Key Marco

Key Marco is a small island off the southwest coast of Florida, near to the Ten Thousand Islands and large areas of mangrove swamp. In 1896 a Smithsonian archaeologist named Frank Cushing conducted excavations in a small muddy pond on the island he called the Court of the Pile Dwellers. From that pond he recovered more than a thousand artifacts, many of wood or fiber. The most famous is the figurine known as the Key Marco Cat. Most people think this is not a cat but a divine being, its shape part cat and part human.

View of Cushing's Excavation

The date of the finds is surprisingly obscure, given the amount of organic material. The first radiocarbon date on wood from the site was 1670 CE, obviously too late. More recently somebody else ran five different dates that came out between 55 and 850 CE. Most people think those are too early. So most archaeologists rely on style, a notoriously subjective business. Most of the estimates I have seen are between 1100 and 1500 CE, with a few going back as early as 700; one careful skeptic says only "between 700 and 1500 AD." Excavations done in the 1960s focused on shell middens about 200 meters away from the pond; they turned up a lot of pottery dating to between 900 and 1500 CE.

Nor is it really clear what this pond actually was. As you will see, Cushing found a bunch of masks and other ceremonial-looking objects, making the pond seem like a ceremonial site and likely a place of sacrifice. But a lot of very ordinary-looking garbage also turned up, discarded clam shells and squash rinds and the like. If the site really had a long occupation period, then perhaps it was a ceremonial pool in some periods and a trash dump in others. Here is one of my favorite finds from the site, a barracuda jaw trimmed and shaped for use as a cutting tool. There is very little stone in that part of Florida, so many tools were made of seashells, fish bones, and the like.

Deer Mask, wooden, originally decorated with clay and paint. (Illustration from Cushing's original publication and old photograph) The ears of this wooden contraption were made separately and attached with string. The mask has holes on the back that were probably used to attach a costume. This and several other objects emerged from the muck brilliantly colored, but those colors started to fade instantly, and they are now rather dim and gray.

Wolf mask made in similar fashion. Artifacts from Cushing's dig are distributed between the Smithsonian, the Florida Museum of Natural History, and the University of Pennsylvania, which holds this mask and posted these lousy photographs.

Effigy heads of a pelican and a sea turtle.

One of Cushing's illustration pages, with two views of a wooden tray carved with an alligator.

Another fascinating find: a shell that was used an a palette, still containing pigment marked with brush strokes.

Masks, combination of Cushing drawings and modern photos.

And a famous painting of a bird, now usually identified as a woodpecker although I gather its markings do not exactly match any real species. It's an astonishing collection of wonders. Since it was all drawn from a single 1-acre pond at one archaeological site that is otherwise not especially impressive, it also reminds us how much of American Indian art has been lost.

Engelbrektskyrkan, Stockholm

Engelbrektskyrkan (1906-14), Stockholm.  Architect Lars Israel Wahlman
Frescoes in the choir and baptismal chapel by Olle Hjortzberg
Frescoes on the ceilings and vaults by Filip Månsson

Household Income and Other Things

Household income in the US went way up in 2015, the biggest one-year jump ever measured. But the level is still lower than the peak figure from 1999. And why might that be? There are reasons to think that wages really are rising quite slowly, and that people suffered a lot in the big recession. But there are also other ways to think about this.

Consider the graph above, which shows the income of married couples in which both spouses are in the work force. (This includes people who have been unemployed for a while but are still actively looking for work.) It shows that for these households, the recession is over and incomes are substantially above the 1999 level. So the problem with household income is not that incomes have declined for these "normal" households. The baseline number for household income is depressed by other factors:

1) more one-person households and single parents
2) more retirees
3) more people on disability
4) more people who have otherwise dropped out of the workforce
5) fewer teenagers working

So the problem is not a simple one of falling wages; the problem is a growing disconnect between many Americans and both the world of work and what we might call the New Standard Family Model. People who are married and working doing fine – not great, but fine. The overall household income number has fallen because of the increasing number of people who are not married and/or not working.

