Book Club: Poor Economics...

I learned about Poor Economics: Rethinking Poverty and the Ways to End It by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo (PE; 2011; PublicAffairs) from an interview conducted with the authors on NPR's Planet Money podcast (which I highly recommend). I was interested in it specifically because its arguments about development are based on empirical tests of the effectiveness of various policies, rather than elegant mathematical theories or case-studies, whichsadly, seem to make up a lot of the discourse in this field.

 

While rather complex in detail, PE really boils down to a series of major points about how and why the most impoverished people in the world make decisions about their lives. Unfortunately, these decisions often interfere with the bettering of said lives. Furthermore, western development agencies (and general foreign aid) frequently enact policies that don't take the idiosyncratic details of individual countries into account, leading to much wasted effort and failed intervention.

 

The five major points outlined in the book are as follows: 

 

1. Poor often lack critical information and believe falsehoods.

2. The poor bear direct responsibility for too many aspects of their lives.

3. Many markets are missing for the poor (for 'good' reasons).

4. Development often fails for idiosyncratic reasons (Ignorance, Ideology, and Inertia).

5. Expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies.

 

Number one is obvious, uneducated, poor people often don't realize the benefits of various interventions (vaccines, condom use, etc.) and thus fail to take advantage of them, even when offered freely. However, this is more pervasive in other aspects of developing countries as well. For instance, the poor frequently under-value education itself, and thus even when services are offered, there's no market for them.

 

The second point is more interesting. The authors of the book argue that the poor need to make far more choices about how to better their lives than we do. We have to send our children to school, we have to pay taxes and invest in social security, our water is treated by default, etc. Poor people don't have to be any lazier than the average first world adult to envision a situation where they'd skip walking an hour in the blistering heat to get chlorine and treat their water, or make sure that they follow trough with a vaccination schedule. In addition, the poor often work a lot longer hours than we do, so there's more incentive not to spend time on critical, but ultimately optional preventive tasks.

 

In point three, 'markets' simply refers to how there are many services that we take for granted - especially insurance - that are unavailable to developing nations. Even when such services are offered, the poor tend to not take advantage of them, even if they've been empirically demonstrated to improve lives (see point #1).

 

The fourth point refers to how many developmental efforts, while laudable for their intentions, are wrong-headed in implementation and doomed to fail. It really boils down to understanding why a situation exists in a particular nation and tailoring developmental investment such that it ameliorates that situation. If a government is known to be extremely corrupt, for example, it seems that using official channels to distribute goods and/or funds will be futile and rife with loss. Development needs to take into account local customs, believes, ethnic makeup, etc. It's easier to tailor policy correctly in the first place rather than fix it once its been implemented (there's a huge amount of resistance to admiting that a charity investment has failed).

 

Finally, the fifth point is something that has been studied in the psychology literature but seems to be more obvious in the case of the extremely poor: If expectations and goals are set so far out of reach that they seem impossible, people will just give up. The authors present some evidence that success in programs increases (sometimes dramatically) when goals and objectives are made concrete and attainable in short periods of time (rather than over years). An example is that teachers do better when their goal is to make sure that every student can actually read, rather than some nebulous pedagogical list of 'educational goals'.

 

Something I quite enjoyed about PE, though I can see it depressing others, is that its goals and policy suggestions are realistic. Most involve small-scale, testable, probably enforceable changes that have measurable benefits, but are not indented as 'magic bullets' that will end poverty overnight. As the authors say, there have always been poor people and if it takes 100 years to eradicate the worst of the world's poverty, so be it. Some of the development community seems based around catchy, feel-good ideologies that often seem to argue falsely that we can fix everything with simple solutions and thus seem doomed to disapointment. PE argues that small goals with long-term development intentions will both be more likely to succeed, and be better in the short term for those they are trying to help.      

The Quality of Internet 'Journalizm'...

Not too long ago, I lamented the rise of the 'New Media', or the change in focus of news outlets from daily/weekly print magazines towards instant, up-to-the-minute online 'blog-style' reporting. To recap: I fear that the business model of online news favors breaking news as quickly as possible in order to get citations and draw 'clicks', the number of which directly contribute to advertizing revenue. In my opinion, this tends to favor rapid, rather than well-written coverage, which is disturbingly often quite innacurate and not properly cited itself.

