There are several conflicting theories of how our species developed and spread around the world. One is the “out of Africa” theory which posits that our species evolved in Africa and spread from there to Asia and beyond. A competing theory, the multiregional model, claims that modern humans originated as a result of genetic contributions from hominin populations all around Europe, Asia, and Africa.

I’ve already posted on recent paleontological findings that cast some doubt on “out of Africa”. There’s more. The “out of Africa” theory predicts that human ancestors like H. erectus have shared habitats with and existed alongside our species. Evidence of such coexistence from a site in Indonesia where erectus had, apparently, persisted until as recently as 35,000 to 50,000 years ago was pointed to as confirming the hypothesis.

However:

The SoRT Project’s investigations occurred in Ngandong and Jigar, two sites in the “20-meter terrace” of the Solo River, Indonesia. The sediments in the terrace were formed by the flooding of the ancient river, but currently sit above the Solo River because the river has cut downward through time. The terrace has been a rich source for the discovery of Homo erectus and other animal fossils since the 1930s.

As recently as 1996, a research team dated these sites of hominin, or early human, fossils to as young as 35,000-50,000 years old. The analyses used a technique that dates teeth, and thus provided ages for several animals discovered at the sites. However, other scholars suggested the sites included a mixture of older hominins and younger animals, raising questions about the true age of the hominin remains.

The goal of the SoRT team, which included both members of the 1996 group and its critics, was to understand how the sites in the terrace formed, whether there was evidence for mixing of older and younger remains, and just how old the sites were.

Since 2004, team members have conducted analyses of animal remains, geological surveys, trenching, and archaeological excavations. The results from all of these provide no evidence for the mixing of older and younger remains. All the evidence suggests the sites represent just a short time period.

“The postmortem damage to the animal remains is consistent and suggests very little movement of the remains by water,” explained Briana Pobiner, the project’s archaeologist and a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. “This means that it is unlikely that very old remains were mixed into younger ones.”

In addition, clues from the sediments exposed during excavation suggest to the projects’ geoarchaeologists, Rhonda Quinn, Chris Lepre, and Craig Feibel, of Seton Hall, Columbia, and Rutgers universities, that the deposits occurred over a short time period. The teeth found in different excavation layers at Jigar are also all nearly identical in age, supporting the conclusion that mixing across geological periods did not occur.

“Whatever the geological age of the sites is, the hominins, animals, and sediments at Ngandong and Jigar are all the same age,” said project co-leader Susan Antón.

The team applied two different dating techniques to the sites. Like earlier work, they used the techniques—U-series and Electron Spin Resonance, or ESR—that are applied to fossilized teeth. They also used a technique called argon-argon dating that is applied to volcanic minerals in the sediments. All three methods use radioactive decay in different ways to assess age and all yielded robust and methodologically valid results, but the ages were inconsistent with one another.

The argon-argon results yielded highly precise ages of about 550,000 years old on pumices—very light, porous volcanic products found at Ngandong and Jigar.

“Pumices are hard to rework without breaking them, and these ages are quite good, so this suggests that the hominins and fauna are this old as well,” said project geochronologist Carl Swisher of Rutgers University.

The finds in Indonesia may be as old as 550,000 years and as young as 143,000. This range is too ancient to demonstrate clear overlap with our species. The Indonesian erectus finds can no longer be pointed to as corroborative evidence that our species originated in Africa.

Via Ambiance, take a look at this re-print of an article on American public opinion from Fortune Magazine, 1939 on the role of government. this graphic provides a handy summary but the entire text of the article is interesting.

From John B. Taylor:

In sum, this empirical examination of the direct effects of the three countercyclical stimulus packages of the 2000s indicates that they did not have a positive effect on consumption and government purchases, and thus did not counter the decline in investment during the recessions as the basic Keynesian textbook model would suggest. Individuals and families largely saved the transfers and tax rebates. The federal government increased purchases, but by only an immaterial amount. State and local governments used the stimulus grants to reduce their net borrowing (largely by acquiring more financial assets) rather than to increase expenditures, and they shifted expenditures away from purchases toward transfers.

