The 14th edition of The Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom has been released. Though its methodology is slightly different, it confirms the results of a similar project run by the Cato Institute and Fraser Institute.

There’s a good first-dip commentary on it by Mary Anastasia O-Grady over at the Wall Street Journal, which includes this table:

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In 2005, according to this news report, “8.8 million people became infected with tuberculosis and 1.6 million died of it. It takes months of careful antibiotic treatment to clear the infection.”

This sort of death toll is why projects like the Copenhagen Consensus, which is due for an update in 2008, cite disease control as a better way to spend a given amount of public money than many others (such as fighting global warming). It cites HIV/AIDS and malaria, though not TB, in particular.

The problem many countries — in particular developing countries like my own — face is that TB treatment is hard to enforce. Although South Africa has had some success with a buddy system to monitor drug treatment, the fact is that among poor communities, rigorous adherence to long-term drug treatments is a problem (and not only in the case of TB). Non-completion of courses of antibiotic medication leads to mutations that create drug-resistant super-strains. These affect not only the country of origin, but the rest of the world.

So, having sketched the bad news, the article cited at the top contains the good news:

Researchers have decoded the gene map of a strain of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis and said on Tuesday their work has identified mutations that may help develop better treatments.

They also sequenced the genome of another dangerous strain called multidrug-resistant TB, as well as run-of-the-mill tuberculosis bugs, and found a few mutations may explain how the mutant strains evade antibiotics.

“By looking at the genomes of different strains, we can learn how the tuberculosis microbe outwits current drugs and how new drugs might be designed,” said Megan Murray of the Broad Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

Of course, one needs to be careful with statistics such as the number of infections and deaths cited above. It turns out, for example, that statistics on HIV/AIDS have been grossly overestimated. As the Washington Post reports from Johannesburg, South Africa:

The United Nations’ top AIDS scientists plan to acknowledge this week that they have long overestimated both the size and the course of the epidemic, which they now believe has been slowing for nearly a decade, according to U.N. documents prepared for the announcement.

AIDS remains a devastating public health crisis in the most heavily affected areas of sub-Saharan Africa. But the far-reaching revisions amount to at least a partial acknowledgment of criticisms long leveled by outside researchers who disputed the U.N. portrayal of an ever-expanding global epidemic.

The latest estimates, due to be released publicly Tuesday, put the number of annual new HIV infections at 2.5 million, a cut of more than 40 percent from last year’s estimate, documents show. The worldwide total of people infected with HIV — estimated a year ago at nearly 40 million and rising — now will be reported as 33 million.

The main reason isn’t an actual decline in the underlying numbers: “U.N. officials say the revisions stemmed mainly from better measurements rather than fundamental shifts in the epidemic.”

Why is this a problem? Well, as James Taranto trenchantly notes in his Best of the Web Today column, the Washington Post piece is quite explicit about it:

Having millions fewer people with a lethal contagious disease is good news. Some researchers, however, contend that persistent overestimates in the widely quoted U.N. reports have long skewed funding decisions and obscured potential lessons about how to slow the spread of HIV. Critics have also said that U.N. officials overstated the extent of the epidemic to help gather political and financial support for combating AIDS.

“There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda,” said Helen Epstein, author of “The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS.” “I hope these new numbers will help refocus the response in a more pragmatic way.”

… Among the reasons for the overestimate is methodology; U.N. officials traditionally based their national HIV estimates on infection rates among pregnant women receiving prenatal care. As a group, such women were younger, more urban, wealthier and likely to be more sexually active than populations as a whole, according to recent studies.

The United Nations’ AIDS agency, known as UNAIDS and led by Belgian scientist Peter Piot since its founding in 1995, has been a major advocate for increasing spending to combat the epidemic. Over the past decade, global spending on AIDS has grown by a factor of 30, reaching as much as $10 billion a year.

But in its role in tracking the spread of the epidemic and recommending strategies to combat it, UNAIDS has drawn criticism in recent years from Epstein and others who have accused it of being politicized and not scientifically rigorous.

… Piot often wrote personal prefaces to those reports warning of the dangers of inaction, saying in 2006 that “the pandemic and its toll are outstripping the worst predictions.”

All of this lends support to the arguments by Taranto, Don Surber, Noel Sheppard and others, that UN claims about future dangers and funding priorities are flawed, corrupt, or both.

Large government or inter-governmental spending sprees are no match for scientific and technical progress that tackles real problems, rather than hyping up politically-correct bogeymen. Scientists outwit high powered mutants¹, whereas the bureaucrats create them.

But guess who’s going to get stick when a pharmaceutical company uses the excellent work of the scientists whom Eli and Edith Broad so generously fund, to make life-saving drugs for sale in Africa?

1. with apologies to Hunter S. Thompson [↩]

This is somewhat surprising. In this picture, you might see expensive toys. Dr Gaurav Khanna saw the makings of a cheap supercomputer.

Instead of paying the government $5,000 a session to rent time on its supercomputers, this enterprising physicist simply clustered eight Sony PlayStation 3 games consoles, and gets the same power, indefinitely, for the grand total of $3,200. And the machines were donated by Sony, so it cost him nothing. With a headline you’d expect to see in The Onion, Wired has more on the story: Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with Eight PlayStation 3s.

There is, of course, a reason Khanna doesn’t use, say, Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming consoles. Nice machines are useless if you can’t hack ‘em. Khanna runs Linux on the PS3 consoles, and discovered something remarkable about the Cell processors at their core:

Overall, a single PS3 performs better than the highest-end desktops available and compares to as many as 25 nodes of an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. And there is still tremendous scope left for extracting more performance through further optimization.

