How public health promotes bad science

There's a pretty good article in Nature about the 'obesity paradox'. This is the consistent finding that, especially as people get older, being overweight seems not to be quite the health problem that we thought it was. The problem is that this sort of finding confounds the efforts of the public health business to push out a message around obesity - so they want those presenting this science to be silenced:

Some public-health experts fear, however, that people could take that message as a general endorsement of weight gain. Willett says that he is also concerned that obesity-paradox studies could undermine people's trust in science. “You hear it so often, people say: 'I read something one month and then a couple of months later I hear the opposite. Scientists just can't get it right',” he says. “We see that time and time again being exploited, by the soda industry, in the case of obesity, or by the oil industry, in the case of global warming.”

The person making this statement is a leading public health academic at Harvard not some sort of local council junior. The campaign message - being fat is unhealthy - cannot be undermined by inconvenient evidence that says this:

A team led by Katherine Flegal, an epidemiologist at the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Maryland, reported that people deemed 'overweight' by international standards were 6% less likely to die than were those of 'normal' weight over the same time period.

This approach undermines science and results in bad policy-making. If it's the case that being overweight but not obese doesn't represent a health problem in most older people (in fact quite possibly the opposite) then we should say so not try to suppress the evidence because the public might be confused.

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Inconvenient truths - public funding of science doesn't promote economic growth

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I'm in favour of science. Mostly for the "cor, wow" factor and because what scientists do at the far boundaries of our knowledge is fantastic. I'm even in favour of some of our taxes being spent on that science. But not because it helps in any way towards the growth in our economy.

In 2003, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published a paper on the “sources of economic growth in OECD countries” between 1971 and 1998 and found, to its surprise, that whereas privately funded research and development stimulated economic growth, publicly funded research had no economic impact whatsoever. None. This earthshaking result has never been challenged or debunked. It is so inconvenient to the argument that science needs public funding that it is ignored.

When I did my masters degree, I looked at this stuff and the evidence is pretty clear - investment in research and development by firms is very effective in drive economic growth whereas there's no link between said growth and investment in research and development by governments or government agencies. Rather than the preferred university-led approach to research we need to look at firm-led approaches. Here's what I found:

There is evidence to suggest that university-led innovation strategies focusing on collaboration and the spinning off of businesses from HEIs leads to a misplaced focus on scientific research rather than business growth (Jones 1995, Frenz & Oughton 2005). Perhaps the most effective way to generate effective innovation at the level of the firm (where it has a direct impact on economic performance) is to reduce the barriers to innovation. The biggest of these barriers is cost and econometric models suggest that reducing innovation costs is more effective that investing in R&D or building innovation networks and systems (Martin 1999).

It won't happen, of course, because the system is controlled by universities and the friends of universities.

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The World's Most Important Thinkers...discussed (and they aren't economists)

Over at a magazine called Prospect (which badges itself rather self-importantly as "The Leading Magazine of Ideas") they're having a fun little poll asking who the world's most important thinkers might be - just follow this link to vote. I would recommend opting for Russell Brand - mostly for the laughs.

However, the list of great thinkers from which we must choose - carefully chosen by Prospect's team of contributors "whether they agree with them or not" (very big of them that) - set me to thinking about what constitutes an 'important thinker'. But first the make up of Propsect's list as this contains an important truth about what the punditry consider important.

The dominant category is 'economist' with thirteen entries in the list of 50 followed by the general term 'activist' with eight entries (ten if you include a lone feminist and someone listed as 'activist and tech theorist') and writers - journalists, novelists, authors -  also with eight entries. The rest of social science and historians musters twelve entries and there's one each of diplomat, surgeon and lawyer. The remaining four entries are scientists - two physicists and two biologists.

What we see here is the increasing hegemony of economics alongside a continuing hero-worship of sexy and attractive activists. The list doesn't contain a single engineer, entrepreneur, chemist or - and this is striking given the importance of the debate - climatologist. There are no artists, designers or architects, no urbanists, no geographers. Given the importance of business and the management of business it is shocking that the only thinker on business issues (as opposed to economics) is Naomi Klein who promotes an anti-market, anti-business message.

