Just How Smart Are You?

We try and try again to convince ourselves and others around us that we’re clearly different from the rest. The aptly named “better-than-average effect” describes the tendency of most people to judge themselves to be harder workers, smarter investors, better lovers, cleverer storytellers, kinder friends, and more competent parents. A wide variety of studies have shown that across the board, no matter what the ability in question, only the most minute fraction of people are willing to describe themselves as “below average.” Ninety percent of us believe ourselves to be in the top 10 percent in terms of overall intelligence and ability. At the very least, we have to congratulate ourselves on our creative statistics. This phenomenon is also sometimes known as the “Lake Wobegon effect,” after the fictional town described by radio show host Garrison Keillor as a place where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” In our minds, it seems, we are all proud citizens of Lake Wobegon.

—The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar

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Lack of Health Care and Death

Later in this book, we’ll take a detailed look at Nikki White’s tragic encounter with America’s health care system. But the larger tragedy is that Ms. White is not alone. Government and academic studies report that more than twenty thousand Americans die in the prime of life each year from medical problems that could be treated, because they can’t afford to see a doctor. On September 11, 2001, some three thousand Americans were killed by terrorists; our country has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But that same year, and every year since then, some twenty thousand Americans died because they couldn’t get health care. That doesn’t happen in any other developed country. Hundreds of thousands of Americans go bankrupt every year because of medical bills. That doesn’t happen in any other developed country either.

—The Healing of America by T.R. Reid

 

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Wasteland Detroit

Like many of Detroit’s abandoned buildings, though, it’s anything but deserted. Rather, it’s a hive of activity, buzzing with scavengers, vandals, late-night revelers, arsonists, photographers and urban explorers who brave the crumbling buildings’ many hazards and create a good number of their own. The complex remains unguarded.
“Mayhem. That’s what they should call the place,” says John, a 36-year-old telephone-line repairman who spends his spare time exploring Detroit’s legendary industrial ruins. “If you decide you want to push a dump truck out of a window, this is the place to do it.”

Detroit has 80,000 abandoned lots and buildings, according to the city’s planning department. Old housing projects, homes, strip malls and even high-rise buildings sit empty across much of the city. Motown has more vacant office, retail and industrial space than nearly every other big city in the country.
Like many of Detroit’s abandoned buildings, though, it’s anything but deserted. Rather, it’s a hive of activity, buzzing with scavengers, vandals, late-night revelers, arsonists, photographers and urban explorers who brave the crumbling buildings’ many hazards and create a good number of their own. The complex remains unguarded.
“Mayhem. That’s what they should call the place,” says John, a 36-year-old telephone-line repairman who spends his spare time exploring Detroit’s legendary industrial ruins. “If you decide you want to push a dump truck out of a window, this is the place to do it.”

 

Images of Detroit

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The Health Danger of Noise?

If we look at the history of the fight against other pollutants—smoke, for instance—the trend is generally upward.  Ever since the first substantial air-pollution regulation was enacted…the more that scientists have identified health risks, the more these emissions have been regulated.  Yet with the exception of the very loudest sound offenders, a chart of the fight against noise would resemble less the progressive ascent to enlightenment than the graph of a wildly swinging stock market.
The easiest assumption would be that noise is simply a less-acute public-health threat than smoke.  Relative to global warming, of course that’s true.  But the overall risk to our health from road traffic noise is 40 percent higher than that from air pollutants, according to a 2008 World Health Organization report.  Dr. Rokhu Kim, the head of the WHO’s noise-related task force, told me that while there’s a politically powerful consensus that particulate matter from combustion engines increases cardiovascular mortality, it’s still difficult to identify how those particles actually enter the body and jeopardize the heart.  At this point, Kim said, “I think it’s fair to say that there’s a higher biological plausibility for noise as a trigger of heart disease than air pollution.”

If we look at the history of the fight against other pollutants—smoke, for instance—the trend is generally upward.  Ever since the first substantial air-pollution regulation was enacted…the more that scientists have identified health risks, the more these emissions have been regulated.  Yet with the exception of the very loudest sound offenders, a chart of the fight against noise would resemble less the progressive ascent to enlightenment than the graph of a wildly swinging stock market.

The easiest assumption would be that noise is simply a less-acute public-health threat than smoke.  Relative to global warming, of course that’s true.  But the overall risk to our health from road traffic noise is 40 percent higher than that from air pollutants, according to a 2008 World Health Organization report.  Dr. Rokhu Kim, the head of the WHO’s noise-related task force, told me that while there’s a politically powerful consensus that particulate matter from combustion engines increases cardiovascular mortality, it’s still difficult to identify how those particles actually enter the body and jeopardize the heart.  At this point, Kim said, “I think it’s fair to say that there’s a higher biological plausibility for noise as a trigger of heart disease than air pollution.”

–In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise, by George Prochnik

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The Passenger Pigeon

The real onslaught began with the onset of large-scale commercial hunting carried out by well-organised trappers and shippers in order to supply the developing cities on the east coast of the United States with a cheap source of meat. It began once railways linking the Great Lakes area with New York opened in the early 1850s. By 1855 300,000 pigeons a year were being sent to New York alone. The worst of the mass slaughter took place in the 1800s and 1870s. The scale of the operation can be judged by figures that seem almost incredible but which were carefully recorded as part of a perfectly legal and highly profitable commerce. On just one day in 1860 (23 July) 235,200 birds were sent east from Grand Rapids in Michigan.

Not surprisingly, even the vast flocks of pigeons could not withstand slaughter on this scale. Numbers fell rapidly and by the late 1880s large flocks, which had once been so common, had become a matter for comment and investigation, and most were no more than a few hundred strong. The last known specimens were seen in most states of the eastern United States, in the 1890s, and the passenger pigeon died out in the wild in Ohio about 1900. The last survivor of a species that had once numbered 5 billion died in captivity in 1914.

–Clive Ponting, A Green History of the World

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