When to Rob a Bank: ...And 131 More Warped Suggestions and Well-Intended Rants (25 page)

The results that came back from the PGD were disastrous. Four of the embryos were determined to be completely non-viable. The other two embryos were missing
critical genes/DNA sequences, which suggested that implantation would lead either to spontaneous abortion or to a baby with terrible birth defects.

The only silver lining on this terrible result is that the latter test had a false positive rate of 10 percent, meaning that there was a 1-in-10 chance that one of those two embryos might be viable.

So the lab ran the test again. Once again the results came back that the critical DNA sequences were missing. The lab told my friends that failing the test twice left only a 1-in-100 chance that each of the two embryos was viable.

My friends—either because they are optimists, fools, or perhaps know a lot more about statistics than the people running the tests—decided to go ahead and spend a whole lot more money to have these almost certainly worthless embryos implanted nonetheless.

Nine months later, I am happy to report that they have a beautiful, perfectly healthy set of twins.

The odds against this happening, according to the lab, were 10,000 to 1.

So what happened? Was it a miracle? I suspect not. Without knowing anything about the test, my guess is that the test results are positively correlated, certainly when doing the test twice on the same embryo, but probably across embryos from the same batch as well.

But the doctors interpreted the test outcomes as if they were uncorrelated, which led them to be far too
pessimistic. The right odds might be as high as 1 in 10, or maybe something like 1 in 30. (Or maybe the whole test is just nonsense and the odds were 90 percent!)

Anyway, this is just the latest example of why I never trust statistics I get from people in the field of medicine, ever.

My favorite story concerns my son Nicholas:

Relatively early on in the pregnancy we had an ultrasound. The technician said that although it was very early, he thought he could predict whether it would be a boy or a girl, if we wanted to know. We said, “Yes, absolutely we want to know.” He told us he thought it would be a boy, although he couldn’t be certain.

“How sure are you?” I asked

“I’m about fifty-fifty,” he replied.

. . . then you have to admit that
this
is a pretty good one: sending a piece of bogus research material to a biographer whom you happen to hate. In this case, the biographer is A.N. Wilson, who was writing a book about the poet John Betjeman. Wilson made use of the bogus letter, only to discover too late that the letter was fake—and that if you took the first letter of each sentence in the letter and added them one to the next, they would spell out this lovely message: “A.N. Wilson is a shit.”

This reminds me of my first job in journalism, as an editorial assistant at
New York
magazine. Once or twice a week, it was my job to stay late to look over the closing page proofs to make sure there were no errors that the story editors, copy editors, or production editors had missed. The most important thing was to make sure that the “drop caps” (i.e., the jumbo capital letters that begin each new section of a magazine article) didn’t inadvertently spell out something offensive. One night, while proofing an article about breast cancer, I found that the first four drop caps were
T, I, T,
and
S
. Yes, we changed them.

I almost never read business books anymore. I got my fill of them years ago when I was a management consultant before I went back and got a Ph.D.

Last week, however, I picked up
Good to Great
,
by Jim Collins. This book is an absolute phenomenon in the publishing world. Since it came out in 2001, it has sold millions of copies. It still sells over three hundred thousand copies a year. It has been so successful that seven years later the book is still in hardcover. I’ve been hearing about it for years and never looked at it. People are always asking me about it. I figured it was about time I took a look.

The book focuses on eleven companies that were just okay, and then transformed themselves into
greatness—where greatness is defined as a sustained period over which the stock dramatically outperformed the market and its competitors. Not only did these companies make the transition from good to great, but they also had the sort of characteristics which made them “built to last” (which is the title of an earlier book by Collins).

Ironically, I began reading the book on the very same day that one of the eleven “good to great” companies, Fannie Mae, made
headlines
in the business pages. It looks like Fannie Mae is going to need to be bailed out by the federal government. If you had bought Fannie Mae stock around the time
Good to Great
was published, you would have lost over 80 percent of your initial investment.

Another one of the “good to great” companies is Circuit City. You would have lost your shirt investing in Circuit City as well, which is also down 80 percent or more.

