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Michael Moore on life-expectancy
The mystery of declining CD sales
Freeman Dyson—“Our Biotech Future”
The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights
ON BBC Newsnight 24th October 2007 Michael Moore was interviewed about his new film “Sicko”. Michael Moore is a shameless self-promoter who should probably be taken with a pinch of salt. On the question of life-expectancy I was moved to verify for myself his dramatic claim that Briton’s lived longer than Americans.
According to the Economist “Pocket World in Figures 2007” citing 2005 figures, life-expectancy in the UK was 79.0 years (presumably this is an adjusted figure to take into account longer female life-expectancy). For the US the corresponding figure is 77.9 years, putting America 40= with Portugal (Britain is 31= with the Netherlands).
http://www.economist.com/markets/rankings/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9283942 (subscription required)
It seems that life-expectancy is not correlated with the quality of
health-care. I would say it would have more to do with diet and lifestyle
choices. I would say that busy people live longer on average (Hong Kong has
the 3rd highest life-expectancy in the world) and that living in a large
family would help. On the subject of health care it is a little remarked
feature of modern medicine that there are few life-threatening conditions
that can be cured. Drugs may alleviate the symptoms, but often cause
complications, and the same applies doubly so to organ replacement. So
perhaps given the primitive state of early 21st century medicine we should
not rely on doctors to extend life and instead try to lead active and
fulfilling lives, take calculated risks and ignore the fad diets. Good
cooking and fresh ingredients are best in my experience. 
From: Christopher G D Tipper Date: 31 August 2007 13:55:25 BDT To: realtime@wsj.com Subject: Why an obituary for the CD?
THE RECENT article “The CD turns 25” wasn’t badly written, but I wonder why you IT journalists all have the same opinion about the CD?
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/122874/comment-the-cd-is-25-today-but-whos-celebrating.html
There’s no meaningful replacement for the CD, and MP3s will eventually be replaced by something. CDs are an archive medium and reference source for the home user. Until you match those functions, computer-based music will be in effect disposable. I have an iPod for convenience but not because it is a replacement for my (steadily expanding) CD collection.
So it might be worthwhile to celebrate the 25 anniversary of the CD, but why on earth does it have to be an obituary? I’ll bet if you looked at unit sales, rather than music industry profits you will find that CD sales are expanding. (see below) To give you an example I noticed a jazz CD I bought in 1999 cost me £14.97 from HMV. I looked up the same album yesterday and it can be had for £7.99 [from the same store]. That’s got to be as much to do with competition in the music business as it has with falling sales.
Christopher Tipper
The article doesn’t actually validate this argument. According to the WSJ:
“According to Nielsen, U.S. CD sales fell to 553 million last year from their peak of 712 million in 2001.”
According to the BBC “Global CD sales slump in 2006”:
“The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) said sales last year dropped to 1.7bn, compared with 1.9bn in 2005.”
Of course the latest figures are not available so CD sales may have started to rebound, as I supposed, but this seems unlikely.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The music in industry has blamed peer-to-peer file-sharing for cannibalizing sales of CDs, but I suspect this is overblown. I think it’s time to consider the possibility that the global music market is saturated. I would also say that the teenagers who consume more music than anyone else cannot afford CDs (and never could in my personal experience). With the demise of the compact cassette the music business has forfeited a large source of revenue. CD buyers are and always have been the older consumers with more disposable income, and they are a shrinking audience. So maybe there is some truth to the file-sharing myth, but it is not CD sales that are under threat but music industry profits.
This from PC Pro “File-sharing not to blame for music sales decline - report”:
Permalink“‘Online music has been booming,’ said Dan Cryan, Screen Digest analyst. ‘However, online sales alone are not going to be enough to halt the decline in music sales.’”
“Cryan said that the music industry should look beyond file sharing as a cause of its ongoing decline, noting that according to the industry’s own figures, the number of tracks available on p2p networks declined from 1.1 billion in 2003 to 885m in 2005. Instead he suggested that it should examine the extent to which music has been pushed aside by other media. In high street stores such as HMV and Virgin, shelves once filled with CDs now hold DVDs, books and mobile phones.”
“‘Seen in this light the fact that the decline in physical music sales corresponds to the boom in DVD sales begins to look less like a coincidence and more like a cause,’ he said.”
