What's The "Middle Ground" On Housing Policy?

At Newsday yesterday, a guy named Ruben Navarette has one of those usual laments about the terrible partisan divide and disappearing middle ground in American politics.  His prescription: we just need to have a civil and intelligent search for "solutions":

We'd be a stronger country . . . if we demanded — from elected officials and from one another — that we all put more thought, honesty and nuance into our discussion of policy issues, instead of drawing out our perspectives in stark black-and-white terms when the world comes in shades of gray.    

Well, Ruben, the problem here is that the other half of us don't buy the idea that the government can solve every human problem if it just puts enough smart people on the job of finding the "solution" and throws enough money in the right direction.  To take two big scourges that the government is endlessly trying to fix with programs and spending -- poverty and homelessness -- the evidence would seem to be rather strong that all government efforts to "solve" these problems only make them worse.  No amount of "thought, honesty, and nuance" is going to change that.

For today let's take Ruben's call to "thought, honesty, and nuance" and apply it to government policy for dealing with the homeless.  Here in New York, the administration of Mayor de Blasio has the idea that the cause of homelessness is lack of sufficient affordable housing, which can be fixed by the government subsidizing and/or mandating the provision of apartments at far-below-market rents.  And yet, New York for around 80 years has been ground zero for affordable and subsidized housing initiatives, not to mention rent control, and somehow the number of homeless never goes down and housing becomes more and more expensive relative to other cities.

Back in 2002 when prior Mayor Bloomberg took office, the City had a policy of giving priority in subsidized public housing to those who had become homeless and entered the shelter system.  Bloomberg and his people became convinced that that policy was giving an incentive to many people to declare themselves homeless in order to jump a long waiting list to get into the public housing.  So in 2005 the Bloomberg administration reversed the policy of giving priority in public housing to the homeless.  That brought withering criticism from homeless advocates, notably something called the Coalition for the Homeless, which called the idea that people would enter the homeless shelter system in order to jump the subsidized housing queue a "zombie lie."   Here is their advocacy piece from March 2014, at the beginning of the de Blasio administration:

In the area of homeless policy in New York City, there is no more persistent “zombie lie” than the notion that providing housing subsidies – in particular, priority referrals for federal housing programs like public housing or Section 8 vouchers – leads to a surge in families entering the homeless shelter system. . . .  [T]his “zombie lie” was long espoused by Bloomberg administration officials to defend their elimination of housing aid for homeless children and families.    

How's that for withering scorn?  After a few months, in July 2014 de Blasio and his people succumbed to the advocacy and reinstated the policy of public housing priority for shelter residents.  Did it work out?  A year and a half into the new policy and the local papers are filled with stories of the surge in homelessness and the new homeless "crisis."  The New York Post has had one article after another on the subject throughout the fall, for example here and here.  And yes, the New York Times has been unable to avoid noticing.  From October 26, "Despite Vow, Mayor de Blasio Struggles to Curb Homelessness":

The number of people entering city shelters has increased under Mayor Bill de Blasio, and when they enter the system, people are staying longer, striking markers of a crisis that has forced its way to the top of the mayor’s agenda.  As of Thursday, 57,448 people — more than 40 percent of them children — were sleeping in shelters overseen by the Department of Homeless Services. . . .        

The 57,000 shelter residents are up from a figure in the mid-30,000s during the Bloomberg tenure.  On December 17 the Times reported that Mayor de Blasio, after insisting for months that nothing was amiss, had finally announced new measures to combat the "homelessness crisis."

But then, even those 60,000 +/- shelter residents are just the tip of the iceberg of New York's population dependent on government handouts for their housing.  The numbers are staggering.  According to the Metropolitan Council on Housing here, New York has almost 180,000 subsidized low-income NYCHA apartments; almost 100,000 "portable" Section vouchers; another 90,000 "project-based" Section 8 vouchers; another 140,000 so-called "Mitchell-Lama" subsidized apartments; and about 1 million private-owned but "rent-regulated" apartments.  And yet somehow the "affordability" crisis and the "homelessness" crisis persist. 