Nine of the eleven companies remain more or less intact. Of these, Nucor is the only one that has dramatically outperformed the stock market since the book came out. Abbott Labs and Wells Fargo have done okay. Overall, a portfolio of the “good to great” companies looks like it would have underperformed the S&P 500.

I seem to remember that someone did an analysis of the companies highlighted in the classic Peters and Waterman book
In Search of Excellence
and found the same thing.

What does this all mean? In one sense, not much.

These business books are mostly backward-looking: What have companies done that made them successful? The
future is always hard to predict, and understanding the past is valuable; on the other hand, the implicit message of these business books is that the principles that these companies use not only have made them good in the past, but position them for continued success.

To the extent that this doesn’t actually turn out to be true, it calls into question the basic premise of these books, doesn’t it?

This post was published in 2008. As of this writing, Fannie Mae is trading at just over $2 per share, down from nearly $80 in 2001, and Circuit City went bankrupt. The rest of the “Good to Great” companies are a mixed bag since 2008. Some have risen steeply (Kroger and Kimberly-Clark), others have fallen badly (Pitney Bowes and Nucor), while two of the eleven companies—Gillette and Walgreens—joined corporate forces (with, respectively, Procter & Gamble and Boots) and have had considerable success.

A while back, I blogged about how every third book had the word
bullshit
in its title. Happily, that trend faded. I could only find two books on Amazon released in the last year with
bullshit
in the title.

Now it seems that going after God is the hip thing to do.
Daniel Dennett started the stampede with
Breaking the Spell.
Richard Dawkins followed with the bestseller
The God Delusion.
Then came
God, the Failed Hypothesis
by Victor Stenger and
God Is Not Great
by Christopher Hitchens.

Next up?
Irreligion
by John Allen Paulos (author of
Innumeracy
). I love the fact that the book’s release date is December 26. What could be more fitting?

Here is what puzzles me: Who buys these books?

I’m not religious. I don’t think much about God, except when I am in a pinch and need some special favors. I have no particular reason to think he’ll deliver, but I sometimes take a shot anyway. Other than that, I’m just not that interested in God.

I’m definitely not interested enough to go out and buy books explaining to me why I shouldn’t believe in God, even when they are written by people like Dennett and Dawkins, whom I greatly admire. If I were religious, I think it would be even more likely that I would go out of my way to avoid books telling me that my faith was misplaced.

So who is making these anti-God books bestsellers? Do the people who despise the notion of God have an insatiable demand for books that remind them of why? Are there that many people out there who haven’t made up their mind on the subject and are open to persuasion?

Let me put the argument another way: I understand why books attacking liberals sell. It is because many conservatives hate liberals. Books attacking conservatives sell for the same reason. But no one writes books saying that
bird-watching is a waste of time, because people who aren’t bird watchers probably agree, but don’t want to spend twenty dollars in order to read about it. Since very few people (at least in my crowd) actively dislike God, I’m surprised that anti-God books are not received with the same yawn that anti-bird-watcher books would be.

Over the years I have had the opportunity to write about a great many interesting people. My mother had an
extraordinary (and long-buried) story
to tell about her religious faith. I’ve interviewed
Ted Kaczynski
, the Unabomber; the
rookie class of the NFL
; a remarkable
cat burglar
who stole only sterling silver.

But lately I have been writing about economists—and, most fruitfully, with the economist Steve Levitt. This is a whole new bag, and here’s why.

A non-fiction writer like me, trained equally in journalism and literature, is constrained by what his subjects tell him. Yes, I am afforded great latitude in surrounding a subject—if Ted Kaczynski won’t discuss his trial, for instance, there are plenty of others who will—but I am gravely limited by what people will tell me and how they tell it.

The obvious fact is that when most people are being written about, they present themselves as well as they can.
They tell the stories that make them look good, or noble, or selfless; some of the cleverer ones use self-deprecation to convey their excellence. Which leaves the writer in an unpleasant situation—dependent on anecdotes that may or may not be true, or complete, and which are told in order to paint a biased picture.

