Links - 20th July 2019 (2)

The $1.5 Trillion Question: How to Fix Student-Loan Debt? (Ep. 377) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "Between 2000 and 2010, undergraduate enrollment at U.S. colleges increased by 37 percent. As demand rose, so did the price: from 2000 to 2016, the average annual cost of college more than doubled, from around $15,000 a year to nearly $32,000. Over the past 20 years, only two other goods or services have risen as much as college. One is hospital services; the other is college textbooks.Since 1985, college costs have risen four times faster than the Consumer Price Index. Why? There are a number of reasons. One has to do with what economists call Baumol’s cost disease. That’s what happens when salaries rise — in this case, the salaries of college administrators and faculty and staff — without a commensurate rise in productivity. You also see this in the performing arts — and in hospital services, by the way...
DANIELS: When I suggested maybe just a one-year pause [in rising tuition fees], there were those among the enrollment professionals here who very genuinely said, “Oh my gosh, if we stand still while everyone else goes up again, people will think we don’t have confidence in the quality of our product.”
And they did it beyond that one year; tuition at Purdue has been frozen at least through the 2021 school year. The cost of room and board was also cut, by five percent.
DANIELS: And so the all-in cost, in nominal dollars, of attending our school in 2021 will be less than it was in 2012...
There has probably always been a leftist tilt in the academy. I can remember a French intellectual — this is 25 years ago now — saying Marxism is so discredited over there, where they’ve seen it close up. He said, “When we need a Marxist, now we have to import one from an American university.”... the advance of knowledge requires the collision of ideas. And that’s what’s beginning to trouble, I think, even people of more liberal or leftist persuasion. Where you get this complete homogeneity, this just dreary conformity. And then the free inquiry stops being the driver of new discoveries and ideas... the first requirement of self-government is to be able to govern oneself. That is, if you want to live in a country that is free, where people come together and decide about their common future, it presupposes that people have some measure of autonomy and are happy about that, and want to live their own lives... on some of the original coinage of the American republic, there was the Latin phrase “Exitus in Dubio Est.” “The outcome is still in doubt.” At the very beginning, people said, “Boy, this experiment in governing ourselves is really unproven, and it might not last.”"

23andMe (and You, and Everyone Else) (Ep. 378) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "GEDmatch lets anyone upload raw DNA data from home-genetics testing companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com. It turned out that at least 24 relatives of the suspect were included in the GEDmatch database. The police, by cross-referencing the suspect’s DNA data against Census data and cemetery records, were able to confirm that they had the right guy."

BBC World Service - The Food Chain, When breast isn't best - "Breastfeeding is what responsible societies and communities expect their new mothers to do. But given so many don't, why has the stigma around formula fed babies stuck so fast? This week, we brought together three mums in different parts of the world. All of them either gave up on exclusive breastfeeding, or decided to not even start... You do find that when you are giving your child formula, feeding him formula, it does help to you know, get the husbands involved... in terms of support, I actually found a lot of sort of judgment from acquaintances. A lot of them are men... A lot of them are just like, you know, do whatever you feel like you need to do. You the mother. So you know best...
In the UK, at least our health visitors and midwives have really got it into their heads that it's such a big thing. And also some of our hospitals, they have a UNICEF baby friendly rating, which means that they only recommend breastfeeding. They don't stock any baby milk. So I knew that I was going to probably bottle feed, you could get a kit for a bottle feeding. And you have to take that in with you...
‘A lot of people don't talk about the benefits of putting your child on formula. And they’re definitely benefits for you as a mother. Maybe because everyone's pushing this you have to breastfeed thing that people don't consider’
‘Happy mother happy child.’
‘Yes... you can plan your day is better. There's just so much flexibility I feel now that I'm putting my son on formula.’"
Is it sexist to say the mother knows best? Do women who never want to have a kid get an opinion on breastfeeding? Post-menopausal women?