Some argue that the economy would have been worse off without these stimulus packages, but the results do not support that view. According to the empirical estimates of the impact of ARRA, if there had been no temporary stimulus payments to individuals or families, their total consumption would have been about the same. And if there had been no ARRA grants to states and localities, their total expenditures would have been about the same. The counterfactual simulations show that the ARRA-induced decline in state and local government purchases was larger than the increase in federal government purchases due to ARRA. In terms of the simple example of Model A versus Model B presented above, these results are evidence against the views represented by Model A, and thus against using such models to show that things would have been worse.

Others argue that the stimulus was too small, but the results do not lend support to that view either. Using the estimated equations, a counterfactual simulation of a larger stimulus package—with the proportions going to state and local grants, federal purchases, and transfers to individual the same as in ARRA—would show little change in government purchases or consumption, as the temporary funds would be largely saved. Of course, the story would be different for a stimulus program designed more effectively to increase purchases, but it is not clear that such a program would be politically or operationally feasible.

More generally, the results from the 2000s experience raise considerable doubts about the efficacy of temporary discretionary countercyclical fiscal policy in practice. In this regard the experience with the stimulus packages of the 2000s adds more weight to the position reached more than 30 years ago by Lucas and Sargent (1978) and Gramlich (1978, 1979).

Note that this finding is not an indictment of Keynesian theory but of political practice. It’s completely consistent with Keynesian theory: if government deficit spending does not result in an increase in net borrowing, there is no increase in aggregate demand and, hence, no stimulus. It’s merely taking money out of one pocket and putting it in the other.

Further, I would suggest that the very decentralized form of government that prevails in the United States make it very much more difficult to coordinate spending than it would be in, say, the United Kingdom, China, or France and this tends to make Keynesian strategies less effective here than they might be elsewhere

As I was reading this rant, a response to President Obama’s Bluto Blutarskyesque full-on campaign mode speech yesterday decrying “tax cuts for the rich” and singling out for particular attention the tax deduction for corporate jets.

Why do I call it “Blutarskyesque”? If President Obama disapproved of the deduction he mentioned so frequently in his speech, he might have mentioned it when he enacted it into law in 2009. If he disagreed with “tax cuts for the rich”, he could have vetoed their extension when the legislation came across his desk.

Back to the post. Mr. Mariotti declaims:

You need to retire your golf clubs and roll up your sleeves and live up to some of that soaring rhetoric that got you into this job—you know, the one you have learned you were woefully underprepared to do.

I think this fails on logical grounds. If President Obama is, in fact, “woefully underprepared”, wouldn’t we be better off if he spent more time on the links?

I’ve seen quite a few complaints lately about the president’s management style, mostly by people who couldn’t care less about his management style and disagree with him on policy grounds, and the retort, mostly from people who couldn’t care less about his management style and reflexively defend him on the basis of team spirit, that the less engaged style is very much what Reagan (presumably, a president admired by the former group) used.

I would say that Reagan employed a staff management style reminiscent of Eisenhower’s, quite a contrast to the hands-on, finger in every pie approach favored by Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, and, later, Clinton.

The problem is that neither Eisenhower nor Reagan ran on a reform platform while Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton did. When you’re not a reform candidate you can bring the old party bulls into your administration without appearing ridiculous, an approach not open to a reforrm candidate and, in general, not desired by a reform candidate. The staff management style is highly appropriate for these highly seasoned and experienced individuals. Not so when your administration is staffed by tyros and shadow ministers.

However, I remain puzzled by President Obama and his administration. As a matter of policy, does he believe that fiscal stimulus is an effective method of producing economic growth or not? If not, why did sign an $800 billion+ stimulus package into law? If he does, why doesn’t he propose more stimulus?

What objectives does he believe will have been accomplished in 2014 in Afghanistan that haven’t already been accomplished?

Does he agree with Sen. Obama on the reprehensibility of raising the debt ceiling?

On the subject of the debt ceiling, I think the entire discussion is political kabuki, I find the argument that the 14th Amendment renders the debt ceiling unconstitutional convincing, and I think that the view that the Congress is empowered to enact spending in excess of the debt ceiling but is required explicitly to raise the debt ceiling to implement the spending is incoherent.

I sincerely believe that President Obama is convinced he’s on the side of the angels in the bombing campaign in Libya (those who support the policy certainly do). I would like to know how long he expects the campaign to last and how he reconciles the campaign as presently constituted with international accords, though.

I’m not alleging hypocrisy in any of this. I want to know what the administration’s policies are.

