International Day of Older Persons (2022)

October 1st is the United Nation's Day of Older Persons.  

In 1970 the number of persons age ≥ 60 was approximately 278 million, and by the year 2020 that number had risen to over a billion people.  That number is projected to rise to over 2 billion by the year 2050, with 80% of those people living in low- and middle-income countries.  Life expectancy at birth for a baby born in the world today is age 73.

IMHO the aging of the world's population is humanity's most significant accomplishment, and yet it also presents public health's most pressing challenge in the 21st century- improving the human healthspan (vs  lifespan).

My TedX talk from 2019 on population aging and longevity science:

Cheers, 

Colin  

National Post Op-Ed

I have a new op-ed published today in the National Post on pubic health and medicine as an institution of social control, which addresses both pandemic public health measures and the new recommendations regarding the health risks of alcohol consumption.  A sample:

The “war against disease” that Winslow proposed for tackling infectious diseases was then extended to combating chronic diseases like cancer, heart disease and stroke. This meant that public health expanded its scope of concern to encompass a broader range of “behaviour control interventions,” covering what we eat, how much daily exercise we do (or do not do), smoking, our sexual habits, our sleep habits, etc.

Taken to an excess, even something as laudable as “the science of disease prevention” can become morally problematic. This was something the sociologist Irving Zola (1935-94) was well aware of. In 1972, he published a very insightful article titled, “Medicine as an Institution of Social Control.”

Zola’s article in The Sociological Review ought to be required reading for everyone who works in public health and medicine today. Zola was concerned that medicine was becoming a major institution of social control, alongside religion and the law. He worried that many considered medicine as “the repository of truth, the place where absolute and often final judgments are made by supposedly morally neutral and objective experts.”

....Zola’s concerns can apply to many other areas of public health and medicine today. Just a few weeks ago, a report was published by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction, which states that “even very small amounts of alcohol (more than two drinks a week) can be harmful to people’s health.” This is about as trite as saying, “Driving your car can be harmful to your health.” What we really want to know is how risky such behaviour is.

....By placing what is now considered low-risk levels of alcohol consumption into the highest-risk category, the report gives the impression that the risks of moderate or social drinking can be equated with those of alcoholism, or binge drinking, or drinking and driving, or drinking while pregnant. Rather than targeting those most at risk of the harms of drinking alcohol, these updated recommendations appear designed to try to persuade people not to tolerate any risks at all from alcohol consumption.

....Zola quipped that “living is injurious to health.” And this is certainly true. Public health and medicine must not only be compatible with individual autonomy, they must also recognize that, for many people, a “life worth living” is not equated with a life of “maximally optimal health choices.” When the sage dictum, “everything in moderation,” is replaced by the untenable dictum, “minimize every possible risk,” public health forgets that we also care about the quality, and not just quantity, of life.

Cheers, 

Colin  

Democratic Education (more important than ever)

 

My 2nd year students have a mid-term exam in a few weeks, and it will be their first time writing an exam in a proctored and in-person setting in over 2 years (when they were only in grade 11 in high school). In tonight’s lecture I told them they would be examined on a book, and they should read the WHOLE book, and that they are  expected to write an essay answer in response to a general question about said book.  I could hear gasps and feel the angst among the nearly 300 students!    

One student asked if they could bring their notes into the exam, another if they could bring a copy of the book to reference during the exam. The look on their faces when I told them they were expected to show up with just a pen in hand, and to actually memorize details from their notes and the reading, in addition to formulate their own critical thoughts on the material. The irony is the book they are to be examined on is Nussbaum's aptly titled Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.  Developing the skills of critical, independent thinking are perhaps more important than ever for the future success of our democracies given the educational setbacks of the past few years.  

Cheers, 

Colin

Nature News Story on embryo tests

 

Nature news has this interesting news feature on embryo testing.  A sample:

Genomic Prediction and some other companies have been using these scores to test embryos generated by in vitro fertilization (IVF), allowing prospective parents to choose those with the lowest risk for diseases such as diabetes or certain cancers. A co-founder of Genomic Prediction has said, controversially, that people might eventually be able to select for traits that are unrelated to disease, such as intelligence.