So does Mr. Navarette actually believe that all it will take is a "thoughtful, honest and nuanced" discussion to figure out the one more program that will finally fix this?  On the other side they are advocating to just dismantle the entire mess.  Is there really a middle ground?

Are Most Published Scientific Research Findings False?

Readers interested in the subject of science versus consensus and orthodoxy enforcement might enjoy the article "Broken Science" by Ronald Bailey appearing in the current (February 2016) print edition of Reason Magazine.  (Here is the link for reason.com.  The article doesn't seem to be at the online site yet, although I assume it will show up within a few days.)

Bailey delves in some depth into the subject of the remarkable amount of published scientific research that cannot later be replicated and ultimately turns out to be wrong.  How much?  As much as half or more.  Citing extensive evidence of pervasive failed replication and/or complete falsification of previously published research results, Bailey reasonably asks whether "science" is "broken." 

If you have read my post from a few days ago on the scientific method, you know my answer.  No, this does not indicate that science is broken.  It is in the nature of science that huge numbers of hypotheses that seem brilliant and reasonable and intuitive and obviously true turn out to be false.  Science is not a process of "proof" of hypotheses, but rather a process of sequential falsification of some hypotheses in favor of better hypotheses.  Publication is just an indication that a hypothesis has survived an initial round of testing, inevitably by the very people who posed the hypothesis in the first place and therefore have a strong interest that the hypothesis should turn out to be right.  Even after initial publication of favorable results, every hypothesis should still be taken with a huge grain of salt; and, after multiple independent replications, a hypothesis should still be taken with a somewhat diminished but still substantial grain of salt.  Eventually most hypotheses -- and, given enough time, maybe all -- will fall, in some cases to a slightly improved hypothesis, in other cases to a completely different hypothesis, and in many cases to the dreaded "null hypothesis."

Bailey begins by citing the famous 2005 PLOS Medicine article by Stanford statistician John Ioannidis titled "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False."  

Ioannidis showed, for instance, that about one-third of the results of highly cited original clinical research studies were shown to be wrong or exaggerated by subsequent research.  "For many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias," he argued.  Today, he says science is still wracked by the reproducibility problem: "In several fields, it is likely that most published research is still false."

After that article was published, many criticized Ioannidis for exaggerating his own results; but Bailey cites multiple subsequent efforts that have repeatedly shown stunning rates of non-replicability of published results:

In 2012, researchers at the pharmaceutical company Amgen reported in Nature that they were able to replicate the findings of only six out of 53 (11 percent) landmark published preclinical cancer studies. . . .  In 2011, researchers at Bayer Healthcare reported that they could not replicate 43 of the 67 published preclinical studies that the company had been relying on to develop cancer and cardiovascular treatments and diagnostics. . . .  Ioannidis estimates that "in biomedical sciences, non-replication rates that have been described range from more than 90 percent for observational associations (e.g., nutrient X causes cancer Y), to 75-90 percent for preclinical research (trying to find new drug targets)" . . . .  In August, Science reported that only one-third of 100 psychological studies published in three leading psychology journals could be adequately replicated.  In October, a panel of senior researchers convened by the British Academy of Medical Sciences (BAMS) issued a major report on research reproducibility indicating that the false discovery rate in some areas of biomedicine could be as high as 69 percent.

If you ask me, all of this is totally normal and to be expected.  This is not an indication that science is "broken," but is rather the very nature of how science works.  I just have two questions: (1) Why does the news service in the elevator at my office building in Manhattan breathlessly report literally every newly-published piece of research in the field of bio-medicine as if it is likely to be true (e.g., people who drink green tea are 17% less likely to develop colon cancer!! people who eat tomatoes are 23% less likely to get breast cancer!! etc., etc.)? Don't they know that almost all of this stuff will ultimately prove to be wrong? and (2) Why is the field of climate science immune to the process of hypothesis falsification that is the essence of the scientific method in all other fields claiming the mantle of the term "science"?  

