My wife and I like to sit out on our patio in the evening with our dog Clementine. This is a ritual we’ve done for years. We’ve noticed something curious about sitting outdoors. My wife gets bitten by mosquitoes far more than I do. We spent a month at an Airbnb in a Costa Rican jungle a few miles from the Pacific coast back in 2018. My wife had to fight off mosquitoes and no-see-ums while I hardly noticed them.
Category: Direct Primary Care
The Biggest Controversy in Pharma World: SSRIs
Scientists at University College London have conducted an umbrella review, evaluating pre-existing research, and concluded that there is little support for the idea that depression is related to abnormally low levels of serotonin.
Sahanika Ratnayake at Slate writes:
It’s true that the authors of the study are controversial figures, vocal to sometimes vituperative critics of the mental health status quo, leaving heated debates in their wake with each new publication. But the authors’ conclusion has been an open secret within mental health circles for at least a decade. The very public dispelling of this “serotonin model” has also removed a key plank in the widely believed but oversimplified myth of mental illness being caused by a “chemical imbalance.”
More on the Idea that Success in Life Depends on Who Your Friends Were
Raj Chetty study summarized here.
James Pethokoukis comments:
I’m reminded here of the important findings about upward mobility found in Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success by economists Ran Abramitzky (Stanford University) and Leah Boustan (Princeton University). This is the headline grabber: “Children of immigrants from nearly every country in the world are more upwardly mobile than the children of US-born residents who were raised in families with a similar income level.”
Thursday Links
- Should manufacturers be required to disclose the development cost of new drugs? Probably not.
- JCT: At least half of the tax burden in the Manchin/Schumer budget bill will be borne by Americans making less than $400,000, and roughly $17 billion worth of new taxes will fall on those earning less than $200,000.
- Voters like the health care provisions: 77% like Rx price caps and 56% like the extension of ACA health insurance premium subsidies for three more years.
- Go Ask Alice? — the supposed 1971 diary of a white teenage suburbanite who gets slipped LSD in a Coke at a party, then slides into addiction and ruin is a complete myth.
- Study: Lower socioeconomic kids do better if they socialize with higher socioeconomic kids. Did we really need a study to know this?