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posted by martyb on Wednesday June 28 2017, @11:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the are-you-a-net-gain-or-a-net-drain? dept.

Many jobs have spillover effects on the rest of society. For instance, the value of new treatments discovered by biomedical researchers is far greater than what they or their employers get paid, so they have positive spillovers. Other jobs have negative spillovers, such as those that generate pollution.

A forthcoming paper, by economists at UPenn and Yale,1 reports a survey of the economic literature on these spillover benefits for the 11 highest-earning professions.

There's very little literature, so all these estimates are very, very uncertain, and should be not be taken literally. But it's interesting reading.

Here are the bottom lines – see more detail on the estimates below. (Note that we already discussed an older version of this paper, but the estimates have been updated since then.)

(Emphasis in original retained.)

At the top, researchers who generate +$950,440 in positive externalities; at the bottom, financiers who generate -$104,000 in negative externalities. In a glaring omission, telephone sanitisers were not listed.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @12:15AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @12:15AM (#532706)

    The reproducibility project is actually now 4 out of 7 (after dropping an initial 25% because it was impossible for the original labs to explain how they got the results), but they have relaxed the definition of reproduced to allow for changing the protocol:
    http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/rigorous-replication-effort-succeeds-just-two-five-cancer-papers [sciencemag.org]

    Both managed to reproduce important parts of the previous research, meaning four out of the seven experiments so far replicated have backed up findings.

    The results weren't all perfect replications, so the news isn't glowing. In spite of the inhibitor in the replicated 2011 study reducing the growth of cancer cells in mice, the new study didn't replicate a prolonging of their lives.

    But since the new study deviated slightly from the previous method, some researchers think it's important to not read too much into such a difference.

    https://www.sciencealert.com/two-more-cancer-studies-have-just-passed-an-important-reproducibility-test [sciencealert.com]

    Why are they changing the protocols when the purpose is to see if others can reproduce your results?... it is like they do not understand the purpose of their actions.