Teddy and New Nationalism

But remember that Teddy lost in 1912 to a Governor from New Jersey!

THE NEW NATIONALISM

Teddy Roosevelt

Osawatomie, Kansas

August 31, 1910.

 

We come here to-day to commemorate one of the epoch making events of the long struggle for the rights of man - the long struggle for the uplift of humanity. Our country - this great Republic - means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy, the triumph of popular government, and, in the long run, of an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him. That is why the history of America is now the central feature of the history of the world; for the world has set its face hopefully toward our democracy; and, O my fellow citizens, each one of you carries on your shoulders not only the burden of doing well for the sake of your own country, but the burden of doing well and of seeing that this nation does well for the sake of mankind.…

 Of that generation of men to whom we owe so much, the man to whom we owe most is, of course, Lincoln. Part of our debt to him is because he forecast our present struggle and saw the way out. He said:

"I hold that while man exists it is his duty to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind."

And again:

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."…

"Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights.... Nor should this lead to a war upon the owners of property. Property is the fruit of labor; . . . property is desirable; is a positive good in the world."…

"Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built."…

At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth. That is nothing new. …

Practical equality of opportunity for all citizens, when we achieve it, will have two great results. First, every man will have a fair chance to make of himself all that in him lies; to reach the highest point to which his capacities, unassisted by special privilege of his own and unhampered by the special privilege of others, can carry him, and to get for himself and his family substantially what he has earned. Second, equality of opportunity means that the commonwealth will get from every citizen the highest service of which he is capable. No man who carries the burden of the special privileges of another can give to the commonwealth that service to which it is fairly entitled.

I stand for the square deal. But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the games, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service. … When I say I want a square deal for the poor man, I do not mean that I want a square deal for the man who remains poor because he has not got the energy to work for himself. If a man who has had a chance will not make good, then he has got to quit. … For every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office. The Constitution guarantees protections to property, and we must make that promise good But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man's making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being.

There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.…

I believe that the officers, and, especially, the directors, of corporations should be held personally responsible when any corporation breaks the law.

Combinations in industry are the result of an imperative economic law which cannot be repealed by political legislation. The effort at prohibiting all combination has substantially failed. The way out lies, not in attempting to prevent such combinations, but in completely controlling them in the interest of the public welfare. For that purpose the Federal Bureau of Corporations is an agency of first importance. Its powers, and, therefore, its efficiency, as well as that of the Interstate Commerce Commission, should be largely increased. We have a right to expect from the Bureau of Corporations and from the Interstate Commerce Commission a very high grade of public service. We should be as sure of the proper conduct of the interstate railways and the proper management of interstate business as we are now sure of the conduct and management of the national banks, and we should have as effective supervision in one case as in the other. The Hepburn Act, and the amendment to the act in the shape in which it finally passed Congress at the last session, represent a long step in advance, and we must go yet further.…

The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise. We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows. …

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar's worth of service rendered - not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective - a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.

The people of the United States suffer from periodical financial panics to a degree substantially unknown among the other nations which approach us in financial strength. There is no reason why we should suffer what they escape. It is of profound importance that our financial system should be promptly investigated, and so thoroughly and effectively revised as to make it certain that hereafter our currency will no longer fail at critical times to meet our needs.…

But I think we may go still further. The right to regulate the use of wealth in the public interest is universally admitted. Let us admit also the right to regulate the terms and conditions of labor, which is the chief element of wealth, directly in the interest of the common good. The fundamental thing to do for every man is to give him a chance to reach a place in which he will make the greatest possible contribution to the public welfare. Understand what I say there. Give him a chance, not push him up if he will not be pushed. Help any man who stumbles; if he lies down, it is a poor job to try to carry him; but if he is a worthy man, try your best to see that he gets a chance to show the worth that is in him. No man can be a good citizen unless he has a wage more than sufficient to cover the bare cost of living, and hours of labor short enough so that after his day's work is done he will have time and energy to bear his share in the management of the community, to help in carrying the general load.

