Bureaucratic travel

Arrival and departure forms. In the US they are called I-94 forms. Never understood their purpose - is all that paperwork really worth the information obtained from those forms?

The only use I can see from them are for tourism statistics, but surely there are more efficient ways of getting this information.

In which I am reminded that facts are open to interpretation

In the National Geographic issue on Easter Island:

Jared Diamond drew heavily on Flenley’s work for his assertion in Collapse, his influential 2005 book, that ancient Easter Islanders committed unintentional ecocide. They had the bad luck, Diamond argues, to have settled an extremely fragile island—dry, cool, and remote, which means it’s poorly fertilized by windblown dust or volcanic ash. (Its own volcanoes are quiescent.) When the islanders cleared the forests for firewood and farming, the forests didn’t grow back. As wood became scarce and the islanders could no longer build seagoing canoes for fishing, they ate the birds. Soil erosion decreased their crop yields. Before Europeans showed up, the Rapanui had descended into civil war and cannibalism. The collapse of their isolated civilization, Diamond writes, is “the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources” and “a worst-case scenario for what may lie ahead of us in our own future.”

The moai, he thinks, accelerated the self-destruction. Diamond interprets them as power displays by rival chieftains who, trapped on a remote little island, lacked other ways of strutting their stuff. They competed by building ever bigger statues. 

I thought he made a very good argument based on his presentation of the evidence. However:

Rearrange and reinterpret the scattered shards of fact, though, and you get a more optimistic vision of the Rapa Nui past—that of archaeologists Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii and Carl Lipo of California State University Long Beach, who have studied the island for the past decade. It’s a vision peopled by peaceful, ingenious moai builders and careful stewards of the land. Hunt and Lipo agree that Easter Island lost its lush forests and that it was an “ecological catastrophe”—but the islanders themselves weren’t to blame. And the moai certainly weren’t. There is indeed much to learn from Easter Island, Hunt says, “but the story is different.”

His and Lipo’s controversial new version, based on their research and others’, begins with their own excavation at Anakena beach. It has convinced them that the Polynesians didn’t arrive until A.D. 1200, about four centuries later than is commonly understood, which would leave them only five centuries to denude the landscape. Slashing and burning wouldn’t have been enough, Hunt and Lipo think. Anyway, another tree killer was present. When archaeologists dig up nuts from the extinct Easter Island palm, the nuts are often marred by tiny grooves, made by the sharp teeth of Polynesian rats.

The rats arrived in the same canoes as the first settlers. Abundant bones in the Anakena dig suggest the islanders dined on them, but otherwise the rodents had no predators. In just a few years, Hunt and Lipo calculate, they would have overrun the island. Feasting on palm nuts, they would have prevented the reseeding of the slow-growing trees and thereby doomed Rapa Nui’s forest, even if humans hadn’t been slashing and burning. No doubt the rats ate birds’ eggs too.
Of course, the settlers bear responsibility for bringing the rats; Hunt and Lipo suspect they did so intentionally. (They also brought chickens.) But like invasive species today, the Polynesian rats did more harm to the ecosystem than to the humans who transported them. Hunt and Lipo see no evidence that Rapanui civilization collapsed when the palm forest did; based on their own archaeological survey of the island, they think its population grew rapidly after settlement to around 3,000 and then remained more or less stable until the arrival of Europeans.

Cleared fields were more valuable to the Rapanui than palm forests were. But they were wind-lashed, infertile fields watered by erratic rains. Easter Island was a tough place to make a living. It required heroic efforts. In farming, as in moai moving, the islanders shifted monumental amounts of rock—but into their fields, not out. They built thousands of circular stone windbreaks, called manavai, and gardened inside them. They mulched whole fields with broken volcanic rocks to keep the soil moist and fertilized it with nutrients that the volcanoes were no longer spreading. In short, Hunt, Lipo, and others contend, the prehistoric Rapanui were pioneers of sustainable farming, not inadvertent perpetrators of ecocide. “Rather than a case of abject failure, Rapa Nui is an unlikely story of success,” Hunt and Lipo argue in their recent book.

It’s called The Statues That Walked, and the Rapanui enjoy better spin in it than they do in Collapse. Hunt and Lipo don’t trust oral history accounts of violent conflict among the Rapanui; sharp obsidian flakes that other archaeologists see as weapons, they see as farm tools. The moai helped keep the peace, they argue, not only by signaling the power of their builders but also by limiting population growth: People raised statues rather than children. What’s more, moving the moai required few people and no wood, because they were walked upright. On that issue, Hunt and Lipo say, evidence supports the folklore.

Mobile blogging

Am trying out the Andoid app. If anything it might get me to blog a little more than in the past year.

Pros: Convenience
Cons: No spellcheck! Which is a necessity with a smaller keyboard.

