Two sources on the state of America

Like many MindBlog readers, I am reading countless articles on the current pandemic and its medical, economic, and social consequences. I generally restrain myself from noting them on MindBlog, worrying that readers have become as saturated as I have. However, I do want to point to two that do stand out:

First, In a Making Sense Podcast Sam Harris talks with General Stanley McChrystal and Chris Fussell about the Covid-19 pandemic. They discuss the nature of the ongoing crisis, the threat of a breakdown in social order, the problem of misinformation, the prospects of a nationwide lockdown, the trade off between personal freedom and safety, the threat of tyranny, the concerns about the global supply chain, concerns about the price of oil, safeguarding the 2020 Presidential election, and other topics. McChrystal was the commander of all American and coalition forces in Afghanistan, is now senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, and is founder of the McChrystal Group leadership institute.

Second, a piece by Leonhardt and Serkez in the New York Times opinion series “The America We Need” paints the most clear graphical picture I have seen of how inequality in America has grown to its current extreme, defining the struggle society faces after Coronavirus.

Psychedelic psychiatry's brave new world, and a new rapid-acting antidepressannt

I want to point to this open source article in Cell magazine, that provides an up to date review of resurrection of research into possible clinical uses of psychotropic compounds such as psilocybin.

After a legally mandated, decades-long global arrest of research on psychedelic drugs, investigation of psychedelics in the context of psychiatric disorders is yielding exciting results. Outcomes of neuroscience and clinical research into 5-Hydroxytryptamine 2A (5-HT2A) receptor agonists, such as psilocybin, show promise for addressing a range of serious disorders, including depression and addiction.

Also, a review by Krystal et al. notes FDA approval of the first mechanistically new treatment for depression in over sixty years - a form of ketamine (the party drug Special K, also used as an anesthetic.) Motivated readers can obtain the full text from me.

The discovery of the strikingly rapid and robust antidepressant effects of r/s-ketamine for the treatment of antidepressant-resistant symptoms of depression has led to new insights into the biology of antidepressants and the FDA approval of its s-isomer, Esketamine (Spravato), the first mechanistically new treatment for depression in over 60 years.

Stress can be enhancing.

Beibowitz and Crum do an Op-Ed piece that is worth a read, noting:

Over a decade of research — ours and that of others — suggests that it’s not the type or amount of stress that determines its impact. Instead, it’s our mind-set about stress that matters most.

The Authors note research showing that adopting a “stress-is-enhancing” mind-set does not diminish the amount of stress being experienced, but does minimize its harmful effects. They describe a three step process to harness the benefits of stress: Acknowledge your stress, own your stress, then leverage your stress to achieve your goals and connect more deeply with the things that matter most.

Self Help during the COVID-19 crisis.

MindBlog is getting bombarded by emails from websites and organizations wanting to advertise their advice on how to cope with our current crisis. The "infographics" that are offered are fronts for commercial sites wanting to sell you something, and I don't pass them on. I do want to pass on one Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook meme pointed out by a friend:

Also,  David Brooks' piece on mental health in the age of the coronavirus is worth reading...

The pandemic spreads an existential feeling of unsafety, which registers in the neurons around your heart, lungs and viscera. It alters your nervous system, changing the way you see and perceive threat..It’s very hard to grasp what’s going on so deep inside. “All trauma is preverbal,” Dr. Bessel van der Kolk writes in his book “The Body Keeps the Score.” “Rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.”...The best way to combat this visceral sense of fear and disassociation is by having ... experiences of deep reciprocal attunement with others that make you feel viscerally safe...I asked the experts whether they thought it was possible to have this sort of deep, visceral attunement over the internet. They thought it was, as long you can see the other person’s face and hear vocal tone. “The internet is a huge variable in this pandemic,” Dr. van der Kolk told me. “We have a profound new way to comfort one another.”

