Self and other-regarding preferences throughout the life cycle

A new film, and a new paper in Nature this week pinpoint exactly when children develop a sense of consideration for others. The film, in addition, pinpoints the age, later in life, when this socially important behaviour appears to vanish entirely.

First to the paper in Nature by researchers Fehr (photo, middle), Bernhard & Rockenbach. It shows that children as young as 8 years old demonstrate a complex set of egalitarian tendencies. Egalitarianism involves the distribution of resources in an equitable fashion between self and other, even when this distribution involves a personal cost.

Many argue that this preference is the bedrock of human cooperation, so it is important to know when and how it evolves in us. We are not born with it. Three year olds have no discernible preference towards sharing and almost never share when sharing results in personal cost to themselves.

The celebrated part of this paper is the meticulous care with which conclusions can be drawn about the precise nature of other regarding preferences. Using methods tailored for children that have been adapted from highly sophisticated experiments used to study adult behaviour, Fehr can easily distinguish human altruism from a host of distracting facsimiles, such as the tendency to be merely helpful. Helpfulness is observed in many kinds of animals.

I wouldn't want to diminish this beautiful experimental work, but I happen to have just heard about a new Ben Kingsley film that seems to chart the age-related decline of other regarding behaviour with an equally impressive accuracy and precision.

Elegy, featuring Ben Kingsley and Penélope Cruz, is a film adaptation of a Philip Roth novella about a Columbia literature professor having an affair with a student. Nicely framing behaviour across the human life span, the film examines self versus other preferences in young women and men in their mid 60s.

The film looks terribly, terribly nauseating. But it seems to provide an elegant study of the disintegration of other regarding preferences during old age and the subsequent return of mental functioning that is characteristic of early childhood. And as a work of pure fiction, the storyline also portrays the generous other regarding tendencies of younger folks that choose to live with such men:

Cruz dialog: "I didn't ask you what I was gonna do. I asked you what you wanted to do with me".

Kingsley dialog: "I was in love with her, George. I have never felt like that ever in all my life."

Cruz dialog: "I am happy".

I'd seen enough by the end of the trailer, but I trawled around and found an illuminating Ben Kingsley Guardian interview by Brian Logan:

"Very soon preconceptions of me, if there are any left, will be meaningless, because I'll be moving too fast,". [Kingsley] makes a karate action with his arms, to indicate how confused we'll all be. The child in him will be pleased at that.

"Egalitarianism in young children" is published on page 1079 in the August 28th edition of Nature. Elegy is coming to a cinema near you.

Lights, Canberra, inaction

Earlier this month I read two very different policy announcements about innovation. The first came from the European Commission and declared hopes that 2009 would be the European Year of Innovation.

The image of the light bulb comes from the official EU press release. Both the image and the sentiment surrounding the announcement speaks volumes about the top down notions held by the Commission about how to realize economic gains from Europe's rich and diverse research base.

A prime example of this top down, and frankly wishful, thinking is the European Institute of Technology (EIT). Intended to rival the MIT as a centre for innovation and the commercialization of research, the EIT was officially launched on March 11th this year by the European Parliament.

If the Commission's hopes are realized and 2009 is declared the European Year of Innovation, the EIT will doubtlessly take centre stage at the celebrations. The only problem is that no one seems willing to come to the party.

The Commission expects universities and companies to fund a lion's share of the EIT's ambitious development costs. Yet the EIT concept has received what can only be described as scorn from academia, research policy groups such as the European Science Foundation and Industry.

Few predict that the initiative will result in any measurable degree of action.

Canberra
The second announcement on innovation came from what I would call a thinking person's academic policy think tank, the Group of Eight based in Canberra, Australia.

The announcement describes how Australian spending on basic research in 2005 has fallen to a third of the levels observed at the beginning of the 1990s.

As Go8 chairperson Alan Robson points out, changes in the way research is funded has created a situation in which "the winners are losers".

Government funding to the top performing research universities fails to cover the total costs of research, effectively forcing the most successful universities to cross subsidize their research from international student fees.

Robson also estimates that the funding shortfall has created a situation in which the top universities of Australia have deferred Aus$1.5 billion in university maintenance activities.

Urging policy makers to think beyond the orthodoxy of "turning ideas into money", Robson says that his priority is towards "building relationships and better communication between universities and the communities they serve".

The focus on innovation alone is failing to achieve this goal.

Banks as dangerous neighbourhoods

Tom Keene interviews Nassim Taleb about the deficiencies of Value at Risk models by explaining that empirical models cannot predict Jerome Kerviel's 5 Billion euro loss at SocGen on the basis of existing data, for example Nick Leeson's 860 Million loss at Barings.