I suppose that all this reflects the current bias in how we seek to understand the world and the continuing botheration about the world's economy. So the preference for economists - and the list isn't especially biased to left or right in its choices - reflects the belief (a misfounded belief) that their musings can help us understand what needs to be done to put things that are wrong with the economy right. But settle back for a moment and ask yourself what message Prospect's 'team' are sending by selecting so few scientists?

Economics, and especially 'grand unified theories of everything' (© M. Piketty) economics, has become something of a fetish with the punditry. The discipline has indulged this - partly with the twee (think Freakonomics) and partly with creating a parallel universe where people continue to kid themselves that national economy models will actually explain the real world rather than simply play games with ever more sophisticated arithmetic.

The most important thinkers aren't those trying to square the circle by pretending there's a way to have a store of value without creating the value in the first place. Rather the important thinking is being done by those working out how to colonise Mars, how to extract more efficiency from the machines that capture energy, and how to feed the world's population as it continues to grow. The important thinking isn't about money or wealth but about technology, creativity and art - yet Prospect have chosen a list utterly dominated by the immediate botheration of national budgets, international relations and, in the case of Russell Brand and Naomi Klein, baying at the moon.

Look ahead at the things that will transform the world - like driverless cars, 3D printing, nanotechnology, hybrid engines, photovoltaic technologies, intelligent surfaces and bio-engineered fungi - none of these things are the stuff of economists, activists and writers. Rather they are the stuff of scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs - I may be none of these things but I'm sure that the most important thinking being done right now is being done in laboratories, test sites and boardrooms not in newspaper offices or wherever it is that economists gather to peddle their myths.

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Politics and science...

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"A soldier, having seen traces of a horse in the sand, will immediately pass from the thought of a horse to the thought of a horseman, and from that to the thought of war...But a farmer will pass from the thought of a horse to the thought of a plough." Spinoza

There's a tendency for some educated scientific people to consider that you can reduce the process of political decision-making to an exercise in the scientific method. Some sort of 'test' is conducted and the results mandate the policy decision. Most often the 'test' isn't an actual experiment (these are, as those scientists should know, pretty hard to construct in real human populations) but some sort of meta-analysis of smaller tests and analyses. From this process we arrive at statements like 'the science is settled' and 'nearly all scientists agree' despite the scientific truth being a whole lot more nuanced.

A related approach is to assume that a human problem identified by 'science' must require the intervention of the state for its resolution. At this point I can hear some on the left peeling away from the argument but bear with me because this really isn't about left/right or big/small government but about the role and purpose of two different things - science and politics. It would be a rum do if we used politics to determine the outcome of science. Why then do some people not see an equivalent problem in trying to use science to make political decisions?

Scientific and political questions are framed very differently. This is for good reason. A scientist would not, for example, ask "Should Scotland be an independent country? Yes/No". Yet this is an entirely valid question in a political context that will lead to a clear decision. A scientist might ask 'what would Scottish independence mean for X' and then try to construct some sort of test to answer the question. And the findings from that scientific enquiry might well help people answer the political question. But the science does not provide the answer.

The second point about that independence question is that is it absolute - the 'right' answer is that answer securing the most votes. Fifty Per Cent Plus One is enough. For science that isn't enough. Read any piece of good scientific research and you will see caveats - a section perhaps entitled 'limitations' setting out the constraints of the test being conducted and towards the end of the paper a piece on the need for further research. Good scientific research doesn't answer questions so much as turn one question into a myriad of other questions. Such an approach is fantastic if we want to understand the world but worse than useless if we want to decide whether or not Scotland should be independent.

So when a writer - as happens here - singles out one political ideology as peculiarly anti-science this is the result of either a profound ignorance of politics and the political process or else the presentation of a personal ideology as if it were scientific fact. Indeed, we can observe the same from other political perspectives - the adherence of many on the left to the view that GMOs are bad, nuclear power peculiarly dangerous and pesticides destructive is a fine example of how scientific evidence is routinely ignored.

If we are to 'respond' to climate change this does not mean that there must be more government, more regulation and some sort of crusade to stamp out any capitalism bigger than the corner shop or the local agricultural co-op. Those who choose to say 'I don't believe a word of it' also cannot be dismissed because they might just be right.  The problem is (and here's some science) that our ideology - political bias - means that we do one of two things: either we make choices that fit our existing bias or else we select particular findings while ignoring others again to fit a prior bias.