The perils of nighttime dining

Kelly et al. show that lipids in late evening snacks are less likely to be oxidized and most likely to be stored as fats than lipids in morning meals. Circadian control of metabolism appears to control whether ingested food is oxidized or stored.:

Circadian (daily) regulation of metabolic pathways implies that food may be metabolized differentially over the daily cycle. To test that hypothesis, we monitored the metabolism of older subjects in a whole-room respiratory chamber over two separate 56-h sessions in a random crossover design. In one session, one of the 3 daily meals was presented as breakfast, whereas in the other session, a nutritionally equivalent meal was presented as a late-evening snack. The duration of the overnight fast was the same for both sessions. Whereas the two sessions did not differ in overall energy expenditure, the respiratory exchange ratio (RER) was different during sleep between the two sessions. Unexpectedly, this difference in RER due to daily meal timing was not due to daily differences in physical activity, sleep disruption, or core body temperature (CBT). Rather, we found that the daily timing of nutrient availability coupled with daily/circadian control of metabolism drives a switch in substrate preference such that the late-evening Snack Session resulted in significantly lower lipid oxidation (LO) compared to the Breakfast Session. Therefore, the timing of meals during the day/night cycle affects how ingested food is oxidized or stored in humans, with important implications for optimal eating habits.

The lockdown turns out to NOT be an introvert's paradise.

Contra my March 28 post on our current lock down being springtime for introverts, here are some slips from a salient article by Abby Ohlheiser that resonates with my experience of feeling overwhelmed by the demands of video conference meetings set up to replace what we have lost in person to person contacts:

...as people began to adjust to isolation, they started to find ways to bring their outside social lives into their homes. Living rooms that were once a sanctuary from people-filled offices, gyms, bars, and coffee shops became all those things at once. Calendars that had been cleared by social distancing suddenly refilled as friends, family, and acquaintances made plans to sip “quarantinis” at Zoom happy hours, hold Netflix viewing parties, or just catch up over Google hangouts.

People are coping with the coronavirus pandemic by upending their lives and attempting to virtually re-create what they lost. The new version, however, only vaguely resembles what we left behind. Everything is flattened and pressed to fit into the confines of chats and video-conference apps like Zoom, which was never designed to host our work and social lives all at once. The result, for introverts, extroverts, and everyone in between, is the bizarre feeling of being socially overwhelmed despite the fact that we’re staying as far away from each other as we can.

Turning down invitations to talk to people during a global pandemic can simultaneously be needed self-care and something that makes you feel like a bad friend...The only excuse is ‘I don’t want to,’ and no one wants to hear that right now...The reality is that introverts don’t want to be alone all the time, and extroverts can appreciate moments of quiet. But the division exists as a way to describe how people gather their energy: introverts charge up by having quiet time to process, and extroverts do it by socializing.

Video chat has become the go-to substitute for many people’s discarded social lives, the place where they can see the most of the people they can no longer be with. Zoom, FaceTime, and Google Hangouts are easy to use. But they have a way of making everything feel like a meeting. At a happy hour of 10 people in a bar, you can settle into a side conversation, step away for fresh air, or listen to a conversation while nursing your drink.

Rejuvenating aging human cells.

Nicholas Wade points to important work by Stanford researchers showing they can rejuvenate human cells by reprogramming them back to a youthful state.

A major cause of aging is thought to be the errors that accumulate in the epigenome, the system of proteins that packages the DNA and controls access to its genes.The Stanford team...say their method, designed to reverse these errors and walk back the cells to their youthful state, does indeed restore the cells’ vigor and eliminate signs of aging...The Stanford approach utilizes powerful agents known as Yamanaka factors, which reprogram a cell’s epigenome to its time zero, or embryonic state....In 2006 Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, a stem-cell researcher at Kyoto University, amazed biologists by showing that a cell’s fate could be reversed with a set of four transcription factors — agents that activate genes — that he had identified...the Stanford team described a feasible way to deliver Yamanaka factors to cells taken from patients, by dosing cells kept in cultures with small amounts of the factors.

The Stanford team extracted aged cartilage cells from patients with osteoarthritis and found that after a low dosage of Yamanaka factors the cells no longer secreted the inflammatory factors that provoke the disease. The team also found that human muscle stem cells, which are impaired in a muscle-wasting disease, could be restored to youth. Members of the Stanford team have formed a company, Turn Biotechnologies, to develop therapies for osteoarthritis and other diseases.

