Tag: Premium

After Harvard revealed that the most commonly awarded grade there is an “A”, Conor defends the practice of grade inflation, at least at elite schools:

A rigorous system of inflation-free grading might benefit any graduate schools or employers interested in using the transcripts of applicants while evaluating them. But Harvard College shouldn’t tailor its grading system to fulfill their needs, and needn’t worry about its students being overlooked regardless of their grading approach. Being admitted to Harvard and graduating is itself a strong signal. There’s also the argument that grade inflation is unfair. Students who do exceptional work are given the very same “reward” as students who do mediocre work. But it’s wrong to conceive of grades as the reward for acquiring more knowledge than other people. The reward is coming away with a better education.

Eleanor Barkhorn pushes back:

Midway through my time at Princeton … the school adopted new grading standards. Starting my junior fall, professors could give out only a limited number of A-range grades. The change prompted lots of anxiety and indignation from the student body—and now, nine years later, it may be rolled back. But for me, “grade deflation” was a much-needed kick in the pants. I started reading more carefully, taking more diligent notes, developing relationships with my professors and their teaching assistants. I ended up learning a lot more and enjoying my classes in a much deeper way. Yes, hard-working students should be rewarded with good grades. But a very good way to inspire students to work hard in the first place is to make good grades worth something.

Yglesias thinks the problem is inflation of another kind:

Also on the subject of grades, Alice Robb informs us that robots can now accurately score essay tests. She proposes nixing multiple-choice exams, which research suggests measure students’ understanding poorly:

A group of researchers, led by Elizabeth Beggrow at the Ohio State University, assessed science students’ understanding of key ideas about evolution using four methods: multiple-choice tests, human-scored written explanations, computer-scored written explanations, and clinical oral interviews. Clinical interviews—which allow professors to ask follow-up questions and engage students in dialogue—are considered ideal, but would be an impractical drain on teachers’ time; in this study, the clinical interviews lasted 14 minutes on average, and some took nearly half an hour. Machines, on the other hand, could generate a score in less than five seconds, though they took a few minutes to set up. The researchers “taught” the software to mark essays by feeding it examples of human-scored essays until it learned to recognize patterns in what the human scorers were looking for …

When Beggrow and her team analyzed the data, they found that professors’ and computers’ scores of students’ short essays were almost identical—the correlation was 0.96 to 1.

(Chart from a 2012 study (pdf) on grade inflation)

Drezner calls the deal signed in Bali over the weekend a “game changer” for world trade:

Bali helps to demonstrate the surprising forward momentum on trade liberalization.  The deal in Bali comes on the same week that Congress nears approving trade promotion authority — or “fast-track’ for President Obama.  If that passes, then the United States will be able to negotiate the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with Europe and the Trans-Pacific Partnership with a passel of Asia/Pacific economies (indeed, U.S. trade negotiators went from Bali to Singapore to continue talks on that deal).  Fast track will signal to U.S. negotiating partners that Washington is committed to finishing a deal.  Combine these negotiations with ongoing services negotiations, as well as a bilateral investment treaty with China, and you have the most ambitious trade agenda for the United States since the first year of the Clinton administration.

Robert Read is less excited:

Bali represents progress. It might not be particularly significant in the context of the original ambition for these talks, but it is still a major step forward for multilateralism. The package is likely to have very limited benefits for many countries but, more importantly, it signals a renewed commitment by WTO member countries to working together at a time of profound global recession.

Catherine Traywick unpacks the deal:

The deal is expected to increase global trade income by $1 trillion and add 20 million jobs, most of which would be in developing countries.

But critics were quick to highlight the deal’s shortcomings. Jeronim Capaldo, a senior researcher at Tufts’s Global Development and Environment Institute, argued in a policy paper this month that estimates of the deal’s potential benefits are overstated and “depend on too many unjustifiable assumptions.” While a trade facilitation agreement may create more jobs in exporting industries, he contends, it would also likely lead to higher unemployment in non-export industries. He also argues that income and savings projections do not take into account the high costs of implementing trade facilitation, which would naturally offset gains for poorer countries. The latter point is one that India brought up prior to last week’s trade talks, when its Confederation of Indian Industry called for the WTO to fund implementation costs for developing countries.