Obviously this has an economic component; one thing that might motivate more people to join or rejoin the work force would be higher wages. But the real problem in America is that millions of people can't find any work they think is worth doing, can't maintain stable households (men in prison is a factor here), or just can't take seriously the mainstream formula of a lifetime of grinding work in exchange for a middle class lifestyle. Something deeper is at work behind the numbers that show stagnating incomes.

Taking "Risks" for Peace in Syria

As I write, the cease-fire in Syria is mostly holding, and people living in besieged areas of Aleppo have reported going outside to walk around for the first time in months. No war as complex and emotional as this one was ever settled so easily, but meanwhile there is at least a day of peace, and that counts for something.

So I offer congratulations to the people who made this possible, especially Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

But I also want to comment on the weird way this deal has been presented in much of the American press. The Times:

The new arrangement on Syria, set to begin Monday, was greeted with skepticism by Syrians on all sides and carries many risks of failure, which the Pentagon and Mr. Kerry acknowledged. . . .

The accord was reached after sharp divisions inside the Obama administration over the wisdom of sharing targeting information with Russia, and accusations that the Russians have used the negotiating period to help Mr. Assad regain control in Aleppo and strike at American-backed opposition groups.

For Mr. Obama, who asked Mr. Kerry to keep working on the negotiation after the president failed to reach an accord with Mr. Putin during the Group of 20 summit meeting in China last weekend, the new accord poses considerable risks.

Risk? What risk, exactly, are Kerry, Obama et al. taking? Or any other American? We are talking about a war in which half a million people may have died, and that has spawned Europe's greatest refugee crisis since World War II. Compared to the risks millions of Syrians and others are facing every day, who has time for the possible damage to the reputations of diplomats, or the ins and outs of Russian-US military posturing?

Sure, if this fails, as it is very likely to, Kerry may end up looking foolish and Obama may end up looking weak, blah blah blah. Those are the risks we pay our leaders to take. I am glad they have taken them. But I am also bewildered by the thicket of bristling suspicion that surrounds this and most other peacemaking efforts. Sometimes there is nothing to be said but do the right thing or go home and let someone else do it.

Dinosaur Camouflage

This well-preserved Psittacosaurus fossil from China shows evidence of dark and light blotching on its skin. Psittacosaurus was a small herbivore of the Cretaceous.

Celtic Horses

Coins from the Middle Danube region, all for sale at Gorny und Mosch. I should note that while these are being sold as Celtic because of the style the actual ethnicity of the people who lived in this region in the last few centuries BCE is much disputed.

A Cultural Appropriation Blowup in Australia

The latest literary tempest at the Brisbane Writers Festival:

Officials in charge of an Australian writers festival were so upset with the address by their keynote speaker, the American novelist Lionel Shriver, that they censored her on the festival website and publicly disavowed her remarks. . . .

Ms. Shriver had been billed as speaking on “community and belonging” but focused on her views about cultural appropriation, a term that refers to the objections by members of minority groups to the use of their customs or culture (or even characters of their ethnicity) by artists or others who do not belong to those groups.

Ms. Shriver criticized as runaway political correctness efforts to ban references to ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation from Halloween celebrations, or to prevent artists from drawing on ethnic sources for their work. Ms. Shriver, the author of 13 novels, who is best known for her 2003 book, We Need to Talk About Kevin, was especially critical of efforts to stop novelists from cultural appropriation. She deplored critics of authors like Chris Cleave, an Englishman, for presuming to write from the point of view of a Nigerian girl in his best-selling book “Little Bee.”

Ms. Shriver noted that she had been criticized for using in “The Mandibles” the character of a black woman with Alzheimer’s disease, who is kept on a leash by her homeless white husband. And she defended her right to depict members of minority groups in any situation, if it served her artistic purposes.