Pre-implantation genetic testing (PGT) for rare genetic disorders and chromosomal abnormalities has become common practice in the US$14-billion IVF industry. But testing for polygenic conditions (often referred to as PGT-P) is much newer, with only a small handful of companies selling it in a few countries, including the United States and Brazil, where it is largely unregulated.

Cheers, 

Colin

Today's Reading

I spent today reading this book- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.  An insightful and powerful autobiography, it is also difficult to read as it recounts with graphic detail the many hardships slavery imposed upon those it oppressed.  

The passage below details Douglass's estrangement from his mother, also a slave, who died when he was only a young child and he had no memory of seeing her during the daytime hours (when she would be working in the fields):

She was a field hand, and a whipping was the penalty for not being in the field at sunrise… I do not recollect ever seeing my mother by the light of day.  She was with me at night.  She would lie down with me, and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone.  Very little communication ever took place between us.  Death soon ended what little we could have while she lived, and with it her hardships and suffering.  She died when I was around seven years old, on one of my master’s farm’s, near Lee’s Mill.  I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial… Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger. (14) 

Cheers, 

Colin

Return of Lectures

Last night was the first in-person lecture I have given in 30 months.  The room was packed with close to 300 students, in one of the newly refurbished lecture rooms (pictured above, after the class was over) on campus.  This was for my Foundations in Political Theory course for second year students.  It was really rewarding to see the students face-to-face again and interact with them.  They eagerly asked questions during the lecture.  And for most of them (they are second year students), this is the first time they are back in the classroom since grade 11 high school.

Yesterday I also had my 4th year seminar course on the politics of pandemics and epidemics.  I first taught this seminar last winter, during the Omicron wave.  And like back in January, I started the class by asking the students to share their thoughts and experiences of the past 2.5 years of the pandemic.  It was very interesting to see how their perspective has shifted since January and now.  There are so many important lessons to learn from the past 2.5 years.

Cheers, 

Colin 

The New Science of Lockdown

Nature news has this piece on the science of lockdowns during the COVID pandemic.  My own personal view is that we will not be in a position to even begin an assessment of the net effect of the harms of lockdown until 3-5 years from now, so it is a bit premature to suggest we are in an epistemic position to make firm proclamations.  What is clear by now we is that lockdowns (at least when they were implemented) failed to eradicate the virus, and it has subsequently spread to every country in the world.  

Locking down billions of humans to try to eliminate a respiratory virus has never been tried before.  So the science of lockdowns is really "experimental science" on a grand scale.  I still find it surprising that even Nature frames the piece as if there was real success stories (I suppose if delaying the spread of the virus constitutes a "success", but only if an island or authoritarian regime).  A sample from the article:

Restrictions on social contact stemmed disease spread, but weighing up the ultimate costs and benefits of lockdown measures is a challenge.

Scientists have been studying the effects of lockdowns during the pandemic in the hope that their findings could inform the response to future crises. They have reached some conclusions: countries that acted quickly to bring in stringent measures did best at preserving both lives and their economies, for instance. But researchers have also encountered difficulties. Analysing competing harms and benefits often comes down not to scientific calculations, but to value judgements, such as how to weigh costs that fall on some sections of society more than others. That is what makes lockdowns so hard to study — and can lead to bitter disagreement.

....Other studies have tried to put more precise figures on the effects of lockdown policies, but their findings differ. An analysis8 of 41 countries in Europe and elsewhere found that stay-at-home orders had a relatively small impact on transmission, reducing R — the average number of people that one person with COVID-19 will go on to infect — by just 13% beyond what could be achieved by closing schools and universities (38%) or limiting gatherings to 10 people or fewer (42%). Yet Bhatt’s analysis4 of 11 countries suggested that stay-at-home orders cut R by 81%, with school closures, public-event bans and other measures being less important. Klimek warns against generalizing about the effectiveness of lockdown policies on the basis of figures such as these. “The effectiveness of each intervention is highly context dependent,” he says. What several analyses suggest is that no single intervention can reduce R to below 1 (signifying that infections are declining): multiple measures achieve this by working in concert.

....And lockdown policies did bring costs. Although they delayed outbreaks, saving lives by allowing countries to hang on for vaccines and drugs, they also brought significant social isolation and associated mental-health problems, rising rates of domestic violence and violence against women, cancelled medical appointments and disruption to education for children and university students. And they were often (although not always) accompanied by economic downturns.