Simon Lester is lukewarm on the agreement:

It’s important to understand … that this agreement is not an agreement under which all countries will lower tariffs or barriers to trade in services, which is the traditional kind of trade agreement.  My colleague Dan Ikenson wrote about trade facilitation here. Reading through a draft of the agreement, it seems to cover two things.  First, it tries to achieve “good governance” in customs procedures, such as through requiring an appeals process for customs decisions.  And second, it requires governments to speed up the import process where possible, for example by letting frequent traders use expedited procedures. These are all good things, but it is not the same as using trade agreements to rein in protectionism.

The Economist weighs in:

[A]griculture proved the sorest subject, as ever. Disagreement spanned several issues, the most contentious of which concerned agriculture subsidies. India, its government facing a general election next year, spearheaded an effort to prevent emerging markets from facing challenges at the WTO over subsidies granted to farmers under the aegis of “food security” measures. In the months leading up to the Bali meeting India wrung substantial concessions from rich-world economies, including a four-year “peace clause” that would have granted developing countries protections from such challenges. Not satisfied with that, India later threatened to derail talks unless the issue was reopened. India ultimately won an indefinite waiver, good until a permanent solution can be reached.

Several other disputes received similar papering over. Indeed, while trade facilitation counts as a meaningful achievement, the deal is unlikely to convince sceptics that the multilateral process can produce ambitious reforms—not while those least committed to progress, like India in this case, can threaten to sink an entire agreement unless their demands are met.

A reader writes:

When I quit smoking, my weight balloons. It doesn’t matter how much I watch what I eat or how much exercise I get, I gain a lot of weight. When I got about 70 pounds above my normal weight, I started smoking again. Within a year, I’m down to my normal weight. I eat because I need to – not because I want to. My Type II diabetes disappeared. Pains in my feet and joints went away. Yet, I am classified as practically a leper from non-smokers even though I do not smoke around them. I asked my family doctor for help regarding my appetite and metabolism, but he said he couldn’t provide anything like that because it’s so bad for you. For me, smoking was my least bad option. I will quit again by the end of this year. Then the cycle will continue.

Another writes:

What Kelly Quirino is describing is detoxing from a drug; she is also trying to cope with the triggers inherent in withdrawal from any substance – in this case, it is cigarettes. Oh no, she’s eating more! So what? A temporary gain in weight is hardly as risky for one’s health than an addiction to nicotine, which will increase the user’s risk to heart disease, cancer, COPD, diabetes, and so on. Even worse, her smoking hurts her children’s health, who are vulnerable to second hand smoke, and are also more likely to become smokers.

Nicotine is more addictive than heroin; 32% of those who try smoking become addicted, as opposed to approximately 23% of people who use heroin. Smoking and tobacco use are insidious addictions, partly because smokers rarely see themselves as what they are: addicts. And as addicts, smokers need to detox from nicotine, utilize medications to stop smoking, and treat their smoking cessation as seriously as one would any other addiction.

But there is one big drawback to the rehab approach:

12-step groups are full of smokers who have traded in their more damaging addiction for the one that they see as benign – smoking. During my stint in rehab, I heard many justify their tobacco use as beneficial to their recovery, which it probably was. (Disclosure: I had my addictions, but was never a smoker.) However, trading one addiction for another is not a solution for the long term. The fact of the matter is smoking is not benign, nor is quitting it anything less than ending an addiction.

Update from a reader:

“Nicotine is more addictive than heroin; 32% of those who try smoking become addicted, as opposed to approximately 23% of people who use heroin.”. I think it is time to give these comparisons a break, or at least include some context. Tobacco is a legally purchased substance. Buying cigarettes is a simple as walking to the store. The availability of heroin is much more challenging. It seems to be that availability is a factor that should be considered when comparing the “addictiveness” of a drug.