… The national government belongs to the whole American people, and where the whole American people are interested, that interest can be guarded effectively only by the national government. The betterment which we seek must be accomplished, I believe, mainly through the national government.

The American people are right in demanding that New Nationalism, without which we cannot hope to deal with new problems.

The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage. It is impatient of the utter confusion that results from local legislatures attempting to treat national issues as local issues. It is still more impatient of the impotence which springs from over division of governmental powers, the impotence which makes it possible for local selfishness or for legal cunning, hired by wealthy special interests, to bring national activities to a deadlock. This New Nationalism regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare. It demands of the judiciary that it shall be interested primarily in human welfare rather than in property, just as it demands that the representative body shall represent all the people rather than any one class or section of the people...One of the fundamental necessities in a representative government such as ours is to make certain that the men to whom the people delegate their power shall serve the people by whom they are elected, and not the special interests. …

The object of government is the welfare of the people. The material progress and prosperity of a nation are desirable chiefly so far as they lead to the moral and material welfare of all good citizens. Just in proportion as the average man and woman are honest, capable of sound judgment and high ideals, active in public affairs - but, first of all, sound in their home life, and the father and mother of healthy children whom they bring up well - just so far, and no farther, we may count our civilization a success. We must have - I believe we have already - a genuine and permanent moral awakening, without which no wisdom of legislation or administration really means anything; and, on the other hand, we must try to secure the social and economic legislation without which any improvement due to purely moral agitation is necessarily evanescent. …You must have that, and, then, in addition, you must have the kind of law and the kind of administration of the law which will give to those qualities in the private citizen the best possible chance for development. The prime problem of our nation is to get the right type of good citizenship, and, to get it, we must have progress, and our public men must be genuinely progressive.

Again on Peer Review

The WSJ published a piece today on the non reproducible results of peer reviewed papers. As I had indicated yesterday this is one of the problems of peer reviewed articles. The most serious one and the one all too often not recognized.

As the article states:

This is one of medicine's dirty secrets: Most results, including those that appear in top-flight peer-reviewed journals, can't be reproduced....

Reproducibility is the foundation of all modern research, the standard by which scientific claims are evaluated. In the U.S. alone, biomedical research is a $100-billion-year enterprise. So when published medical findings can't be validated by others, there are major consequences. Drug manufacturers rely heavily on early-stage academic research and can waste millions of dollars on products if the original results are later shown to be unreliable. Patients may enroll in clinical trials based on conflicting data, and sometimes see no benefits or suffer harmful side effects.

 Thus the issue of peer review being the sine qua non is somewhat baseless. One can assume the best of intents on the part of the researchers but in the final count the work all too often fails in the most critical step of scientific discovery, repeatability. Furthermore the works seem rarely to be retracted.

The piece continues:

In September, Bayer published a study describing how it had halted nearly two-thirds of its early drug target projects because in-house experiments failed to match claims made in the literature. 

The German pharmaceutical company says that none of the claims it attempted to validate were in papers that had been retracted or were suspected of being flawed. Yet, even the data in the most prestigious journals couldn't be confirmed, Bayer said. 

One thus wonders if it would be better to demonstrate repeatability in the presentation of the results. All too often there is a race to publish without a care of the result having the ability of standing the most critical of tests. One experiment, with results, may have limited value.

More on Peer Review

Yesterday I discussed the problems with Peer Review regarding the papers on obesity and social networking. There is an interesting set of articles in The Scientist which addresses this in more detail.

They list the problems and solutions as follows:

Problem #1: Reviewers are biased by personal motives;Solution: Eliminate anonymous peer review ( Biology Direct, BMJ, BMC); run open peer review alongside traditional review

Problem #2: Peer review is too slow, affecting public health, grants, and credit for ideas; Solution: Shorten publication time to a few days (PLoS Currents Influenza); bypass subsequent reviews (Journal of Biology); publish first drafts

Problem # 3: Too many papers to review; Solution: Recycle reviews from journals that have rejected the manuscript (Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium); wait for volunteers (Chemical Physics Letters); reward reviewer efforts.

