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HOTTE #5: Let them eat cake!
26 Jun 2017
Reflections on hunger and food; their importance in explaining behaviour; their insufficient visibility in the contemporary human sciences; what peer reviewers don’t like; and the strange things we choose to focus on in our research. This is the last installment of Hanging On To The Edges until autumn 2017 Let them eat cake 1.0. (PDF) Return to the Hanging On To The Edges home page.
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HOTTE #4: How My Theory Explains Everything: And Can Make You Healthier, Wealthier and Happier
31 May 2017
The fourth essay in Hanging On To The Edges. A reflection on why scientists behave like red jungle fowl, and a hesitant encomium to doubt and uncertainty. How my theory explains everything 1.0 (PDF)
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Update on the 2017 starling breeding season
9 May 2017
The 2017 breeding season is nearly over in our colony. Here’s Starling Times 2017, a newsletter on how the birds have been doing, and what we have been up to–including our exciting TA-65 experiment……
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HOTTE #3: What we talk about when we talk about biology
26 Apr 2017
A reflection on humans, animals, and disciplinary distinctions, in homage to Ted Benton. What we talk about when we talk about biology 2.0 Go back to the Hanging On To The Edges homepage.
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HOTTE #2: Why inequality is bad
27 Mar 2017
The second essay in the Hanging On To The Edges series. A meditation on Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level, the ecological fallacy, and the complexities of being an academic. Download: Why inequality is bad 1.0 (PDF) Go back to the Hanging On To The Edges homepage.
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HOTTE #1: The mill that grinds young people old
1 Mar 2017
This is the first essay in the Hanging On To The Edges series. A meditation in an English urban graveyard, with a slight nod of the head to Thomas Gray, another to Tony Harrison, and a guest appearance by Charles Dickens. Download: The mill that grinds young people old 1.0 (PDF) Go back to the Hanging On To The Edges homepage.
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Blue/Orange to play Durham
10 Feb 2017
We are delighted to announce that Blue/Orange will play in Durham on Tuesday March 21st 2017, at 19:30pm, at the Empty Shop HQ in Framwellgate Bridge, DH1 4SJ. Tickets are available from here. This simple space is going to be wonderful for the piece. I like productions where I can carry the set down with me on the train. And don’t forget, of course, performances in Newcastle on the Friday and Saturday of the same week, at Northern Stage.
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And this little birdie got none……
17 Jan 2017
We’ve just published a new paper on the effects of early-life adversity in starlings. We are particularly interested in how early adversity affects the shortening of telomeres. Telomeres are the protective DNA caps on the ends of our (and their) chromosomes, whose length is often used as a marker of biological age. We have found previously that nestlings who are smaller than their brood mates lose telomeres faster in the first few weeks of life. A bad start ages you. However, we didn’t know what it is about being at a disadvantage in the brood that accelerates telomere loss. Is it that you don’t get so much to eat? Or is it the stress of having to struggle and beg more to hold your own when those around you are bigger and stronger? Or a bit of both? We decided to test this in a hand-rearing experiment. Here, we would play the parents and thus decide what each bird experienced in its formative days. Many collaborators contributed to this study. Clare Andrews did much of the hard work We took four siblings from each of eight wild broods. From each family, one sibling was fed all it wanted nine times … Continue reading “And this little birdie got none……”
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The behavioural constellation of deprivation
10 Jan 2017
We are used to the idea that the poor behave in a certain way- living for the day, devil may care, fatalistic, impulsive, enjoying life while they can- whilst the rich are more future-oriented, self-controlled and cautious. Just read the novels of Zola, for example, for vivid descriptions the appeal of present consumption over savings amongst those with the poorest lot in society. There’s actually a lot of evidence that, statistically, this is more than just a myth. People of lower socioeconomic status-in Britain for example-do tend to discount the future more heavily, are less health-conscious and future oriented. This can lead to a particular discourse about poverty: that people’s poverty is the consequence of their impulsive behaviours, and hence that poverty is in some sense the poor’s fault or failings that leads to their being poor (there would be no other good reason to be poor, right?). In a new paper coming out in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Gillian presents a different analysis of this phenomenon. What if the relative present-orientation that often goes with poverty were not a failing or weakness (or some kind of primordial character trait), but a sensible response to certain kinds of … Continue reading “The behavioural constellation of deprivation”