Another obvious source of clicks is rumormongering and controversy. For instance, a website can frabricate an interesting 'rumor' (design specs of the new iPhone, for example), and harvest the clicks both for the original story, AND for the subsequent clarification/retraction. Unfortunately, it's a model whose perverse incentives can lead to all sorts of ridiculousness. Free-market economists could argue that sites that engaged in such behavior could quickly find themselves with no readers - however, it seems as though looking at these sites isn't a significant time or financial investment, and thus even sites with a record of ridiculous scandals can continue to thrive1.

One such outlet is Gawker media, whose garbage2 I don't read unless of course I'm linked to it by friends due to some scandal or other. This blog post is in response to one such 'scandal' that particularly irked me:

Gizmodo is Gawker's tech blog and generally reports on all things technology and electronics related. Lest anyone think that it is an obscure site, it's not: Gizmodo famously illegally obtained a prototype version of the iPhone 4 and broke the specs to the world. Prior to this (and since), it was cited by major news sources like Reuters and the AP in many matters 'tech'. This is why I was puzzled when I was made aware of the following recent post on Gizmodo: 'My Brief OkCupid Affair With a World Champion Magic: The Gathering Player'. 

Apparently, the author of the post, Alyssa Bereznak, went on a date with a guy she met on the popular online dating site, OKCupid. She was horrified to discover that the guy in question played Magic: The Gathering - in fact, he was a former world champion. Ms. Bereznak, writer for an online tech-blog, thought that this was way too geeky for her tastes, and called the affair off; but not before arranging a second date to quiz him about his Magic playing past. She then used that information to write a tawdry piece - calling the guy out by name, no less - about how horrible it was that she dated a nerd and that we (or maybe only women?) should, "Google the shit out of your next online date. Like, hardcore."

I think it's rather beyond the pale to write about something so personal, even using real names, on a private blog. But posting it on a major website that gets millions of clicks is ridiculous. Also, why is this even on Gizmodo??? It's a technology blog, not a dating rag-sheet (or is it?).

This also raises the specter of something that seems to come up a lot on the internets - namely, are nerdy pursuits becoming more mainstream? Sure, almost everyone plays videogames, some of us have even tried, gasp, Dungeons & Dragons, but is it ok to admit to doing so in public2? Cripes, some people actually write this stuff on their CVs under 'Interests'. I'm still firmly of the opinion that most people don't get the difference between 'hobby' and 'obsession' when it comes to some of this stuff, and that Gizmodo piece simply reaffirms my convictions. Probably best to hold your love of wizards close to your chest until a few dates in.

Regardless, Gawker probably got what they wanted: a huge flurry of internet traffic that they can show to potential advertizers. Technically, I'm probably helping them by writing this post. However, I'd like to think that by publicizing such a piece of garbage, it'll turn more people against the frequent, terrible writing that passes for 'analysis' or 'news' at Gawker and pressures them to improve... or at least set some standards.   

1There's an entire argument here about how this stuff only exists because there is a demand for it, which is valid. It somewhat hearkens back to the era of 'yellow journalism' among the mainstream press, which led to an eventual period of self-regulation and accepted standards. The difference here may be the nature of the medium - it seems that any amateur can put together a semi-credible website, so for-profit companies are pressured to find ways to capture eyes. Hopefully it'll all settle down as the medium ages, but I consider criticisms such as the present post useful in separating the wheat from the chaff in the court of public opinion.

2Despite its popularity, Gawker's stuff really is garbage: 1) It's offensive (e.g., articles comparing the very real and soemtimes very violent 'Arab Spring' to video games?), 2) it's ridiculously random (see above post), and perhaps mostly 3) it's terribly written (just look at anything on Kotaku - the editors are well-respected but the content is in some primordial form of English at best).

3Many years ago, I had a girlfriend who was not ok with my playing of D&D, which unfortunately, I haven't done in something like seven years. Her method for disabusing me of the desire to want to get together with my friends and kill orcs was to introduce me to all of her friends with the following line: "Hi, this is my boyfriend Carlo, he plays Dungeons & Dragons." I'm not joking - it was super awkward. I'm glad that that ended.