Exactly one year ago my state, Washington, legalized marijuana possession and use. Though the actual “stores” don’t open until next spring, marijuana is now readily available, and the pro-active dispensaries mean that I can even get it delivered within the hour.

Prior to a year ago I’d probably smoked weed 10 times in my life. Since legalization? Ummm … Pretty much almost every single day. The difference is that I didn’t have a huge desire to violate the law previously, and did not honestly have a good idea where to find weed conveniently. For me, at least, marijuana was as “addictive” five years ago as it is today, but now it’s legal and very accessible.

An expert weighs in:

Kelly Quirino wrote, “I wander around, feeling like there’s something I’m supposed to be doing but coming up empty. I’m crabby, and sad, and my hands feel completely useless,” sounded so familiar to me. It’s what I heard over and over from the 60+ former smokers I interviewed in depth for a book that’s coming out in a week, Quit Smoking for Life. (It’s a legit, gimmick-free book, backed by the American Cancer Society and several academics, tobacco researchers, etc.)

I don’t know if you’d consider posting this, since it’s “promotional,” but if the hardcore smokers I interviewed can overcome tobacco addiction, and they did, then Quirino and your readers who smoke can as well. The reason most smokers fail their attempts to quit is that they don’t adequately prepare for how they’ll occupy their hands, mouths, and minds, or how they’ll cope with stress or with other people smoking around them.

Planning is the critical step between deciding to quit and quitting, yet most smokers just wing it – and fail. Most of the folks I interviewed had failed multiple times before finally succeeding with a mapped-out quit. They all said quitting sucked but that it was more bearable than they’d expected and that it changed them, as human beings, in ways that made them never want to return to smoking.

Writing this book gave me considerable compassion for smokers and made me loathe the tobacco industry even more than I already did.

Readers suffering from ulcerative colitis have testified to the cigarette’s ameliorative effects. Another suggests:

Those with colitis should give e-cigs a try if the effective ingredient for them happens to be nicotine, not the tobacco. Perhaps they can get the relief they need without exposing themselves to the dangers of regular cigarettes.

After analyzing the company’s data-driven business model, Tim Wu argues that “much more so than a network that reaches viewers through a third-party cable operator like Comcast or Time Warner, [Netflix] knows what its customers actually like and how they behave”:

Right now, American viewers are averaging only about 45 minutes of Internet-streaming video per week, a blip in comparison with total television intake. Given that audiences trained for decades to respond to event-driven television, how realistic is it to expect more viewers to shift from traditional TV? John Steinbeck offered one answer: “It’s a hard thing to leave any deeply routined life, even if you hate it.” Any historian of consumer technology would add that machines change much faster than people.

Television in particular moves so slowly that the last time the concept of the network really came up for grabs was the late ’70s.

That’s when Ted Turner (the Turner Broadcasting System), Pat Robertson (the Christian Broadcast Network), and the founders of HBO successfully used satellites to begin to beam programming to cable subscribers. The ensuing frenzy resulted in the launch of a dozen networks, including ESPN, MTV, CNN, Discovery, and Bravo. Most of those channels are still around, not necessarily because of the strength of their programming, but because the reigning content hierarchy has been so entrenched.

Netflix believes it has a powerful factor in its favor as it tries to change viewers’ habits. “Human beings like control,” says [chief content officer Ted] Sarandos. “To make all of America do the same thing at the same time is enormously inefficient, ridiculously expensive, and most of the time, not a very satisfying experience.” There is a freedom achieved when your options extend beyond that night’s offerings and the limited selection of past episodes that networks make available on demand. Specifically, it’s the freedom to only watch television you really enjoy.

Previous Dish on Netflix here.

James Antle spotlights it:

The right tends to have one of two responses to figures like Mandela abroad or Martin Luther King, Jr. at home: suggest their radicalism is more important than the struggles of the people they championed or to try to claim them as conservatives. Neither approach will do.

The lack of empathy many white conservatives feel toward communities of color may not be the only barrier between the right and minorities. But it is an important barrier.