“Otherwise, all I could write about would be smart-alecky 59-year-old 5-foot-2-inch white women from North Carolina,” she said.

I agree. The notion that writers should only write about people exactly like themselves is pernicious and would lead to the death of real art.

I do understand that there are things a writer from outside any culture would be rash to attempt. For example, Jamaican writer Marlon James' Brief History of Seven Killings is narrated by seven or eight different Jamaicans, each of whom speaks a different sort of Jamaican dialect, all faithfully rendered on the page; only long-term immersion in the culture can make that sort of writing possible. If I tried that, the result would indeed be embarrassing all around. But there are also two white Americans among James' narrators, a CIA agent and a reporter for Rolling Stone, and I thought James did a great job with their ways of speaking, too. Was it cultural appropriation for him to use those characters?

Absolutely not; the story he is telling demands their presence, and he did the necessary work to make them believable characters. That is where I would put the focus. I am sure that novels by white people are full of offensive, lazy, ignorant, and otherwise bad portrayals of minority characters, and by all means let us condemn them. But what is missing from those books is the work of imaginative sympathy, not the correct political attitude.

The thing that really irks me about this version of cultural appropriation – the assertion that white people should not write about minority characters – is that it turns ethno-cultural differences into an unbridgeable gap while ignoring every other sort of difference between people. Let's start with the difference between men and women, which I would say is as important in my world as the difference between blacks and whites and Asians. Should men not write about women? If not, how can they write novels at all? A huge part of the craft of novel writing is crossing the boundary between the writer and the character; who is this character, and what would he or she be doing or saying at this point in the story? Obviously it is easier to do this with people more like yourself. But that applies in lots of ways. Can a shy, socially awkward writer understand a social animal like Bill Clinton? Can a graduate of an elite university understand working people in the Texas panhandle? Can an atheist understand religious believers? Can dialogue written in English really capture conversations that were actually held in Italian or Chinese?

It is very hard to understand any other person, even your own brother or sister. Real communication is one of the most difficult tasks we can undertake, usually requiring years of effort to bear real fruit. It is probably true that the greater the cultural gulf, the more difficult it becomes. But should we surrender to that? Should we write off most of humanity as people we will never understand? I refuse to. I insist on believing that by making the necessary effort we can understand other people, including those from very different backgrounds. Are we not all human, with the same brains and linguistic programming?

I would say further that achieving this sort of mutual understanding is the very point of writing novels. Novels show us what other people are like. I insist on believing that talented writers can put themselves into the minds of many sorts of people, with results that do wonders for mutual human understanding. Would it really be better if white authors wrote about an imaginary America with only white people? only people of their own class and background? How can you write believably about contemporary American without crossing boundaries of race and class and who knows what else? Should nobody ever write about an interracial romance?

If we don't believe that good writers can create characters that live apart from them, we should forget about fiction altogether and just write memoirs. If we do believe in fiction, we have to shout down this crass attempt to narrow our world and speak up for the freedom of artists to take up any topic they please.

Strategic Bombing and Imperial Policing

In the 1920s and 1930s, the people most excite by the idea that long-range bombers would revolutionize warfare, and that future wars would be won by air power alone, were in the British and American air forces. In the British case, part of the reason was their recent experience:

Instead of drawing lessons from the Spanish Civil War about the advantages of close-support aviation and air superiority, which was the conclusion drawn by most other air forces, RAF doctrine was mainly informed by the experience of what was called air policing in the empire or Afghanistan. The use of aircraft to enforce local control against rebel tribes and tribesmen (described in the RAF War Manual as "war against semi-civilized peoples") was taken as a paradigm to explain what might happen if a civilized state was subjected to a heavier level of bombing. Even tribal communities, it was argued, had vital centers that governed their existence; target intelligence on those centers would allow the small light bombers allocated to the operation to destroy them and, in doing so, to compel compliance from unruly subjects. John Slessor, director of plans in the Air Ministry in the late 1930s, gave a brutally frank description in his memoirs of why air policing worked: "Whether the offender concerned was an Indian Frontier tribesman, a nomad Arab of the northern deserts, a Morelli slaver on the border of Kenya, or a web-footed savage of the swamps of the southern Sudan, there are almost always some essentials without which he cannot obtain his livelihood." A model example for the RAF was the bombing undertaken in Ovamboland in southern Africa in 1938, in which rebel chieftain Ipumbu of the Ukuambi tribe was brought to heel by three aircraft that destroyed his kraal (camp) and drove off his cattle. In this case, and others, emphasis was put on the "moral effect" of coercive bombing, as well as its material impact. . . . In September, 1941, Charles Portal, chief of the air staff, used the analogy to explain to Churchill the nature of the assault on the "general activity of a community" in Germany: "In short, it is an adaptation, though on a greatly magnified scale, of the policy of air control which has proved so outstandingly successful in recent years in the small wars in which the Air Force has been continuously engaged."

Hey, we put down the chief of the Ukuambi, so we won't have any trouble with Hitler and those pesky Germans. Trust us.

The mind boggles.

From Richard Overy, The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War over Europe, 1940-1945 (2014), pp. 20-21.

Luigi Kasimir, Aggstein Castle on the Danube

With a name like Luigi Kasimir you might guess that he was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and he was, in Slovenia in 1881. Mainly famous for etchings and aquatints.

More about Trump and Conservative Principles

Another great example of the strange reasoning used by some conservatives to support Trump comes from a writer who calls himself Publius Decius Mus, via the Claremont Institute. The Claremont Institute is one of those conservative think tanks dedicated to restoring the original spirit of the constitution – prudence, morality, small government, etc. And yet they, like so many others, have been driven by the prospect of President Hillary to hysterical advocacy of a man who manifestly rejects everything they stand for. The hysterical tone is set in the first sentence:

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

That's showing a lot of respect for the constitution, isn't it? One term of a moderate democratic woman and the whole system is doomed. What were those shortsighted framers thinking?

But it gets worse. (Really.) Somewhat later, after summarizing all the bad things that some conservatives have said about America, Decius writes,

If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.

But it’s quite obvious that conservatives don’t believe any such thing, that they feel no such sense of urgency, of an immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff.

Because if they did really worry, they would obviously be supporting Trump! No, that's what Decius thinks. He believes that people who care about virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character "and so on in the individual" should support the prominent American who most conspicuously lacks all of those things; that people who oppose big government should support a man who seems to have no thoughts at all about such questions; that those who care about "prudent statesmanship" should support a man who insults at least one prominent world leader a day.

Later on, Decius actually admits that Trump is not a conservative:

Trump is the most liberal Republican nominee since Thomas Dewey. He departs from conservative orthodoxy in so many ways that National Review still hasn’t stopped counting. But let’s stick to just the core issues animating his campaign. On trade, globalization, and war, Trump is to the left (conventionally understood) not only of his own party, but of his Democratic opponent.

I would call this a plausible interpretation of some things Trump has said. To Decius this proves that opposition to Trump must really be about the one issue where Trump is farthest from the mainstream: immigration. That perhaps some people opposed to Trump actually care about things like virtue, morality, stability and character seems not to have occurred to him.

One of the people Decius is attacking – conservatives who despise Trump – read his piece and found in it an argument for authoritarian rule:

The motive of such inflationary rhetoric is often the accumulation of power. Its result always is. Note well the monomaniacal formulation of Trump: “I am your voice . . . I alone can fix it.” There is a bizarre detachment of conservatism from conservation here. All is change, oriented toward future ends. This requires power above all else: The power of He Alone Who Can Fix It.

I am not much impressed by Trump's threat to the Republic; a coup would be too much work for him. But really Trump is not a conservative, certainly not about the issues that American conservative leaders and intellectuals claim to care about, and supporting him seems to me like a bizarre thing for them to do.