Markets Serve A Purpose

Regular readers here know well of the unfolding disaster of New York's vast socialist-model public housing empire known as the New York City Housing Authority, or NYCHA.  In a post back in May, I compiled data on NYCHA's catastrophic financial state from a report put out by the de Blasio administration titled NextGeneration NYCHA.  The problems include: multi-hundred million dollars of admitted annual operating losses; rent collections that cover barely a third of operating expenses and nothing at all for capital improvements or property taxes; an annual federal operating subsidy of over $2 billion, which effectively hides that the real operating deficit of the projects far exceeds $2 billion per year; $16+ billion of unmet capital needs, and no source of money to fund that gap; and a complete lack of any plan to fix the financial crisis other than transferring many NYCHA expenses off its budget and into other places in the $70+ billion City budget where they can be hidden outside of public view.

Well, you will be glad to know that in an op-ed in today's Crain's New York Business, philanthropist Laurie Tisch is announcing the latest initiative to turn things around, which is -- to establish farms on otherwise-underused NYCHA real estate.

You wouldn’t expect to find a vegetable farm at a public housing development in New York City. But a one-acre farm at Red Hook Houses—the first-ever large farm on New York City Housing Authority property—is growing cabbage, collard greens, butternut squash and basil. Soon, new urban farms will sprout on five more NYCHA properties in Brownsville and Canarsie in Brooklyn, East Harlem, the Bronx and Staten Island.

These new farms will increase access to fresh produce in communities with high levels of poverty, food insecurity and diet-related diseases, while also serving as hubs for education, community engagement, and job training for residents. The workers will be supplied by Green City Force, a nationally recognized AmeriCorps program that recruits and trains 18- to 24-year-old NYCHA residents and pays them to work on environmental sustainability and energy-efficiency programs at Housing Authority sites. These young people gain rigorous job training and career planning support that propels them into jobs.

Really, you can't make this up.  Of course this is a "public-private partnership" with the full backing of the de Blasio administration.  Indeed, according to Tisch, the initiative is part of de Blasio's "Building Healthy Communities" program. 

Ms. Tisch appears to be one of those well-intentioned but completely uninformed New Yorkers with more money than she knows what to do with.  She acquired her wealth by inheritance from her father, Preston Robert Tisch, who was a principal in Loews Corporation and an owner of the New York Giants football team.

I wonder if Ms. Tisch or anybody in the de Blasio administration might stop for a moment to ask why there are no farms in New York City on private land.  It's not too hard to figure out.  The reason is that the land is way too expensive to make it possible to farm profitably.  Here are some listings for land for sale in Brooklyn.  It's $10 million per acre and up.  And by the way, there's no such thing as a full contiguous acre.  Mostly it goes by tenths and even hundredths of an acre.  In Sullivan County -- less than 100 miles away -- you can get land for $4000 - 5000 per acre in multi-hundred acre parcels. 

But since the NYCHA land is publicly owned in a socialist-model arrangement, we can pretend it's free!  At huge effort we have provided the people with $100 tomatoes and $200 squashes, and then suppressed the costs through public ownership so that nobody realizes how completely nonsensical this is.

Meanwhile, of course, we have what is officially designated as a "crisis" of lack of affordable housing.  But instead of using that underused NYCHA land in Brooklyn for more housing, where it might actually make sense economically, we'll require developers to provide "affordable" apartments on land in Manhattan that costs not $10 million per acre, but more like $100 million.  It's how North Korea and Cuba found the route to starvation.  In New York, the great and the good think that it all makes perfect sense.

Consensus Science And Orthodoxy Enforcement

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post laying out the basics of the scientific method.  Not that I came up with this; it's just the basic stuff everybody learns (or should learn) in junior high school.  Essentially, the idea is that every hypothesis is open for challenge by all comers at all times, and when observation or experiment contradicts a hypothesis, then that hypothesis is wrong and must be rejected.

But then there's the small problem that arises when accumulating data contradict some scientific hypothesis on which a lot of careers and funding and public policy have already been built.  The acute version of this problem occurs when a hypothesis has become official scientific dogma and is currently in use by some powerful government bureaucracy to enhance its power and advance its preferred policy agenda.  All of a sudden the problem is not so small to the people whose funding, status, perks and careers are on the line.  And thus we find in the community calling themselves "scientists" people in positions of high power and prestige who in fact are the opposite of scientists, and who have taken on the role of enforcing orthodoxy and suppressing contrary evidence in service of pre-established public policy agendas.  This may be anti-science, but it turns out it's a good way to get yourself lots of fancy titles, awards, grants, perks, and compensation.

