President Obama nominated Jim Yong Kim, a Partners in Health original, good friend of Paul Farmer, president of Dartmouth College, anthropologist, MacArthur genius, and brilliant medical doctor to head the World Bank. Not a former banker nor politician in the US government. Very interesting.

Kim played an important role in the foundation of PIH and I learned the most about him through Mountains Beyond Mountains, which captures the mission of Paul Farmer in creating the Partners in Health organization. PIH was a bit radical in its inception by clearly stating a preferential option for the poor in health care, but since its exponential growth and publicity, this notion isn't so controversial. No doubt due to the success of both Farmer and Kim.

I think I read Mountains Beyond Mountains six or seven years ago (again CBT hat tip), but it is still at the top of my list of best books of all time. Despite my economist training and mathematical background, the drive of Farmer, a doctor and anthropologist, is actually what motivated me to study international development.  If you haven't read MBM (and I haven't already hassled you about it), get off the computer and go to the library. Right. Now.

And just to be clear, its a good thing Obama didn't nominate Bill Easterly. As a clever and harsh critic of the World Bank, he wasn't quite up for the job.

Olympia Snowe calls it quits.

Repeating a particular phrase or story over and over does not make it true. Further, having a particular personal theory that has been validated by you in the small sample size of your own life experiences also does not make it true. In fact, we have people dedicated to testing theories. It's called research.

This completely uninformed theorizing is particularly frightening as it relates to reproductive rights and the ugly republican primary.

The permeated scared theory that a couple of old guys have planted that easier access to birth control will induce an evil moral decline is not just angering and ridiculous, its uninformed.  Here's what birth control does: it results in large increases in overall female education, further increases in labor force participation, particularly during childbearing ages, raising the number of annual hours worked and enabling future independence.  Additionally, it improves education outcomes for children. Didn't someone say the economy the should be the main issue?

It's so shocking and disappointing that solid empirical evidence like this is completely ignored and that the personalized theorizing is all that we hear, that sometimes you just have to laugh. Thank you, Amy Poehler:

Mike Huckabee joined the fight against President Obama's mandate saying "We're all Catholics now." You know who is not all Catholic now? All Catholics now. 98% of Catholic women say they've used birth control.

Wait, maybe Amy Poehler just made up a fact that everyone seems to be repeating? No, this fact comes from a research paper.

Head nod: CBT, LANS


Addendum: A distinguished fan (read: dad) noted my inappropriate language choice in the title. He's probably right.

A while back, I responded to Hanna Rosin's 2010 The End of Men in a post entitled the Rise of Parents Opting for Girls at Fertility Clinics, which might give you some idea on my stance about this ominously approaching theoretical termination.  Still, the freak-out on this topic has been substantial. I just heard an intelligent policy debate from Intelligence-Squared on whether or not, in fact, "men are finished." What?? Yes.  And after the debate, 66% of voters agreed. Seriously.

Most of the discussion seems preposterous and sensational to me, however, I did like this bold comment by David Zinczenko:

Gender equality is something, we can all agree on, as an ideal. But if we are
approaching gender equality, why are there fewer women in government today than there were ten years ago? Why is it so much easier for men to hold onto their gun rights than it is for women to hold onto their reproductive rights? Not only aren't men finished, but women haven't even begun. Let's at least get to the point where the game is tied before we start writing all the men off.

And finally, as I thought more about why this freak-out about appears to be so sensationalized, I learned this:

Men control opinion journalism; only 10 to 15 percent of talking heads on opinion news shows are female and between 80 and 90 percent of a newspaper’s opinion essays are written by men, according to the Stanford Op Ed Project.

From here.

A troubling front-page article on the cover of the NYTimes yesterday, Contraceptive Used in Africa May Double Risk of H.I.V.

I'm a slightly skeptical of the methodology. Even though there were 3800 couples in the study, only 200 women were using injectable contraceptives (Depo-Provera, or some generic version of it). Of these 200 couples, 10 H.I.V contractions occurred among couples using injectables, while 3 occurred among couples using oral contraceptives. That is a very small sample. Additionally, almost half the women using injectables were also using oral contraceptives over the course of the study and this non-compliance was not accounted for. Although compliance was never the objective, given that this was not a randomized controlled trial.

These are a few points of criticism, but regardless, this study leaves many alarming and urgent questions unanswered. And even if the methodology is skeptical, this article and its spread will itself be detrimental by scarring people away from contraceptives of all forms.

Authors comments on the study.
Full study.

Input credit: AD, DG, BA