A Huge New Oil Find in . . . Texas

The latest from the fracking front:

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported on an energy bonanza. A company discovered a new field with “the equivalent of at least two billion barrels of oil” that “has the promise to become one of the biggest energy finds of the past decade.”

But the discovery wasn’t made by a foreign company in the Amazon, or deep in the waters off the coast off Africa, or in Kazakhstan—or any of the other politically treacherous, high-risk, low-infrastructure places where Big Oil has been prospecting for gigantic new gushers. Instead, the lucky firm was Texas-based Apache Corporation, which struck black gold in Texas’s Permian Basin, one of America’s most prolific and picked-over sources of oil and natural gas for decades.

Fracking is not a static technology, it's a new and dynamic technology that is still rapidly getting better and cheaper. So watch for more discoveries like this one of massive oil and gas deposits in places once thought worked out.

Mysterious Absence

Apologies for the silent weekend. My youngest daughter picked flowers for my wife's birthday and put them in a vase on the table, and then one of our cats, who loves to chew on flowers, dumped the whole vase onto my laptop. Things fried. C'est la vie.

British Wildlife Photography Awards

David Maitland, Silver Birch Seeds in Garden Spider Web, Norfolk, England

Jamie Mina, Mountain Hare, Scotland

Rest of the winners here.

How Work is Changing in America

Matthew Klein:

In the past sixteen years, 94 per cent of the net jobs created were in education, healthcare, social assistance, bars, restaurants, and retail, even though those sectors only employed 36 per cent of America’s workforce at the start of the millennium. . . . Average hourly pay in these sectors, weighted by their relative sizes, has consistently been about 30 per cent lower than in the rest of the economy. And since typical jobs in bars, restaurants, and retail involve far fewer hours than normal, weekly pay packets for workers in these growing industries were more than 40 per cent lower than workers in the rest of the economy. Average weekly earnings are now 3 per cent lower than they would have been if the distribution of employment had stayed the same as in January, 2000

In the past, the economy has grown, and wages have grown  with it, because employment growth was concentrated in the most productive sectors of the economy. (Factories in the 1920s, IT in the 1990s.) Now most new jobs are in sectors where productivity is flat or declining, with the predictable result that wages are going nowhere. When you hear various glib theories about how to bring back high wage jobs (e.g., Trump's coal and steel plan, or various Democratic proposals for "green jobs") you have to remember that wages are stagnant because of some very fundamental, hard to change things.

Treasures from the Kevorkian Collection

Hagop Kevorkian was a wealthy Armenian who assembled an amazing collection of Islamic art, focusing on Persia, Central Asia, and the Mughals. Among his treasures was an album of beautifully illustrated pages assembled in 19th-century India, but including several pieces centuries older. Today the fifty leaves of that album are distributed between the Metropolitan in New York and the Freer Gallery in Washington. A few of the amazing pictures. Bee eater, Mughal, 19th-century.

Kneeling Angel with Cup and Bottle, Attributed to Shah Quli, Ottoman period, mid-16th century

Iskandar (Alexander) and the talking tree. Folio from a Shahnama (Book of kings) by Firdawsi; created in Mongol Persia around 1330 CE.

A princess is abducted by sea. Folio from a volume of poems by Amir Khusraw Dihlavi (d. 1325); Attributed to Kamal al-Din Bihzad (ca. 1467 - 1535), done in Herat, Afghanistan, for the last major ruler of the Timurid dynasty.

Persian illustration, c 1535, from a book of the poems of Hafiz.

One Man Nonsensically Defends His Vote

Conor Friedersdorf has found a great example of the nonsense some people come up with when asked to justify, in rational terms, political choices that are  not very rational at all:

The talk-radio host, writer, and speaker Dennis Prager has spent most of his career as an unapologetic public moralist who champions Judeo-Christian values in American life. He believes that it is important for public figures to be good role models. And he wants Donald J. Trump to win the upcoming presidential election. Can his principles be reconciled with supporting that man, however reluctantly?