Which brings me to the story of Marcia McNutt.  Dr. McNutt is the Editor-in-Chief of Science magazine, one of those premier peer-reviewed scientific journals that a budding scientist absolutely must get published in to rise out of obscurity and become someone in the field.  Currently Dr. McNutt has been nominated to be the next head of the National Academy of Sciences.  There is no other candidate.  Here is a picture of Dr. McNutt:

Yesterday I received a copy of an extraordinary email on the subject of Dr. McNutt authored by Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars.   The email was sent by Wood to the membership of the National Association of Scholars, and a full version of it appears on their website.    Mr. Wood raises serious issues of what he terms "threats to the integrity of science" arising during Dr. McNutt's tenure at Science.  Essentially the issue boils down to McNutt turning Science from a organ of science into a tool of orthodoxy enforcement. 

Dr. McNutt has in her career found herself faced more than once with the challenge of what to do when an entrenched orthodoxy meets a substantial scientific challenge.  The challenge in each case could itself prove to be mistaken, but it met what most scientists would concede to be the threshold criteria to deserve a serious hearing.  Yet in each case Dr. McNutt chose to reinforce the orthodoxy by shutting the door on the challenge. . . .  Dr. McNutt’s dismissive treatment of scientific criticisms is disturbing.         

Wood treats three particular controversies in detail.  In each case the hypothesis in question is a main underpinning of government regulatory and/or environmental policy in some respect.  In each case the hypothesis has come into serious question based on observation and data that appear to contradict it.  In each case McNutt has used her role as Editor-in-Chief of Science to make sure that no paper presenting evidence contrary to the hypothesis can see the light of day.  I will quote Wood extensively on each of the three controversies.  You can then judge for yourself:

1.  The status of the linear no-threshold (LNT) dose-response model for the biological effects of nuclear radiation.  The prominence of the model stems from the June 29, 1956 Science paper, “Genetic Effects of Atomic Radiation,” authored by the NAS Committee on the Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation.  This paper is now widely questioned and has been seriously critiqued in many peer-reviewed publications, including two detailed 2015 papers.  These criticisms are being taken seriously around the world, as summarized in a December 2, 2015 Wall Street Journal commentary.  In August 2015 four distinguished critics of LNT made a formal request to Dr. McNutt to examine the evidence of fundamental flaws in the 1956 paper and retract it.  However, on August 11, 2015 Dr. McNutt rejected this request without even reviewing the detailed evidence.  Furthermore, Dr. McNutt did not even consider recusing herself and having independent reviewers examine evidence that challenges the validity of both a Science paper and an NAS Committee Report.

This is a consequential matter that bears on a great deal of national public policy, as the LNT model has served as the basis for risk assessment and risk management of radiation and chemical carcinogens for decades, but now needs to be seriously reassessed.  This reassessment could profoundly alter many regulations from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, and other government agencies.  The relevant documents regarding the 1956 Science paper and Dr. McNutt can be examined at www.nas.org/images/documents/LNT.pdf.

2.  Extensive evidence of scientific misconduct in the epidemiology of fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) and its relationship to mortality.  Since 1997 EPA has claimed that lifetime inhalation of about a teaspoon of particles with diameter less than 2.5 microns causes premature death in the United States and it established an national regulation based on this claim.  Science has provided extensive news coverage of this issue and its regulatory significance, but has never published any scientific criticism of this questionable claim, which is largely based on nontransparent research.

Earlier this year, nine accomplished scientists and academics submitted to Science well-documented evidence of misconduct by several of the PM2.5 researchers relied upon by EPA.  The evidence of misconduct was first submitted to Dr. McNutt in a detailed June 4, 2015 email letter, then in a detailed July 20, 2015 Policy Forum manuscript “Transparent Science is Necessary for EPA Regulations,” and finally in an August 17, 2015 Perspective manuscript “Particulate Matter Does Not Cause Premature Deaths.” Dr. McNutt and two Science editors immediately rejected the letter and the manuscripts and never conducted any internal or external review of the evidence.  This a consequential matter because many multi-billion dollar EPA air pollution regulations, such as, the Clean Power Plan, are primarily justified by the claim that PM2.5 is killing Americans.  The relevant documents regarding this controversy can be examined at https://www.nas.org/images/documents/PM2.5.pdf.