IF this article from the New York Review of Books were written by anyone other than Freeman Dyson, gadfly of particle physics, I doubt anyone would pay any attention. It is so speculative, morally dubious and naïve that I doubt anyone else would be taken seriously. As it is, Mr Dyson (or is that ‘Professor’?) has laid out a schematic argument for the democratisation of genetic engineering (at least the words “Open Source” are used, capitalisation included) which he argues will lead to the reinvigoration of rural economies world-wide and the beginning of a new ecology based on engineered organisms.
He starts by quoting Carl Woese who has sketched out a new tree of life and at the same time argued that primordial life was not entirely based on Darwinian selection. Dyson argues that evolution ‘stopped’ 10,000 years ago (questionable) and that with the ecological domination of homo sapiens there will come a time when we are creating new organisms according to design, in effect cross-pollinating genes across species and replacing the slow tedious processes of evolution with our own ingenuity. So far so good.
The problem is that Dyson tries to elaborate his argument by trying to show how this might happen. His example of new silicon based photo-synthesizers sounds radically implausible. If silicon were easily integrated into biological processes does it not seem likely that evolution would have discovered how to do so in the last three billion years? More seriously the idea that I could grow my own pet fills me with moral horror. Dyson does not seem to acknowledge the profound ethical dilemmas posed by his futurology. One does not have to be a Christian fundamentalist to be concerned about the potential for untold suffering caused by human interference in genetic processes. He seems to believe what he is talking about is no more controversial than uploading a home movie to YouTube.
Mr Dyson’s economics is also questionable. He seems to believe that the long-term migration of populations to urban centres has come about at the expense of rural economies. I would say that commerce between town and country has always been a two-way street and urban civilisation has evolved partly because of the growing productivity of agriculture and the division of labour that Adam Smith described in his “Wealth of Nations”. Urban civilisation would not be possible without cheap and efficient food-production.
Urbanisation occurs for much the same reason similar industries tend to
cluster (think Silicon Valley): it brings people closer together and fosters
economic development. Rural poverty in the developing world has more to do
with over-population and poor farming methods. Urbanisation is the
economist’s solution, and it has the advantage of being pragmatic, the
opposite of Mr Dyson’s neo-ecological hand-waving. If amateur genetic
engineering is ever to be the answer to rural poverty, Mr Dyson had better
hope for more birth-control in the third world.
IN “A major concession” by Mark Mardell, BBC Europe Correspondent, 14 Jun 07, 04:36 PM, wrote: Just seen a copy of a report by the Germans to national governments about the new treaty.
“Some delegations have requested that the text of the Charter of Fundamental Rights be removed from the Treaty. Others strongly oppose this move. Most of the latter could however accept it, provided that the legally binding character of the Charter is preserved by means of a cross-reference in the body of the Treaty.”
My comments:
As I understand it the Charter includes such unprecedented provisions as the “Right to work” and the “Right to Health”. Isaiah Berlin in his essay “Two concepts of Liberty” deliberated a concept of ‘positive liberty’ and ‘negative liberty’. His terminology was slightly confusing, but broadly speaking ‘negative liberties’ are those negative rights, freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, freedom to worship, that don’t impinge on anybody else’s rights; and ‘positive liberties’ are those rights that may conflict with the rights of other members of the community. Berlin was attempting to build an intellectual defence of classical liberalism, arguing that the newer ‘positive liberties’ were a threat to rule by consent and in the end deeply illiberal. A Communist state would aim to provide universal employment and universal health care, but in a free society these were incompatible with rule by consent.
In a nutshell you could categorise a “right to work” by the question “Who are you going to sue?” For to answer this question you would in the end have to admit of the State as the employer of last resort. This is nothing but old-fashioned Socialism and it begs the question of why we are contemplating introducing such an insidious provision into European law. Likewise a “right to health” makes a mockery of the notion of private health-care, and I doubt there are many medical practitioners who would wish to provide their services at minimal cost under the force of law.
The British Government is for analogous reasons opposed to importing the
Charter into domestic law and is seeking an opt-out. It seems that the recent
memo from the German Government is seeking to undermine this position by
making the Charter a binding component of the Treaty
(“cross-reference”). I think this is an act of subterfuge and only
reinforces the arguments of those opposed to the EU on principle. I am not
yet a eurosceptic, but I object most strongly to this sort of underhand
tactic.
Content Feed
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October 2007—Health-care and life
expectancy...more
September 2007—The music industry is in
decline...more
August 2007—“Our Biotech Future” from
New York Review of Books...more
June 2007—Isaiah Berlin and “positive”
liberties...more
May 2007—Ten years is a long
time in politics...more
April 2007—Précis of “War of the
World”...more
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