Khanna uses the parallel computing power of the eight-unit PS3 cluster to research fascinating but very complex arcana such as the gravity waves produced when two black holes merge.

I think this story makes a fairly good point about the notion of governments and their capabilities. Often, when I argue that the private sector is inherently better suited to provide products and services than the public sector, I hear examples of government innovation and research that the private sector didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t engage in. And to be sure, such innovations exist, especially when the research is directed to the needs of tax collection or the defence sector.

In response, I point out that a government is worse at innovation not because it is inherently less capable, innovative, or efficient than any one company (though that is often the case). It’s because a government funds one project, to find one solution, and when it fails, can only really repeat this process in series. If something succeeds, the innovation stops. By contrast, the private sector consists of multiple actors committing risk capital to trying multiple solutions in parallel. They all compete with each other on performance, features, cost, and time-to-market. So not only are the chances of rapid success that much higher, but even those that succeed face competition from other, possibly better, solutions.

When a government does develop a solution, which it often does by excluding potential private sector competitors either just by tapping the almost bottomless well of taxpayer funds for capital, or by explicitly legislating to forbid competition, who’s to say whether the solution it comes up with is actually cost-effective? There’s usually no market to benchmark it against. Until someone like Dr Khanna comes along.

Is it any wonder, then, that the government, as a large end-user with diverse and advanced needs, does sometimes manage to innovate in its own interests, to meet its own needs, but that even when it succeeds, those innovations are soon made obsolete by the private sector? That the government developed the first electronic computers, but that it took IBM to turn the super-expensive behemoths into efficient computing machines for general use? That the government developed the embryo of the internet, but that it took thousands of private sector companies to bring its costs to within reach of ordinary consumers, and develop its full utility by developing new features, better usability and compelling content?

Is it any wonder that the US government runs expensive national supercomputer facilities, but it takes one researcher with a begging bowl and a brain to build a dead simple, dirt cheap lab hack that thrashes them all?

So next time your kid asks you for a PS3, know that he could deploy powerful tools to investigate the ripples binary black hole systems create in the fabric of space-time. Literally.

In case the world’s output of meaningful research is not enough for you, the year’s most meaningless and absurd research has been selected for the annual Ig Nobel Prizes, awarded last night at Harvard University.

Apparently, and I bet you didn’t know this, sword swallowing can cause injuries to the throat. So found Brian Witcombe and Dan Meyer. Give those fellows a prize!

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Temba Nolutshungu, a director of the Free Market Foundation, has written an interesting piece that examines the role and influence of non-governmental organisations in African policy formulation around major development issues. The link will not work forever, so the full text follows.

Statist NGOs wreak havoc in Africa
Temba Nolutshungu

Ever since the 19th century territorial scramble for Africa, Africans have become used to Western intervention in their affairs. Decolonisation and independence was supposed to mark the end of this, and to a large extent, Africans govern their countries in a sovereign way. But long after the pith helmets and starched uniforms of the colonisers have left Africa, a new breed of colonialist is emerging. These are the statist NGO campaigners who hope to save Africa from everything from GM food to globalisation.

These NGOs consist of ‘consumer’ and humanitarian groups and ‘development’ charities. They are united in the belief that modern industrial civilisation, profit and competition are unethical. In their view, people, particularly those in developing countries, would be better served by the existence of strong, comprehensive regulations and state intervention that put ‘equity’ and the redistribution of wealth ahead of the economic dynamism that has made the West and eastern countries like Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea wealthy.

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So the European Science Foundation holds a conference on research integrity, to “foster responsible research”. And guess who’s not invited?

Granted, he’s Canadian, but since their research found he is British and his work to foster responsible research did get a mention, you’d have thought he’d crack an invite too. As a commenter at the ClimateAudit site writes: “How can you trust the integrity of a conference that lacks the integrity to include the person who discovered the very errors they are discussing?”

A statistical researcher who worked on the same issue, might have had some contribution to make on the subject of research disputes, and is really British, didn’t get a nod either. Neither did this Danish statistician, of whom the organisers of a conference on research integrity must at least have heard.

Omitting some of the most visible and public critics of research integrity — on whatever grounds — does nothing to allay suspicions that it was just a one-sided public relations exercise for the status quo, does it?

There’s a new book out, called Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes, by Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne. Penn is a pollster for Hillary Clinton. The book is, a blurb on Amazon.com would have us know, “sound and cleverly written.” It will “undoubtedly appeal to marketing analysts and armchair sociologists, as well as fans of Megatrends and Malcolm Gladwell [author of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference].”

Let’s leave aside for a moment the terribly annoying publisher’s habit of insisting on explanatory sub-titles, which can make a perfectly clever business book title filched from a perfectly decent British newspaper appear dull and obviously unoriginal.

One can only assume that the marketing analysts and armchair sociologists invited to write op-eds for the Wall Street Journal aren’t fans of Megatrends and Malcolm Gladwell. In a fairly dismissive review, with the derisive subtitle, “Experts try to predict the future without knowing the past”, Sam Schulman, the publishing director of The American, says that the observations in Microtrends aren’t exactly new, nor are they groundbreaking revelations, nor are the reasons behind them surprising. He concludes by stating the obvious:

Mr. Penn sees the future as a myriad of choices driven by individual tastes. And it may well be. But why are all these little trends possible? Because we live in a free society with a free economy, and our choices in coffee, sports and health care aren’t restricted by the government. Maybe that’s a trend he can share with his client Mrs. Clinton sometime.

I detest reading business books. Perhaps it is because the obvious needs pointing out to so many of their authors.