Sibling Study Finds No Long-Term Breastfeeding Benefits For Kids - "in this study spanning 25 years of data on more than 8,000 children ages 4 to 14, the long-term benefits of breastfeeding dwindled down to virtually nothing? “Nothing. Exactly.”... We know moms are able to pass immunity through breast milk to babies, and that in the very short term, it makes sense biologically that this boosted immunity can protect their intestines or their lungs from infections. But this is likely to wear off fairly quickly during that first year"

Research shows we shouldn’t always recommend breastfeeding. - "In July 2002, the results of a large study were published that showed that women who took HRT were more likely to develop breast cancer. They also had a higher incidence of heart attacks, strokes, and blood clots. Nearly everything that health care providers had believed about HRT was disproved. It was a formative experience of my career. How did good people with good intentions get things so very wrong? They made a mistake common in the field of preventive health. They based their recommendations on small, early studies that showed benefits without waiting for larger studies to demonstrate that the benefits were real, and that no risks had been overlooked. Even the professional societies failed to wait for definitive evidence. We don’t seem to have learned from that debacle. In fact, we are currently engaged in repeating it. In this case, the practice being aggressively promoted is breastfeeding. Every major professional organization and society, from the World Health Organization to the American Academy of Pediatrics, insists that breastfeeding has significant health benefits for babies, that increasing breastfeeding rates will improve infant health, and that breastfeeding save lives.In 2010, breastfeeding advocates confidently predicted that raising breastfeeding rates would save lives, reduce disease, and lower health care costs. Nearly nine years later, none of that has come to pass, even though the breastfeeding rate in the U.S. has almost quadrupled... There has never been any proven association between breastfeeding rates and infant health: Many countries with very high breastfeeding rates have high rates of infant mortality, and many countries with low rates of infant mortality have very low breastfeeding rates. That’s just what you would expect if breastfeeding had very little impact on infant health... aggressive breastfeeding promotion has significant risks. There has been an increase in babies falling from their mothers’ hospital beds or suffocating. There has been a rise in serious harms to babies including dehydration, starvation, brain injuries, and even deaths. Indeed, exclusive breastfeeding on discharge is now the leading risk factor for hospital re-admission... the known benefits for most babies—slightly fewer colds and cases of diarrhea—are so minimal... up to 15 percent of first-time mothers will not be able to produce enough breast milk to fully nourish an infant, especially in the first few days after birth. The relentless emphasis on exclusive breastfeeding instead leaves frantic new mothers to cope with starving babies who won’t sleep because they are so hungry...
1. Nearly all benefits of breastfeeding come from extrapolation of small studies that have never been replicated at larger scale. This is the same thing that happened with hormone replacement therapy.
2. Breastfeeding is closely associated with higher socioeconomic status. That means the benefits we’ve attributed to breastfeeding may actually accrue from greater wealth and better access to health care, not from breastfeeding itself.
3. White-hat bias, a cognitive bias promoting what are believed to be righteous ends"

The cost and value of breast milk. - "It’s only free if your time is worthless. And even then, it is only free if we all turn the blind eye to some obvious economic realities... Among women who were employed in the year before their first child, those who breast-feed for six months or longer experienced a steeper decline in their annual income, on average, than mothers who breast-fed for shorter durations or not at all"

Do Tongue Ties Really Cause Breastfeeding Problems? - "Moms might start worrying about tongue tie when breastfeeding fails to be the peaceful bonding experience they envisioned, when they’re dealing with cracked nipples and the pain of trying to nurse a baby who can’t latch properly.They might call a local lactation consultant to help. If the consultant suspects a tongue tie, she’ll typically refer mom and baby to a pediatric dentist or an otolaryngologist (an ear, nose, and throat doctor), who will perform a procedure to “clip” the stringlike piece of tissue underneath the tongue. In some cases, the child’s pediatrician is not involved in the decision... While the popularity of frenotomies has exploded in recent years, many medical professionals and researchers say it’s not totally clear whether they address the issues they’re supposed to—or whether a lot of babies are having an unnecessary procedure... While the popularity of frenotomies has exploded in recent years, many medical professionals and researchers say it’s not totally clear whether they address the issues they’re supposed to—or whether a lot of babies are having an unnecessary procedure... Many parents seek tongue-tie treatment for their babies in the weeks and months following birth, after experiencing difficulty breastfeeding... “Today, people are trying to find reasons why it isn’t working, whereas in the past, if it didn’t work, people just went to formula and it was fine”... Today, women face pressure to breastfeed from the moment their babies are born. Yet, they might not be taught about proper latching, or the fact that—unsurprisingly—attaching a tiny suction machine to your nipples for hours each day can be painful. Instead of working through the natural learning curve, parents might look for a problem they can fix to make it better. Enter tongue tie... I can still remember the annoying, singsongy refrain: If it hurts, you’re doing it wrong. Guess what? It really, really hurts, just like several other aspects of expelling a human being from your body... much of the research on the subject relies on mothers self-reporting the effect a frenotomy had on breastfeeding, which is highly subjective. In short, moms might see a change post-frenotomy because they want to... An errant tongue-tie diagnosis can obscure a more serious issue... only 10 percent of pediatricians think tongue ties affect breastfeeding, compared with 30 percent of ENTs and nearly 70 percent of lactation consultants"
What a religious obsession with breastfeeding does