To return to that Scottish independence question again. Were I a 'Yes' supporter seeking evidence to support my case, I would select those studies, tests and experiments that support my contention that Scotland should be independent. I would also ignore the element of choice involved in political decisions. There are costs and benefits to every decision but political or ideological bias leans us towards emphasising only the costs or only the benefits.

To give another example, the argument that alcohol costs the UK £21bn each year is, say public health people, derived from scientific enquiry. It may well be a true figure. But against that figure we have to set an estimate of the benefits society gains from alcohol not just jobs, businesses and exports but the pleasure we get from a glass of wine or a pint of beer.

In the end we have become rather too dependent on scientific enquiry in answering (rather than framing) political questions. And the risk here is that the scientist, once removed from the constraints of experimental investigation, is likely to be just as ideologically biased as the non-scientist. Indeed, what we get too often is a complete misrepresentation of the ideology with which the scientist is disagreeing. To suggest that somehow 'libertarians' balance "individual rights against the rights of others" is a complete misrepresentation both of libertarianism and of the small-government conservsatism that the author was actually criticising.

One of the curiosities about what we might call the 'scepticism movement' is its ideological attachment to a sort of social democratic human engineering view of politics. I compare this to the commonplace view among the centre-right that everything would be fine if only we put businessmen in charge. For the 'sceptics' the solution appears to lie in sort sort of post-democratic technocracy where the task of politics is to implement the 'findings' of the scientific consensus and that politicians should be slaves to the selected and presented evidence. A side effect of this concept in politics is the modern idea of leadership - politicians' task is to 'lead' the reluctant and recalcitrant populace towards to consensus defined by the technocrats' 'science'.

None of this is to dispute the value of science. Rather I want to step back from the fetishising of scientific enquiry as the only worthy decision-making system. Instead of a "science says yes" process called evidence-based policy making, we need to understand that the purpose of the evidence is to inform our decision-making not to do that decision-making for us. And the point and purpose of democracy - lost in translation all too often - is for the people or the representatives of the people to make choices about things that can't be (or aren't) made in the market.

Like everyone else scientists are prejudiced, have irrational attachments to ideological positions and allow personal likes and dislikes to colour their thinking. I take the view - like many of those libertarians - that most of the time decisions are better taken in the marketplace where mutual benefit and added value determine the outcome. But this is an ideological position - one with a great deal of scientific support as it happens - and others will believe differently. As we've seen with the independence debate, scientific enquiry can only inform the choice that people have before them.

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On the BBC's definition of crank...

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crank¹ [krangk] noun

1.Machinery . any of several types of arms or levers for imparting rotary or oscillatory motion to a rotating shaft, one end of the crank being fixed to the shaft and the other end receiving reciprocating motion from a hand, connecting rod, etc.
 

2.Informal. an ill-tempered, grouchy person.
 

3.an unbalanced person who is overzealous in the advocacy of a private cause.
 

4.an eccentric or whimsical notion.
 

5.a strikingly clever turn of speech or play on words.

The BBC is on about 'crank' scientists and has set about re-educating its programme makers and producers:

BBC journalists are being sent on courses to stop them inviting so many cranks onto programmes to air ‘marginal views’

The BBC Trust on Thursday published a progress report into the corporation’s science coverage which was criticised in 2012 for giving too much air-time to critics who oppose non-contentious issues. 

Not surprisingly the BBC has turned to its coverage of 'climate change' as an illustration of the problem. Indeed, three of these so-called 'cranks' are described:

Andrew Montford, who runs the Bishop Hill climate sceptic blog, former children’s television presenter Johnny Ball and Bob Carter, a retired Australian geologist, are among the other climate sceptics that have appeared on the BBC. 

Now, despite me being sceptical about climate change scepticism, I'm prepared to listen to what well-informed people have to say about the subject. So let's look at a couple of these folk.

Montford has a chemistry degree and has written extensively on the subject of climate change, his books are informed and comprehensive (if a little polemical). I do not have to agree with him to appreciate the contribution he has made to an important debate. He has as much knowledge of climate change as, for example, Paul Nurse, the geneticist who has often been used as a front man for promoting the case for anthropogenic global warming.

