A quote from Far From the Tree I thought I’d share: “There is no such thing as reproduction. When two people decide to have a baby, they engage in an act of production, and the widespread use of the word reproduction for this activity, with its implication that two people are but braiding themselves together,…
The New Yorker recently published a very nice article on Pope Francis. At one point in the article, the Pope explains why he is trying to deemphasize all the controversies that have taken up so much of the Church’s attention in recent years, controversies about birth control, abortion and the like. His explanation shows a respectable…
Read the following quote, and try to guess which U.S. president made this statement: “A responsible budget is not our only weapon to control inflation. We must act now to protect all Americans from healthcare costs that are rising $1 million per hour, 24 hours a day, doubling every 5 years. We must take control…
In a late night phone call during a foreign policy crisis, Kennedy expressed disdain for domestic policy, showing the kind of attitude that doomed later efforts to reform the U.S. healthcare system: “It really is true that foreign affairs is the only important issue for a president to handle, isn’t it? I mean, who gives…
According to traditional economic theory, when people perform jobs for pay, they decide whether the pay they receive is large enough to justify the effort they put into the task at hand. But what if someone else is doing the same work for more pay? They probably won’t feel so great about their jobs anymore,…
Lyndon Johnson’s advisers were worried. They were drafting a Medicare proposal, a major component of Johnson’s war on poverty. But the cost of this program was turning out to be much larger than expected. By their estimates, in the first year alone, they would face $400 million more in expenditures than they had budgeted for….
I have conducted a number of studies on a phenomenon sometimes referred to as emotional adaptation. The basic idea behind this phenomenon is that people often respond with strong emotions to significant changes in their circumstances, but these emotions tend to diminish over time. Moreover, people often fail to anticipate this change in emotions, a failure…
If you ever want to know why one is the loneliest number, consider the words of John Tukey, a prominent American mathematician from the 20th century. Not the most socially adept person in the world, he relied heavily on his wife Elizabeth to help them live a normal life. When she died in 1998 Tukey…
In The Theory That Would Not Die, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne brings to life many famous scientists and statisticians, the one of the moments that struck me most was when she described one of those people as he faced his death. That person was Jerome Cornfield, a prominent statistician at the NIH. Cornfield had been diagnosed…
I recently read Sharon Bertsch McGrayne’s The Theory That Would Not Die, which recounts the controversial history of Bayes theorem in the world of statistics. To oversimplify quite a bit, Bayes theorem requires those using it to make an initial guess about, say, the probability that one outcome is more likely than another, and then…