Book Club: Cracking the Genome...

I read science books for a variety of reasons. While learning new things is undoubtedly the most important (and arguably fascinating), sometimes I'll read about a topic with which I'm intimately familiar just to get ideas about how to present it more clearly. Other times I'll read books in the hope that I can find a good resource for 'lay-people'. There's a certain balance you need to strike about communicating the social value and research enthusiasm of particular scientific discoveries, versus spending too much time on the minutiae and details of how the stuff actually works1. For instance, I think that Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale is one of the better overviews of evolutionary biology techniques and principles.

Another book I'm going to add to my list of recommendations is Kevin Davies' Cracking the Genome (CtG; 2001; The Johns Hopkins University Press), but this time as a general overview of the field of genomics. Written in 2001, the technologies detailed in the book are a bit dated by the standards of a swift-moving field of science, but that's probably an overall benefit to the layperson anyways.

I picked up the book because I wanted to get an overview of the famous public vs. private efforts to sequence the human genome. In brief, a public consortium of interested academic groups (as well as a few private firms) had agreed to proceed with sequencing the entire human genome in the early 90s, with the intent to be finished in 2005. This was first led by Nobel laureate James Watson, but quickly turned over to Francis Collins, the present director of the NIH, where until recently, I worked. However, in the late 90s, a former NIH researcher-turned-biotech guru, J. Craig Venter, entered into an agreement with Perkin Elmer and Applied Biosystems to form Celera Genomics and sequence the human genome using a much faster method (shotgun sequencing) with the intent of patenting pharmaceutically interesting genes as well as monetizing access to the data. This led to a several year spat between the two groups, as well as a flurry of popular media activity over the ethical implications of patenting the genes shared by all of us (polymorphisms, indels, and copy-number variants excepted, of course). In the end, the public project had to massively accelerate their timeline, and both projects were co-published in 2001.

This was all happening while I was in my undergrad, and if there's one thing that I can clearly remember, it's that Craig Venter's name was synonymous with 'Satan' to many of my profs. There were many reasons for academics to feel this way beyond the ethical patent considerations: A major concern was the question as to how the public would feel about the ~2 billion dollars that had been invested in the academic sequencing effort if the private sector managed to accomplish the same task in a fraction of the time and without tax-payer expense? Would funding for genome science be cut back in general?

After reading CtG, coupled to my experiences over the past few years, my opinion of the two racing projects has changed somewhat. Venter caught a lot of flak from the scientific community for moving to the private sector, but his ideas and interests were production-scale and not well-suited to academic labs (Venter became famous by generating large-scale expressed sequence tag [EST] libraries). Similarly, part of the reason that the public project floundered was because if was being run by academic labs. Everyone had their own research goals, and few graduate students/postdocs wanted to spend their days merely generating the millions of base-pairs of sequence the project required. In order to accelerate their schedule (remember the public project 'ended' 4 years ahead of their expected stop date) the academic project re-structured their staff and transferred the bulk of the work to technicians who were paid to generate sequence. Analysis was reserved for researchers. Sequencing technology has made huge progress since 2001, and it's now possible for a single person to do large-scale sequencing and analysis. However, the lure of production projects remains and the 'herding cats' problems facing large consortiums of academic labs hasn't really changed.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the actual details of the Human Genome Project only accounted for perhaps 60% of the book. The remainder is a series of surprisingly detailed tangents into various scientific and historical details behind the story. It begins with a background into the genome itself, followed by sequencing technology, later moving into human medical genetics and gene mapping, and finally entering some fairly detailed exploration of the medical benefits of having a completed genome sequence - even brushing into such topics as pharmacogenomics. I'm really keen on the idea that large sections of the book be spent on explaining why this stuff is so important, and I think that case-studies and history lessons do a much better job of framing the issues as compared to abstract explanations in line with the text. That's why I think that CtG would probably be of interest to the genome science interested lay person, because it provides a broad contextualized overview of the material.

