Owen abroad

Archive for March, 2006

Before setting off for New York this morning, we tried a new workout at thetrack.   The session is recommended by the legendary British coach Frank Horwill in his book “Obsession for Running”.   Frank was the founder of the British Milers’ Club in the 1960s, which nurtured talents such as Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett, Steve Cram and Tim Hutchings and which led to the golden era of British middle-distance running. Peter Coe based his son’s training program on Frank’s five-pace training programme, so Frank knows of what he speaks.

You run 25 continuous laps of a 400 metre track (that is, 10km in total), alternating between your 5km pace and your marathon pace.  (If you don’t know these, you can use my pace calculator at www.runningforfitness.org to estimate them from a recent race or training run.)  There are no rests between laps. 

This tough session can substitute in your programme for a tempo session; it will help improve your ability to run aerobically. Frank reckons it is one of the most effective workouts for runners who need to get fit quickly – for example to pass a fitness test or to get ready for a race after a lay-off. 

This morning I ran 83 seconds for the fast laps and 94 seconds for the marathon-pace laps – giving me a total for 10km of a fraction under 37 minutes – which is about my 10km race pace.  (I started with a marathon pace lap.)

If you are not able to sustain the paces, don’t do the session slower. When can’t make the lap times, stop and walk a lap to recover, and then pick up where you left off. 

As well as being a great fitness booster, this session gives you a feel for running at different paces, and helps you to get used to your marathon pace as an “easy” recovery pace. 

You won’t find a better way to pack a lot of benefit into a 40 minute work-out.   

Today’s Guardian (27 March) includes a roundup of what the bloggers are saying about Norman Kember. (I can’t find it online).

Except that I did not say what is attributed to me.  The excellent Neil Hall said it, in the comments to my post.

Tim Worstall sometimes gets sloppy when he wants to score points.

No individual runs the economy. No individual can. No bureaucracy, no centralized point can run the economy. The best we can hope for is that a Chancellor doesn’t screw it up.

Whoever is Chancellor makes decisions that have a huge impact on the economy. Some of them good (eg the change in monetary policy in 1997) some of them bad (eg the Lawson Budget of 1988). 

Saying that the Chancellor does not "run" the economy because "no centralized point can" is like saying that Sven Goran Eriksson does not "run" the England football team because he cannot control every pass, tackle and shot.

We want more than a Chancellor that does not screw it up.  Good economic policy-makers also make decisions to improve the functioning of the market economy.  We need a Chancellor who adjusts taxation in the light of new evidence (such as raising tax on environmental taxes), and who responds to problems that would persist without action (eg raising benefits to lift children out of poverty).

Of course, knowing when not to do anything is an important talent too.

The Norman Kember affair has raised an interesting question.  If a citizen of a country takes risks, or otherwise makes decisions that are likely to have expensive consequences, in what circumstances should other people be expected to pick up the bill?

Here are some examples of that problem on which reasonable people might differ:

• a peace-campaigner who gets kidnapped in Iraq
• a mountain climber who has to be rescued from a mountain
• a rich businessman who tries to balloon around the world and needs rescuing
• an obese person who seeks treatment for medical conditions resulting from obesity
• a smoker who seeks treatment for medical conditions resulting from smoking
• a liver transplant patient who continues to drink
• a person who chooses to have a child but cannot afford to the expense
• a person who needs expensive fertility treatment to have a child
• a person who wishes to have significant cosmetic surgery
• a marathon runner who gets arthritis and needs physiotherapy
• a car driver who has a road traffic accident

On the one hand, my economic instincts tell me that the economic consequences of our decisions should be visited on us, so that we make decisions that reflect the costs and benefits of our actions.  This is not to say that people should not choose to climb mountains or eat sugar, but that they should only do so if they value the benefits more than those decisions will cost.  On the other hand, I believe that when people are in desperate circumstances (e.g. being held hostage in Iraq, or needing medical treatment), society has an obligation to provide that help.  I am happy to contribute to the treatment of others, knowing that they will contribute if and when I need help.

