Author: Andrew Sullivan

A new study premised on the idea that “cognitive resources, like our physical resources, are limited” has found that prayer helps block some of the effects of cognitive depletion. First, researchers asked participants to watch funny videos while stifling “all emotional responses, verbal and non-verbal, to the content … [which] requires a good amount of cognitive energy to pull off successfully.” Then, another experiment further tested participants’ brainpower:

The second, called a stroop task, asked participants to indicate the ink color of various words flashed to them on a computer screen. The trick is that the words spell the names of various colors that are either consistent or inconsistent with the ink they are to identify. Check it out here. You’ll find that the inconsistent word/ink items are harder to respond to than the consistent items. Researchers have found that after cognitive depletion, this task becomes even harder.  So, the authors had an elegant methodological question: will people who pray be able to avoid the depleting effects of emotion suppression and not show a deficit on the stroop task? In other words, will prayer give them the cognitive strength to perform well on both these challenging tasks?

Indeed it did.

Participants who were asked to pray about a topic of their choosing for five minutes showed significantly better performance on the stroop task after emotion suppression, compared to participants who were simply asked to think about a topic of their choosing. And this effect held regardless of whether participants identified as religious (70 percent) or not.

Paul Fidalgo suggests that the methodology was slightly flawed:

Certainly it’s more difficult to perform intellectual tasks following an emotional drain, but it doesn’t surprise me at all that folks would perform better on the intellectual exercise after a short period of mindfulness or meditation. The study happens to label the activity as “prayer,” but it sounds to me that they just got 5 minutes to relax and reset their brains in a concentrated and intentional manner, as opposed to the less formal “think about something else for 5 minutes” control group.

Meanwhile, another recent study examined the brains of children and grandchildren of participants in an earlier study about depression and found a link between religiosity and thicker brain cortices:

Overall, the researchers found that the importance of religion or spirituality to an individual – but not church attendance – was tied to having a thicker cortex. The link was strongest among those at high risk of depression.

Josh Green makes the “case for extending jobless benefits in seven charts.” One of the most striking:

How Republicans are approaching the unemployment insurance fight:

[M]ultiple Republicans are going all in on the suggestion that they would support extending benefits if only it were paid for. Republicans want to reframe this as a battle over how to pay for extending benefits, not over whether to extend them at all — as a fight over fiscal responsibility, not over whether to preserve the safety net amid mass unemployment.

Beutler suggests calling the GOP’s bluff:

[I]f Democrats relent and agree to an offset, one consolation will be some insight into the split between the GOP’s political opportunists and its unyielding ideologues — those who refuse to subsidize the less fortunate and have convinced themselves that the long-term unemployed have been lulled into complacency by unemployment benefits or have determined that it’s not in their interest to return to work. These are the folks who side with Heritage Action and other conservative groups warning Republicans not to vote for any UI extension, even one that’s deficit neutral.

Remember, nobody actually thinks unemployment is such an emergency that it’s appropriate to renew emergency unemployment benefits but not such an emergency that it’s better to let them expire if they add to the deficit. If anyone actually fit into that category they’d be willing to defray the cost by closing tiny tax loopholes. In the days ahead I wouldn’t be surprised if Republicans vote down such an offset unanimously.

Cassidy notes that “the financial cost of the program is pretty modest: about two billion dollars a month in 2013”:

Other than an ideological aversion to government spending of any kind, there is no reason not to extend unemployment benefits for a while longer. Economists sometimes worry that making them available for long periods will encourage the jobless to remain unemployed rather than taking jobs, but careful studies have failed to show much evidence of this. When employment openings are scarce, as they are still, a bigger worry is that curtailing benefits will encourage some of the long-term unemployed to drop out of the labor force completely. (As a condition for receiving benefits, recipients have to be looking for work.) When that happens, it inflicts further suffering on many of the people concerned, and crimps the growth potential of the economy at large.

Perhaps it isn’t accurate to say that most Republican senators and congressman don’t care about these things. But they are trapped inside a party and a conservative movement that, increasingly, makes them act as though this were the case.

Waldman considers the moral underpinnings of the UI debate:

When liberals talk about extending unemployment insurance, they talk about people who can’t find work and are keeping their heads above water only because of those benefits. Take away the benefits, and that family could lose their home or suffer other kinds of deprivation. What distresses liberals is the thought of a family that needs help not getting it. Conservatives don’t deny that those people exist. But they don’t talk about them. When conservatives talk about this issue, they focus on a different kind of person, the one who could get a job, but hasn’t because he’s chosen to suckle at government’s teat, making taxpayers pay for his continued enjoyment of things like food and heat.

Liberals don’t deny that those people exist, either. Somewhere, there’s an unemployed engineer who could get a menial job somewhere, but is managing to pay the rent and feed himself with the help of unemployment benefits, and is hoping that if he holds out a few more months he’ll be able to find a job in his chosen field. What liberals believe is that even if you think that guy is “undeserving,” taking away 50 other deserving people’s benefits just so you can tell that one guy to get his butt down to Arby’s to fill out an application would be unconscionably cruel. But that numeric argument is utterly unpersuasive to conservatives, because the family not getting the benefits they need—even fifty such families—doesn’t, for them, have the same moral urgency as the one guy getting benefits they think he doesn’t deserve.

Recent Dish on the unemployment insurance debate here.

