Memory Loss, Economic Predictions, and Girls' Self-Esteem.

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Gilles O. Einstein, chairman of the department of psychology and professor of psychology at Furman University, and author, with Mark A. McDaniel, of Memory Fitness: A Guide for Successful Aging (Yale University Press, 2004):

One thing we tend to notice with increasing age is memory loss. It becomes more difficult to remember the name of a student from the previous term, whether we have already told a story to a particular class, or the details of a conversation that we had two weeks ago. Many people interpret these increasingly frequent memory lapses as the ominous first signs of Alzheimer's disease.

Recently, I asked faculty and staff members at my institution to provide their age and answer the following question: "Have you ever had the thought (with some degree of seriousness) that you might have Alzheimer's disease?" About one-third of respondents who were in their 40s and older thought they might have Alzheimer's. This is interesting in light of the fact that the actual prevalence of Alzheimer's disease for people under 65 is lower than 1 percent.

Why do so many of us make this inference? It's very likely that we start to notice memory losses in our early 40s. Indeed, when testing people from their 20s onward, the research is clear in showing normal age-related declines on most types of cognitive tasks, such as processing speed, working memory, and long-term memory. So, we should be reassured to realize that the vast majority of our memory lapses are signs of normal aging and not dementia.

Bruce J. Caldwell, professor of economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and author of Hayek's Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F.A. Hayek (University of Chicago Press, 2004):

One of the most misunderstood concepts in my discipline of economics is prediction. The public wants economists to be able to predict things like turning points in the stock market, the growth rate of the economy over the next year, or when interest rates are going to go up or down and by how much. People want to know these things in advance so that they can become rich (or avoid becoming poor) by making the right financial decisions. It would be nice if economists could reliably forecast such things. (Of course, if we could, we wouldn't tell anyone else, we'd just use the information to become rich ourselves.) But we cannot.

Economists can make fairly reliable predictions about certain things. Unfortunately, they are not the sorts of predictions that people (perhaps especially politicians) enjoy hearing -- especially those of the "you can't have your cake and eat it too" variety. So, for example, economists told Ronald Reagan that he could not simultaneously cut taxes, increase military spending, and balance the budget. Another type is when economists point out the unintended adverse consequences that will result when certain (often very popular) policies are followed: rent controls leading to housing shortages and the deterioration of the housing stock, or minimum-wage laws increasing teenage unemployment, especially among minorities.

So, economists cannot make the predictions that people want us to, and the ones we can make are unpleasant to contemplate. Carlyle's quip about economics being the dismal science was not so far off the mark. But recognizing constraints is sometimes very useful, especially in an election year.

Rosalind Chait Barnett, director of the Community, Families, & Work Program and senior scientist at Brandeis University, and author, with Caryl Rivers, of Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs (Basic, 2004):

As a clinician, a researcher, and a mother, I am amazed at how much we talk about self-esteem and self-esteem problems and how little we actually know about this important construct. Beginning with Carol Gilligan's book Making Connections (1990) and Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia (1994), conventional wisdom has had it that in early adolescence, girls experience a large, predictable drop in self-esteem from which they never fully recover. According to these books, based on anecdotal evidence from small, nonrepresentative samples, young girls lose their voice, becoming less assertive and confident.

Researchers, skeptical about these conclusions, undertook large-scale meta-analyses to determine just how serious girls' problems with self-esteem really were. Based on studies of about 100,000 male and female students using established self-esteem measures, researchers completely overturned the earlier "findings." Self-esteem differences between boys and girls were negligible, there was more variation within gender than between genders, and, most startling, there was no evidence of a dip in self-esteem at adolescence for girls or boys.