Part of the solution to this lies in compulsory insurance, either privately or through taxation.  Smokers should be (and are) taxed to reflect the cost of their choice.  Likewise car drivers are taxed – though perhaps not enough to reflect all the social, environmental and health costs of their choices.   This line of reasoning suggests that there might be a case for higher taxes on sugar, mountain climbing boots, running shoes, hot air ballons and other goods or services that on average lead to significant costs for society in the future.  Air tickets to Iraq should certainly bear an ‘SAS premium’, to cover the expected costs of having to provide security to people there or mount rescue operations.  And perhaps car drivers should be required to have medical insurance to cover their treatment in road traffic accidents?

You may be wondering about the distributional consequences of such a policy: won’t this mean that all these activities are then available only to the rich?  Actually, the opposite is true. An increase in the cost of these potentially expensive activities can be made tax-neutral by reducing general taxation such as income tax and VAT which less well-off people pay.  This takes less money out of their pockets which they can use, if they wish, to pay the higher prices on sugar, mountain shoes or whatever other dangerous (and hence potentially expensive) hobbies they wish to pursue, or for some other benefit.  And raising the price will reduce the total  amount of these expensive activities that some people undertake, thereby reducing the overall cost to society and so reducing the total level of taxation for everyone.

So I am glad to have paid for Norman Kember’s release. But I wish he had been forced to buy insurance – either through a tax on air tickets to Iraq, or being required to show he had private insurance for his trip that would pay out if he had to be rescued.  Perhaps then he might have thought twice about going in the first place.

The Government has announced new mental health detention plans under which people who are deemed mentally ill with a condition that cannot be treated, and who have committed no crime, can be detained in Lubyanka a mental hospital indefinitely.

The Government has concluded that it will not be able to get its controversial draft Mental Health Bill through Parliament to make these changes, because of criticism of the measures from mental health experts and civil rights groups.

So instead they are going to introduce similar measures by amending the existing Mental Health Act 1983 and Mental Capacity Act 2005.  The main difference is that patients who are locked up without their consent will be given a right to appeal. As things stand, Parliament will need to approve the amendments.

How much easier this will be for Ministers when the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill gives the government power to introduce these measures without having to obtain Parliamentary approval.  Then it won’t matter whether Parliament agrees or not. Much more efficient, you see?

That’s a heading I never thought I would write. 

The Cato Institute – a right-wing libertarian think-tank in Washington – has published an analysis of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act:

The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders—and the technology companies that distribute their content—the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from interoperating with them. Worst of all, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates.

Most papers from the Cato Institute are either obvious, or wrong, or (usually) both.  This paper is neither – full of interesting insights into why digital rights management is in the interests of neither the companies nor consumers.  It explains how digital rights management undermines the very characteristics we need for progress: interoperable products, consumer choice and competition.

As well as sharing these general concerns about digital rights management, I have a particular concern, which the paper touches on but does not discuss in detail.  I mainly use open source software: I am writing this using Firefox on a computer running Linux, with no proprietary or closed-source software.  Open source computing already provides much of the infrastructure of the internet (from email systems to the majority of web-servers) and is likely to play an increasingly important role for consumers over the coming years. But there is a fundamental inconsistency between using digital rights management to restrict what you can do with media files and open source applications.  With open source software, any user can change the line that says "do not allow file to be copied" to "allow file to be copied" – so DRM relies on the existence and widespread use of proprietary software.  And that is not acceptable to me.

According to MSNBC.com the state of Mississippi has passed a law which outlaws sex toys:

“A person commits the offense of distributing unlawful sexual devices when he knowingly sells, advertises, publishes or exhibits to any person any three-dimensional device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs or offers to do so or possesses such devices with the intent to do so.” …

In Mississippi, people can buy guns at a gun show with no background check and certain weapons can be carried almost anywhere. Sure, guns and toys can bring joy and a sense of comfort to the user, but apparently the legislators concluded that a genital replica is a far greater threat to society.