Many conservatives who have been supportive of civil-rights struggles overseas err in another direction: expressing their concern through bombing and sanctions, as if the people and their leaders live in separate hermetically sealed containers. Condoleezza Rice once compared the war in Iraq and the fight against Jim Crow, an analogy that may strike many Iraqi refugees as inapt.

TNC chimes in:

As Sam Kleiner demonstrates in Foreign Policy, apartheid would ultimately draw some of America’s most celebrated conservatives into its orbit. The roster includes Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff, Jesse Helms, and Senator Jeff Flake.

Jerry Falwell denounced Desmond Tutu as a “phony” and led a “reinvestment” campaign during the 1980s. At the late hour of 1993, Pat Robertson opined, “I know we don’t like apartheid, but the blacks in South Africa, in Soweto, don’t have it all that bad.”

Not all prominent conservatives were so dishonorable. When Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan’s veto of sanctions of South Africa, Mitch McConnell, for instance, was forthright—”I think he is wrong … We have waited long enough for him to come on board.” When Falwell embarrassed himself by condemning Tutu, some Republican senators denounced him.

But the overall failure of American conservatives to forthrightly deal with South Africa’s white-supremacist regime, coming so soon after their failure to deal with the white-supremacist regime in their own country, is part of their heritage, and thus part of our heritage. When you see a Tea Party protestor waving the flag of slavery in front of the home of the first black president, understand that this instinct has been cultivated.

Chotiner diagnoses conservatives’ history with Mandela as mostly Cold War fever:

Conservatives today—or at least those writing pieces, rather than commenting on them—don’t speak up for the apartheid regime, but they also don’t show much of a desire to think about the Cold War, and the moral costs of having fought it. … It is not simply that the United States waged nasty military campaigns like the one in Vietnam, or supported death squads throughout Latin America. Nor is it simply that the United States backed undemocratic regimes everywhere from Pakistan to South Africa to Greece. It’s also that the war prevented many of the people fighting it from viewing Mandela in anything but Cold War terms. Think about it this way: Isn’t there something tremendously wrong with a war which requires your side to miss the importance of a figure like Mandela? Isn’t there something tremendously wrong with a war that requires you to view apartheid-era South Africa as part of the “free world?” (It should also be said that the position being defended here is strategically inept too. The Soviet Union did not fall because America supported the South African government and various other unsavory regimes.)

Serwer adds his thoughts:

The point of remembering all this is not mere point-scoring. It is to remember that sometimes the radicals are correct, that in the heat of the moment, movements for justice can be easily caricatured by those with authority as threats to public safety, and those seeking basic rights and dignity as monstrous villains. And then after the radicals win, we try to make them safe and useless to future radicals by pretending our beloved secular saints were never radical at all.

It’s tempting to pretend we’ve all always agreed about Mandela, or about racial equality, or about South African apartheid. It would avoid awkwardness or hostility to join together in mutual admiration and mourning for a figure who was indispensible in so many senses of the word, without recalling those who stood against him.

Mandela believed in forgiveness, but he also believed in truth and reconciliation. And the truth is that many self-proclaimed champions of individual freedom in the United States refused to champion the individual freedom of black people in South Africa and at home.

Susan Boyle revealed in an interview this weekend that she has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. Ellen E. Jones thinks this makes Boyle more culturally relevant than ever:

For people who feel isolated or stigmatised, it is usually a comfort to know there is someone else in the same situation – especially a successful person. It’s now slightly less stigmatising to suffer from depression (Alastair Campbell, Stephen Fry and Rebecca Ferguson from The X Factor all have) or to go bankrupt (Miquita Oliver and Burt Reynolds know all about that) and we’ve been thanking Tom Daley since last week for making it that little bit easier for teenagers to come out as bisexual or gay…

At first she was celebrated as a victory for talent in a culture obsessed with physical attractiveness, and a reminder to not judge a book by its cover, but as she’s become more successful, the PR blurb has morphed into something more familiar and much less interesting. Susan is now a classic underdog, a rags-to-riches success and a reminder to ordinary people to dream their own impossible dream. It’s well-worn trope of reality TV, and in this case it’s more than just trite, it obscures the real triumph of SuBo. She’s not, and never has been, an ordinary woman to whom we can all relate; she’s a very unusual woman with an extraordinary talent and specific needs. Her presence in popular culture is a much-needed reminder to never underestimate people who, for whatever reason, don’t fit the mould.