3. Science promotes the so-called consensus model of climate change and excludes any contrary views.  This issue has become so polarized and polarizing that it is difficult to bring up, but at some point the scientific community will have to reckon with the dramatic discrepancies between current climate models and substantial parts of the empirical record.  Recent evidence of Science bias on this issue is the June 26, 2015 article by Dr. Thomas R. Karl, “Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus”; the July 3, 2015 McNutt editorial, “The beyond-two-degree inferno”; the November 13, 2015 McNutt editorial, “Climate warning, 50 years later”; and the November 25, 2015 AAAS News Release, “AAAS Leads Coalition to Protest Climate Science Inquiry.”

Dr. McNutt’s position is, of course, consistent with the official position of the AAAS. But the attempt to declare that the “pause” in global warming was an illusion has not been accepted by several respected and well-informed scientists. One would not know this, however, from reading Science, which has declined to publish any dissenting views.  One can be a strong supporter of the consensus model and yet be disturbed by the role which Science has played in this controversy.  Dr. McNutt and the journal have acted more like partisan activists than like responsible stewards of scientific standards confronted with contentious claims and ambiguous evidence.  The relevant documents and commentary regarding the Karl paper and McNutt editorials can be examined at https://www.nas.org/images/documents/Climate_Change.pdf.

So how does a Marcia McNutt come to be the unopposed shoo-in candidate to head the National Academy of Sciences?  My hypothesis is that those promoting her candidacy know that she can be counted on to protect any important orthodoxy from serious challenge.  This is one hypothesis I'd like to see proved wrong; but don't count on it.

The Folly Of "Affordable Housing" In Manhattan Marches On

Early in the history of this blog (September 2013), I nominated affordable housing in Manhattan as the "worst possible public policy."  I mean, creating subsidized housing that by its nature traps people in poverty for life is pretty bad for starters; but doing it on the most expensive real estate in the country and at the highest possible cost per subsidized family -- could anything be stupider?  Of course I naively thought that people would read my post, get dazzled by its brilliance, and shortly start to unwind the vast empire of subsidized housing that looms over Manhattan.  Or, whatever might be done with the existing subsidized housing in Manhattan, at least we wouldn't go on creating more and more of it at astounding cost.  Hah!

The voters taught me my lesson by promptly electing Bill de Blasio as the new mayor in November 2013.  At the top of his announced policy agenda was lots more subsidized "affordable" housing, and of course much of that would have to be in Manhattan.  Both the Wall Street Journal and New York Times have had updates in the past couple of days.

The December 15 report from Josh Barbanel in the Journal focuses on 456 Washington Street, a brand-new top-end rental project in the Tribeca neighborhood, about to open with spectacular waterfront views over the Hudson River.  Here is a picture: 

456 Washington Street, Tribeca, Manhattan

Barbanel reports that the market-rate rentals in this building will be offered at up to $50,000 per month.  Meanwhile, the building contains 22 so-called "affordable" apartments, to be allocated by a lottery, going for as little as $800 per month.  For comparable size apartments, market rate two bedrooms "start" at $9995 per month, while the "affordable" two bedrooms will go for about $1041 per month (for a family size of four and an income between the precise levels of $37,132 and $51,780 -- it's exquisitely perfected fairness!).  A little arithmetic and we know that each such non-poor family will get an annual subsidy of well over $100,000, not just this year and next year, but year after year for as long as they don't move out.  It's a handout worth at least $2 million per family, although impossible to turn into cash.  Oh, and meanwhile the City gives up $837,000 of annual real estate taxes through its so-called 421-a program; the state issues $7.5 million of tax-exempt bonds to support the project; the developers become eligible for federal tax credits (Barbanel does not specify the amount); and the building gets a zoning bonus to increase its size.  All so we can give handouts of $2+ million each to 22 non-poor families?  How can this possibly make sense?