I struggle to understand this country sometimes. There seem to be a lot of people who think that Government should be just small enough to fit into your bedroom.

Daniel Davies in the new Guardian blog thing writes that limiting foreign ownership of companies is not the same as forms of protectionism that restrict trade in goods and services:

while the gains from goods markets liberalisation are big and definitely there, the gains from capital account liberalisation are small and frustratingly difficult to detect, no matter what econometric techniques you bring to bear.

Set against this, there are on occasion quite legitimate reasons why one might want to put curbs on the foreign ownership of domestic industries. …

The rise of cross-border ownership of companies has gone hand in hand with the rise of a lot of bogus WTO cases trumped up by multi-national companies which don’t like the way in which they are being regulated in one of their countries of operation, and have managed to convince someone that it is a restraint of international trade.

Davies is right that the case for liberalising capital market ownership is different from, and possibly weaker than, the case for liberalisation of trade in goods and services.

Nonetheless, the onus of proof is on those who advocate government restrictions on foreign ownership to explain what benefits such restrictions might bring.  On the whole, there need to be good reasons to intervene to prevent a voluntary economic transaction between adults (which, almost by definition, must make both parties to the exchange better off.)  Davies does not offer any explanation of a market failure that such restrictions would correct (and which could not be more efficiently corrected in some other way). 

Davies rightly says that the growth of cross-border investment makes it more difficult for countries to maintain local regulations and tax systems, because companies with multi-national operations can move their operations elsewhere.  But that is true as well of free trade in goods and services (which Davies says he favours) – any country that creates regulations that makes firms in that country less productive will see a decline in their incomes, whether or not they restrict ownership.

All in all, Davies makes a good point in highlighting the theoretical distinction between protection of trade in goods and service, and restrictions on foreign ownership.  But he offers no convincing case for restricting either.

There is a discussion at Crooked Timber – much richer and more interesting than at Comment is Free.

Everybody knows that E-Bay was a great innovation. By reducing transactions costs, and enabling users to establish
reputations, it has enabled millions of people to buy and sell goods in small quantities and of lower value than would have been possible in traditional bricks and mortar stores.

But there is another important, and little understood, innovation in the E-Bay model: the second price auction. “Oh, the second price auction”, I hear you cry in unison, “WTF is that?”

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According to Michael Crichton, writing in the New York Times the observation that doctor should test for the existence of a particular amino acid to determine if a patient needs a vitamin supplement has been patented:

• The Earth revolves around the Sun.
• The speed of light is a constant.
• Apples fall to earth because of gravity.
• Elevated blood sugar is linked to diabetes.
• Elevated uric acid is linked to gout.
• Elevated homocysteine is linked to heart disease.
• Elevated homocysteine is linked to B-12 deficiency, so doctors should test homocysteine levels to see whether the patient needs vitamins.

ACTUALLY, I can’t make that last statement. A corporation has patented that fact, and demands a royalty for its use. Anyone who makes the fact public and encourages doctors to test for the condition and treat it can be sued for royalty fees. Any doctor who reads a patient’s test results and even thinks of vitamin deficiency infringes the patent. A federal circuit court held that mere thinking violates the patent.

Now I think that Michael Crichton made a fool of himself with State of Fear, which claims that the threat of climate change is merely alarmism. But if he is right on this, then it is indeed something that should concern us.

So it turns out that one of the many things that is done for us that we would rather not think about is testing our drugs.

The terrible story of six men who suffered severe complications in the trial of TGN1412 should make us pause to ask how we choose which of us will test new drugs.

