When true believers strike

True Believers who put their own agendas ahead of sound science enjoy what success they do because the effects of their policies may take years to manifest.

The True Believers who oppose fluoridation in water systems can scare people into refusing or abandoning water fluoridation programs. The effects won't show up immediately, but they do show up.

In the three years since fluoride was removed from Ashburton’s water supply, the town’s oral health has been on a plummeting, downward spiral, says an Ashburton dental surgeon. Dr Justin Wall said the increasing incidence of oral decay in the Ashburton District could be directly linked to the removal of fluoride on March 31, 2002. <snip>

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"The time from when a tooth is perfectly healthy until it is travelling home in your pocket is normally four years and we’re approaching four years now. For people who didn’t have sound teeth when fluoride was taken out, the deterioration has been accelerated," he said. Dental therapists who worked with young children were now becoming overloaded with work and that was spilling over onto his workload, Dr Wall said. As a contractor to the Canterbury District Health Board who deals with advanced problems with children’s teeth, he said his waiting list was now running three or four weeks out. "By the time they see us we are looking at abscessing and things like that in children from about the age of four. If we can’t treat them, they sit on waiting lists for six months in Christchurch Hospital for a general anaesthetic."

Of course, a spot on a waiting list that's occupied by a kid with abscessed teeth means someone else is waiting that much longer. (Blame some of that wait on a socialized medicine system. A market-based system would have some incentive to respond to an upswing in abscessed teeth.) Left untreated, a decayed tooth will impact health in general, eventually leading to more hospital time.

The point here is that in this case, the lag time between discontinuing fluoridation and the visible impact on health is only(!) three years. In other cases, the lag time can be even longer. That doesn't make them any less serious.

Policies, for example that punish drug companies and force them to sell their wares at artificially low prices have a short-term benefit, but discourage long-term research. Even if profits remain high, the incentive to produce a "killer app" drug wanes. If the drug is that much of a "killer app", the company that invents it may lose all control over it due to political pressure to make it available to all comers for free. In the current climate, the company that invents boosterspice (Larry Niven's drug that prevents aging) will find that it has no say over its manufacture and distribution. It might as well spin off a separate company, which would then be the government-regulated boosterspice utility company.

The "controversy" over evolution is another example where the effects have a long lag time. Evolution is either true or not. By "true", I mean that evolution, as a model, describes what happens in nature. Either it's an accurate description, or it's not. As David Friedman points out in his books on price theory, the alternative to a true theory is a false theory – that is, one which says false things about how the world works.

If you reject a true theory, you will be led to believe false things about the world around you. And if you base your research or your policies on false ideas, you will get wrong answers. Now it's possible the answers won't be very wrong. An answer that's not very wrong is one that won't kill you outright, or even make you sick. It just won't make you any better. Or, an answer that's only slightly wrong won't make you as much better as one that's spot on correct.

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The effect rejecting a correct theory in favor of one that is only slightly wrong is that you won't get ahead as fast as you would if you kept the correct one. Over a year, it won't make that much difference. In the long term, though, it adds up.

Consider a society that rejects true theory A in favor of slightly false theory B. Theory B falls short of theory A by a tenth of a percent. Thus, the society that chooses theory B is only acting on the right information 99.9% of the time.

In the first year, that society has fallen behind a society using theory A by a tenth of a percent.

After a decade, it adds up to one percent.

After a century, we're looking at a ten percent shortfall.

After a thousand years, the shortfall is some 63%. A society that had opted for the correct theory would be 270% farther along in whatever field the theory addresses. If the cure for your disease happened to be in that gap, well the people whose agenda favored theory B won't be around to demand an apology from.

The anti-fluoridation movement is an example of where bad theory kills people.

It's not the only one.