Mary Elizabeth Williams is happy for Boyle:

Recognizing that there’s a reason for one’s behaviors, rather than some kind of personal failing because they’re not like everybody else’s, has got to be pretty validating — especially after more than five long undiagnosed decades of living. For a smart woman once mocked as “Susie Simple,” one who has also battled depression and “got laughed at because people didn’t think I’d do well … It’s a condition that I have to live with and work through, but I feel more relaxed about myself.” Boyle says she hopes that now “People will have a greater understanding of who I am and why I do the things I do.”

Dreher writes that he is “deeply appreciative of her decision to go public with this diagnosis, both to raise awareness of it and to show what Aspies can achieve.” He also discusses his son’s Asperger’s and how it has changed his perspective on his own habits:

Learning about Asperger’s and the autism spectrum from this experience as a parent of an Aspie has made me aware of my own Aspie tendencies. It’s easy to see my son’s inordinate demand for order and logic as an expression of his cognitive condition, but I have always seen the same trait in myself as an expression of moralism. Maybe it is, to some degree, but I have had to concede that a lot of this probably comes from an abnormal neurology, not from an overdeveloped conscience.

Unless Congress acts, 1.3 million Americans will lose their unemployment benefits on December 28th. Rand Paul claims this is for their own good:

Matthew O’Brien counters:

This long-term unemployment trap has nothing to do with long-term benefits. Indeed, [Rand] Ghayad [a PhD candidate at Northeastern University] looked at the labor markets for unemployed people who are and aren’t eligible for benefits, and found they’ve been equally dysfunctional. No, this long-term unemployment trap has to do with our great recession, and not-so-great recovery. With a labor market that doesn’t work for people who made the mistake of losing their job at the wrong time. If anything, unemployment benefits have kept people from giving up; remember, you have to be actively looking for a job to qualify for them. The San Francisco Fed, for one, estimates that unemployment would have been 0.4 percentage points lower without extended benefits, mostly because more people would have stopped trying to find work.

Josh Green runs the numbers:

How much does growth stand to suffer?

Well, according to the U.S. Labor Department, the cost of extending federal benefits through 2014 would be about $25 billion. But the economic impact of cutting them off would be larger. That’s because the unemployed reliably spend the benefits they get, creating a “multiplier effect” in the economy. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics (MCO), estimates that every dollar of unemployment benefits generates about $1.55 in economic activity, meaning that the federal benefits set to end later this month will cost the economy about $39 billion in spending next year (which would, in turn, have supported 310,000 jobs, according to a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute).

However, the effect on the economy will be worse than just the lost spending from those 1.3 million people. Throughout the year, state unemployment benefits will expire, with those who lose them having no emergency federal benefits to fall back on. Last week, a report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the Labor Department estimated that an additional 3.6 million people stand to lose access to benefits next year, so the drop in demand will be much larger than $39 billion.

Kilgore doubts unemployment benefits will get extended:

So it appears a budget “deal” that raises appropriations above sequester levels and avoids another government shutdown will involve sacrificing the Democratic priority of extending unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed. It’s not clear why congressional Democrats are making it so clear so early that these folks are going to be the first to go over the side, but as Greg Sargent reports abundantly today, the signals are unmistakable.

Beutler looks at how the unemployment benefits fight intersects with the ongoing budget negotiations:

This is back-of-the-envelope. But if emergency unemployment benefits lapse, the $25 billion hit to the economy would largely, if not entirely, offset the fiscal easing Ryan and Murray are contemplating on the discretionary side of the budget. That’s not trivial

If a Ryan-Murray deal were the only viable budget vehicle, then digging in for extending emergency UI benefits as part of said deal would be such an obvious play politically, and on the economic merits, that it’s hard to see Democrats’ reluctance to pick the fight at this juncture as anything other than a testament to their belief that Republicans could act unilaterally and leave them on the hook for shutting down the government.