Why this lactation consultant told a new mom to stop breastfeeding - "the day I gave her permission to stop breastfeeding was the day she felt a shift. The tears stopped. She started enjoying the little moments with her boy and their bond grew. She said she still has moments when she feels sad that she and her son missed out on the nursing experience, but she knows that stopping is what her family needed... As much as I like #fedisbest, I think it should evolve into new movement: #momsmentalhealthmatters"
What trans inclusive term for mom could we use? People who have given birth to babies? #mentalhealthofpeoplewhohavegivenbirthtobabiesmatters

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent Podcast, Airstrikes and Sirens - "There are no air raid sirens or shelters for the ordinary residents of Gaza. Only the militants it is said can escape to their underground bunkers"

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Morality of Leadership - "Politicians may have been left wrestling with an irreconcilable conflict between direct and representative democracy. Their fractious fumbling may reflect how rancorous and divided all the rest of us are. But there are many who see this as a moral failure of leadership, an entire political class seemingly unable to define objectives that attract support, act in the wider public interest rather than their own. Is that as much about the nature of leadership itself? Do we want visionary leaders or leaders who listen? Idealists or pragmatists? Messiahs or managers?...
I feel like one of the things that I think is a duty of a leader, is that at anytime we have a crisis, whether it's at the beginning or the middle or the end, a leader should try and unite a people, whatever, however, the leader does that. What we've seen in the current Premiership, is that Theresa May has spectacularly failed to unite either parliament, party or people. That can’t all be down to circumstances...
We have a Labour Party, which doesn't seem to be pretty interested in winning power, because it's obsessed with its own kind of activist base...
‘Jimmy Carter, in the 1970s. Said we need to use less energy, we need to spend less, we need to balance the budget. The American voters kicked him out, they elected Ronald Reagan instead and they had a great party in the 80s. But really, who historically was great? The man who saw the troubles to come or the man who just provided a short dose of sugar.’
‘Well, Reagan is dead. And Jimmy Carter continues to try and negotiate, getting people free and so forth. Carter was, could be a great man without being a great leader.’...
'If the leader is the smartest person in the room, the assertion in the book is that they're in the wrong room. The leader’s job is to make other people feel like they're the smartest people in the room and draw out the talents of the team themselves... there are well known leaders that have been particularly good at certain times in our history, such as Churchill in wartime, but who didn't turn out to be good leaders in peacetime. And so we use these pejorative terms as being right or wrong or good or bad, when in reality, it's about the right fit of the right leader at the right time, the right place... It’s often said that management is doing things right. And leadership is doing the right things'"

New Classical Tracks: Guitarist Thibaut Garcia takes deep dive into Bach's legacy with new album | Classical MPR - "The recordings' possibilities were very short, because the length or the size of the vinyl or LP... the size of the recording was very short, he had to play very fast to fit the whole piece on it"

'Mighty boutique orchestra' celebrates diverse women composers in 'Project W' | Classical MPR - "I couldn't get my Green Card after 911. My lawyer said to me: well man you only have two choices, because they have changed the rule. Having a doctorate degree not necessary qualify you for Green Card. So she said to me, either marry an American, which is quicker to obtain the Green Card, or go win an international competition. I didn't know which was harder"