Measles in Massachusetts: The hatred of the present and our medieval future

Megan McArdle picks up on a report of a measles outbreak in Massachusetts. Officials don't know where it came from, though it may have spread from the French consulate: "France reported 10,000 cases — and six deaths — during the first four months of the year, most likely due to low vaccination rates."

This has been in the making for years. British health officials were warning over a decade ago that immunization rates were dropping dangerously low and that the "herd immunity" was going to disappear. It is tempting to blame it all on the criminal Andrew Wakefield, but his sort of panic-mongering only gets traction in a public that is already widely disposed to despise the present, and fear the future. 

Indeed, as McCardle points out, "It's hard to believe, but we're sliding backwards on two of the three public health achievements of the 20th century: vaccination, antibiotics, and clean water." And she doesn't mention that while our water might be clean (well, for most of us anyway, unless you happen to live on a native reserve in Canada), some of our largest cities have decided that another great public health achievement -- control of tooth decay through water fluoridation -- is some black-helicopter plot. 

We are on what is looking like an inexorable slide into magical thinking, turning our backs on the technologies, the medicines, and the markets that are the basis of our civilization. McCardle suggests that we make a guy like Wakefield "spend the rest of his life explaining himself to the parents of children who have died from diseases that could have been prevented through timely vaccination" but that misses the essence of the madness. Wakefield's victims will go to their graves singing his praises. 

(Via Tyler Cowen)

When ideas have sex: My interview with Matt Ridley (UPDATED)

A few weeks ago I had the chance to interview science writer Matt Ridley for Canadian Business about his new book The Rational Optimist. I really like his writing on evolutionary biology (especially Genome), and from the reviews, the argument of RO looked like it would dovetail nicely with the conclusion of my book The Authenticity Hoax, about the virtues of progress.

His book has received fairly polarized reviews. An early piece by John Tierney was very positive (and contained this great line: “Predicting that the world will not end is also pretty good insurance against a prolonged stay on the best-seller list”). George Monbiot, on the other hand, has been trashing the book, largely on the grounds that Ridley is supposedly a hypocrite for writing endless state-bashing columns for the Telegraph while having the “chutzpah” to take public bailout money when he was chairman of Northern Rock. He dismisses Ridley as a “cornutopian” (cornutopians are people who envisage a utopia of limitless abundance).

I don’t think the book is nearly as bad as Monbiot says, though it is true I didn’t get that much out of it. It’s  Guns, Germs, and Steel as told by Adam Smith. So instead of environment being the primary factor in human development, Ridley says that it is trade. I hate the phrase he uses (“when ideas have sex”) but it does highlight the way Ridley is essentially adapting the mechanism of sexual selection and applying it to economic and technological evolution. That’s not a super-new idea; what is somewhat novel about Ridley’s thesis is the deeply teleological element to his analysis: As he sees it, when you have a critical mass of humans who are free to exchange, innovation happens almost as a matter of course — It’s like Wisdom of Crowds meets The Selfish Gene.

The one aspect that Monbiot is right about is the off-putting anti-government snarkiness that runs through the book. Ridley’s account of history is one long tale of energetic and insightful entrepreneurs having the fruits of their labours appropriated by lazy and jealous governors and bureaucats. I asked him about it, and he replied:

But you’ve nailed me right, there’s not a lot about government in my book. But I don’t regard myself as anti-government; I’m inherently skeptical of the power of monopolies of any kind to pick winners. And looking back at history, the past 200 years and indeed the last 2000 years, the threat of too much government is greater than the threat of too little government. It is hard for me to even think of an example of a country that suffers from too little government today.

Even beyond this, though, Ridley’s account suffers from what is sometimes referred to “catallactic bias” — the privileging of gains from trade as the primary mechanism of cooperative benefit, which tends to relegate the state and other institutions to the status of mere redistributors of wealth. If you’re interested in a corrective to that position, Joe Heath’s paper “The Benefits of Cooperation” is a good place to start.