Given the weak-kneed performance House GOP moderates staged during the shutdown fight — the willingness they demonstrated to allow hard-liners to lead them by the nose — it’s hard to blame Democrats for assuming these guys might not be reliable allies of convenience. And if that assessment is correct, then the two in the bush are unattainable, and Democrats are making the right move.

A charity group in Amsterdam is paying alcoholics to clean up public parks – and paying them in beer:

The former public nuisances start off the working day with two cans of beer each at 9 a.m. and walk out into the park and the adjoining streets with their garbage bags. They have another two beers at lunch and one more when they’re done at 3:30 p.m. Apart from the beer, the day’s wages amount to 10 euros ($13.69). In typical Dutch fashion, this is a highly practical arrangement: With a can of beer costing as little as 40 U.S. cents, the men earn less than $20 per six-hour day if you count the hot meal they are served. This is far below the national minimum wage, $11.60 per hour. Nobody complains. The beer is the alcoholics’ fuel, and some of them even say they are drinking less because, for the first time in years, they have some structure to their day.

Katelyn Fossett wrote last month about the problems she sees with the policy:

Paying alcoholics in beer doesn’t just turn a blind eye to the problem in the name of practicality but turns it into labor that benefits the city, even at the risk of worsening these alcoholics’ drinking problem. The plan highlights a problematic quality of so-called “Dutch pragmatism”:

If a government really does subscribe to the premise that social ills like alcoholism are inevitable, then can it be implicated in encouraging it, even if it’s part of a scheme that obviously profits the city? In other words, if cities are free from the burden of correcting social ills because they are inevitable, are they also free from the guilt of potentially worsening it?

Eric Crampton disagreed with Fossett, writing that instead of “enabling alcoholism [the initiative] looks a lot more like harm-minimisation to me”:

I don’t know, but would be willing to bet, that most of these workers were consuming rather more than the equivalent of five cans of beer per day before they started in. The delivery is paced throughout the day so there’s no chance any of them get drunk. By delivering the beer as beer rather than as the cash equivalent encourages pacing things rather than having the workers spend it all on lower cost per unit binge at the end of the day.

Sarah Hedgecock zooms out:

Although the first program of this kind was in Canada, it’s well-suited to the Netherlands’ famous disdain for zero-tolerance policies. It’s certainly an approach employed in many countries with regard to other vices: the idea takes the same approach as methadone clinics, which provide a less-strong drug to serious heroin addicts on the road to recovery. If some of Amsterdam’s alcoholics are working a full shift and drinking beer, it’s that many fewer lying unemployed in the city’s parks, polishing off bottles of hard liquor. In other words: it’s not a cure, but it’s a start.

Update from a reader:

Your post about Amsterdam’s harm reduction strategy for alcoholics reminds me of a story on This American Life a few years ago about the St. Anthony wet house in St. Paul Minnesota.  It’s a residence for homeless chronic alcoholics in which the residents are allowed to drink on site.  The theory is that it keeps them from doing so under a bridge and dying of exposure.  It was also chronicled in the New York Times Magazine in 2011.  I like this sort of pragmatic harm reduction, though the idea of someone being so far gone is really quite sad.

Yesterday, the administration called Sy Hersh’s latest report – turned down by the Washington Post and the New Yorker – “simply false.” Money quote:

“The intelligence clearly indicated that the Assad regime and only the Assad regime could have been responsible for the 21 August chemical weapons attack,” Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence, said in a statement to The Hill. “The suggestion that there was an effort to suppress intelligence about a nonexistent alternative explanation is simply false.”

Count me unsurprised that the US intelligence establishment refuses to accept that its findings might have been cherry-picked by those in the administration who had long wanted to go to war in Syria anyway. Count me also unpersuaded by the push-back.