Barbanel at least shows a modicum of skepticism:

The estimate [of $16.7 million foregone real estate taxes over 20 years], prepared at the request of The Wall Street Journal, found that was enough money to finance the construction of 93 apartments in the Bronx through a cash grant.

Or probably more like 250 apartments in Detroit.  But hey, we have infinite money here, so what's to worry?

Meanwhile, don't expect any skepticism from the New York Times.  Their article by Charles Bagli today has the headline "Sale Keeps 975 Rents Affordable In Harlem."   This one concerns the Riverton Houses in Harlem, not exactly the most beautiful buildings in the City, but long home to some of Harlem's gentry.  (Among notable residents have been former Mayor David Dinkins and former HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce.)  Here is a picture (sorry it's so small, but you can click to enlarge):

View fullsize

Riverton Houses, Harlem, Manhattan

In the Times's narrative, Riverton "fell victim to speculators" in the run-up to the financial crisis.  The lenders took over, and they are now selling the buildings to new buyers.  Of course the buyers might have the crazy idea of trying to maximize the rents they will get in the buildings.  Well, we can't have that, so the City has swooped in with a 30-year tax abatement quantified by the Times as worth about $100 million.  Here is de Blasio:

“It’s been our mission to keep tenants in their homes and keep Riverton affordable for the next generation,” Mr. de Blasio said in a statement. “This is preservation on a grand scale, and it is going to protect the kind of economic diversity that’s always been part of Harlem.”

In return for the $100 million the developers must protect the "affordability" for tenants earning up to $97,125.  (Once again, that exquisite fairness!  Don't try earning $97,126, or you're out!)

Well, considering it's affordable housing in Manhattan, $100 million might sound ridiculously cheap for almost 1000 apartments -- it's only about $100,000 per apartment.  But don't let yourself be fooled; this is just the Times's complete lack of skepticism.  In fact the suppression of the rents will in turn suppress the market value of the buildings, and thus the taxable value.  The City will easily lose multiple hundreds of millions more on the deal.  Handouts per family will not be in the same range as the Tribeca building, but only because market rents in Harlem have not yet reached the stratospheric levels of Tribeca.  A good estimate would be $1 million per family instead of $2 million.  And remember, these are not poor people.

With a few chirping little voices like my own continuing to point out the massive costs and tiny benefits of these programs, the development community has lined up to protect its bread and butter in the tax breaks.  Crain's New York Business today has an interview with Lisa Gomez of L+M Equities, a rental developer.  Ms. Gomez does her best to defend the tax breaks, arguing that without them developers just can't make new projects work at today's land prices:

 It’s all about land price. We have a scarcity of land. . . .   In strong neighborhoods, you can afford to make it work, but in weaker neighborhoods, I don’t know. I don’t know how that happens at all without 421-a, or some other replacement tax abatement.  

Of course Ms. Gomez has it exactly backwards.  The tax breaks are precisely the cause of the inflated land prices.  The most likely effect of the expiration of the tax breaks would be for land values to fall back down and development to resume after some period of adjustment.  Of course, developers who had bought land speculatively at the current inflated prices would lose a bundle of money.  You can bet that plenty of cash is getting sprinkled around the legislature to prevent that from happening.  Affordable housing in Manhattan marches on!

How's That Scientific Consensus Working Out For You?

If you put some time into looking at various situations where a scientific "consensus" has developed, you will be stunned at how often the consensus has later proved to have been dead wrong.  The phenomenon is particularly prevalent in fields involving complex and poorly understood systems.  The human body is one such system.  The climate is another.

Back in my law school days, one of my friends developed a case of severe and debilitating stomach ulcers.  In those days (early 1970s) the "scientific consensus" was that ulcers were caused by some combination of stress and harsh and spicy foods.  Of course my friend went to doctors, and of course their diagnosis was that stress was mainly to blame.  Hey, what could be more stressful than the first year at law school?  (This was actually the year that the book The Paper Chase came out.)  Next thing you know the poor guy was told that he needed to take a year off from school and go on a diet of bland mush.  After a hiatus he came back, but somehow the ulcers had not really improved. 