PS: Never understood why there isn't an option for a Dvorak keyboard for mobile devices. With a smaller than usual screen/keyboard it seems more efficient to just lay everything out alphabetically.

Condos in Penang vs Bangkok

I am surprised by the differences in the new condo market in Penang (Malaysia) versus Bangkok (Thailand). In Penang I am told, the condos are unfinished - no bathroom fixtures, toilets, or even floors! Presumably those who buy in Penang are more interested/vested in personalizing the place. In Bangkok, the market seems to be very different since not only are the condos completely finished, they are also completely furnished!

The obvious and perhaps wrong conclusion is that there is a larger foreign component in the Bangkok market who are buying for investment and income purposes by renting out to vacationers or the expat community whereas the Penang market caters more towards the locals who are more willing to deal with the added hassles of personalization.

But with the apparent never ending construction of new condos in Penang the local market might soon be tapped out. Will the Penang condo construction ever move toward the Bangkok model? With a smaller expat community, it is not likely, at least not all the way to fully furnished. But they may come with floors and toilets.

I wonder what the differences are in other places.

Singaporean buffoons in Thailand

Spotted at Suvarnabhumi airport - a bunch of 20 somethings high on themselves. Cut right in front of us at the immigration line. A woman in front of us waved her friends over and five or six of them came running over laughing and giggling. They were probably reveling in the fact that they managed to get into a shorter line. This just confirms my belief that Singaporeans are a bunch of assholes.

Or if you prefer a less harsh judgment - Singaporeans are the Asian version of the ugly American.

Most surprising fact about DC

Police Chief Cathy Lanier:


"After becoming pregnant at age 14, I dropped out of high school."

What the Oregon health study shows or doesn't show

Some thoughts about the Oregon Health Study - which is being dissed by MR here and here.

First off the comparison of this study to Reinhart and Rogoff is way off base. Reinhart and Rogoff were recalcitrant in sharing their data. Had they been more forthcoming in the first place it is possible that someone would have pointed out the Excel error much earlier. Instead they left all the researchers puzzled over their attempts to replicate their findings. This is NOTHING like Reinhart Rogoff.

What if they had found positive effects? Then I think the debate would have shifted to size effects and whether the results were meaningful in any sense. The critics are leaping to the "no result" finding as a way to justify their opposition. They would probably have leaped to a positive result by pointing out the lack of meaningful results regardless.

RCTs are pretty useless in this debate. Think of their outcomes - blood pressure, hypertension and cholesterol levels. How can having insurance by itself promote better outcomes? To actually change these outcomes, insurance holders have to actually change their behavior. There is a lot of behavioral economics evidence out there to argue against anyone actually doing anything about this regardless of health insurance status.

This is an example of RCTs taking away the analysts' ability to think straight. Retrospection would have predicted the null effect. The low income population makes them even more constrained in their ability to affect lifestyle changes that would positively affected the outcome measures. I have some doubt as to whether even a high income population would have been able to affect the lifestyle changes necessary to have a detectable effect.

This is an example of RCT measuring the wrong outcome. We only measure what we can see or even worse - what is easiest to measure. By some kind of fluke these are the outcomes that are hardest to change. I have to change my diet, my exercise regimen, my sleep habits, and so forth. If this is hard for a middle class person how much harder would it be for a low income group?

Effects of the recession on health? Is it possible that the stress of the recession and the job market is driving the results in both treatment and control?

This randomized study should have been titled something like "How much do people take their doctors' advice in changing their lifestyles? An analysis of low income population using Medicaid lotteries" or something similar. Would the findings have made any headlines then?

Alternatively, if the study participants were given medications to treat their hypertension, cholesterol, etc. then the study would have been about the efficacy of drugs on the low income population. Or perhaps prescription drug compliance among the low income population.

The comeback "You still buy health insurance don't you?" is a reasonable response contrary to what Tyler Cowen thinks. And this returns to the possibility that the benefits of ACA and expansion of Medicaid was oversold. Why do we buy health insurance - surely not to become healthier. We buy insurance to preserve the status quo, i.e. I don't want my health to get worse and if it gets worse then at least I can do something about it. I have health insurance and I can go to the doctor. And when we think about health we generally don't think in terms of cholesterol or blood pressure. We think of actual illnesses, pain, discomfort, etc. and again evidence from behavioral economics may be useful here.

What is going here I think is that possibly and perhaps in fact, very likely that supporters of ACA felt they had to justify the expansion of Medicaid by some evidence based reason and like their opponents who will grab at anything they can to fight against it they fell onto the belief that health insurance improves overall health - not specific illnesses, but overall health because it was easier to measure in an RCT.

Instead of making arguments for ACA on grounds of equity and perhaps even a right to adequate care and a right not to impose the costs of emergency room visits on others, etc. they have backed themselves into a corner with this null finding.