Month: May 2014

This is terrific news for combating the resilient transmission of HIV among gay men:

“HIV infection is preventable, yet every year we see some 50,000 new HIV infections in the United States,” stated CDC Director Dr. Tom Frieden. “PrEP, used along with other prevention strategies, has the potential to help at-risk individuals protect themselves and reduce new HIV infections in the United States.” The new guidelines also stress that patients be tested for HIV prior to starting PreP and be tested again at three-month intervals so if someone on PrEP does become infected with HIV they discontinue taking the drugs and begin HIV treatment.

Soon to follow: a serious public health education campaign. The CDC report is here (pdf). The Dish’s extensive recent coverage of this issue can be read here.

Hans Noel tries to answer the question:

Members of Congress are not polarized because voters are now better sorted. And voters are not polarized simply because legislators now are. The missing piece is ideological activists, who now dominate the political parties. In short, policy demanders. These politically engaged activists are the base that legislators are increasingly playing to, because they are the ones who provide campaign resources and who threaten primary challenges. Their polarization also filters to voters, through elected officials but also through the media and informal networks. (And ultimately, these activists themselves may be polarized because elite political thinkers are polarized, but you don’t have to buy that story to believe that activists are important.) Of course, studying legislative and mass polarization is very important, but its far from the center of the story.

Seth Masket adds that almost no one “gets into politics with the goal of driving the parties further apart.” Instead, he argues, individuals “get involved in politics usually because they want the government to do something different from what it’s currently doing”:

Activists have become better at this over time. They’re increasingly organizing over a broader range of issues and they’ve become adept at getting political parties to adopt their stances, making it even harder for politicians to resist them. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, this is how governing ideas are generated and translated into law. But it’s important to remember that the parties aren’t far apart because people hate each other; they’re far apart because people want the government to do things. This is why exhortations for common ground tend to fall on deaf ears. People favor compromise in principle, except on the one thing that drove them into politics in the first place.

Julia Azari partially blames growing polarization on growing distrust of government:

[P]artisanship and declining trust in government have become mutually reinforcing. In my research, I find that mistrust of governing institutions (I focus on the presidency, although I think we can all agree that Congress has not been immune to this) emerged around the same time that the parties began to sort ideologically in response to the collapse of the New Deal coalition and the rise of cultural issues on the agenda. These began – in the late 1960s – as distinct phenomena. But as time went on, they became intertwined. A general lack of reverence and respect for the office of the presidency – not without good reason after Watergate and Vietnam – have merged with party polarization to create an environment in which presidents tend to be divisive, rather than uniting figures. They also tend, as I argue in the book, to rely more on language that appeals to their supporters and their campaign promises, which does little to alleviate the problem. In turn, these developments shape the incentives of individual members of Congress, who have increasingly little reason to collaborate across party lines.

Perusing the latest Pew survey data from seven European countries, Adam Taylor notices an interesting finding about attitudes toward ethnic and religious minorities:

The most negative views in Europe aren’t directed toward Muslims or Jews. Rather, it’s Roma. This chart is really quite remarkable, showing that Spain is the only nation where more people hold positive views of Roma than negative. In Italy, just 10 percent have positive views about Roma, while 85 percent have negative views.

Unfortunately, it’s not entirely surprising. Roma, often dismissively referred to as “gypsies” in Europe, have suffered discrimination in Europe for centuries, and some estimates suggest that 70 percent of their European population was killed during the Holocaust. Last year, Europe’s tabloid media got into a frenzy over allegations that Roma families in Greece and Ireland had stolen “blond girls.” (In both cases, it was later confirmed that the children were actually Roma).

The Dish looked at attitudes toward the Roma in Europe at the time of the “blond girls” allegations here.

James Surowiecki finds that entrepreneurs have a hard time identifying a bad bet:

The 18th-century Irish-French economist Richard Cantillon, who coined the term “entrepreneur,” defined it as a “bearer of risk.” And in 1921 the economist Frank Knight argued that the function of entrepreneurs was to “specialize in risk-taking.” Yet studies of entrepreneurs find that, in general, they’re as risk-averse as everyone else. Only when it comes to starting a business are they daring.

And that’s because the fundamental characteristic of entrepreneurs isn’t risk-seeking; it’s self-confidence. A 1997 study in the Journal of Business Venturing found that entrepreneurs are overconfident about their ability to prevent bad outcomes. They’re also overconfident about the prospects of their business. A 1988 study in the same journal of some 3,000 entrepreneurs found that 81 percent thought their businesses had at least a 70-percent chance of success, and a third thought there was no chance they would fail – numbers that bear no relation to reality. A recent paper called “Living Forever” notes that entrepreneurs are more likely than other people to overestimate their life spans.

But really, just one tree. Or so it would seem from this roundup of book covers from Africa Is A Country:

Michael Silverberg explains:

The texts of the books were as diverse as the geography they covered: Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique. They were written in wildly divergent styles, by writers that included several Nobel Prize winners. Yet all of books’ covers featured an acacia tree, an orange sunset over the veld, or both. …

I asked Peter Mendelsund—who is an associate art director of Knopf, a gifted cover designer, and the author of a forthcoming book on the complex alliances between image and text—to help me understand how the publishing industry got to a place where these crude visual stereotypes are recycled ad nauseam. (Again and again, that acacia tree!)

He points first to “laziness, both individual or institutionalized.” Like most Americans, book designers tend not to know all that much about the rest of the world, and since they don’t always have the time to respond to a book on its own terms, they resort to visual cliches. Meanwhile, editors sometimes forget what made a manuscript unique to begin with. In the case of non-Western novels, they often fall back on framing it with “a vague, Orientalist sense of place,” Mendelsund says, and they’re enabled by risk-averse marketing departments.

The sky still hasn’t fallen in Colorado:

The Denver Police Department’s crime data shows that violent crime from January through April dropped by 5.6 percent compared to the same time period last year, and robberies in particular fell by 4.8 percent. Major property crimes also dropped by 11.4 percent, with burglaries falling by 4.7 percent, compared to the same time last year. …

All of that is despite warnings from law enforcement officials that crime, particularly robberies and burglaries, would rise following legalization. Two months back, Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey told me that legal marijuana was already causing more crimes. But if that’s the case, it’s not showing up in the city’s crime statistics.

That’s one lesson drawn from Steven Hahn’s review of David Brion Davis’ The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation:

Rather than portraying the age of emancipation as an inevitable process once it commenced, Davis suggests that the Haitian Revolution and the British emancipation may have steeled the resistance of American slaveholders, who came to regard abolition as a fatal blow to the world they knew. That resistance, in turn, worsened tensions in national politics over the future of slavery, and led slaveholders to demand greater protection for their property and greater power in the federal government. They had been especially exercised by abolitionists aiding fugitives from slavery and driving off slave-catchers who came to retrieve them. As a consequence, slaveholders pushed a new Fugitive Slave Law through Congress in 1850 that both strengthened their hands and increased the vulnerabilities of all people of African descent, whether or not they were enslaved. Growing numbers of white Northerners – not just abolitionists – saw in this a fundamental attack on religious principles and civil rights.