Glenn Reynolds points to a post on declining pharmaceutical R&D spending which, in turn, quotes this post of Megan McArdle’s at length without adding a great deal. In one of my earliest posts around here, now six or seven years ago, I cited the annual reports of the large pharmaceutical companies and noted that R&D increased, essentially, at the rate of inflation while advertising and the amount spent on lobbying increased with revenues.

My conclusion from that is that the companies know what business they’re in: pharmaceutical sales and rent-seeking. This is part and parcel of the loss of entrepeneurial spirit I’ve been complaining about. R&D is risky and doesn’t have a huge ROI. Lobbying is practically risk-free and provides enormous returns. Why take risks?

I wanted to draw your attention to a paper from David Cutler and Dan Ly published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives analyzing U. S. healthcare costs (hat tip: James Hamilton). The paper is well worth reading in it entirety—it’s chockful of interesting tidbits, e.g.

Currently, the United States imports a significant share of its physicians. Almost one-quarter of U.S. physicians were trained abroad (Simoens and Hurst, 2004). The
leading supplier is India, though a significant number are U.S. residents who go abroad for training. The shortfall of U.S. doctors seems to be driven not by a lack of supply but by a lack of medical school openings (AAMC, 2010a).

or

Differences in demand do not appear to drive much of the international variation in use of medical services. While the U.S. population is sicker than the Canadian population in some ways (for example, obesity rates are higher in the United States), the difference in care provision seems to occur even conditional on health status. For example, the greater use of intensive medical therapy after a heart attack is true even controlling for the characteristics of the heart attack patient (Ko et al., 2007). Similarly, people in the United States use mental health services more than people in Canada, but the additional use is entirely accounted for by the population with less-severe illness (Kessler, Frank, Edlund, Katz, Lin, and Leaf, 1997). People with severe needs are treated similarly in the two countries. Nor are out-of-pocket prices lower in the United States; out-of-pocket payments in the United States are actually higher than in most countries.

The paper can be summarized as finding that about 40% of the difference between U. S. healthcare costs and those of other OECD countries can be attributed to higher administrative costs in the U. S., 31% can be attributed to higher provider costs, and 14% to more procedures for hospitalized patients. An even shorter summary would be: incentives matter.

We are unlikely to bring our healthcare costs within an affordable range by tweaking the healthcare system around the edges. We could achieve costs comparable to those of other countries by going to a single-payer model and abandoning the fee-for-service compensation model in favor of a capitation system. Those aren’t tweaks.

Unfortunately, even those substantial reforms are unlikely to be enough. They would only slow the growth in healthcare costs while reducing the cost basis over time if politicians had the political will to do so which is not apparent. In addition, healthcare costs are rising not only in the U. S. but everywhere. I believe that some of that can be attributed to the perverse U. S. healthcare system but not all of it. The urgency for a technologically-driven radical revision in how healthcare services are provided could hardly be more urgent.

There’s an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that should give us pause. Former Federal Reserve governor Lawrence Lindsey lists several reasons that we can’t wait to do something about the deficit:

1. Interest rates are at historic lows and won’t stay there forever.
2. Economic growth is significantly below the rates that were assumed just a year or so ago and it’s likely to stay that way.
3. The PPACA is already proving to be a lot more expensive than was originally assumed.

His estimate for the costs that may be incurred by increasing interest rates, low growth, and higher costs for the PPACA, just for the next four years (but accrued over ten years)? Just about $10 trillion.

You can’t raise that kind of money just by eliminating the “Bush tax cuts” and cutting back on discretionary spending. Spending reform has got to get serious and it’s got to get serious now.

I have been very consistent on this. I think that both tax increases and major spending cuts must happen immediately. We’ve deferred tweaking past the point at which tweaking will be enough to solve our problems. Time to stop living in a dream world.

Via Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, Michael Mandel has produced an excellent example of a point that is a repeated theme around here: artificial scarcity in healthcare. In his report Dr. Mandel considers the case of a medical device, Melafind, and its failure to receive approval from the FDA.

Melafind is (or was) a handheld computer vision device and expert system designed to detect and identify skin melanomas, the most serious form of skin cancer. Melanoma is common and, sadly, on the increase.

