Trump Victory Undercut Faith in Big Data

(p. B1) It was a rough night for number crunchers. And for the faith that people in every field — business, politics, sports and academia — have increasingly placed in the power of data.
Donald J. Trump’s victory ran counter to almost every major forecast — undercutting the belief that analyzing reams of data can accurately predict events. Voters demonstrated how much predictive analytics, and election forecasting in particular, remains a young science: . . .
. . .
(p. B5) This week’s failed election predictions suggest that the rush to exploit data may have outstripped the ability to recognize its limits.
. . .
Beyond election night, there are broader lessons that raise questions about the rush to embrace data-driven decision-making across the economy and society.
The enthusiasm for big data has been fueled by the success stories of Silicon Valley giants born on the internet, like Google, Amazon and Facebook. The digital powerhouses harvest vast amounts of user data using clever software for search, social networks and online commerce. Data is the fuel, and algorithms borrowed from the tool kit of artificial intelligence, notably machine learning, are the engine.
. . .
The danger, data experts say, lies in trusting the data analysis too much without grasping its limitations and the potentially flawed assumptions of the people who build predictive models.

For the full story, see:
STEVE LOHR and NATASHA SINGER. “How Data Failed Us in Calling an Election.” The New York Times (Sat., NOV. 10, 2016): B1 & B5.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Rigid Labor Regulations Hurt Labor in India

(p. A9) . . . rigid and complex regulations have discouraged investment in labor-intensive industries in India, . . . .
Many economists say India’s labor laws have encouraged enterprises to stay small, rely on informal labor or substitute capital for workers. A report by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said for India to return to a high-growth trajectory, it must “reduce barriers to formal employment by introducing a simpler and more flexible labor law which doesn’t discriminate by size of enterprise.”

For the full story, see:
NIHARIKA MANDHANA. “India State Tests Labor-Law Overhaul.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Dec. 6, 2014): A9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Dec. 7 [sic], 2014, and has the title “Modi’s BJP-Controlled States Become Labs for Contentious Reform.”)

One Way to Defend Free Trade (in Honor of Reagan’s Birthday)

(p. A9) Baldrige also knew how to use humor to deflate tense moments, as when the U.S. toy balloon industry petitioned for protection against cheap Mexican imports. Baldrige was opposed, but after debate the entire cabinet favored sanctions. Sensing this was not where the president wanted to go, Baldrige pulled from his pocket a dozen toy balloons and tossed them on the cabinet table. As the room filled with laughter, he said, “This is what we are talking about.” Reagan denied the sanctions.

For the full review, see:
CLARK S. JUDGE. “BOOKSHELF; The Cowboy At Commerce; During tense talks over steel imports, Baldrige insisted the tired Europeans work through lunch. He’d hidden snacks for his team nearby.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Jan. 5, 2016): A9.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 4, 2016, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; The Cowboy At Commerce; During tense talks over steel imports, Baldrige insisted the tired Europeans work through lunch. He’d hidden snacks for his team nearby.”)

The book under review, is:
Black, Chris, and B. Jay Cooper. Mac Baldrige: The Cowboy in Ronald Reagan’s Cabinet. Lanham, MD: Lyons Press, 2015.

Innovation Brought Rise of Middle Class and Decline of Aristocracy

(p. C7) Mr. Evans claims that “master narratives” have fallen into disrepute, and he does not aspire to provide one. But he returns repeatedly to such themes as the growth of “public space” as Europe urbanized and communications improved. He likewise describes the “shifting contours of inequality” as the middle classes burgeoned and benefited from the hastening pace of scientific innovation while the aristocracy slowly declined in status (albeit not in creature comforts).
Similarly, Mr. Evans offers an interesting discussion of how various forms of serfdom disappeared, even as the essence of rural immiseration generally did not. He conveys the degradation of existence for the emergent working class of the cities with controlled pathos yet without acknowledging the improvements in living standards that took place in advanced countries during the last decades of the century. He adduces evidence to show that the benefits of improved sanitation and hygiene, health and nutrition, consumer products and home conveniences, as well as longer life expectancy, went at first disproportionately to the urban middle and professional classes, strata that tripled as a fraction of the population in leading countries. Thus even in comparatively prosperous England, well-off adolescents at midcentury stood almost 9 inches taller than their proletarian contemporaries and by 1900 enjoyed a life expectancy 14 years longer.

For the full review, see:
STEPHEN A. SCHUKER. “The European Century.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 3, 2016): C7.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 2, 2016, and has the title “A Long Century of Peace.”)

The book under review, is:
Evans, Richard J. The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914. New York: Viking, 2016.

