Day: August 29, 2001

Sweet Fancy Moses has a hilarious look at what Amazon.Com reviewers thought of each of the American Film Institute’s Top 20 films (the AFI actually listed the top 100 films, but SFM only highlights the top 20.

The AFI list itself is interesting, but I think The Godfather is a far better film than either Citizen Kane or Casblanca. In fact if you treat The Godfather and The Godfather II as a single narrative, I think there’s no question you’re watching the best mainstream American cinema ever (as mush as I like the film, I’m not sure I’d put it in the top 10 films if you include foreign films).

Of course I’m a bit biased because over the past few years I’ve become pretty obssessed with the films to the point where I’ve memorized most of the dialogue and watch them any chance I can get. I.e., whenever my wife is out of town because, as she puts it, “I’m sick of watching that stupid movie all the time.”

Little does she know that I pre-ordered the deluxe DVD version set to be released in October.

The National Center for Policy Analysis published a short summary of the arguments that the coming end to population growth is going to harm economic growth. According the Center,

Such prospects [a smaller, aging population] have many demographers and world leaders concerned. Not only might there come a time when there would be too few workers to support retirees, but there would also be too few workers to support economic growth.

The article offers two possible solutions: encouraging people to stay in the work force longer before retiring, and using immigration to keep the work force growing. Even if the concerns about economic growth are accurate, however, these would be stop gap measures at best.

A better focus would be to ensure that legal structures are in place to allow aging, shrinking societies to organically adapt to these gradual changes.

This is, after all, what largely determined success or failure during the 20th century’s enormous population boom. Countries that had legal structures in place to allow people to adapt to the changes thrived, while countries that did not stagnated or worse.

For example, the Center cites concerns about the viability of the U.S. Social Security Administration. The SSA is a rigid scheme that is largely predicated on population growth. It will not be able to survive the coming change in population trends without major modifications.

But economic growth itself does not depend on population growth. In fact, the most successful economies today grow much faster than their population. There is no reason such growth can’t continue, again provide legal structures are not so overly rigid that they prevent institutions and individuals from adapting.

Source:

Population growth rate slowing. The National Center for Policy Analysis, August 28, 2001.

The Daily Telegraph (London) had an interesting summary of an Ohio State University study of using hypnosis to recover memories . The results confirm a lot of skeptical suspicions about the practice — the memories of people who underwent hypnosis were no more accurate than those who had not undergone the procedure, but the subjects who were hypnotized were far more convinced that there erroneous memories were accurate than were the control group.

Subjects in the study were either hypnotized or given a relaxation exercise. They were then asked to estimate the dates that certain historical events took place, such as the Persian Gulf War. Both groups were just as likely to be accurate, but when their memories were faulty the group that had been hypnotized were more likely to insist that their memories were accurate even after the errors were pointed out.

As Joseph Green, an associate professor of psychology who conducted the study, said, “While hypnosis does not enhance the reliability of memory there is evidence that it leads to increased confidence in memories.”

Those two effects in combination — enhanced confidence without an increase in reliability — is a potentially dangerous combination and the results add yet one more nail into the coffin of the supposed benefits of using hypnosis to recover forgotten memories.

Source:

Hypnosis does not help accurate memory recall, says study. Celia Hall, The Daily Telegraph (London), August 27, 2001.