 Pearls before swine It wouldn’t surprise most authors to learn that there’s a huge amount of luck in publishing. After all, your as yet unpublished novel is clearly a work of extraordinary genius, and yet it inexplicably has not gained as much attention as obviously inferior works such as Middlemarch. In her newsletter, Virginia Postrel, herself an author, agrees: “When it comes to books, no amount of intellectual quality is enough without dumb luck.” “The importance of luck to the spread of valuable insights — and creative work in general — is widely underestimated,” she says. That’s true in science, where studies vital to the understanding of the world — notably, Gregor Mendel’s “Experiments in Plant Hybrids,” written in 1866 but ignored until the early 20th century, revolutionized evolutionary theory — can be missed for decades. But it’s also true of publishing. “Ninety percent of everything may be crap,” she writes. “But that doesn’t mean that the only good stuff is in the 10 percent that sees daylight.” Cervix with a smile Cervical cancer is a horrible disease. Unusually for cancers, it disproportionately strikes the young: In the U.K., the most common age to get a diagnosis is 30 to 34. And it kills many thousands of women every year. But, says the epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz on his Substack Health Nerd, there is some good news: It might be eradicated within our lifetimes. Cervical cancer is almost exclusively caused by human papillomavirus, which is often spread by sexual contact. When that was realized, scientists started working on a vaccine, and in 2006 they created one. Now, 17 years later, the first generation of girls who received that vaccine is reaching the age when cervical cancer is most common — and far fewer of them are getting it. Cases in the U.S. are down 65% among 25- to 29-year-old women, one study found, and in Scotland, among women vaccinated at age 12 or 13, there were no cases at all. Another study in Sweden found similar results. “There is increasingly strong evidence that cervical cancer will be gone within our lifetimes,” says Meyerowitz-Katz, “which is nothing short of miraculous.” PEP talk One of the most impactful moments of the George W. Bush presidency was the decision, announced in the same State of the Union speech in which he called for an invasion of Iraq, to pay for antiretroviral drugs for 2 million HIV/AIDS patients around the world. At the time, though, economists objected — the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, PEPFAR, may be “humane,” one wrote, “but it isn’t economical.” This wasn’t an objection to overseas aid in general; the claim was that the money would do more good elsewhere, if spent on prevention, rather than cure. Those arguments made good sense — but 20 years later, we can see they were probably wrong. PEPFAR has saved millions of lives and been one of the most effective aid programs in history. In Asterisk, the development researcher Justin Sandefur asks why the economists got it wrong. They put too much weight, he argues, on shaky empirical evidence supporting alternative possibilities; and they treated the available budget as a fixed sum, when it turned out to be flexible. It’s not that the economists were wrong to think of lifesaving in economic terms: “Economists got PEPFAR wrong analytically, not emotionally, and continue to make the same analytical mistakes.” |
