay wrote an article last year in praise of the market economy (I came across it in the Financial Times). Kay pointed out some of the major innovations of the last 30 years that came from unknown people. He asks whether a planner for the computer industry in the 1970’s would have consulted Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Microsoft) or whether a planner for the retailing industry in the 1990’s would have consulted Jeff Bezos (Amazon). Kay answered his questions: “Of course not: members of the politburo, cabinet or large company board would have consulted grey men in suits like themselves.”
CROWDSOURCING.
Thursday, August 12th, 2010CROWDSOURCING. The wikipedia article on Foldit says that it is a variant of “Crowdsourcing”, which is discussed in this wikipedia article. I posted here about James Suroweicki’s book THE WISDOM OF CROWDS, which is about another form of throwing a problem out to a large group of people. Surowiecki discusses how groups can under certain circumstances make better decisions than could any individual expert. Foldit is a little different because it seeks to collects ideas of individuals no matter what their backgrounds. What they have in common is the desire to obtain the benefits of the thinking of more people.
NONSCIENTISTS DOING BIOCHEMISTRY—THE VIDEO GAME.
Wednesday, August 11th, 2010NONSCIENTISTS DOING BIOCHEMISTRY—THE VIDEO GAME. This Economist article describes a videogame, with 57,000 registered users, in which players score points by finding chemically stable configurations for chains of protein molecules. The game is called “Foldit.” The science behind the game is described here. Some excerpts: “Every protein consists of a long chain of joined-together amino acids….. Every kind of protein folds up into a very specific shape….[The shape] specifies the function of the protein.” The game was designed by scientists to further research into proteins, and it has done so. People can do in some respects as well as the best best current algorithm. They are especially good at what the Economist characterizes as “problems requiring extensive remodeling.” The game has resulted in new strategies for future use. If you would like to play Foldit and possibly do valuable scientific research, the website is here.
FINDING ADDITIONAL DRUGS TO FIGHT DRUG-RESISTANT BACTERIA.
Tuesday, August 10th, 2010FINDING ADDITIONAL DRUGS TO FIGHT DRUG-RESISTANT BACTERIA. I am pleased to see intensity rising almost to violence in debates about FDA statistical methods. This article about the debates says: “At times the debate has been so heated that the acting chairman of an FDA committee opened a 2009 meeting by warning that he didn’t want to read the day next about police ‘having to arrest scientists for breaking shop windows and turning over cars.’” There should be intensity because so much is at stake—a matter of life and death (the article opens by describing the death of a toddler from a drug-resistant bacterium.) The article describes “a nearly decade-long stalemate with the Food and Drug Administration over how to bring new antibiotics to market.” Apparently the FDA is insisting on tests for approval which demonstrate that the prospective drug is better than the old one—a change from previous practice. The article says that; “For years, new antibiotics often were approved based on clinical trials that didn’t have to show the new drug was better than an old one.”
I don’t understand the FDA’s position. What is being sought is a drug to use in the case where the primary antibiotic has encountered a bacterium that is resistant to it. The new drug doesn’t have to be better in all circumstances. It has to be different. It has to work against a particular mutation. Testing to see which drug is better against non-resistant bacteria is irrelevant. And how can a control group be devised to test effectiveness against a mutation which has not yet been encountered?
GARUM—THE IMPORTANCE OF ROTTEN FISH.
Thursday, August 5th, 2010GARUM—THE IMPORTANCE OF ROTTEN FISH. Garum was a fish sauce made by the fermentation in brine of the innards of fish. The article on Portus that I linked to yesterday says that archaeologists at Portus have found hundreds of amphorae which were used to transport oil, wine and garum—evidence of the widespread Roman trade in those commodities. Fraser and Rimas discuss garum as one of the pillars of the Roman diet. It was an important source of protein, vitamins and other nutrients and was a staple in the diet of the poor. At the same time, there was an upscale market for premium garum. Most of the recipes in one Roman cookbook include garum as an ingredient. Fraser and Rimas quote Pliny that unguents (for perfume) were the only liquids that sold at a higher price. This wikipedia article quotes Seneca as protesting against what the article calls the “expensive craze” for garum. Seneca described garum as: “that expensive bloody mass of decayed fish.” I am curious as to what garum tasted like, and, given its former popularity, it does seem that there might be a business opportunity for some entrepreneur.
ROMAN WAREHOUSES.
Wednesday, August 4th, 2010ROMAN WAREHOUSES. One of the things that the dig at Portus has turned up is “the remains of a large Roman warehouse.” The reference reminded me of a recent interview on NPR with Evan D.G. Frazier and Andrew Rimas, the authors of EMPIRES OF FOOD—an interview which led me to buy the book. They said that Roman warehouses were as important an engineering accomplishment as Roman roads or Roman bridges. The Roman Empire relied on grain from the periphery. Grain imported from Africa constituted one third of the needs of Rome. Winter storms closed the Mediterranean shipping lanes for four months of the year so that grain had to be stored for considerable periods. On the radio, the authors discussed the problems that the Roman warehouses had to solve. The grain exerted a lot of lateral pressure. Humidity has to be less than 15% to keep grain from spoiling. Grain has to be kept below 60 degrees Fahrenheit to deter bugs. The Romans devised a standardized model for warehouses in the same way that Roman army camps and Roman roads were standardized. They had walls a yard thick with raised floors for circulation of air. One storehouse was about ten times as large as the Colosseum.