The media have coyly referred to the men as "volunteers". In one sense they are: industry guidelines require that trials should not be advertised as a way to make a living, and that payment for testing can only for the time and inconvenience it caused.  But they are not really "volunteers" because that they take part for money.  Drugs are tested mainly students and the unemployed, who are paid between £120 and £150 a day. In an interview on the World at One on Wednesday, one such ‘volunteer’ said that he took part because testing drugs was an easy way to earn money.  (Why else would they do it?)

More than 100,000 people take part in clinical trials every year in the UK.  The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority (MHRA), which reviews the testing of the drug on animals and in laboratories and the conditions of any human trial, say that 1,100 clinical trials are currently under way in Britain, involving between 10 and 120 patients. Of those, 284 are phase one trials, the riskiest stage and the first testing on humans, typically involving healthy subjects.

While I am opposed to unnecessary testing on animals, I am in favour of testing drugs on animals first before they are tried in humans, if the scientists believe that this will help to reduce the risks to people when the drugs are eventually tested in humans. But eventually we do have to test new drugs in humans.  The question then arises: who should those people be? 

This is a case in which we need some people in a society to make a sacrifice, by taking a risk that can be detrimental to their health and sometimes fatal, for a broader public benefit.  

One option is to offer payments sufficient to induce people to take part in the trials.  My inner economist has no problem with paying other people to take risks that we would rather not take ourselves.  In one sense no different than paying people to fight wars or to go down coal mines.   But drug testing is not a profession that requires training and experience.  Nor is it particularly inconvenient.  I could not be an effective fire fighter without proper training, and that would be a career.  But any of us at random could test a drug.  The egalitarian in me feels very uncomfortable with the notion that we should rely on the poor being so hard-up that they are willing to risk discomfort, their future health and perhaps their lives to test a drug that, on average, they will never need themselves.  Unlike fire-fighters, the only reason it is them, and not us, taking this risk is that they need the money more than we do.

In principle, an alternative approach would be to make drug testing like jury service, based on random selection of citizens. You would receive a message in a brown envelope:  "You have been randomly selected to test a new drug.  Please present yourself to Northwick Park Hospital at 9am on Monday morning."    True, this would require people to make a sacrifice that they would probably rather not make, but such are the costs that somebody has to bear for the tremendous benefits of new drugs.  Why should it not be you, from time to time?  (There might be an opt-out: I have decided not to take part in this trial, and recognise that this means that I will not be permitted to use any pharmaceutical product that I may need in the future.)

If we do think that it is acceptable to allow people to sell their bodies to medical science to test our drugs because we don’t want the burden to fall on society through random ballots, then we should have the courage of our convictions:

• the ABPI guidelines which limit the payments that can be made in drugs trials are hypocrisy verging on market fixing.  If we are going to pay people to take part in trials, we should at least let them negotiate a decent payment.  It is self-delusional to pretend they are not doing it for the money.

• we should also allow poor people to rent out their wombs as surrogate mothers, and to sell body parts such as kidneys or corneas, to people who are willing to pay for them.  There is no logic in saying that people can be paid to risk their lives testing drugs, but not be paid to donate a body part to someone who needs it.

We were all shocked at the suggestion in the recent Oscar-winning film, The Constant Gardener, that pharmaceutical companies might exploit Africans to test new products.  In that case, part of the allegation was that the people being treated as guinea pigs had not given informed consent: nobody is making such a claim about the people in the UK who take part in trials. But it is a difficult line to draw. If we are prepared to let the disadvantaged in our own society take these risks on our behalf, then why not outsource the whole business to people in countries who need the money even more? 

When soldiers in the First World War shot themselves in the foot, they did so because the harm they did themselves (injured foot) was preferable to what would happen to them if they were not injured (going over the top).   So the phrase “shooting yourself in the foot” means to do something apparently injurious to yourself, in order to achieve a greater overall benefit. (It does not just mean doing yourself harm.)

So what did Condoleezza Rice mean whan she said last week that sanctions against Latin American countries

were “sort of the same as shooting ourselves in the foot.”