 Bob Carter - "retired geologist" according to the BBC? Here's a chunk from his wikipedia page;

He has published over 100 research papers on taxonomic palaeontology, palaeoecology, the growth and form of the molluscan shell, New Zealand and Pacific geology, stratigraphic classification, sequence stratigraphy, sedimentology, the Great Barrier Reef, Quaternary geology, and sea-level and climate change.^[5][6] Carter has published primary research in the field of palaeoclimatology, investigating New Zealand's climate extending back to 3.9 Ma.

So this 'crank' is, in truth, an academic who has actually done primary research into climate change during the world's history. The only 'crank' bit is, of course, that Carter doesn't agree with the approved position on man-made climate change.

It seems to me - and I watch with incredulity as the media push real pseudo-science in health - that the definition of crank being used here is ideological. Essentially you are a crank if you disagree with the defined and accepted editorial bias of the BBC.

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Update: Saw this article by a climate change chap called Bob Ward - presumably the very sort of scientist that the BBC wants to put forward on its programmes. The article is an extended ad hominem attack on Nigel Lawson but I checked out Ward's credentials. Let's be clear, Ward isn't a climate scientist, indeed he's barely a scientist at all certainly compared to Bob Carter. Ward is a PR man for a climate change research institute.

"White Hat Bias" - fixing results to support what you think is righteous

When we look at research in public health fields - those matters relating to lifestyle choices especially - we often see what we suspect is a search for evidence to substantiate an ideologically-predetermined position. So, for example, the ideology decides that standardised packaging would be a way to reduce the uptake of smoking among the young and this is followed by a set of studies that appear to show just how much packaging influences the decisions of young people considering taking up smoking. Except that, when we pull these studies apart, we find that they show nothing beyond the (rather obvious) fact that people prefer attractive, bright colours to drab unattractive colours.

This is "white hat bias" - a term coined by US biostatistician Professor David Allison:

It was Professor Allison and Dr Mark Cope who coined the phrase in relation to obesity research. They defined it as: “bias leading to the distortion of information in the service of what may be perceived to be righteous ends”*

 

It seems to me that this problem is endemic in evidence-gathering for the development of public policy and especially social policy. Examples would include starting with the presumption that inequality is a negative indicator of health - there isn't any consistent evidence to support this contention yet is remains an assumption in healthcare planning and, in particular, planning around public health.

 

Alongside this prejudiced approach to evidence we also find the use of 'evidence' that is not supported by the facts -  so one of Bradford Council's public health consultants presents as 'fact' that, without further intervention, hazardous drinking will increase in the City. This ignores another fact - that alcohol consumption (especially among the young) has fallen significantly. It seems odd, given this change, to make an argument stating that 'hazardous' drinking will increase unless 'something is done'. We see an intelligent, well-informed man allowing his presumptions about health to run ahead of the actual evidence simply because he believes that drinking is something to be discouraged.

This problem would be fine if it wasn't the case that lay people can be easily dismissed when they challenge this 'white hat bias'. From sweeping statements such as 'we have evidence to support this from the literature' (I got that one when I challenged some facts), to simply ignoring the challenge and falling back on the logical fallacy of 'I'm the expert so I'm right'. We also get 'Macclesfield is in Greater Manchester' answers where the 'white hat bias' allows the person to simply ignore a fact. A good example here is the fact that consumption of non-dairy extrinsic sugars (that's all the sugar we add to stuff plus honey) has fallen significantly over the past 30 years. Meaning, of course, that sugar cannot be isolated as the guilty party in rising rates of obesity.

The problem of 'white hat bias' isn't limited to public health - I've seen it in work around regeneration, local economic development and retailing - but it is that case that such bias is now so ingrained in public health research as to cast doubts on the entire corpus. As the researchers at the University of Alabama pointed out:

UAB researchers examined ways in which scientists writing new research papers referenced two studies reporting the effects of sugar-sweetened beverages on body weight. They found that less than one-third of the papers that cited the beverage studies accurately reported the overall findings, and more than two-thirds exaggerated evidence that reducing sugar-sweetened drink consumption reduced weight or obesity. The UAB researchers also found several examples in breastfeeding studies in which the authors selectively included some data and discarded other research to support the theory that breastfeeding decreases the risk of obesity.

 And the result of this is that we get public policy initiatives that are not appropriate to the problem - plain packaging for cigarettes is unlikely (indeed one year on in Australia evidence now supports this argument) to make any difference to either the take up of smoking by teenagers or the overall consumption of tobacco. Yet the bias of researchers means that the only studies considered are those limited, qualitative studies showing that kids like bright colours.