In order to get approval, Mela Sciences, the company that created MelaFind, did a multi-year study of the accuracy of the device compared to a panel of dermatologists. The company claims that it passed the test that the FDA had agreed to.2 Indeed, on some dimensions of the study the device did better than the panel of dermatologists. Nevertheless, the FDA staff deemed the device “not approvable,” saying that MelaFind “puts the health of the public at risk.”3 Despite the strong negative response from the FDA, the company requested that the device be assessed by a panel of dermatologists, statisticians, and other medical experts. The advisory panel met in November 2010 and voted narrowly to recommend approving MelaFind.4 Nevertheless, the FDA has not yet approved the device.

Why has the FDA withheld its approval:

• The device did not do better than the experienced dermatologists in the study (“the FDA review team does not believe this is a clinically significant difference between MelaFind and the examining dermatologist”)
• The device was tested on lesions identified by experienced dermatologists, not on the broader set of lesions that might be identified by “physicians less experienced than these dermatologists.”
• The device did not find every melanoma in the sample (“Since the device is not 100% sensitive, if use based on the device’s diagnostic performance reduces the number of biopsies taken, harm could ensue in the form of missed melanomas.”)
• The device was not demonstrated to make inexperienced physicians the equal of experienced dermatologists (“Currently, formal training is offered to physicians to become board certified dermatologist and thus be able to diagnose clinically atypical lesions. The FDA review team would have to compare this board certification training to that offered by the sponsor to those physicians operating MelaFind to determine if it is found adequate.”)

No first generation device could meet the standard that’s being set out here and by withholding its approval the FDA is ensuring there will be no second generation. It is inevitable that investment will dry up for approaches and devices that can’t get approved.

If Melafind’s case is as its being reported the FDA would appear to me to have exceeded its statutory authority and, again assuming that the facts are as outlined, if the FDA’s actions has acted within its authority, its authority should be revised.

From my point of view there’s a larger lesson here. The FDA should be determining effectiveness and safety not pickiing winners and losers. A standard of “must do better than experienced dermatologists” and “must be 100% sensitive” is telling (are all board certiied dermatologists 100% sensitive?).

The FDA is voting to preserve the status quo. Accordiing to the BLS the median dermatologist earns $215,000 a year, the median GP $180,000, and the median PA half that. Not every lesion is biopsied and it would be needlessly expensive to do so. If the FDA is trying to establish medical policy it should be considering whether many more inspections, aided by Melafind, would be more effective not to mention less expensive than an infrequent or nonexistent examination by a dermatologist.

The essential question is not just one of effectiveness and safety but of how healthcare is supplied. The FDA apparently has a vision of a future in which a relatively small number of highly trained physicians have incomes rising far faster than the average persons and far faster than GDP, something we very clearly cannot afford. My vision is that in every drugstore there will be descendants of Melafind that can inspect, identify, and painlessly remove malignant melanomas of the skin so inexpensively that it will encourage their frequent use. The future should be one in which healthcare is abundant, not artificially scarce.

A federal jury has found impeached Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich guilty on 17 of 20 counts:

A federal jury today convicted former Gov. Rod Blagojevich on 17 of 20 counts, finding he brazenly abused the powers of his office in a series of attempted shakedowns captured on undercover government recordings.

Blagojevich showed no reaction as the jury announced their decisions. Once the verdicts were read, he sat back in his chair with his lips pursed, looked toward his wife Patti and whispered, “I love you.”

As the first guilty verdict was read, Patti Blagojevich slumped into the arms of her brother, who stroked her head. She kept shaking her head “no” as the jurors left the courtroom, and once the judge was gone, the former governor grabbed his wife’s right hand and hugged and kissed her.

Blagojevich spoke briefly as he and his wife left the federal courthouse. “Patti and I are obviously very disappointed,” he said at a bank of microphones. “I frankly am stunned.”

“There’s not much left to say other than we want to get home to our little girls and talk to them and explain things to them and try to sort things out,” he added. The two then walked to a waiting car as some in the crowd booed.

Even his reaction following conviction exhibited the same arrogance, detachment from reality, and miscalculation that he paraded before the citizens of the state on a daily basis when he was governor. He should never have testified on his own behalf and I would be mightily surprised if he hadn’t been offered a deal to plead guilty. The cumulative sentence for these offenses adds up to 300 years. I can see no explanations other than monumental arrogance, delusion, and an overwhelming compulsion to be center-stage to explain a gamble that he has now lost.

I now wait for the other shoe to fall. Does he have anything worth trading to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison? There must be some very, very nervous bigwigs out there tonight.