The real problem is often the fact that reviewing a paper falls into three categories:

1. Just Plain Junk: Namely the paper is poorly written, is outright wrong, or is incomplete.

2. Duplication: The work may already have been done.

3. Falsification: Namely that the results are fraudulent.

Typically the second should be the easiest. You show what and where and note the result. However all too often the reviewer will say it has been done elsewhere but never state where. The Editor takes it as gospel and the author is left hanging. This is both unprofessional and unethical but I have seen it many times.

The first issue is sometimes difference in style. Although some reviewers want to see it written the way they dictate to their students, style should not be the selector. True errors should be noted and either corrected or rejected. Style on the other hand should no be a basis. Even if it makes the paper less readable.

The third issues is quite difficult. As we have seen again and again fraudulent results often take time to uncover and in the review process there is a presumption of integrity of the data.

The Scientist also discusses new biological journal trying to meet this challenge:

Although there are many specialist journals headed by scientists, the top tier publications are often run by professional editors who do not work in a lab, and who do not moderate the peer-review process. Many researchers have complained that their manuscripts are rejected on the opinion of one reviewer, even when the remaining two reviews are glowing.  To stem this problem Schekman plans to have referees discuss their opinions in a private online forum and come to a consensus—a process mediated by the senior editor—ideally within a month of the paper’s submission.

It will be interesting to see if this makes progress.

The whole process of peer review will change as we see more and more on-line drafts. The old stodgy types will refrain from placing anything on line until peer reviewed bu frankly the sooner a result is available the sooner the usefulness can be maximized.

Obesity, Peer Review, and Questions

I had commented on a NEJM paper a while back which was said to determine a relationship between obesity and associated groups such as facebook friends. At the time I thought is nonsense.

A paper by Lyons debunks the paper and its sequallae quite well. As Russ Roberts states quite well:

Here is the summary:

We begin by summarizing the major problems with C&F’s studies:

1. The data are not available to others.
2. The unavailable data are sparse for friendships.
3. The models used to analyze the sparse data contradict the data and the conclusions.
4. The method used to estimate the dubious models does not apply.
5. The statistical significance tests from the questionable estimates do not show
the proposed differences.
6. The wrongly proposed differences do not distinguish among homophily, environment, and induction.
7. Associations at a distance are better explained by homophily than by induction.

Or in another words, bad paper, meaningless results. It’s not an easy article to follow (and neither was the original work by Christakis and Fowler.) The point on statistical significance is pretty clear though and pretty deadly.

However the paper also demonstrates the problems with Peer Review.

Lyons states:

Both of C&F’s first two papers were published in the world’s top medical journal, the New Engl. J. Med. Their third paper was published in BMJ, another very highly respected medical journal. Their fourth paper was published in the J. Pers. Soc. Psychol., a top journal and the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association. After we had completed our analysis of those four papers, two more based on the same data appeared: the fifth (Rosenquist, Murabito, Fowler, and Christakis, 2010) in Ann. Intern. Med., again a very highly respected journal, and the sixth (Rosenquist, Fowler, and Christakis, 2011) in Mol. Psychiatry, a top journal in psychiatry. We leave as an exercise to the reader to spot in these last two papers the same errors we have recounted here.

Given the fundamental errors we have described, what can we conclude about the process of peer review at these top journals? Altman (1998), currently the senior statistics editor at BMJ, gave a personal account as a statistical reviewer of submissions to medical journals, as well as a table summarizing some studies on the quality of statistics in published medical articles. His bleak assessment: “The main reason for the plethora of statistical errors is that the majority of statistical analyses are performed by people with an inadequate understanding of statistical methods. They are then peer reviewed by people who are generally no more knowledgeable. Sadly, much research may benefit researchers rather more than patients, especially when is carried out primarily as a ridiculous career necessity.”

