Ready for some trick questions — to test your eyesight & intuition?
Y or N — All lines have identical length
This is the Müller-Lyer illusion — lines of the same length with different arrowheads at the ends, making the line at the bottom appear longer than the others.
Y or N — Lab-grown beef will raise the price of luxury handbags
Chanel & Luis Vuitton execs should be worried. You think I’m pulling your leg?
Actually, I have no idea if that is true. But humour me — the key to understanding this connection is the way innovation & prices shape supply & demand.
What If lab-grown beef falls in price and becomes a substitute for conventional beef? Fewer ‘beef’ burgers (& steaks) will mean fewer cattle raised for meat, reducing the supply of hides available for leather.
Y or N — Recessions improve your health
The human and economic costs of recessions are well-documented. They can also have real health benefits, however, as explained in a new paper from the US National Bureau of Economic Research: ‘The Great Recession provided 1 in 25 55-year-olds with an extra year of life.’
One driver is air pollution, which is lower in recessions, because of reduced economic activity. The benefits of lower pollution levels persist long after the recession — at least 10 years, according to research. Air pollution reduction accounts for more than one-third of the mortality benefits from the Great Recession.
Y or N — Your survival odds increase when the senior cardiologists are away
You’re kidding me, right? No I’m not.
In this intriguing study spanning a decade and involving 200,000 patients, a surprising revelation emerged. Patients who happened to have a heart attack during a week when hot-shot cardiac surgeons were away at national conferences were found more likely to survive. It sounds like the joke — stay away from hospitals because that’s where lots of people die — but the statistics are solid. The heart surgeons most likely to attend big national or international meetings also tend to be the go-getters, eager to cut and demonstrate their prowess in the operating theater. When these surgeons are away, mortality rates decrease by about 12.5%, a decrease ‘similar in magnitude to some of the best treatments we have available for heart attacks.’
What if I told you that marathon race days cause an increase in (non-runner) mortality rates — you’re scratching your head but you get the drift by now.
Watch this interesting EconTalk podcast to find out why — Anupam Bapu Jena is a physician & economist. He is the Joseph P. Newhouse professor of healthcare policy at Harvard Medical School and a physician in the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. He has an M.D. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.
He is the author, along with Christopher Worsham, of the book Random Acts of Medicine: The Hidden Forces that Sway Doctors, Impact Patients, and Shape Our Health which is the subject of the discussion below.