Double-Blind Trials Are Not the Only Source of Sound Knowledge

(p. 1) . . . while all doctors agree about the importance of gauging the quality of evidence, many feel that a hierarchy of methods is simplistic. As the doctor Mark Tonelli has argued, distinct forms of knowledge can’t be judged by the same standards: what a patient prefers on the basis of personal experience; what a doctor thinks on the basis of clinical experience; and what clinical research has discovered — each of these is valuable in its own way. While scientists concur that randomized trials are ideal for evaluating the average effects of treatments, such precision isn’t necessary when the benefits are obvious or clear from other data.
Clinical expertise and rigorous evaluation also differ in their utility at different stages of scientific inquiry. For discovery and explanation, as the clinical epidemiologist Jan Vandenbroucke has argued, practitioners’ instincts, observations and case studies are most useful, whereas randomized controlled trials are least useful. Expertise and systematic evaluation are partners, not rivals.
Distrusting expertise makes it easy to confuse an absence of randomized evaluations with an absence of knowledge. And this leads to the false belief that knowledge of what works in social policy, education or fighting terrorism can come only from randomized evaluations. But by that logic (as a spoof scientific article claimed), we don’t know if parachutes really work because we have no randomized controlled trials of them.

For the full commentary, see:
PAGAN KENNEDY. “The Thin Gene.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., NOV. 27, 2016): 1 & 6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date NOV. 25, 2016.)

The academic article calling for double-blind randomized trials to establish the efficacy of parachutes, is:
Smith, Gordon C. S., and Jill P. Pell. “Parachute Use to Prevent Death and Major Trauma Related to Gravitational Challenge: Systematic Review of Randomised Controlled Trials.” BMJ 327, no. 7429 (Dec. 18, 2003): 1459-61.

Elephant Poaching Boosts Lion Population

(p. A7) In Mozambique, the number of people living inside the country’s gigantic Niassa Reserve grew to around 35,000 in 2012 from about 21,000 in 2001, and those people are increasingly clashing with the park’s lions–catching them in snares or hunting them when they attack livestock, said Alastair Nelson, the country director for New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society. In a strange sense of how out-of-whack the area has become, the park’s lion population has risen because of a jump in elephant poaching for ivory that has created a multitude of carcasses for the lions to feed on, Mr. Nelson said.”

For the full story, see:
HEIDI VOGT. “Humans, Lions Struggle to Co-Exist.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Aug. 8, 2015): A7.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date Aug. 7, 2015, and has the title “Human-Population Boom Remains Largest Threat to Africa’s Lions in Wake of Cecil’s Killing.”)

Science Can Learn Much from Outliers “Who Are Naturally Different”

(p. 1) Abby Solomon suffers from a one-in-a-billion genetic syndrome: After just about an hour without food, she begins to starve. She sleeps in snatches. In her dreams she gorges on French fries. But as soon as she wakes up and nibbles a few bites, she feels full, so she ends up consuming very few calories. At 5 feet 10 inches tall, she weighs 99 pounds.
Now 21 years old, she is one of the few people in the world to survive into adulthood with neonatal progeroid syndrome, a condition that results from damage to the FBN1 gene.
. . .
(p. 6) Dr. Chopra told me that, as far as medical science is concerned, Abby Solomon is worth thousands of the rest of us.
. . .
“Nothing comes close to starting with people who are naturally different,” he said. This is why he searches out patients at the extreme ends of the spectrum — those who are wired to weigh 80 pounds or 380 pounds. He said, “We have the opportunity to help a bigger swath of humanity when we learn from these outliers.”
In 2013, after hearing about Ms. Solomon’s unusual condition from another patient, he asked her to visit his clinic. Ms. Solomon warned him that she would be able to carry on a conversation for only 15 minutes before she needed to snack on chips or a cookie. That remark inspired a revelation. Dr. Chopra realized that “she had to eat small, sugary meals all day to stay alive, because her body was constantly running out of glucose,” he said.
The clue led Dr. Chopra and his colleagues to their discovery of the blood-sugar-regulating hormone, which they named asprosin. Ms. Solomon’s natural asprosin deficiency keeps her on the brink of starvation, but Dr. Chopra’s hope is that an artificial compound that blocks asprosin could be used as a treatment for obesity. He and his team have already tested such a compound on mice, and found that it can reverse insulin resistance and weight gain.

For the full commentary, see:
PAGAN KENNEDY. “The Thin Gene.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., NOV. 27, 2016): 1 & 6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date NOV. 25, 2016.)