Problems with peer review have long been known and several remedies have been proposed. One remedy has even been shown to fail (see Fidler, Thomason, Cumming, Finch, and Leeman, 2004). We propose a new solution below, based partly on our experiences in getting the present critique published. One can find several anecdotal reports on the web about the policies of top scientific journals regarding critiques, but we are not aware of any study of the issue. Our experiences matched the anecdotes we saw and seem informative.

We first submitted our critique to the New Engl. J. Med., but it was rejected without peer review. The journal declined to give a reason when asked. We next submitted to BMJ, but it was again rejected without peer review. This journal did, however, volunteer that “We decided your paper was probably better placed in a more specialist journal.” It is interesting to note that the same issue of BMJ that published Fowler and Christakis (2008a) also published the critique Cohen-Cole and Fletcher (2008a). The cover of that issue, in fact, was devoted to those two articles. In contrast to BMJ’s decision, the general-interest online newsmagazine Slate published an article by Johns (2010) on our critique the same month we submitted our paper. An delightful coda is that a few months later, BMJ published an editorial by Schriger and Altman (2010) called “Inadequate post-publication review of
medical research”.

After these rejections by the New Engl. J. Med. and BMJ, we approached three top journals who did not publish any of C&F’s studies, JAMA, Lancet, and Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.. All were uninterested in our critique since they do not publish critiques of articles they did not originally publish. The section of J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. that published Cacioppo et al. (2009) does not publish critiques even of papers they have published, unless accompanied by new data.

Following on this educational venture, we submitted to a statistics journal that specializes in reviews, Stat. Sci. Five months later they had 3 referee reports. The first two recommended publication after revisions (e.g., “an important critique” and “well worth publishing”), while the third, though  agreeing with our critiques, said that C&F’s work was insufficiently important to warrant publication of a critique in Stat. Sci. Two months after getting these reports, the editor made his decision: rejection, allowing for resubmission if we made the tone more neutral and changed the focus, perhaps to “editorial decision making standards in medical journals”, as suggested by the third referee.


The above is one of the best arguments against Peer Review ever. It demonstrates the closing of ranks. It shows that Kuhn and his paradigm shift is a simplistic reason at times for scientific lack of integrity. I rarely include such a length reference but Lyons has done a service.

The Internet has dramatically changed the essence of peer review. It allows presentation of material and its evaluation as is. In my recent experience the peer reviewed journals are all too often a closed environment, closed for certain points of view. NEJM during the health care debate had in my opinion an undue balance in favor of the law. It published articles often from Administration advisers as if they were purely academic research analyses. They were in fact propaganda.

Thus a congratulations to Lyons for a superb piece of work and hopefully more of this can be delivered. I especially would like to see this applied to the less than reasonable analysis of PSA testing.

Wrong Premise

MIT hosted a conference on the loss of manufacturing in the US, a conference of a White House panel to understand what could be done. In the MIT report on the event they state:

AMP’s premise is that there exists a substantial “innovation gap,” as many forum participants called it, in which not enough of the country’s research discoveries move on to form the basis of viable businesses. Helping those innovations move into the marketplace could strengthen the nation’s manufacturing sector and reverse the sector’s long decline in employment.

Now one should explore that premise. Having headed R&D groups as well as having started a few companies the issue is not one of too few ideas becoming reality. That is the natural course of things. A viable business is based upon markets not good ideas or technology.

I am reminded of an early investment opportunity I rejected almost thirty years ago. The inventor had a great idea and he built a great prototype and he had a fantastic assembly line, yet he went bankrupt. His final comment to the Board was:


"If only there were customers I could have made millions of the units!"

