Monthly Archive for May, 2015

Bosonic Ka-Ching Theory

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 12, 2015
in Current Events, Law and Philosophy
. 55 Comments

George Johnson of the New York Times writes that:

In a saner world, where science and the law meshed more precisely, a case like Firstenberg v. Monribot would have been dead on arrival in court.

Arthur Firstenberg, you see, is suing his neighbor, Raphaela Monribot, for bombarding him with photons from her iPhone, her WiFi connection, her dimmer switches and her fluorescent bulbs (all as side effects of her ordinary use of these devices). Mr. Firstenberg believes (or claims to believe) that said photons are damaging his health — a belief with essentially no scientific basis.

Mr. Firstenberg requests $1.43 million in damages, so perhaps we should think of this as an exercise in bosonic “ka-ching” theory. The case has gone on for five years, and might be headed to the New Mexico Supreme Court. Estimated court costs so far exceed a quarter of a million.

It would be easy — in fact, Mr. Johnson of the Times finds it extremely easy — to see this case as nothing but a minor tragedy with comic overtones. But the issues it raises are deeper than that.

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Sweet Talk

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 5, 2015
in Bad Reasoning, Current Events and Rants
. 39 Comments

Is it only me who is driven crazy by the American Heart Association’s campaign against “added sugars”, and the attendant campaign to label foods for their added sugar content?

Look. I am no expert, so correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I can tell from a trip around the Internet, sugar is sugar. More precisely, fructose is fructose, glucose is glucose, and so it goes. The fructose in an apple is exactly as bad for you as the fructose in a Cola drink.

Now an apple provides all sorts of good nutrients and fiber that are missing from the Cola drink. But if you want to send that message, the way to send it is to advertise that apples provide all sorts of good nutrients and fiber that are missing from Cola drinks — not to suggest (nonsensically, as far as I can tell) that the “added sugar” in the Cola drink is somehow different from the non-added sugar in an apple. If your main concern is to watch your sugar intake, the distinction doesn’t matter. If your main concern is, say, Vitamin C, then sugar counts are irrelevant anyway. If you care a little about a lot of things, then it’s good to know sugar contents, vitamin contents, and a whole lot more. But I cannot imagine any individual, in any state of the world, who is better off counting added sugar than counting total sugar.

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Life in Baltimore

Published
by
Steve Landsburg
on May 4, 2015
in Current Events, Musings and Wealth and Poverty
. 8 Comments

Christopher Ingraham, writing in the Washington Post, points with alarm to a 20-year gap in life expectancies between the poorest and the richest Baltimoreans. This begs the question of whether that gap is too small or too large, or better yet, what the optimal gap would be. Surely it is not zero, which is to say that longevity is only one of the problems poor Baltimoreans face, that directing more resources to life extension means directing fewer resources elsewhere, and that redirecting enough resources to close a 20-year longevity gap would almost surely leave poor Baltimoreans worse off than they are. Even if we were prepared to spend whatever it takes to close that gap, it’s not implausible that most poor Baltimoreans would rather have the cash.

More striking is Ingraham’s observation, in the same article, that in some Baltimore neighborhoods, life expectancies are lower than they are in North Korea. Poor Baltimoreans are certainly wealthier than average North Koreans, so you’d expect them to live longer. Unless there’s some other variable at play (like, for example, a Korean genetic predisposition to long life), this suggests either that poor Baltimoreans die too young or that North Koreans live too long. It’s not clear which.

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