The same problem can be seen with policies to limit or control fast food takeaways despite there being little or no evidence linking fast food to obesity. However, we still get Councils pushing through planning controls (banning takeaways near schools, for example) that won't change anything. 

We went through a time when 'evidence-based policy-making' was all the rage. What we should now realise is (as those cultural studies students could have told you from the start) that scientists and researchers wedded to a particular position will be selective in their interpretation and presentation of evidence so as to provide support for that position. 

 

The researchers who coined the phrase 'white hat bias' should be commended for their efforts and for the warning. But I fear it will fall on stony ground - the ideologues of public health are simply uninterested in any evidence that questions or contradicts their prejudged policy prescriptions.

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Science doesn't support EU proposed restrictions on e-cigs

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The New Scientist reports that:

Fifteen prominent scientists who have investigated the health consequences of electronic cigarettes have accused European Union regulators of misinterpreting their results. The scientists say the EU aim is to draft an unjustifiably burdensome new law to regulate e-cigarettes.

These scientists - including several cited in the EU's justification for stricter controls - argue that:

...regulation must be built on robust science. The cited errors relate to the strength of nicotine solutions allowed, the doses needed to match the nicotine "hit" from real cigarettes, an overstatement of the known dangers from nicotine and unwarranted assumptions that e-cigarettes will become "gateway products", tempting non-smokers and young people to try real cigarettes.

Of course the usual suspects are still wriggling with the BMA calling for more studies to find out things we already know (e.g. nicotine content, safety, health risks of nicotine). Nothing changes - although it's notable that the New Scientist gives the issue such coverage.

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Maths and social science...

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The research methods lecture for my MSc sticks in my mind. Not just because I have a curiosity about different research methods and their rationale but also because the lecturer told us not to worry about maths, indeed that she wasn't any good at maths.

Sadly, the results of such wilful ignorance look like this:

"Not many psychologists are very good at maths," says Brown. "Not many psychologists are even good at the maths and statistics you have to do as a psychologist. Typically you'll have a couple of people in the department who understand it. Most psychologists are not capable of organising a quantitative study. A lot of people can get a PhD in psychology without having those things at their fingertips. And that's the stuff you're meant to know. Losada's maths were of the kind you're not meant to encounter in psychology. The maths you need to understand the Losada system is hard but the maths you need to understand that this cannot possibly be true is relatively straightforward."

In the social sciences (and this is psychology among the most maths rich of these disciplines) the use of maths appears almost discouraged - we're told about qualitative research, how it gives greater insight and understand than mere number crunching. And, when someone comes up with a complicated quantitative explanation of everything ("The Spirit Level" springs to mind as a good example here) the legions of non-mathematicians leap upon the research with glee and excitement. Sadly, what they can't do is explain the maths.

It is a deceptive idea that we can call something 'science' - even with the qualifier 'social' - and then pretend that it can be studied without a reasonable degree of competence in maths and with research methods based on experiment, empirical study and data analysis. This isn't to dismiss qualitative studies - I used to be Planning Director in an ad agency, I love a nice focus group - but to say that, for all their value, such methods simply aren't science.

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The Climate Puppy

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A delightful analogy for the worst sort of climate change agitation:

Let us use, instead of a child with cancer, a happy little puppy dog. Somebody presents themselves as an expert, and tells you that the puppy dog is terribly, terribly sick. But you look at the puppy, and to you it seems to be perfectly normal. It wags and chases its own tail. It investigates every new object and smell, runs around, eats a bit, and falls asleep. You challenge the expert. He says that unless you do as he says, according to the computer model of a puppy he has devised, the real puppy will die in a horrible, horrible way, and it will all be your fault. Do you want to be a puppy murderer?

Whatever the truth of climate change, this does sum up so much of the debate.

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The truth about evidence-based policy making...

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Via Dick Puddlecote, the low down about the manipulation of truth by so-called academics:

Evidence based policymaking (EBPM) is about power: to decide what counts as evidence; to ignore or pay attention to particular studies; to link the evidence of a policy problem to a particular solution; and, to ensure that policymakers have the motive and opportunity to turn a solution into policy. Indeed, an attempt to portray EBPM as a technical or scientific process is often an attempt to exercise power: to rule some evidence in and most evidence out; and, to use particular forms of evidence to justify political action.