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Hitting the Wall & Blue/Orange
17 Nov 2016
I am very excited about our imminent production of Matthew Warburton’s Hitting the Wall at Northern Stage on November 30th. In 2012, Wayne Soutter, a middle-aged father of two, attempted to swim the as-yet unconquered sea-channel between the Mull of Kintyre and Ireland. Hitting The Wall is a theatrical recreation of that extraordinary endeavour. Cold seas. Strong winds. Treacherous tides and 50 foot jellyfish. What could possibly go right? Based on blogs and interviews with Wayne and Paul (the boat captain on the attempt), Hitting The Wall asks why we choose to do things that might better be left undone. It’s going to be fun evening, with a chance to discuss the mad endeavour (actually, both mad endeavours, the swim and play about the swim) with the creative team afterwards. You can buy tickets from here. I am also equally ecstatic to announce that Straw Bear’s next production after that will be Joe Penhall’s extraordinary Blue/Orange, on March 24th and 25th 2017. Blue/Orange is about many things, most especially schizophrenia, race and Welsh rarebit, and was described (when it originally appeared in 2000) as the finest new play in the English language for a generation. We are presenting it in association … Continue reading “Hitting the Wall & Blue/Orange”
Another great essay!!! Really insightful analysis of issues of so diverse natures. Most interesting for me, since it concerns a personal belief, that the provision of health care should be the number one function of a government. Also, a sound reasoning on the problems faced by science communicators on the use and abuse of the information provided by them. Looking forward to more of your views on that subject.
Hats off to the Mayr citation!
Hi Daniel, enjoying these very much. They are the perfect nap time reading (Penny’s not mine) to give my mat leave squidgy brain a bit of a workout. Looking forward to reading the next instalment. Hope you are well. Take care
Daniel,
I very much enjoyed your essay and think your diminishing returns (DR) argument is a strong one.
I guess you know this but wanted to simplify your essay: increasing the dispersion of income under DR doesn’t necessarily reduce average health outcome. It would do so if the increase in dispersion were symmetric (equally great in the rich and poor directions). If asymmetric, an increase in the high income direction, with its consequent small improvement in health outcome, would have to be large enough to outweigh the relatively large detriment to health outcome due to any decrease in the value of the lowest incomes. Unlikely perhaps but mathematically possible.
A second thought is that the mere fact that greater income brings better health outcomes means that the poor suffer unfairly and we should try to lift people out of poverty (and In a relatively closed system like a nation state this means taking from the rich). This conclusion holds whatever the shape of the function between income and health (linear, DR or whatever). To the extent that Wilkinson & Pickett’s hypothesis is correct their mechanism is an additional way in which inequality results in the poor suffering unfairly, since any stress resulting from perceived societal inequality must surely fall more strongly on the disadvantaged (and you point to evidence for this).
Concerning the “profound unease” of your last few paragraphs I also prefer the stumbling naivety you refer to, openly acknowledging our scientific uncertainty about complex social phenomena. This is not only more honest but, in the long-term I believe, more effective in driving change. Since there will always be other academics to dispute an oversimple claim an apparent ‘controversy amongst the experts’ can be used by policy makers who wish to deny the evidence. And sometimes academic disagreements are relatively unimportant to a case for social change; in the present case of income and health outcomes it might be more effective, as I implied above, to put aside the inequality concept altogether and focus instead on the case for improving the health of the poor by reducing poverty. Of course it is difficult in this argument to avoid comparison with the rich but to the extent that a comparison must be made ‘unfairness’ may be a more broadly acceptable moral label than ‘inequality’. And although, as you say Daniel, the DR argument is more complicated than Wilkinson & Pickett’s, it is a powerful and, I believe, sufficiently understandable point to be used effectively in making the case for the health benefits of reducing poverty (and you say this too). Finally, a purely societally selfish reason for improving the nation’s health is that it reduces pressure on the resources of the National Health Service.