Brain regions that predict money choices also predict allocation of time to watching videos

People currently spend over 1 billion hours every day in attention markets watching video content, and the world’s second-most popular search engine is the video site youtube.com. Combining neuroimaging with a behavioral task, Tong et al. extend the neuroeconomic toolkit to find that brain activity in regions previously shown to predict allocation of money also predicted choices to allocate time to watching videos in the youtube.com attention market. They also find that sampled activity in a subset of these brain regions implicates anticipatory affect at video onset generalizes to forecast the frequency of choices to allocate time as well as the duration of time allocated to videos. Their abstract:

The growth of the internet has spawned new “attention markets,” in which people devote increasing amounts of time to consuming online content, but the neurobehavioral mechanisms that drive engagement in these markets have yet to be elucidated. We used functional MRI (FMRI) to examine whether individuals’ neural responses to videos could predict their choices to start and stop watching videos as well as whether group brain activity could forecast aggregate video view frequency and duration out of sample on the internet (i.e., on youtube.com). Brain activity during video onset predicted individual choice in several regions (i.e., increased activity in the nucleus accumbens [NAcc] and medial prefrontal cortex [MPFC] as well as decreased activity in the anterior insula [AIns]). Group activity during video onset in only a subset of these regions, however, forecasted both aggregate view frequency and duration (i.e., increased NAcc and decreased AIns)—and did so above and beyond conventional measures. These findings extend neuroforecasting theory and tools by revealing that activity in brain regions implicated in anticipatory affect at the onset of video viewing (but not initial choice) can forecast time allocation out of sample in an internet attention market.

Prosocial behavior can increase happiness in the short term but decrease it in the long term.

From Falk and Graeber:  

Significance

Governments around the world increasingly acknowledge the role of happiness as a societal objective and implement policies that target national wellbeing levels. Knowledge about the determinants of happiness, however, is still limited. A longstanding candidate is prosocial behavior. Our study empirically investigates the causal effect of prosocial behavior on happiness in a high-stakes decision experiment. While we confirm previous findings of a positive effect in the short term, our findings distinctly show that this effect is short lived and even reverses after some time. This study documents that prosocial behavior does not unequivocally increase happiness because prosocial spending naturally requires giving up something else, which may decrease happiness in its own right.

Abstract

Does prosocial behavior promote happiness? We test this longstanding hypothesis in a behavioral experiment that extends the scope of previous research. In our Saving a Life paradigm, every participant either saved one human life in expectation by triggering a targeted donation of 350 euros or received an amount of 100 euros. Using a choice paradigm between two binary lotteries with different chances of saving a life, we observed subjects’ intentions at the same time as creating random variation in prosocial outcomes. We repeatedly measured happiness at various delays. Our data weakly replicate the positive effect identified in previous research but only for the very short run. One month later, the sign of the effect reversed, and prosocial behavior led to significantly lower happiness than obtaining the money. Notably, even those subjects who chose prosocially were ultimately happier if they ended up getting the money for themselves. Our findings revealed a more nuanced causal relationship than previously suggested, providing an explanation for the apparent absence of universal prosocial behavior.

Google knows more about me than I do. Further comment on Harari article.

Again I have the eerie feeling that one of the phrases that sticks in my mind from reading Yuval Harari’s books, namely that “Goggle knows more about you than you know about yourself.” is absolutely correct. My March 24th MindBlog post points to an article in the Financial Times by Yuval Harari on the world after coronavirus (brought to my attention by my son Jonathan’s March 21 Facebook post). Google has been watching, and so knows that I would be interested in a Financial Times letter to the editor on March 28 titled ‘So, professor Harari, who am I supposed to trust?’ It is passed to me via my google news app on March 29. I hit the link and read the two paragraph letter, but then when I try to return to the link later I hit a paywall. Turns out a friend has just told me about http://archive.is/ which will attempt to archive the content of any URL you send to it. It retrieves the text of the snarky comment on Harari:

Yuval Noah Harari is a stimulating and interesting figure, even if his arguments aren’t designed to stand up to sustained questioning (“The world after coronavirus”, Life & Arts, March 21). But even using the loosest standards, I was still surprised to see him spend five columns on panic-inducing thought experiments about governments surveilling me under my skin, in which China, Israel and North Korea are set up as perfectly representative nation-states . . . only to then spend three columns begging us all to trust our governments and the experts and wash our hands.