Not All Old Ideas Should Be Recycled

(p. C16) “What is true in the consumer tech industry is true in science and other fields of thinking,” Mr. Poole elaborates. “The story of human understanding is not a gradual, stately accumulation of facts” but rather “a wild roller-coaster ride full of loops and switchbacks.”
Horses, for example, are once again being used in warfare in the Middle East. Vinyl records are back after losing out to digital CDs and internet streaming. Leeches, whose use was once considered a barbaric medieval practice, are now an FDA-approved “medical device” for cleaning wounds. Bicycles are making a comeback as a popular and efficient means of moving about in large, crowded cities. Blimps are starting to compete with helicopters for moving heavy cargo.
. . .
To understand this process of rediscovery–“old is the new new”–we need to abandon the myth of progress as something that results from a rejection of all that is old.
Still, not all old ideas will return reconfigured into new and useful ones, and it is here where readers may find room for disagreement, despite Mr. Poole’s many caveats.
. . .
That there are many unsolved mysteries in science does not always mean that we should turn to the past for insight. Sometimes–usually, in fact–the bad ideas rejected by science belong in the graveyard. Phlogiston, miasma, spontaneous generation, the luminiferous aether–wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong.
Nevertheless, those notions–and many others that Mr. Poole surveys in this thought-provoking book–were wrong in ways that led scientists toward a better understanding, and the middle chapters of “Rethink” elegantly recount these stories. Going forward, Mr. Poole ends by suggesting that we adopt a “view from tomorrow” in which we “try to consider an idea free of the moral weight that attaches to it in particular historical circumstances” and that “we could try to get into the habit of deferring judgments about ideas more generally” in order to keep an open mind. On the flip side, skeptics should not rush to dismiss a consensus idea as wrong just because consensus science is not always right. Most of today’s ideas gained consensus in the first place for a very good reason: evidence. Do you know what we call alternative science with evidence? Science.

For the full review, see:

MICHAEL SHERMER. “Everything Old Is New Again.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 10, 2016): C16.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 9, 2016, and has the title “Electric Cars Are Old News.”)

The book under review, is:
Poole, Steven. Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas. New York: Scribner, 2016.

Increasing Minimum Wage Hurts Low Productivity Workers

(p. B1) CHICAGO — A growing number of economists have found that many cities and states have considerable room to raise the minimum wage before employers meaningfully cut back on hiring.
But that conclusion may gloss over some significant responses to minimum-wage increases by individual employers, according to two new studies. And those reactions may, in turn, raise questions about the effectiveness of the minimum wage in helping certain workers.
The findings, presented over the weekend at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, the nation’s premier gathering of academic economists, come as many cities and states are raising their minimum wages. California and New York last year approved gradual increases to $15 per hour. Proponents argue that raising the minimum is one of the most practical ways of improving living standards for the working poor and reducing inequality.
To test that proposition, John Horton of New York University conducted an experiment on an online platform where employers post discrete jobs — including customer service support, data entry, and graphic design — and workers submit a proposed hourly wage for completing them.
Mr. Horton, working with the platform, was able to impose a minimum wage at random on one-quarter of about 160,000 jobs posted over roughly a (p. B4) month and a half in 2013. If a worker proposed an hourly wage that was below the minimum, the platform’s software asked him or her to raise the bid until it cleared the threshold. In some cases the minimum wage was $2 per hour, in some cases $3, and in some cases $4.
At first glance, the findings were consistent with the growing body of work on the minimum wage: While the workers saw their wages rise, there was little decline in hiring. But other results suggested that the minimum wage was having large effects. Most important, the hours a given worker spent on a given job fell substantially for jobs that typically pay a low wage — say, answering customer emails.
Mr. Horton concluded that when forced to pay more in wages, many employers were hiring more productive workers, so that the overall amount they spent on each job changed far less than the minimum-wage increase would have suggested. The more productive workers appeared to finish similar work more quickly.

For the full story, see:
NOAM SCHEIBER. “Studies Find Higher Minimum Wage May Have Losers.” The New York Times (Weds., JAN. 11, 2017): B1 & B4.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date JAN. 10, 2017, and has the title “Higher Minimum Wage May Have Losers.”)

The paper that Horton presented at the 2017 AEA meetings in Chicago, is:
Horton, John J. “Evidence from a Minimum Wage Experiment.” Working Paper, Leonard N. Stern School of Business. New York University, Jan. 10, 2017.

Entrepreneur Hires for Perseverance

Max Levchin, who is quoted below, is an entrepreneur who played an important role in the early days of PayPal.

(p. 2) How do you think your parents and grandparents influenced your leadership style today?

My grandmother was exceptionally formative. She basically was willpower personified. If she wanted something to happen, it would happen. She had this walk-through-walls style where you did not ask for permission or forgiveness; you just did what you needed to get it done. I still judge some of my decisions based on: What would Grandma decide? Was I sufficiently tenacious or not enough?
And one thing I have found over the years is that in hiring, the dominant characteristic I select for is this sense of perseverance in really tough situations. It’s like the difference between endurance athletes and sprinters. I think it is a really good predictor for how people behave under severe stress.
Working in a start-up means there is a baseline of stress with occasional spikes. There are people who are really good at handling spikes. In fact, most people are really good at handling spikes. But normal isn’t normal. There is constant stress. And so I look for endurance athletes, in the business sense.

For the full interview, see:
ADAM BRYANT. “Corner Office; Looking for Signs of Endurance.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., December 11, 2016): 2.
(Note: bold in original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date DEC. 9, 2016, and has the title “Corner Office; Max Levchin of Affirm: Seeking the Endurance Athletes of Business.” The bold words are Adam Bryant’s question; the non-bold words are Max Levchin’s answer.)