Economics


Maggots, Leeches and….

Whipworms.
Yes, whipworms are joining the arsonal of modern medical technology following the recent discovery of the benefits of maggots and the periodic reappearance of leeches as a treatment for various conditions.
In a recent clinical trial 50% of ulcerative colitis patients and 70% of Chron’s disease patients entered remission when treated with regular doses of pig whipworms.
The theory is that the human immune system evolved to deal with worm parasites and may become overactive in their absence. An interesting unintended consequence of the large reduction in human parasite infections in advanced western economies.


Losing Height to Europe

I spend a lot of time around the sports of basketball and rowing and, though dealing with a biased sample, I thought Americans were getting taller. There seem to be more and taller women and men in these programs then in the past.
But Burkhard Bilger reports in this weeks New Yorker that this is not the case across the population as a whole:

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the country seemed set to regain its eminence. The economy was expanding at a dramatic rate, and public-hygiene campaigns were sweeping the cities clean at last: for the first time in American history, urbanites began to outgrow farmers.
Then something strange happened. While heights in Europe continued to climb, Komlos said, “the U.S. just went flat.” In the First World War, the average American soldier was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955 the situation began to reverse. The Germans and other Europeans went on to grow an extra two centimetres a decade, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven’t grown taller in fifty years.

One possible reason:

In a recent British study, one group of schoolchildren was given hamburgers, French fries, and other familiar lunch foods; the other was fed nineteen-forties-style wartime rations such as boiled cabbage and corned beef. Within eight weeks, the children on the rations were both taller and slimmer than the ones on a regular diet.

This may not be the whole story but it certainly provides food for thought and, I think, individual action.
Via Newmarks Door.


bush Policys Create Job Growth

Washington DC has averaged 0.8% job growth per year while w has been in office. Which might show that deficits have been good for the bureaucracy.
Ok, sure this is not fair. Even in DC bush has not done as well as reagan and clinton who scored 4.1% and 2.4% annual job growth in DC. And it paints a distorted picture as it turns out that so far 63 of the top 100 labor markets have shown job loss during bush’s first 3 years or, full the half full crowd, 37 of the top 100 have shown job growth.
Read a more thorough comparison at American City Business Journals.
Via Suburban Guerilla.


Watching for Sign

Hmmm…perhaps the DA will be watching Tyco jurer #4 for signs of ill earned income. The Talking Dog suggests that there might be reason:

Dennis Koslowski and Mark Swartz of the Tyco Corporation, who bought themselves a mistrial today after 11 unfruitful days of jury deliberations. And when I say bought a mistrial, let me just say I mean EXACTLY that– “J’Accuse”, and leave it at that.=; Juror No. 4, a 60-something retired schoolteacher who went to law school in her 50’s, flashed the “OK” sign to the defense table, to signify that the brown paper bag arrived where it was supposed to (this is all on information and belief, and IMHO; I have no idea HOW Koslowski and company managed to get the juror to side with them– maybe they even did it with their case;…

Thieves of all kinds need to spend their time in jail and pay back their victims. Too bad these guys probably won’t live long enough to make restitution…it’d take more then a few life times to earn the $600,000,000 legitimately.


Where We’ve Been

Lists detailing what it was like somewhere in 19xx or 18xx show up from time to time in varying formats. We might be well served if we clipped and posted one next to our monitors as a reminder of how much things can change and how little someone looking back on 2004 from the future may understand us.
Tyler Cowen provides some excerpts from one version and Michael at 2blowhards provides a variant extracted from an audio Economics course he has listening to.
Read both lists here:

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