His previous work suggests that Professor Harari wants to be one of the experts in whom we should believe. If he really wants to earn my trust, he must decide whether I’m meant to be terrified of my government, or to trust it completely, or if I should only trust experts who can’t maintain a single line of argument over two pages.

Justin Evans

Washington, DC, US

Vulnerable robots induce prosocial behavior in groups of humans.

Interesting work from Traeger et al.:  

Significance

Prior work has demonstrated that a robot’s social behavior has the ability to shape people’s trust toward, responses to, and impressions of a robot within human–robot interactions. However, when the context changes to interactions within a group involving one robot and multiple people, the influence of the robot on group behavior is less well understood. In this work, we explore how a social robot influences team engagement using an experimental design where a group of three humans and one robot plays a collaborative game. Our analysis shows that a robot’s social behavior influences the conversational dynamics between human members of the human–robot group, demonstrating the ability of a robot to significantly shape human–human interaction.

Abstract

Social robots are becoming increasingly influential in shaping the behavior of humans with whom they interact. Here, we examine how the actions of a social robot can influence human-to-human communication, and not just robot–human communication, using groups of three humans and one robot playing 30 rounds of a collaborative game (n = 51 groups). We find that people in groups with a robot making vulnerable statements converse substantially more with each other, distribute their conversation somewhat more equally, and perceive their groups more positively compared to control groups with a robot that either makes neutral statements or no statements at the end of each round. Shifts in robot speech have the power not only to affect how people interact with robots, but also how people interact with each other, offering the prospect for modifying social interactions via the introduction of artificial agents into hybrid systems of humans and machines.

Springtime for introverts...

Thank goodness some sparks of humor are available to lighten the somber clouds of the COVID-19 pandemic. You should check out Atlantic staff writer Andrew Ferguson’ piece in that magazine as well as New Yorker cartoonist Chris Ware’s “Self-Isolating: A Pandemic Special"...Thirty years of avoiding other human beings...validated! Here are a few clips from Ferguson:

That February was the virus’s American debut is fitting, because many introverts were still recovering from the trauma of the end-of-year holidays...We are the people...who preferred to eat alone at corner tables in restaurants with a book propped up on the salt shaker, ignoring the occasional puzzled or pitying glances from the extroverts at the bar. Replace the restaurant corner table with a tub of takeout, eaten over the sink standing up, and you can see how everyone else’s new normal conforms to our old normal. I have never known an introvert who washed his or her hands fewer than a dozen times a day; it’s our version of calisthenics. Hugs, long a source of terror for us, are now generally understood to be as violent and unwelcome as decapitation. The elbow bump is a social greeting most introverts can live with, far superior anyway to the viral autobahn of the handshake. A brief, awkward wave at six paces would be best of all. Indeed, for a true introvert, any encounter closer than six feet constitutes foreplay.

Only recently has introversion been deemed a social force, thanks to the writer Susan Cain. She became an unofficial spokesperson, a very soft-spoken spokesperson, when she published Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking a few years ago...Her book became a huge best seller with the aid of the internet, which allowed its target audience to buy as many copies as they wished without having to go to the store...Her theme was perhaps novel to some people, but not to us: This is the extroverts’ world; the introverts just live in it...If Cain’s book, readable, clever, and popular as it is, was intended as a revolutionary manifesto, it largely failed. It is very difficult to coordinate an uprising of people who would rather not leave the house. Now, though, the virus has done what a revolution never could: The social order has been upended, and extroverts find themselves living in the introverts’ world.