My one criticism of an otherwise excellent text is its odd, yet frequent appeal to religious imagery and/or explicite religious themes. I understand why former US President Clinton appealed to God in speaches about the project. I also understand why the Evangelical Christian Francis Collins does as well. I'm not quite sure why a book about the science behind human genome sequencing keeps referring to how 'God'was involved in DNA. Perhaps the author is himself religious, or perhaps he felt that it was appropriate for a popular audience. In addition to being irrelevant, it also raises a lot of strange theological questions - we're 98.6% similar to chimpanzees, so if DNA is 'The Language of God' are chimps just slightly less-favoured than we? Do they also have a 'soul'? I suppose that as an evolutionary person, I think about these things.

The above, minor criticism doesn't detract from the overall excellence of the book's portrayal of the early study of genomics. People have frequently asked what having the sequence of the genome 'does' for us and Davies does an excellent job of explaining the current and potential future benefits... which is good, because it gives me ideas on how to explain these benefits to others and justify why I should have a job.

1Of course you do need to explain how stuff works, otherwise science would be asking people to just take this stuff 'on faith'. The question is how much is too much? I've read a few popular physics books that were rather difficult to follow, for instance.  

Management...

I wanted to blog about something that I've discussed with many people over the years: The management of a scientific group (specifically here, an academic lab). I have to admit that I was rather shocked the first time that I learned that professors generally don't need to go through any serious 'management' training1. I find this somewhat strange as companies routinely hire business and management majors directly out of college in order to oversee accounts that aren't exhorbitantly larger than some grants that PIs are working with. I've now worked under the supervision of 4 separate PIs, and I've observed that techniques vary wildely, as does success.

It seems obvious to me (though correct me if I'm wrong) that managing a scientific lab is qualitatively different than managing a company. Allow me to explain via a personal example: I worked as the night-shift manager at a Shopper's Drug Mart Pharmacy for 4 months between finishing my M.Sc. and beginning my Ph.D.2. When I came in for my shift, I looked at what people had to accomplish for the evening and delegated responsibility to my employees; that is, I told them precisely what to do. An academic lab may have a few people that fit the 'tell them what to do' bill - technicians and junior grad students, for instance - but senior grad students and postdocs are typically considered to be fairly independent.

Following on that topic of independence, a previous advisor of mine once described relationships within academic labs as 'partnerships', consisting of a senior partner (the PI) and various 'junior' partners with varying degrees of investment in the direction of their own work as well as the lab's. The job of the senior partner was therefore to steer the lab towards accomplishing its overall 'vision', for lack of a better term, by hiring interested people as well and 'consulting' on projects. I think that this consulting role plays a part in explaining why many lab websites say things like, 'we are broadly interested in...'. There are many ways to chip away at the myriad of current 'hot topics' in science.

I imagine that this ability to trust in the independent judgement of 'junior partners' is probably one of the most challenging tasks of being a PI. Unlike the 9-5 jobs at the office, people in labs tend to work in very different ways, and it's not always obvious that any particular person is being 'appropriately' productive. The obvious solution is to check in regularly with weekly lab meetings and/or round-tables. However, it's pretty common to hear of situations where supervisors want weekly written progress reports. A very controlling person may decide to take a completely top-down (a.k.a. 'hands-on') approach and simply come tell you what to do regularly.

There are pros and cons to the above scenarios. PIs who are too 'hands off' can leave more junior members floundering - it's not everyone who's able to walk into a new lab and design a project from the ground up without any guidance. Weekly progress reports force people to think about the overall picture of their work regularly, something that's easy to avoid in the tedium of long, ongoing experiments. However, such progress reports become less useful if they require a lot of work as well as polished figures (I have a  friend who spends ~4 hours/wk preparing his progress reports, which seems excessive). The very 'hands-on' supervisor is arguably the worst in my experience, as they're rarely as 'up' on the details of techniques and background materials leading to many unreasonable requests based on misunderstanding.

For all of the differences between managing a business team and an academic lab, there are also a lot of parallels as well. Things like maintaining employee morale, how to deliver criticism, how to plan and manage long-term projects, and how to sell ideas in general, among other concepts, are certainly universal. Some people obviously have the knack for these types of things, but others clearly do not. Yet there's a certain hubris among academics in thinking that it is not a worthwhile exercise to have such skills taught. This is all the more odd given the general emphasis that academics place on education.