Turned out that the whole idea of stress as a cause of ulcers was plain wrong.  Experiments in the mid-80s by Barry Marshall and Robin Warren established the bacterium Helicobacter pylori as the principal cause.  In 2005 Marshall and Warren won the Nobel Prize for medicine.  Now most ulcers can be cured by a couple of weeks of antibiotics.  But before their hypothesis was established, Marshall and Warren underwent a good deal of scorn and ridicule for bucking the "consensus."  Here is a summary from Bahar Gholipur of Live Science, citing Dr. Arun Swaminath of Lenox Hill Hospital:

The discovery of H. pylori's role in ulcers led to the Nobel Prize in 2005 for Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, who were ridiculed when they suggested the idea, Swaminath said. It is a myth that peptic ulcers are caused by stress and spicy food.             

Meanwhile, as the consensus persisted, people like my law school friend had to suffer for no reason.

Or how about the consensus that the way to reduce the risk of heart disease is the low fat diet.  The geniuses in our government, based on consensus science, started recommending to reduce fat in the diet about 40 years ago.  Today the campaign against dietary fat remains literally everywhere, and you can't go to the grocery store without getting bombarded with sales pitches for low fat products.  The following line continued to appear as recently as the 2010 guidelines that were not superseded until early this year:

A strong body of evidence indicates that higher intake of most dietary saturated fatty acids is associated with higher levels of blood total cholesterol and low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol. Higher total and LDL cholesterol levels are risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

And what "evidence" was that exactly?  I would say the whole thing was based on myth from the get-go, but it gets worse.  This was/is one of those myths that was just so intuitively obvious and had such a strong consensus backing it that it became literally impossible to destroy.  Study after study completely contradicted the hypothesis that dietary fat increased the risk of heart disease, but the consensus went on undisturbed for decades.  To take just one of the largest and most definitive studies among many, in the 90s the government commissioned a gigantic randomized study of 50,000 women called the Women's Health Initiative Diet Modification Trial.  After a full eight years of following the women, in 2006 the Harvard School of Public Health came out with a report summarizing the results:

The results . . . showed no benefits for a low-fat diet. Women assigned to this eating strategy did not appear to gain protection against breast cancer, colorectal cancer, or cardiovascular disease. And after eight years, their weights were generally the same as those of women following their usual diets.

But even that devastating conclusion couldn't kill off this one.  Four years after that report -- and plenty of others with similar results -- the government reissued its dietary guidelines without change.  And those guidelines remained in effect right up until this year.  Finally in February of this year the government's Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee began the slow backdown from the bogus recommendations it has been disseminating for decades.  Here is the February 2015 Report, couched in endless bureaucratese.  Or try a summary from the Washington Post wonkblog on February 10:

The nation’s top nutrition advisory panel has decided to drop its caution about eating cholesterol-laden food, a move that could undo almost 40 years of government warnings about its consumption.  The group’s finding that cholesterol in the diet need no longer be considered a “nutrient of concern” stands in contrast to the committee’s findings five years ago, the last time it convened. During those proceedings, as in previous years, the panel deemed the issue of excess cholesterol in the American diet a public health concern.    

And by the way, it's not just that the government's guidelines were dead wrong for 40 years.  Many assert that the guidelines in addition were actively harmful to the health of the American people, basically because reducing fat in the diet inevitably leads to increase in consumption of more-harmful carbohydrates.  Here is one such assertion (by a heart surgeon named Dwight Lundell).  (For myself, I continue to follow the guidance of eating what tastes good.)

The most remarkable thing about the high-fat-diet/heart-disease hypothesis is that the accumulation of decades worth of devastating contrary evidence has still not killed it off completely.  Even the latest report from the Advisory Committee is only a partial backdown from the recommendation to reduce fat.  Hey, it's consensus!  Everybody knows it's true!  Same thing, of course, is going on in climate science.  Eighteen plus years of contrary evidence?  So?  The leader of every single country in the world knows that consensus trumps the evidence!