As Friedersdorf explains, the positions Prager has taken over the years add up to a comprehensive denunciation of Trump: Prager hates profanity, despises adultery and divorce, strongly opposes torture, wants people to take responsibility for their actions and statements, thinks our public life needs more religion, and so on. One of his most distinctive pleas has been for an end to character assassination in our public life, which he calls "the rape of a name" and thinks may sometimes be worse than physical rape.

So how does he defend himself against the charge that by supporting Trump he has abandoned his principles? In a piece in the National Review, he wrote

We hold that defeating Hillary Clinton, the Democrats, and the Left is also a principle. And that it is the greater principle.

Whoa. And what is it about liberals that make defeating them so important?

One side seeks to undo just about every founding principle that made America exceptional. Examples include small and limited government; preservation of the power of the states to serve as political and social laboratories; a belief in individual responsibility; a society rooted in Judeo-Christian morality—meaning a society composed of people most of whom affirm God and Bible-based moral teachings; and a deep sense of a unifying national American identity and destiny.

So, let me get this straight. To defend God and Bible-based moral teachings, we need to vote for the man who is probably the least religious major party nominee of my lifetime, over a lifelong, committed Christian?  Defending small government is so important that we should vote for a man who has no interest in small government at all, and has in fact promised to expand it in every direction?

It seems to me that all of his talk about small government and religious values are just a smokescreen for Prager, what a Marxist would call superstructure. His bedrock belief is the one he concludes with: American nationalism. What he really cares about is "a unifying national American identity and destiny," with lots of flag-waving and saluting. Trump has done us the service of exposing how many so-called conservatives really don't care about the "conservative values" they like to preach about. What they want is to celebrate and defend America as the best country in the world, with or without God and the Constitution.

It can't be said enough: politics is not mainly about policy. It is about identity, and the emotions that surround it. People defend particular policies because they fit the political identities they have chosen, not the other way around.

Realignment?

David Brooks thinks the old party coalitions are dying, and he predicts a new arrangement of American political parties:

Politics is catching up to social reality. The crucial social divide today is between those who feel the core trends of the global, information-age economy as tailwinds at their backs and those who feel them as headwinds in their face.

That is to say, the most important social divide today is between a well-educated America that is marked by economic openness, traditional family structures, high social capital and high trust in institutions, and a less-educated America that is marked by economic insecurity, anarchic family structures, fraying community bonds and a pervasive sense of betrayal and distrust.

These two groups live in entirely different universes. Right now each party has a foot in each universe, but those coalitions won’t last. Before too long the politics will break down into openness versus closedness, dynamism versus stability, what Ronald Brownstein of The Atlantic described in 2012 as the Coalition of Transformation versus the Coalition of Restoration.

Put me down as doubtful on this one. First, it would require Americans who consider themselves conservative to give up their ancient devotion to limited government and free markets. There may be much logic in that, since (as I have always argued) the free market is the greatest destroyer of tradition. But elections are not about logic, and anyway free markets and limited government really are major parts of the American tradition. It is hard for me to imagine Texas voting for a party that advocated higher taxes and more regulation in the name of preserving our heritage.

Second, it assumes that the culture wars will either fade away or somehow come to align themselves with economic interests. Brooks believes that many Sanders supporters, the ones who hate the wealthy elite and want to bring back union factory jobs, will end up in the Coalition of Restoration. But to the young people I know issues of race, homosexuality, trans-acceptance, and the like loom much larger than economics, and I can't see any way for these folks and Trump supporters to sign up together.

So I predict no realignment, just an ever larger percentage of Americans who feel abandoned by both parties.