Best, John
John,
Thanks for your helpful and thoughtful comments.
I guess you know this but wanted to simplify your essay: increasing the dispersion of income under DR doesn’t necessarily reduce average health outcome. It would do so if the increase in dispersion were symmetric (equally great in the rich and poor directions). If asymmetric, an increase in the high income direction, with its consequent small improvement in health outcome, would have to be large enough to outweigh the relatively large detriment to health outcome due to any decrease in the value of the lowest incomes. Unlikely perhaps but mathematically possible.
That’s true enough, but I was considering only increases in dispersion that leave the mean income unchanged. I think the asymmetric case you are thinking of would also shift the mean income up (if the total positive gain were greater than the total loss). And the inequality argument is really all about increases in dispersion given a fixed mean – clearly if the whole distribution goes up then even if it goes up unevenly, average health could improve.
A second thought is that the mere fact that greater income brings better health outcomes means that the poor suffer unfairly and we should try to lift people out of poverty (and In a relatively closed system like a nation state this means taking from the rich). This conclusion holds whatever the shape of the function between income and health (linear, DR or whatever). To the extent that Wilkinson & Pickett’s hypothesis is correct their mechanism is an additional way in which inequality results in the poor suffering unfairly, since any stress resulting from perceived societal inequality must surely fall more strongly on the disadvantaged (and you point to evidence for this).
Absolutely – and of course DR and Wilkson and Pickett’s process are not mutually exclusive.
Concerning the “profound unease” of your last few paragraphs I also prefer the stumbling naivety you refer to, openly acknowledging our scientific uncertainty about complex social phenomena. This is not only more honest but, in the long-term I believe, more effective in driving change. Since there will always be other academics to dispute an oversimple claim an apparent ‘controversy amongst the experts’ can be used by policy makers who wish to deny the evidence. And sometimes academic disagreements are relatively unimportant to a case for social change; in the present case of income and health outcomes it might be more effective, as I implied above, to put aside the inequality concept altogether and focus instead on the case for improving the health of the poor by reducing poverty. Of course it is difficult in this argument to avoid comparison with the rich but to the extent that a comparison must be made ‘unfairness’ may be a more broadly acceptable moral label than ‘inequality’. And although, as you say Daniel, the DR argument is more complicated than Wilkinson & Pickett’s, it is a powerful and, I believe, sufficiently understandable point to be used effectively in making the case for the health benefits of reducing poverty (and you say this too). Finally, a purely societally selfish reason for improving the nation’s health is that it reduces pressure on the resources of the National Health Service.
I agree with all of this. And I also think that we need to be more open about our uncertainties, so that the media and public comes to appreciate that some uncertainty in complex scientific matters is the norm. That way ‘the experts disagree’ cannot be used to dismiss the case for action–as if the case where experts disagreed was somehow atypical. We need people to understand that experts always disagree in details of the specifics; but nonetheless there is often broad consensus shining through that disagreement, in cases like climate change and the health consequences of poverty, things that we can all agree on the need for.
Thanks again
Thanks for your response Daniel. On my first point yes, of course you’re right, for this analysis you need to keep the mean income constant, as Wilkinson & Pickett did in theirs. And in this case dispersion of income must change symmetrically and so, given diminishing returns, mean health outcome will decline as dispersion increases.
Total agreement on the final point. And there’s a long way to go in the understanding of science by the public, policy makers and politicians; and the last of these have a vested interest in maintaining (or pretending) some level of ignorance.