Ms Harman may have been surprised to hear David Grossman on Newsnight this evening refer to Jack Dromey as being married to "former Minister Harriet Harman".  

Perhaps Mr Grossman knows something that the Department of Constitutional Affairs does not? 

What is not to like about pancakes? 

If you are on one of these crazy, low-carb diets, then I suppose you might give them a wide berth.  And if you are, more intelligently, someone who avoids sugar and heavily processed foods, then you may be suspicious of shop-made pancakes.  But you can make pancakes at home and serve them with lots of fresh fruit, low-fat yoghurt, and nuts for a very filling, healthy breakfast. Just go easy on the syrup.

Here is a recipe adapted from a recent Runner’s World. 

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Andrew Sullivan yesterday:

I’m aware of one person who clearly stated before the war that he believed that Saddam had no WMDs. That was Scott Ritter. This is not the same as saying that we didn’t know for sure, or should have waited some more; or that containment could have worked for a few months or years longer. I mean: an anti-war commentator, writer or speaker who clearly said that Saddam had no WMDs before we invaded and that therefore the war was illegitimate.

Robin Cook, in his resignation speech as Foreign Secretary of the United Kingdom on 18 March 2003:

Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the
commonly understood sense of the term – namely a credible device
capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.

It isn’t just hindsight.  

As I go about my daily life here in America, I notice things that I really like about this country.

Here are some:

• You can get a proper healthy breakfast almost anywhere here.  There must be a profitable business to be made opening a decent breakfast venue in London – selling fruit, porridge, pancakes, omlettes etc.
• Access for disabled people is taken much more seriously.  Offices, shops, transport and other services provide access; and as a result you see many more disabled people around who are able to live independent lives.
• You get a glass of iced water when you sit down in a restaurant – without being asked or charged.  And they don’t make a fuss if you want tap water with your meal rather than bottled water.
• Americans care about freedom and rights. They talk about them and they are prepared to stand up to their government to protect them.  (They are somewhat less vigilant about the rights of foreigners.)
• American dentistry is better than in England. (I’ve changed my mind about this in the light of experience of both.)

The WHO and UNICEF announced today that The Measles Initiative has halved measles deaths.

Global deaths due to measles fell by 48%, from 871 000 in 1999 to an estimated 454 000 in 2004, thanks to major national immunization activities and better access to routine childhood immunization …

The largest reduction occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the highest burden of the disease, where estimated measles cases and deaths dropped by 60%.

Tell that to people who say that aid does not work.

George W Bush is right about:

• opposing the nonsense that it is dangerous to let an Arab company operate your ports
• seeking a line-item veto to enable the President to veto individual budget lines.  The "take it or leave it" budget packages are a recipe for pork.

Credit where it is due.  He’s wrong about pretty much everything else, of course.

I’ve got a post up at Views from the Center on whether the proposed new mechanisms to finance aid are a good idea.

Since I can remember, my mother has made New York style baked cheesecake.  She learned how to do this when my parents lived in New York in the 1960s from a recipe in Life Magazine. I think of baked cheesecake as part of my cultural heritage, because I was born in Manhatten. 

Baked cheesecake is nothing like the anaemic, no-bake confection that masquerades as cheesecake in Britain. It is rich, creamy, delicious and dangerously addictive.

NY-style cheesecake is more widely available here in America than in Britain.  I try it in coffee shops and restaurants, but inevitably it is never as good as my mother makes.

So I asked my mother to email me her recipe so that I could try to make it myself.  I gather that cheesecake has a temperamental chemistry – even quite small changes in the ingredients can change the whole character of the end result.  I thought myself very daring in cutting the amount of sugar in half, and using buckwheat flour instead of normal flour (because that was all I had).

What was the result?  See for yourself: the photo is of my elevenses this morning. Of course, it was nothing like as good as my mother makes, but not bad for a first attempt.

My mother’s full recipe is below the fold.
 

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