Science has had many triumphs and successes over the past two centuries.  I am confident that the prolonged lockdown measures implemented during this pandemic will not be included among the list of defensible public health measures for today's aging populations.  Sadly progress in science is sometimes a "one step forward, two steps back" type of thing.

Cheers, 

Colin

The Socioeconomic Roots of Faculty Might (at least partially) Explain the Persistence of Ideal theory?

Higher education is a real privilege and joy to work in. But in many ways it can also be a very insular work environment, serving as a "echo chamber" to reinforce the beliefs and aspirations of a homogeneous elite group in society.

This is how I have long felt about "ideal theory" in political philosophy.  I have written about this many times here before, and in my published work, so I won't repeat my grievances against the paradigm again.  But this study in Nature Human Behaviour helps explain (IMHO) why so many in my discipline had been in the grips of "reflective equilibrium" ("let's derive theories of justice that validate the moral sensibilities of other ivory-tower elites!") and "abstraction" ("let's simplify the messy empirical realities of the world so that we can delve deeper into our hypothetical thought experiments vs actually attending to the realities of injustice") for so many decades.

Consider, for example, the educational origins of two of the most prominent non-ideal theorists- Charles Mills and A. Sen.  Mills did his first degree, in physics, at the University of West Indies in Jamaica.  And Sen first attended Presidency College in in Calcutta, before going on to elite universities to pursue other degrees (and I believe his father had a PhD, so he did come from an educated family within India).  By contrast prominent ideal theorists all attended elite universities from the start of their education:  Rawls did his undergraduate degree at Princeton, Cohen at McGill, Dworkin at Harvard and Nozick at Columbia University.  One's socio-economic background does shape the questions, methodologies, etc. of one's research projects.  Had more scholars in the discipline come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds during the 1970's-1990's I really doubt that ideal theory would have had so much sway in the field for so long.  

A sample from the study:

Professors play a unique role in the knowledge economy: they both train the next generation of thinkers and generate new scholarship, which informs national policy and advances scientific discoveries. But the professoriate has never represented the sociodemographic characteristics of the population it serves. While the diversity of the educational pipeline has been extensively studied in terms of race and ethnicity, and the links between parental income and occupational status, and their children’s educational attainment are well documented, there exist comparatively few systematic studies on the socioeconomic roots of professors or how their socioeconomic origins interact with institutional prestige.

....Research has shown notable socioeconomic differences in not only whether individuals attend and complete college, but also where they attend, with more advantaged students attending more selective institutions. Students completing degrees at highly selective institutions are more likely to come from the top 1% of the US income distribution than from the bottom 50%15. Students from more disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds who attend college, particularly those who attend selective colleges, also have different experiences on campus that are less conducive to academic success than their higher socioeconomic peers.

Cheers, 

Colin

Current Writing Projects

My classes start up next week and I am really looking forward to the beginning of term, especially the return to in-person classes for my large political theory course.  It has been 30 months since my last large in-person lecture!  

I thought I would write a brief blog looking back at the research I have done over the past summer, probably one of my most productive summers for research, though I wish I had a few weeks off now!  But I do have a sabbatical in the winter term to look forward to (more on that latter).  

I have 3 different papers on aging and geroscience in the works.  One, currently at the second stage of a R&R, is on this interesting book.  A second paper explores the significance of geroscience for women's health (currently under review for a journal).  And the third paper, still being polished before journal submission, is on the "folkbiology" of early 20th century public health pioneers.

In addition to those 3 new papers, I am also making progress on my textbook on the history of political philosophy.  I have half a chapter left to write on Black Political Thought, a chapter on Aristotle and Stoicism, and then a chapter on Conservatism and the conclusion.  This is the main project for coming year for me, and something I hope to complete during my sabbatical in the winter term.

Academic writing is both a source of meaning, fulfillment and achievement, but also stress, anxiety and exhaustion!  One always feels there are more topics to read about and address than is humanly possible to undertake. When deep into a project I tell myself that, when said project is completed, I will take a break before starting something new.  But inevitably I get immersed and intoxicated by the ideas for the next, new project, before even completing said project.     

Cheers, 

Colin