Check out, for example, this blog on the circumstances surrounding the August 21 attack. It really does what the new media does best: it takes you through the evidence, with links, to a conclusion that the al Nusra front might very well have been the instigator. It convinced me, at the very least, that this remains an open question. Liberal internationalists are just as likely as neocons to see things they want to see and ignore those things they don’t. The need to meddle in other countries finds its justifications as it goes along. A reader adds:

If you look at the Russian presentation of facts and evidence, especially as put out by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, it was far more accurate and more candid than was the American presentation of facts and evidence.

In the end the Russians played a key positive role in defusing the situation. But what’s really remarkable, they were also consistently far more honest about what they were up to, and what was going on on the ground in Syria, than was the United States. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be.

I come away from this thinking very poorly of our intelligence establishment. They’re bloated, lazy, stupid and increasingly dangerous to the United States and the world. It’s a clear demonstration of the fact that throwing billions of dollars at it doesn’t get you better intelligence.

The GOP rails on about this moronic Benghazi “scandal.” But this is a real scandal. Watch official Washington just ignore it.

(Photo: An image grab taken from a video uploaded on YouTube by the Local Committee of Arbeen on August 21, 2013 allegedly shows Syrians covering a mass grave containing bodies of victims that Syrian rebels claim were killed in a toxic gas attack by pro-government forces in eastern Ghouta and Zamalka, on the outskirts of Damascus. The allegation of chemical weapons being used in the heavily-populated areas came on the second day of a mission to Syria by UN inspectors, but the claim, which could not be independently verified, was vehemently denied by the Syrian authorities, who said it was intended to hinder the mission of UN chemical weapons inspectors. By DSK/AFP/Getty Images.)

Ronald Bailey explains why libertarians should not support the right of vaccine refuseniks to put the rest of us at risk:

People who don’t wish to take responsibility for their contagious microbes will often try to justify their position by noting the fact that the mortality rates of many infectious diseases had declined significantly before vaccines came along. And it is certainly true that a lot of that decline in infectious disease mortality occurred as a result of improved sanitation and water chlorination. A 2004 study by the Harvard University economist David Cutler and the National Bureau of Economic Research economist Grant Miller estimated that the provision of clean water “was responsible for nearly half of the total mortality reduction in major cities, three-quarters of the infant mortality reduction, and nearly two-thirds of the child mortality reduction.” Improved nutrition also reduced mortality rates, enabling infants, children, and adults to fight off diseases that would have more likely killed their malnourished ancestors.

But vaccines have played a substantial role in reducing death rates too.

An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association compared the annual average number of cases and resulting deaths of various diseases before the advent of vaccines to those occurring in 2006. Before an effective diphtheria vaccine was developed, for example, there were about 21,000 cases of the disease each year, 1,800 of them leading to death. No cases or deaths from the disease were recorded in 2006. Measles averaged 530,000 cases and 440 deaths per year before the vaccine. In 2006, there were 55 cases and no deaths. Whooping cough saw around 200,000 cases and 4,000 deaths annually. In 2006, there were nearly 16,000 cases and 27 deaths. Polio once averaged around 16,000 cases and 1,900 deaths. No cases were recorded in 2006. The number of Rubella cases dropped from 48,000 to 17, and the number of deaths dropped from 17 to zero.

His bottom line:

Oliver Wendell Holmes articulated a good libertarian principle when he said, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins”… To borrow Holmes’ metaphor, people who refuse vaccination are asserting that they have a right to “swing” their microbes at other people.

Last week, Alexandra Sifferlin slammed Katie Couric for lending credence to vaccine fear-mongering after she hosted opponents of the HPV vaccine on her daytime talk show:

The two HPV vaccines currently available, Gardasil and Cervarix, are both proven safe through clinical trials, independent studies, and post licensure monitoring. The CDC and FDA also continue to track the vaccines’ safety. And yet Couric has framed the issue as if there were a debate to be had about whether the HPV vaccines are good for the public’s health.

“This kind of coverage is so incredibly irresponsible,” says Seth Mnookin, author of The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy. “The danger of saying we are going to present both sides of an issue, when all of the facts line up on one side, is that as far as the audience is concerned, you are giving these sides equal weight. It presents a false impression that there is a legitimate debate here.”