Consider: As Cain points out, the world’s most introverted country, Finland, is also the world’s happiest.

How introverted are the Finns? Here’s how: You can tell a Finn likes you if he’s looking at your shoes instead of his own.

That’s a joke the Finns tell on themselves! Just because people are introverted doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun. We just don’t want to overdo it, is all.

When we return to the gym...A molecular muscle memory helps retraining of muscles after inactivity.

For me the most deranging part of the current "Stay Home" order that I am obeying during the coronavirus crisis is being unable to do my customary workouts at a gym. It is heartening to see Gretchen Reynolds point to a study that finds that...

...if muscles have been trained in the past, they seem to develop a molecular memory of working out that lingers through a prolonged period of inactivity, and once we start training again, this “muscle memory” can speed the process by which we regain our former muscular strength and size.

Swedish researchers...began by recruiting 19 young men and women who had never played sports or formally exercised at all, so that their muscles were new to formal weight training. They checked these volunteers’ current muscular strength and size, and then had them start training a single leg...one-legged workouts continued for 10 weeks, at which point the researchers re-measured muscles, and then the volunteers stopped their training completely for 20 weeks...After this layoff from working out, they returned to the lab, where the scientists checked the current state of their leg muscles, took muscle biopsies from both legs and had them complete a strenuous leg workout, using both legs this time. Afterward, the researchers biopsied the muscles again. Then they checked the levels of a wide array of gene markers and biochemical signals within the volunteers’ muscle cells that are believed to be related to muscle health and growth.

They found telling differences between the legs that had trained and those that had not, both before and after the lone training session. For one thing, the previously trained leg remained sturdier, having retained about 50 percent of its strength gains during the 20 weeks without exercise.

Taken as a whole..the trained leg’s genetic activity suggests that its muscle cells had become genetically and metabolically more ready to strengthen and grow than the cells in the leg that had not trained before. These findings support the idea that muscle memory can occur at the gene and protein level.

Harari on the world after coronavirus.

I want to point to an article in the Financial Times by Yuval Harari that makes a clear description of choices the current pandemic is forcing on us. You should read the whole piece, but here are a few clips:

In this time of crisis, we face two particularly important choices. The first is between totalitarian surveillance and citizen empowerment. The second is between nationalist isolation and global solidarity.

In order to stop the epidemic, entire populations need to comply with certain guidelines. There are two main ways of achieving this. One method is for the government to monitor people, and punish those who break the rules. Today, for the first time in human history, technology makes it possible to monitor everyone all the time...governments have already deployed the new surveillance tools. The most notable case is China. By closely monitoring people’s smartphones, making use of hundreds of millions of face-recognising cameras, and obliging people to check and report their body temperature and medical condition, the Chinese authorities can not only quickly identify suspected coronavirus carriers, but also track their movements and identify anyone they came into contact with. A range of mobile apps warn citizens about their proximity to infected patients...This kind of technology is not limited to east Asia. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel recently authorised the Israel Security Agency to deploy surveillance technology normally reserved for battling terrorists to track coronavirus patients.

Asking people to choose between privacy and health is, in fact, the very root of the problem. Because this is a false choice. We can and should enjoy both privacy and health. We can choose to protect our health and stop the coronavirus epidemic not by instituting totalitarian surveillance regimes, but rather by empowering citizens. In recent weeks, some of the most successful efforts to contain the coronavirus epidemic were orchestrated by South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. While these countries have made some use of tracking applications, they have relied far more on extensive testing, on honest reporting, and on the willing co-operation of a well-informed public.

The coronavirus epidemic is thus a major test of citizenship. In the days ahead, each one of us should choose to trust scientific data and healthcare experts over unfounded conspiracy theories and self-serving politicians. If we fail to make the right choice, we might find ourselves signing away our most precious freedoms, thinking that this is the only way to safeguard our health.