Namely he was looking at the wrong thing, namely the good idea and his ability to execute on the manufacturing side. In surviving and growing companies they all have one thing in common, customers, and more customers. The challenge is in having the entrepreneur who finds that bridge between good technology and a customer demand.

That is why I always insist on having the customer first. That hopefully presents revenue but it also modifies the product so that it meets the need.

The article continues:

Indeed, as White House officials emphasized, the challenge of AMP is to identify and support new areas of manufacturing activity. Some of these areas may be in existing fields such as biotechnology, energy and robotics; others lie in evolving fields such as nanotechnology and advanced materials, where advances could create either specific products or new techniques that could apply to many industries.

Manufacturing is but one of several elements in the delivery of market demanded goods and services.  Manufacturing qua employing trained union labor is being pressed out of existence by the use of robots and other intelligent production means. Why use humans when the robot is cheaper. Yet the intelligence that goes into the robot is of substantial value. It is the next step on the evolutionary trail, not more manufacturing jobs.

They continue:

When it comes to commercializing research, one challenge for AMP is to figure out how best to help university scientists connect with manufacturers. “There is a discontinuity between academic research and industrial needs [that is] particularly pronounced in manufacturing,” said Andre Sharon, a mechanical engineering professor at Boston University. Speakers on one panel described a variety of emerging university-industry partnerships, from nanotechnology to stem-cell research, that aim to make applied research a more central part of their organizations.

Another set of challenges involves finding ways to help innovative small firms expand. Some of these concern funding: The credit crunch has made small-business loans harder to come by. But many speakers at AMP cited an additional problem: getting skilled technologists to stick with manufacturing firms and follow through with the often-arduous process of not just hitting on an innovation, but delivering it to customers.

“The big problem, and the one we really haven’t solved at all, is that while we’re quite good at supporting the efforts that lead to startups, we’re really very poor at supporting the research and education that would help startups to scale up,” said Suzanne Berger, the Raphael Dorman and Helen Starbuck Professor of Political Science at MIT, who is helping lead the Institute’s own study group on manufacturing, Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE). 

 University researchers connect to entrepreneurs NOT manufacturers. That is the food chain and shame on these folks for not understanding it. Or perhaps this is nothing but a political agenda. Yes MIT and Stanford and others are good at connecting with start ups, AKA then entrepreneur, yet they miss the manufacturer since that entity is well down the food chain. You do not manufacture until and unless there is a customer and it is the entrepreneur who starts that process.

As for scaling up, that is a normal Darwinian process well understood. If one makes progress with customers and generates cash then more cash will flow.

And We Let Them Vote

I noticed a short piece by Gawker which included a plethora of "tweets" regarding the implausible endorsement of Newt by a "union leader". This came initially from DeLong.

Now having just returned from my home in New Hampshire, the northern Republican region to my New Jersey home, the Republican county of Morris and the most Republican town in the country, I was amazed of the general stupidity of twitter users. You see every town in northern New England has a Civil War memorial in the town center. A stature commemorating the survival of the Union, not the IBEW or Teamsters, but the real Union, like Lincoln and all that stuff about 150 years ago.

The idiots who tweeted though it was some New Hampshire labor union. That tells you a great deal of who made up the selection of the government which now rules, It is a terrifying fact, we have ignorant malcontents deciding who governs. It took much less to destroy Athens, in 400 BC that is.

Now for those who know little of New Hampshire one should be aware of Gov Meldrim Thomson who amongst his many claims sought to get nuclear weapons for the NH National Guard to protect us from those Canadians. Now I got to know the Gov when driving across Rt 25 over the hills past his farm. I often stopped and purchased a few vegetables and then passed the time on politics. Where else can one meet a Gov on a hill selling goods and who will share part of his day. Not in New Jersey, some of them are just trying to stay out of the local lock up. Same at times for New York.

But that is New Hampshire and that is why it is a good place to start. So for those twitter morons perhaps you may find that the union is the Union, the United States of America, and the Union Leader is the reflection of that concept.