Drug Pricing in America

Scott Alexander is in the midst of an argument with Vox about the EpiPen mess, with Vox putting most of the blame on our lack of drug price controls and Alexander blaming the regulations that make it so hard to bring in generic competition. In the course of his latest, long response, Alexander explains that the best way to control drug costs is neither price regulation nor competition, but changing the behavior of doctors:

Pristiq is the brand-name of desvenlafaxine, a new antidepressant which is still brand-name only. Desvenlafaxine sounds a lot like venlafaxine – which is Effexor, an old antidepressant which is available in generic. In fact, desvenlafaxine is a tiny change to the venlafaxine molecule which may or may not have any interesting medical benefit over the original, and which was invented solely to have something whose patent hasn’t expired.

Wyeth, the company that makes Pristiq, says that it’s better than Effexor because it doesn’t have as many drug-drug interactions. But Effexor doesn’t really have clinically significant drug-drug interactions, and this seems to be them just saying random stuff and hoping people believe them. There are no good head-to-head studies comparing Pristiq to Effexor, but if you try to piece together a comparison from unrelated studies (not recommended, but we’ll do it anyway) Effexor actually seems better than its newer cousin. Even the data I took from drug rating databases shows patients preferring Effexor to Pristiq by quite a lot. Carlat Psychiatry, which is psychiatrists’ insider news site on pharmacology developments, has a blog post called Top Five Reasons To Forget About Pristiq. Most of the well-informed psychiatrists I know agree that Pristiq is a slightly worse version of an older antidepressant with no proven advantages.

A month’s supply of Effexor costs $20. A month’s supply of Pristiq costs $300. So let me amend the paragraph above. Pristiq is a slightly worse version of an older antidepressant with no proven advantages that also costs fifteen times as much.

It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the state of psychiatry that it is the second most-prescribed antidepressant in the USA, with three million prescriptions per month.

Why would this happen? The relevant study is called Pharmaceutical Industry-Sponsored Meals And Physician Prescribing Patterns For Medicare Beneficiaries, so you know it’s going to be good. It shows that doctors who often eat drug-company-sponsored free lunches are more than twice as likely to prescribe Pristiq as doctors who rarely eat such lunches. This matches my observations perfectly. Doctors prescribe Pristiq because they don’t know very much about antidepressants, but they attend free lunches by pharmaceutical companies who tell them that Pristiq is great, and they believe it. If this surprises you, be more cynical.

I’m looking at the price of Pristiq in Canada, and it seems to range around $120 to $250. So if we instituted price regulations like Canada’s, we might lower the cost of Pristiq from $300 to $150. If we convinced doctors to prescribe Effexor instead, it would be $20, plus I really do believe Effexor is genuinely better.

Pristiq is far from alone in this. I don’t have good statistics, but I bet that at least half of brand-name prescriptions in the US are more like Pristiq (attempts to rip people off) than like Harvoni (genuinely wonderful breakthroughs in medical science).

Parental Matchmaking

Via Marginal Revolutions, here is a study that compared Chinese marriages arranged by the parents with those arranged by the husband and wife:

While parental matchmaking has been widespread throughout history and across countries, we know little about the relationship between parental matchmaking and marriage outcomes. Does parental involvement in matchmaking help ensure their needs are better taken care of by married children? This paper finds supportive evidence using a survey of Chinese couples. In particular, parental involvement in matchmaking is associated with having a more submissive wife, a greater number of children, a higher likelihood of having any male children, and a stronger belief of the husband in providing old age support to his parents. These benefits, however, are achieved at the cost of less marital harmony within the couple and lower market income of the wife. The results render support to and extend the findings of Becker, Murphy and Spenkuch (2015) where parents meddle with children’s preferences to ensure their commitment to providing parental goods such as old age support.

Much of this is just going to be the difference between the kind of people who let their parents make their match and the ones who insist on doing it themselves. But I was struck by the finding that people in parentally-arranged marriages are less happily married but more likely to take care of their aging parents. You can generally count on people to look after their own interests.