The second important choice we confront is between nationalist isolation and global solidarity. Both the epidemic itself and the resulting economic crisis are global problems. They can be solved effectively only by global co-operation...A collective paralysis has gripped the international community. There seem to be no adults in the room. One would have expected to see already weeks ago an emergency meeting of global leaders to come up with a common plan of action. The G7 leaders managed to organise a videoconference only this week, and it did not result in any such plan....In previous global crises — such as the 2008 financial crisis and the 2014 Ebola epidemic — the US assumed the role of global leader. But the current US administration has abdicated the job of leader. It has made it very clear that it cares about the greatness of America far more than about the future of humanity.

Humanity needs to make a choice. Will we travel down the route of disunity, or will we adopt the path of global solidarity? If we choose disunity, this will not only prolong the crisis, but will probably result in even worse catastrophes in the future. If we choose global solidarity, it will be a victory not only against the coronavirus, but against all future epidemics and crises that might assail humankind in the 21st century.

Modeling Donald Trump - A Process Model of Narcissistic Status Pursuit

From Grapsas et al.:

We propose a self-regulation model of grandiose narcissism. This model illustrates an interconnected set of processes through which narcissists (i.e., individuals with relatively high levels of grandiose narcissism) pursue social status in their moment-by-moment transactions with their environments. The model shows that narcissists select situations that afford status. Narcissists vigilantly attend to cues related to the status they and others have in these situations and, on the basis of these perceived cues, appraise whether they can elevate their status or reduce the status of others. Narcissists engage in self-promotion (admiration pathway) or other-derogation (rivalry pathway) in accordance with these appraisals. Each pathway has unique consequences for how narcissists are perceived by others, thus shaping their social status over time. The model demonstrates how narcissism manifests itself as a stable and consistent cluster of behaviors in pursuit of social status and how it develops and maintains itself over time. More broadly, the model might offer useful insights for future process models of other personality traits.

A Psychological Profile of the Alt-Right

From Forscher and Kteily:

The 2016 U.S. presidential election coincided with the rise of the “alternative right,” or alt-right. Alt-right associates have wielded considerable influence on the current administration and on social discourse, but the movement’s loose organizational structure has led to disparate portrayals of its members’ psychology and made it difficult to decipher its aims and reach. To systematically explore the alt-right’s psychology, we recruited two U.S. samples: An exploratory sample through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (N = 827, alt-right n = 447) and a larger, nationally representative sample through the National Opinion Research Center’s Amerispeak panel (N = 1,283, alt-right n = 71–160, depending on the definition). We estimate that 6% of the U.S. population and 10% of Trump voters identify as alt-right. Alt-right adherents reported a psychological profile more reflective of the desire for group-based dominance than economic anxiety. Although both the alt-right and non-alt-right Trump voters differed substantially from non-alt-right, non-Trump voters, the alt-right and Trump voters were quite similar, differing mainly in the alt-right’s especially high enthusiasm for Trump, suspicion of mainstream media, trust in alternative media, and desire for collective action on behalf of Whites. We argue for renewed consideration of overt forms of bias in contemporary intergroup research.

Surprise! Oil and gas companies give more money to legislators that vote against the environment.

Goldberg et al. analyze campaign contribution data over 28 years to show that, rather than attempting to influence votes, interested parties contribute the most to legislators that have policy positions that are already aligned with the interested party.

Do campaign contributions from oil and gas companies influence legislators to vote against the environment, or do these companies invest in legislators that have a proven antienvironmental voting record? Using 28 y of campaign contribution data, we find that evidence consistently supports the investment hypothesis: The more a given member of Congress votes against environmental policies, the more contributions they receive from oil and gas companies supporting their reelection.

In response to COVID-19 crisis, several anti-anxiety apps have become free.

The HealthyMinds App, which I have reviewed on MindBlog, has become free, and is cancelling existing user fees.

Sanvello, an app with over 3 million users has cut subscription fees to zero.

Humans were not designed for sitting in chairs.