I don't think that it's a waste of time for me to ponder these issues given that I would like to have a lab of my own some day. Assuming that this comes to pass, where will I learn these techniques? There's a certain sad logic in the argument that one 'learns' to be a PI over the course of their grad-school and postdoc experiences. Though somewhat better than 'the blind leading the blind' (students of good PIs may learn good management skills) it's all too likely that poor skills will be passed on as well. I wonder if it would be practical to organize 'management seminars' or brief classes for new PIs (as well as refresher sessions for longer term employees)? Time and finances are likely stretched too thin as it is, but it's something to think about. 

1Actually, I think that the first such shock that I received was when, during my undergrad, I found out that professors don't actually have to learn how to teach, either. I don't know which one worries me more now. 

2Tangent here: The greatest benefit of this job is that it unequivocally established the value of my M.Sc. After I accepted the position, the big boss looked down at my resume and said 'Oh, I see you have a Masters degree. We can bump you up by $2/hr!' Thus, it would take me something like 4-5,000 hours of work to see a return on investment on my M.Sc. Ungh.   

Camping in Ohiopyle, PA...

Over the past few years, I've been trying to get into more 'outdoorsy' stuff. On top of a general desire to 'be more active', I also think that biking, jogging, hiking, camping, etc. are a good way to get out of the lab and see more of the land around me. In this spirit, some friends of mine invited me on an impromptu camping trip in Ohiopyle State Park, Pennsylvania:

Ohiopyle State Park, PA, is roughly a 3/4 of the way to Pittsburgh, and a 3.5 hour drive from my place in Rockville, MD.

The park itself is dominated by the Youghiogheny (YAW-KI-GHEN-EE) River Gorge, which is quite gorgeous, hosts a number of scenic waterfalls, and is apparently a very popular destination for kayaking and boating. Luckily for us, the Over The Falls Race took place during one of our hikes, and we ended up in a perfect position for me to capture a video of several of the kayakers braving the rapids and falls with my new camera (forgive me if this looks odd, I'm new to this YouTube thing):  

What shocks me is watching some people capsize in the rapids before reaching the falls, only to go over the falls while upside-down. That does not look comfortable :-(

We spent both days at the park hiking along its rather excellent (if a bit muddy) trails, many of which offer excellent views of the river and surrounding natural environment. Unfortunately, the first day ended with a rainstorm and three of us being soaked and huddling in a tent for 1.5 hours. It really actually wasn't all that bad, as we had some... er root beer to pass the time1.

I've uploaded a large number of photos to a Picasa Web Album for anyone who's interested in seeing more of the park, but I'll post a few of the more interesting photos below:

The impressive, beautiful, and oddly named Cucumber Falls. It's difficult to get a sense of the scale in this photo, but it's a roughly 30 foot drop. This is a shot of the falls at 'low water', but they can be much wider during the spring as shown here.

The main falls just outside the small touristy town of Ohiopyle, and those which people are riding over with their kayaks in the video above.

There's a large bridge that crosses the river gorge along one of the main hiking/biking trails. The view from the top is quite gorgeous (pardon the pun).

There's a neat area of the park where a tributary to the main river has carved 'natural waterslides' into the rock. Kids were sliding down these slides, but I'm skeptical of one's ability to navigate the channel, bum unscathed.

It's been a long time since I've been camping. There's something exciting about it, even if 'roughing it' takes a bit of getting used to (I'm somewhat obsessive about cleanliness, being unable to begin my day without a shower, even if I'm going directly from bed to the gym). However, given the close proximity of a town with restaurants, and our having brought a bunch of food and cooking equipment, it wasn't really 'hardcore' camping in any real sense.  

Regardless, it was great, and I would certainly be up for doing more camping in the near future. Next year, my REI dividends are probably going to pay out pretty well, and I think I'm going to look into getting myself a tent and a sleeping bag.

1It was, in fact, root beer as the consumption of alcoholic beverages is prohibited in State parks, 'round these parts. Pro-tip: There are also Narcs driving around to check...