There you have it from Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the University of Stirling Paul Cairney. This is, as I have said many a time, the misuse of science to justify political control. While there are no uniforms it is objectively little different to the abuse of science practiced by certain 20th century regimes.

Bear in mind that the writer is a sociologist not a scientist. And understand that it is people like Prof Cairney who are misusing the science - the scientists themselves are, in the main, just useful idiots providing the substance from which the control freaks of government can carve their judgemental, nannying state.

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Open Access: It's not free you know - not even a little bit...

The Internet I mean. Yet that's what people persist in believing - and worse that somehow forcing it all to be 'free' (it isn't free by the way) is some kind of righteous moral crusade:

"The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations."

Now let's deconstruct this argument.

Firstly, prior to the arrival of the Internet and digital technologies, that scientific and cultural heritage was found typed onto paper stored as journals, books, monographs and so forth in myriads of libraries across the world. Nothing that MIT has done - or for that matter any of the publishers of academic research - changes this situation. Those books and other source materials are still 'locked up' in libraries and archives. Some of which have public access but most of which don't.

The point of JSTOR and other similar digital archives isn't to wickedly exploit the world's heritage but to ensure that, whatever happens to the current holders of that heritage, it remains available to the world's researchers. And the process of digitizing that heritage isn't cheap but right now is being paid for by the fact that JSTOR is able to recover costs from users (who otherwise might have to trip round the world to view the documents in question unless the holders of those documents were happy to use the well-established 'inter-library loan' system).

The question for all these self-righteous campaigners for "open access" is therefore, who pays? After all there's still a cost to digitizing content - it has to be scanned, key-worded, indexed, abstracted and stored in a searchable and recoverable way. And funnily enough all that work costs a lot of money. Then it has to be made available, promoted, catalogued and the server space paid for. This also costs a lot of money.

If the user isn't going to pay - directly through a per-use fee or indirectly via their institution - then somebody else has to cough up. And the only remaining candidate for stumping up the cash is the government - the taxpayer. So, far from being a liberation, so-called "open access" simply involves handing control of the entire system to the government and the costs to a load of people who have no interest in accessing the information.

So we replace a system where the world's intellectual heritage is largely available when needed to people who want to use it but which costs the taxpayer nothing with a system where everyone - including all those folk who aren't interested - can access but where there's a multi-billion dollar cost to the taxpayer.

This isn't about copyright but about how we pay for things we want - like saving the world's heritage for posterity. And it's much better done without loads of extra cost on the poor old taxpayer don't you think?

Finally, let's remember that seeking - through hacking and illegal downloading - to undermine this process serves nobody. It threatens the work of academic societies, it undermines the librarianship and archiving role of libraries and it means that access can only be sustained if it is the government's wish for that access to be sustained.

However we look at it, Open Access isn't free. Unless of course you steal the books.

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Eating stuff doesn't cause cancer....

Pie. A very good pie. From Ellisons in Cullingworth

Over recent years assorted nannying fussbuckets and attention seeking "researchers" have bombarded us with tales that warn how those wonderful foods we love are giving us cancer. Not that I was taking any notice but it does seem that it was - to be polite - a little exaggerated. At least according to some American academics:

...US scientists have warned that many reports connecting familiar ingredients with increased cancer risk have little statistical significance and should be treated with caution.

"When we examined the reports, we found many had borderline or no statistical significance," said Dr Jonathan Schoenfeld of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

In a paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Schoenfeld and his co-author, John Ioannidis of Stanford University, say trials have repeatedly failed to find effects for observational studies which had initially linked various foods to cancer.

These foods included:

...flour, coffee, butter, olives, sugar, bread and salt, as well as peas, duck, tomatoes, lemon, onion, celery, carrot, parsley and lamb, together with more unusual ingredients, including lobster, tripe, veal, mace, cinnamon and mustard.

Plus, of course, as the Daily Mirror puts it - the "British breakfast":

A health warning on the British ­breakfast was lifted yesterday after scientists ruled that bacon, tea and burnt toast may not cause cancer after all.

After months of stories linking the ­nation’s favourite foods with the disease, US scientists now say there is in fact NO evidence that they are harmful.

