- Kristen French for Nautilus: New Fathers Are Dying, and We Don’t Know Why.
Oh but we do, at least superficially: “of 130,000 men who became new fathers between 2017 and 2022, almost 800 died during that same 5-year period, and 60 percent of those deaths were from potentially preventable causes like homicide, accidental injury, and suicide” which is about what you would expect for a group of men that skews younger. The authors of the paper make a comparison between fathers who died and those that survived but a more interesting one would have been a demographically matched of childless men. Alas, all we have is all the men in Georgia and lo, for each age range the new fathers have a lower mortality and the discussion appropriately leads with “Fatherhood appeared to be associated with reduced mortality.“ [Note: Another reason to have more children. Though, if you are going to do it solely because of a misguided belief that you yourself would live longer, then perhaps don’t? ] Methinks French — or her headline writer — were fooled by randomness.
- Derek Lowe: What Success Can Look Like, Darn It.
Vepdegestrant for breast cancer seems to be another entry in the annals of approved drugs being considered failures by Mr. Market. Let it be noted that a chemist (Lowe) writing for a prestigious peer-reviewed journal (Science) dunks on a drug while citing millions and billions of dollars exchanged or promised to various stakeholders while barely mentioning, and wrongly at that, the actual trial results. “It did not really demonstrate any advantage versus the comparison in the trial, fulvestrant” is factually incorrect: median progression free survival was 5 versus 2.1 months, which, fine, is tiny and may have been the result of statistical shenanigans; but it may also be a true and meaningful incremental improvement and if we are going to dismiss it out of hand then what are we even doing here? The rot runs deep.
- Deena Mousa: We don’t know why Malawi is poor.
It is a genuine mystery of why a mostly agrarian functional democracy with no separatist movements, demographic catastrophes, curses of resource wealth and the other usual suspects of stalled growth should completely flatline their GDP. Mousa shows compelling data and many hypotheses, though I wonder whether there is something that isn’t and can’t be measured which is keeping the country where it is. And if you are thinking that oh, GDP can’t measure happiness, I bet that at least they are happy, think again: it was the 4th least happy country last year. But then the “Happiness Report” methodology takes GDP into account (!?) so it is almost impossible for a GDP-poor country to break through in the rankings.
- Dynomight: What’s with all the slide decks?
This is about slides shared via email, never meant to be presented, but rather serving as a landscape-oriented picture book for adults. I don’t know what is behind communication-by-slide, and as a seminar-attending Tufte acolyte I abhor it. Management consultants spreading them around like a viral respiratory disease — which is the thesis of the blog post — certainly has something to do with it, but the syndrome is now bottom-up as well. My third-grader asked me just this morning why they were forced to watch and make (!?) slides at school.