The paper is paywalled and the abstract doesn't say how big these effects are. I would bet they aren't very big, since all the other data I have seen on arranged vs. self-made marriages finds only small differences in satisfaction.

Liberals, Conservatives, and the News

Interesting article in Upshot about how liberals and conservatives consume the news. The main discovery is that despite everything you read about how the media have changed and echo chambers and so on, most Americans still get their news from the same mainstream sources. Also, the number of conservatives who rely on conservative sources is greater than the number of liberals who rely on liberal sources.

But of course such a study assumes there is a good way of determining which news sources are liberal or conservative. Zooming in on the habits of people who consume their news online gives the graph above. If you're like me, you are perhaps wondering why the New York Times shows up far to the left of MSN. If you read the fine print, you discover that web sites assigned places on the political spectrum using data from Facebook, by counting up the self-declared political affiliations of people who follow that news source. Thus, the Times shows up as far left because most of the people who follow the Times on Facebook describe themselves as liberals.

Is that a reasonable way to assess the content of a publication as big and fact-filled as the Times? The Times is certainly liberal, but it is also a great newspaper, in terms of spending money to cover issues that matter, and giving them space in its pages. It also covers things like theater and dance better than any other paper I know of, and it has some great science writers. Conservatives who won't read it because of the liberal slant are missing out. And, you know, the Times is not that far left; they despised Bernie, and real socialists hate the Times as much as Breitbart readers do. The Times is the neoliberal newspaper, not the leftist one.

The named publication that takes up the farthest left slot is Talking Points Memo (TPM), which is also strange. TPM is certainly on the left, but it is not the place you go to get your daily dose of outrage at crazy conservatives. It is aimed at Democratic activists and professionals, the sort of people who want to follow the ins and outs of competitive House races in Florida. So, yes, there are "Trump is Crazy" stories to enliven things, but the meat of the publication is stuff political insiders need to know, like which Super-pacs have decided to take out ad buys on behalf of whom, and whose campaign might be derailed by a scandal.

So I don't like this attempt at a political news spectrum at all. It shows something about who reads each publication, but not what is in it.

The Latest from the Exciting World of For-Profit Colleges

ITT Technical Institutes has collapsed, and is closing all its campuses. Good riddance to a "school" that paid a lot of attention to its stock price and practically none to educating its students. A few snippets from the Times story:

With Wall Street demanding steady growth, the pressure on the company’s managers was relentless. The chain was adding eight to 10 new campuses a year, according to the Senate committee. Former employees said recruiters pushed to enroll more and more students — regardless of their preparation, chances of graduating or ability to repay their loans — even as the company pared instructional costs and raised tuition to increase profits. . . .

Aggrieved students, graduates who found their degrees of little value, even insiders who became whistle-blowers turned to online websites and watchdog groups. Many filed complaints with state prosecutors and regulators, the Education Department and lawmakers.

They reported deceptive marketing; strong-arm recruitment tactics; misleading information about costs, courses, graduation and job placement rates; inflated enrollment numbers; bait-and-switch schemes; subpar instruction; and more.

Ms. Wofford of Veterans Education Success said that every time the government tried to clamp down on an abuse, some for-profit colleges would come up with a scheme to circumvent the rule, like a private loan program set up by ITT to keep the pipeline of federal funds flowing.

“There’s a perniciousness that’s disturbing,” Ms. Wofford said.

If you ask me, that disturbing perniciousness pervades the whole field of for-profit technical education. These "colleges" are trying to compete with community colleges, which get big state subsidies and tax breaks and often have cooperative deals with employers that bring in even more money. To make money the for-profit schools have to charge significantly more than community colleges charge, and only a few very specialized schools have been able to provide instruction that is meaningfully better. So they are essentially reduced to operating a scam. They find ignorant students who don't know they could get the same classes for less elsewhere and extract the maximum amount of student loan money from them before they either 1) drop out, or 2) graduate and realize they've been had.