What on earth will the Daily Mail publish now?

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Public health - in which truth takes second place

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Sometimes people say the most worrying things:

So if these exercises are not capable of producing truth as we know it, do they serve other functions that are useful if not scientifically credible?

Read that carefully, at least three times. Ponder on its meaning.

Now read the next bit:

In a democracy, politicians and policymakers often need to be shamed into doing the right thing, and costs to society have the ability to shame, blame and even defame.

So the figures used by public health people are not true but it doesn't matter because we need to be "shamed into doing the right thing".

And that right thing is prohibition of course. Denormalising choices made by ordinary people. Banning and restricting our choices.

Despite the "science" being a lie. A lie justified on the basis of a specious "public good" by a man who claims to be a scientist:

Dr. Babor spent several years in postdoctoral research training in social psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and subsequently served as head of social science research at McLean Hospital's Alcohol and Drug Abuse Research Center in Belmont, MA. In 1982 he moved to the University of Connecticut School of Medicine. He has served as the Scientific Director at the Alcohol Research Center and the interim Chair of the Psychiatry Department before moving to Community Medicine in 1998.

Welcome my friends to the world of "public health".

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Science and growth. It really isn't as simple as all that...

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Science is wonderful. I'll sign up to government investing in basic science every day. But I don't think it's a growth panacea. Lots of people do though:

The private sector can’t do it alone. We rely on companies to translate scientific discoveries into products. But federal investment in research and development, especially basic research, is critical to their success.

Now the author of those words is a physics professor and former scientific advisor to President Clinton so we might say he has an interest. But his view is widely held - investment in science, technology and maths by governments is a surefire route to growth. The problem is that there's precious little link (at least in the medium term) between investment in basic science and economic growth.

You see folks. Spending money on scientific research in universities doesn't cut the mustard as a growth strategy. A while ago in a different circumstance I wrote this:

We need, therefore, to examine what other (ideally measurable) inputs might improve our assessment of innovation.  Some authors identify ‘learning-by-doing’ as a factor in innovation (Iyigun 2006) while others argue for exogenous factors such as the size of the (innovating) population (Jones 1995).  This latter measure suggests that a better proxy for innovation activity might be the number of ‘knowledge workers’.  Such an approach would capture R&D workers and other workers involved in innovative activities. 

It seemed to me then that government is better placed investing in creating scientists, engineers and mathematicians rather than spending money on basic research in those subjects. At least if they want to generate growth. And for those regions that want to shift their economies they need to get lots of these people to live and work there. That means they aren't stuck with the one employer of those skills or forced to flit from one end of the country to the other so change jobs. And more importantly there will be plenty of people to partner with in developing and actioning innovative ideas.

This was a central failing of the UK's Regional Development Agencies (RDAs). All of them had innovation strategies but all of these strategies were, in effect, captured by higher education. Rather than focusing on innovation in business the RDAs spent their cash instead on funding research institutes and university-led strategies sited too close to their research.

There is evidence to suggest that university-led innovation strategies focusing on collaboration and the spinning off of businesses from HEIs leads to a misplaced focus on scientific research rather than business growth (Jones 1995, Frenz & Oughton 2005).  Perhaps the most effective way to generate effective innovation at the level of the firm (where it has a direct impact on economic performance) is to reduce the barriers to innovation.  The biggest of these barriers is cost and econometric models suggest that reducing innovation costs is more effective that investing in R&D or building innovation networks and systems (Martin 1999).  

In the long-term scientific research does help drive the technological advances that lead to economic growth. The problem is that, in the short- to medium-term, it's very difficult to spot the beneficial effects of such research especially when compared to the promotion of in-firm innovation.

References (yay, I don't do this often!):

Frenz M. & Oughton C. (2005), ‘Innovation in the UK regions and devolved administrations: a review of the literature’ presentation of report for DTI and ODPM, London, DTI

Iyigun M. (2006), ‘Clusters of invention, life cycle of technologies and endogenous growth’ in Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Vol. 30 pp687-719, New York, Elsevier

Jones C I, (1995), ‘R&D-based models of economic growth’ in Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 103 No. 4 pp759-783, University of Chicago

Martin P. (1999), ‘Public policies, regional inequalities and growth’ in Journal of Public Economics Vol. 73 pp 85-105, New York, Elsevier

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