As I near my 78th birthday I've become increasingly aware of how debilitating activities like sitting and typing this blog post can be. Moving just a bit is a relief (as when I crank my desktop up to standing level or move about just a bit) and exposes how the body's fluxes can become shut down on sitting. This makes me want to pass on the original abstract for work described by Reynolds on how modern hunter-gatherer people deal with periods of being sedentary.  From Raichlen et al.:  

Significance

Inactivity is a growing public health risk in industrialized societies, leading some to suggest that our bodies did not evolve to be sedentary. Here, we show that, in a group of hunter-gatherers, time spent sedentary is similar to that found in industrialized populations. However, sedentary time in hunter-gatherers is often spent in postures like squatting that lead to higher levels of muscle activity than chair sitting. Thus, we suggest human physiology likely evolved in a context that included substantial inactivity, but increased muscle activity during sedentary time, suggesting an inactivity mismatch with the more common chair-sitting postures found in contemporary urban populations.

Abstract

Recent work suggests human physiology is not well adapted to prolonged periods of inactivity, with time spent sitting increasing cardiovascular disease and mortality risk. Health risks from sitting are generally linked with reduced levels of muscle contractions in chair-sitting postures and associated reductions in muscle metabolism. These inactivity-associated health risks are somewhat paradoxical, since evolutionary pressures tend to favor energy-minimizing strategies, including rest. Here, we examined inactivity in a hunter-gatherer population (the Hadza of Tanzania) to understand how sedentary behaviors occur in a nonindustrial economic context more typical of humans’ evolutionary history. We tested the hypothesis that nonambulatory rest in hunter-gatherers involves increased muscle activity that is different from chair-sitting sedentary postures used in industrialized populations. Using a combination of objectively measured inactivity from thigh-worn accelerometers, observational data, and electromygraphic data, we show that hunter-gatherers have high levels of total nonambulatory time (mean ± SD = 9.90 ± 2.36 h/d), similar to those found in industrialized populations. However, nonambulatory time in Hadza adults often occurs in postures like squatting, and we show that these “active rest” postures require higher levels of lower limb muscle activity than chair sitting. Based on our results, we introduce the Inactivity Mismatch Hypothesis and propose that human physiology is likely adapted to more consistently active muscles derived from both physical activity and from nonambulatory postures with higher levels of muscle contraction. Interventions built on this model may help reduce the negative health impacts of inactivity in industrialized populations.

Krugman on Piketty's new book on inequality - "Capital and Ideology'

Krugman's review is worth reading in it entirely, and I pass on a few clips that encapsulate his summary and option of Piketty's core points. Piketty:

...describes four broad inequality regimes, obviously inspired by French history but, he argues, of more general relevance. First are “ternary” societies divided into functional classes — clergy, nobility and everyone else. Second are “ownership” societies, in which it’s not who you are that matters but what you have legal title to. Then come the social democracies that emerged in the 20th century, which granted considerable power and privilege to workers, ranging from union representation to government-provided social benefits. Finally, there’s the current era of “hypercapitalism,” which is sort of an ownership society on steroids.

For Piketty, rising inequality is at root a political phenomenon. The social-democratic framework that made Western societies relatively equal for a couple of generations after World War II, he argues, was dismantled, not out of necessity, but because of the rise of a “neo-proprietarian” ideology. Indeed, this is a view shared by many, though not all, economists. These days, attributing inequality mainly to the ineluctable forces of technology and globalization is out of fashion, and there is much more emphasis on factors like the decline of unions, which has a lot to do with political decisions.

But why did policy take a hard-right turn? Piketty places much of the blame on center-left parties, which, as he notes, increasingly represent highly educated voters. These more and more elitist parties, he argues, lost interest in policies that helped the disadvantaged, and hence forfeited their support. And his clear implication is that social democracy can be revived by refocusing on populist economic policies, and winning back the working class.

Piketty could be right about this, but as far as I can tell, most political scientists would disagree. In the United States, at least, they stress the importance of race and social issues in driving the white working class away from Democrats, and doubt that a renewed focus on equality would bring those voters back. After all, during the Obama years the Affordable Care Act extended health insurance to many disadvantaged voters, while tax rates on top incomes went up substantially. Yet the white working class went heavily for Trump, and stayed Republican in 2018.