Here is where economists are different. Instead of using anecdotes to augment reality, they use data to assert the truth. That, at least, is the goal. Some of these truths can be uncomfortable. After I wrote about the economist
Roland Fryer
, he was assailed by fellow black scholars for having underplayed the degree to which racism afflicts black Americans. Steve Levitt’s work with John Donohue on the link between
Roe v. Wade
and the drop in violent crime has made people of all political beliefs equally queasy.

But for me, the writer, this kind of thinking is a godsend—a way of looking at the world that’s more long-sighted and unbiased than journalism typically affords.

Levitt likes to say that morality represents the way that people would like the world to work, whereas economics represents the way it actually does work. I don’t have the mental horsepower to be the kind of economist that Levitt and Fryer are; but I feel lucky to have found a way to hitch my curiosities to their brains. In the parlance of economists, my skills and Levitt’s are complementarities. Like most of the language of economics, the word itself is an ugly one; but, like a lot of economics itself, the concept is grand.

Steve Levitt wrote:

My sister Linda passed away this summer. Nobody could love a daughter more than my father Michael loved Linda. My father, who is a doctor, was realistic from the start about what modern medicine might be able to do to save his precious daughter from cancer. Even with those low expectations, he was shocked at how impotent—and actually counterproductive—her interactions with the medical system turned out to be. Here, in his own words, is my father’s poignant account of my sister’s experience with medical care.

“Daddy, I am going to tell you something you are not going to want to hear. The MRI showed that I have two brain tumors.” This verbal catastrophe is the telephone message that I (an elderly, practicing gastroenterologist) received from my previously healthy fifty-year-old daughter, who had just undergone a brain MRI for unsteady gait of one week’s duration. A worrier and a pessimist, I feared the MRI might show multiple sclerosis. Metastatic brain tumors were outside even my fertile imagination. The date is August 9, 2012.

For unknown reasons, my daughter is transferred via ambulance to a local metropolitan hospital. In a one-hour
period, the MRI result has converted my daughter into an ambulance case and me into a very nervous, distressed father. A total-body CT exam shows additional tumors in the neck, lungs, and adrenal glands with possible involvement of the liver. A relationship is formed with a local oncologist, the neck mass is biopsied, and my daughter is discharged to await biopsy results. Four days later, the biopsy is read as non-small-cell carcinoma of the lung. We are told that in young women who have never smoked, this tumor occasionally may have a favorable genotype that renders it susceptible to chemotherapy. An Internet check indicates that the favorable genotype is rare and “susceptible”—one of those relative terms employed in oncology.

A Greek aphorism warns, “Call no man happy until he is dead.” A calamity that I hoped/presumed never would occur now seems likely—I am going to outlive one of my children. I am very unhappy, and my wife asks if we will ever be happy again.

My daughter needs local treatment of the brain tumors and systemic chemotherapy. She and her husband opt for care at a distant referral center. She promptly is seen by a neuro-oncologist at the referral center, and a PET scan confirms the widespread nature of the tumor. The following day gamma knife therapy is performed on the two major brain tumors, in the cerebellum and the frontal lobe. Nine days after the brain lesions were first observed, she leaves the referral center ostensibly in her usual good state of health (dexamethasone relieved the unsteady gait). Temporarily,
I begin to eat and sleep once again. My daughter awaits a return visit to the referral center to discuss chemotherapy with a pulmonary oncologist. While I text or talk with her daily, I am completely unprepared for what I see when we meet five days later. She now looks ill. She is hoarse and short of breath with minimal exertion, and the neck mass seemingly has doubled in size. At this moment, the referral center notifies us that re-staining of the tumor indicates that it is of thyroid rather than lung origin. The appointment with the pulmonary oncologist is replaced by a visit with an endocrine-oncologist who recommends an adrenal biopsy to determine the differentiation of the metastatic tumor. Independent of the tissue of origin, it is apparent that a genetically altered monster is running rampant in my daughter’s body.