Ashutosh Jogalekar explains that the high price of drugs isn’t entirely due to corporate greed:

Often you will hear people talking about why drugs are expensive: it’s the greedy pharmaceutical companies, the patent system, the government, capitalism itself. All these factors contribute to increasing the price of a drug, but one very important factor often gets entirely overlooked: Drugs are expensive because the science of drug discovery is hard. And it’s just getting harder. In fact purely on a scientific level, taking a drug all the way from initial discovery to market is considered harder than putting a man on the moon, and there’s more than a shred of truth to this contention.

In this series of posts I will try to highlight some of the purely scientific challenges inherent in the discovery of new medicines. I am hoping that this will make laymen appreciate a little better why the cost of drugs doesn’t have everything to do with profit and power and much to do with scientific ignorance and difficulty; as one leading scientist I know quips, “Drugs are not expensive because we are evil, they are expensive because we are stupid.”

I could actually end this post right here by stating one simple, predominant reason why the science of drug discovery is so tortuous: it’s because biology is complex. The second reason is because we are dealing with a classic multiple variable optimization problem, except that the variables to be optimized again pertain to a very poorly understood, complex and unpredictable system.

In a later post, he focuses on the difficulty of finding new drugs:

Almost every single time, irrespective of the starting source, a promising newly discovered molecule is what’s called a hit. A hit is to a drug what a freshly minted West Point graduate is to a four-star general. It is weak and unpolished in its interactions with biological system and it can often be too toxic. It may be poorly absorbed or it may hang around in the body for much too long. It may be impossible to press it into a pill and it may be impossible to simply get it into cells in the first place. Namely, it may have a lot of potential but very few real credentials. With some effort a hit may be turned into a lead which is a better version of a hit but still inadequate. Turning a hit or lead into a drug occupies the mind of the best scientists in academia and industry and even after decades of efforts there is no general formula which will achieve this. But not for lack of trying.

Siddhartha Mahanta exposes how your tax dollars are funding the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the lobbying arm of Big Beef:

Imagine if the federal government mandated that a portion of all federal gas taxes go directly to the oil industry’s trade association, the American Petroleum Institute. Imagine further that API used this public money to finance ad campaigns encouraging people to drive more and turn up their thermostats, all while lobbying to discredit oil industry critics—from environmentalists to those calling for better safety regulations or alternative energy sources. That’s a deal not even Exxon could pull off, yet the nation’s largest meat-packers now enjoy something quite like it. Today, when you buy a Big Mac or a T-bone, a portion of the cost is a tax on beef, the proceeds from which the government hands over to a private trade group called the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. The NCBA in turn uses this public money to buy ads encouraging you to eat more beef, while also lobbying to derail animal rights and other agricultural reform activists, defeat meat labeling requirements, and defend the ongoing consolidation of the industry. …

[I]n the case of the NCBA, the degree of subsidy is particularly extreme.

With its membership having shrunk from 40,000 in 1994 to 26,000 today, only 7 percent of the NCBA’s revenue comes from membership dues. That means that most of the cost of its overhead, from the $434,477 it paid its chief executive in 2010 to the cost of keeping the lights on and maintaining its Web site, comes from public money. As such, the comingling of its public money with lobbying activity is inherent and of great value. If the NCBA didn’t have those checkoff funds, says rancher Steve Charter, “they would have a pretty tough time keeping going.” Put another way, without the public money it receives, the NCBA might not even exist, and certainly would not have the lobbying clout it has today. As it is, the NCBA uses its power to lobby on a broad range of issues besides meat labeling that benefit meat-packers and other concentrated interests in agriculture. Most dramatic has been its successful effort to sabotage the Obama administration’s high-profile campaign to use antitrust law to limit the power of the big packers.

The NCBA is also a major opponent of animal welfare legislation:

The NCBA’s hostility to the Humane Society also puts it at odds with many independent ranchers. To be sure, ranchers and animal rights activists have stood for decades on almost entirely opposite sides of all farming issues. But that is changing, as consumer awareness and concern grows over the ethical and public health issues raised by confined animal feeding operations and other forms of industrial agriculture. Ranchers who treat their animals well want the public to know their story, and don’t want to be forced to subsidize a trade group that vilifies their potential customers as animal rights “radicals.”

Update from a reader: “In his new book Meatonomics, David Robinson Simon digs deeper“:

·         Average market value of a cow in the North Central United States : $245

·         Average cost to raise a cow in that region : $498

·         Amount US taxpayers spend yearly to subsidize meat and dairy : $38 billion

·         To subsidize fruits and vegetables : $17 million

·         Revenue collected by US fishing industry per pound of fish caught : $0.59

·         Portion of this figure funded by taxpayers as subsidies : $0.28

·         Annual government-managed “checkoff” spending to promote meat and dairy : $557 million

·         To promote fruits and vegetables : $51 million

·         Human lives that a 50% excise tax on meat and dairy would save yearly : 172,000

·         Animal lives it would save : 26 billion

·         Pounds this tax would cut yearly from US carbon-equivalent emissions : 3.4 trillion

·         Pounds of carbon equivalents emitted yearly from all US motor vehicles and vessels : 3.3 trillion

Another:

I think the beef post is a little misleading. The article is referring to the USDA “check off” program from the mid-’80s. Now, I can’t stand NCBA, the dairy producers, or the egg or pork guys (based on health and animal welfare grounds) who all use this program. If the author wants to repeal the law, that’s fine, but it’s not fair to keep insinuating that it’s public money, as though Congress is appropriating general fun revenue to these ag industries. They agreed to tax themselves to raise the money. There are plenty of insidious corporate welfare programs to attack without making one out to be more than it is.