A Lesson in Tyranny

The Tyranny of Power

When I began my career in medical statistics, back in 1972, little was heard of power calculations. In major journals, sample size often appeared to be whatever came to hand. For example, in that month, September 1972, the Lancet contained 31 research reports which used individual subject data, excluding case reports and animal studies. The median sample size was 33 (quartiles 12 and 85). In th...

A lesson in sigmoidoscopy.

"watershed effect," finding 10 to 15 years ofproblems all in 2 years due to an enhanced technology, or the common effect of increased findings that happens with many new screening or casefinding programs. In any event, as a direct result of screening sigmoidoscopies, three patients have had their cancers diagnosed at an earlier time than would have otherwise happened. Most importantly, four to ...

The Tyranny of Inequality

When parties are very unequally endowed, agreement may be very difficult to reach, even if the specific transaction is easy to contract on, and fungible resources can be transferred to compensate the losing party. The very fungibility of the resource transferred makes it hard to restrict its use, changing the amount the parties involved spend in trying to grab future rents. This spill-over effe...

The Tyranny of Geography

When Matt’s job search reached its third year, his family became convinced that his studying computer science in college was a mistake. “If computer science is such a good thing to study,” his grandmother sni ed, “why can’t it get him a job?” I wasn’t an intimate friend of Matt’s, but as his neighbor, I’d seen him grow from toddler to teenager to tech geek. As a gesture to the family, I o ered ...

The Tyranny of Embodiment