The progression can only be explained by evoking nonlinear processes, says Taleb. Taleb suggests that the nonlinearity can be explained by the trend towards concentration in the banking industry (fewer banks, each larger in size) and by increased interdependencies between these banks (eg increased use of interbank loans).

The solution? Smaller banks; and more of them.

Pandemic preparedness in the 21st century

I'm back from another cerebral treat at the Swiss Re Centre for Global Dialog, Rueschlikon, Switzerland.



Andreas Reis, WHO Department of Ethics and Human Rights, reviewed the 50+ year history of pandemic preparedness. Back in 1952 the WHO created the Global Influenza Surveillance Network, now comprising 118 centres in 89 countries. Reis described how GISN has been tirelessly detecting and cataloging flu strains ever since.

The year 2000 saw the establishment of the Global Outbreak Alert Response Network (GOARN), which has already delivered vaccines and antivirals to more than 50 flu outbreaks in 40 countries.

GOARN has also advanced the thinking behind the institutional response to pandemics. Reis talked about the "Titanic" principle of vaccine allocation, in which women and children are privileged in the response to a pandemic.

He contrasted this with strategies in which health care professionals would instead get to jump to the front of the treatment queue. He emphasized that every strategy has its weakness.

Next came Basel county Chief Medical Officer Anne Witschi to describe the various phases of Switzerland's impressive outbreak response strategies. Witschi started with a description of Phase 3 of the response: the detection and isolation of a person infected with influenza A virus.

Contact tracing roots out those who have been exposed to the virus. Isolation of all traced contacts completes the picture for phase 4 of the response.

Phases 5 and 6 see mass vaccinations, - voluntary in Switzerland, and attempts to achieve social distancing. Social distancing refers to the prevention of any significant aggregation of people by shutting down schools, public transport and canceling all unnecessary workplace activity.

Remember that the Swiss government has stockpiled 8M doses of the antiviral Oseltamivir (Tamiflu) in anticipation of pandemic. Enough for every human in Switzerland.

Witschi described how Switzerland would manage the resulting traffic jams (no public transport) and boarder controls (people will make unpredictable moves to join family members and other loved ones). Much thought has gone into managing religious congregations.

Finally, medical insurance expert Peter Miller presented Swiss Re's models for predicting the death toll of a full blown pandemic. What was interesting for me was to learn that the mortality rate has never exceeded about 3% of those infected.

Miller was quick to point out how our preparedness has improved. A calamity of the scale of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic has, according to his models, been reduced to a 1 in 3000 year event.

One serious difference between the H5N1 flu virus and other threatening viral nasties is the time lag between when one can infect others and when symptoms start to show. Someone infected with SARS is symptomatic from the moment they can pass on the disease.

For H5N1, there is a 1 day time lag before the symptoms set in; a whole day when a victim can innocently infect others.

During question time marking the end of the meeting, the man sitting next to me raised his hand and asked Anne Witschi some probing questions about the Swiss stockpile of Tamiflu. "Is there really enough medical equipment to deliver treatment for everyone?", he asked.

"There's a full treatment course for every person in Switzerland," came the confident reply.

"And the syringes?" he probed. "Are there enough syringes stockpiled to keep treating people?".

Suddenly, just for a moment, the spell was broken. "There is still a small problem with the stock of syringes and needles," Witschi added sheepishly. The man ceased his questioning.

Afterwards, I asked the man whether he had already known the answer to his question. "I'm working in this area," he said. And then said no more.

Flu pandemics remain spooky, no matter how impressive 21st preparedness appears.

Links 2008.01.09: Hygiene, Social nets and EU-land media survey

Hygiene hypothesis links rising allergy rates with antiseptic modern life: new twist
Study by Bengt Björkstén explores human gut microbiome - sum total of microbes in the gut, for clues as to why rich microbiome correlates robustly with reduced allergy.

Social-networking biggest in Japan
Flattish growth in online membership around the 100M mark in the US is contrast with "rest of world" membership topping 400M and rising.

Citizens grumble about poor coverage of EU in media
Survey of all member states reveals that citizens feel EU news is insufficiently reported on TV (48% thought so), radio (46%) and print (36%), with generally positive attitudes about the quality of what media coverage there is.

There was little consensus regarding Internet media coverage. This surprises me. I'm always shocked that what little internet news covered European achievements covers is badly: Ever noticed that the media announces a 1 year delay for Boeing Dreamliner as 'confirming a plan' but announced the same news for Airbus A380 as 'troubled plane maker faces further delays'?