They are surrounded by more bus lanes, picked on by more traffic wardens, spied on by more speed cameras, punished with more fines and soaked more enthusiastically by the exchequer than ever before. Now, to cap it all, British drivers are threatened with a road-pricing system that would track their movements and bill them according to where they travel and when.So much for the freedom of the road.

The driving lobby suspects that the government would use road pricing to screw more money out of it, but it need not be that way. Combined with a reform of motoring taxes, road pricing could make life better, not worse. For drivers road pricing is an economist’s dream solution because it replaces a system that rations road use by queuing, which wastes people’s time, with one which rations it according to the value different drivers place on their journeys. And as demand varies, so can price: in cities at rush-hour prices can be set high; at night and in the countryside they can be kept low. Actually, the best way would be to introduce road pricing along with a reform of the inefficient system of taxing and investing in transport.

Road taxes should charge drivers for four sorts of damage they do: to road surfaces, to the climate, to other people’s health and to other drivers by creating jams. The two main current sorts of tax—fuel duty and vehicle excise duty (VED)—do not do that well. VED, an annual tax, penalizes some dirty cars, while fuel duty taxes people for burning up petrol, and thus for contributing to climate change. Neither tax, however, does much to discourage congestion, which wastes time and damages health.

Road prices, by contrast, could be set to take into account all those four sorts of damage. Charges would depend crucially on assumptions about the costs of economic damage; but according to one set of calculations, mid-range assumptions about climate change and pollution costs would lead drivers to pay about the same overall as they do at present. Rural drivers would pay less; urban ones would pay more but get around faster, so saving money in other ways.

At present, investments in the road system are based on awkward cost-benefit calculations. By charging for road use, the government would discover just what people were prepared to pay for. That would encourage private investment in roads, and might lead to a more rational system of allocating public investment in transport of all types.

A class action lawsuit has been filed against a prominent Toronto doctor by patients who allege he injected a banned substance into their faces for cosmetic purposes. The doctor had already been investigated for more than three years for using the liquid silicone, a product not authorized for use in Canada.

Some patients say they are now suffering health problems and think the liquid silicone may be to blame. One of those patients is Anna Barbiero. She says her Torontodermatologisttold her he was using liquid silicone to smooth out wrinkles. What she says he didn’t tell her is that it isn’t approved for use in Canada. After her last treatment, Anna discovered Dr. Sheldon Pollack had been ordered to stop using the silicone two years earlier by Health Canada.

“My upper lip is always numb and it burns,” Barbiero says. Barbiero is spearheading a lawsuit against the doctor, who her lawyer thinks might involve up to 100 patients injected with the same material. “The fact, a physician of his stature would use an unauthorized product on a patient because he thought it was okay, is really very disturbing,” says lawyer Douglas Elliott.

Ontario’s College of Physicians and Surgeons (OCPS) is also investigating Dr. Pollack to see if, in fact, he continued to use the silicone after agreeing to stop and whether he wrote in patient records that he used another legal product when he used silicone. However, in a letter to the College, Dr. Pollack wrote that he had always told patients that the silicone was not approved for sale in Canada, and had warned them of the risks. And in Barbiero’s case, “…I specifically informed her that the material was not approved for sale in Canada… I would like to emphasize that, as is evident on Ms. Barbiero’s chart, I drew a specific diagram on the chart which I carefully discussed with and explained to Ms. Barbiero as I did with every other patient… to explain the nature and likelihood of complications and the reasons and consequences of those possible complications.”

Dr. Pollack declined to speak to CTV News, or to have his lawyer discuss the case. None of the allegations have been proven in court. But the case raises questions about the ability of governing bodies to monitor doctors. “There’s a larger message and that is: buyer beware,” says Nancy Neilsen of Cosmetic Surgery Canada, “It’s incumbent (负有义务的) on consumers to do their research.”

Oscar Wilde said that work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do. If so, Americans are now among the world’s saddest refugees. Factory workers in the United States are working longer hours than at any time in the past half-century. America once led the rich world in cutting the average working week—from 70 hours in 1850 to less than 40 hours by the 1950s. It seemed natural that as people grew richer they would trade extra earnings for more leisure. Since the 1970s, however, the hours clocked up by American workers have risen, to an average of 42 this year in manufacturing.

Several studies suggest that something similar is happening outside manufacturing: Americans are spending more time at work than they did 20 years ago. Executive and lawyers boast of 80-hour weeks. On holiday, they seek out fax machines and phones as eagerly as Germans bag the best sun-loungers. Yet working time in Europe and Japan continues to fall. In Germany’s engineering industry the working week is to be trimmed from 36 to 35 hours next year. Most Germans get six weeks’ paid annual holiday; even the Japanese now take three weeks. Americans still make do with just two.

Germany responds to this contrast with its usual concern about whether people’s aversion to work is damaging its competitiveness. Yet German workers, like the Japanese, seem to be acting sensibly: as their incomes rise, they can achieve a better standard of living with fewer hours of work. The puzzle is why America, the world’s richest country, sees things differently. It is a puzzle with sinister social implications. Parents spend less time with their children, who may be left alone at home for longer. Is it just a coincidence that juvenile crime is on the rise?

Some explanations for America’s time at work fail to stand up to scrutiny. One blames weak trade unions that leave workers open to exploitation. A recent study by two American economists, Richard Freeman and Linda Bell, suggests not: when asked, Americans actually want to work longer hours. Most German workers, in contrast, would rather work less.

Then why has the century-long decline in working hours gone into reverse in America but not elsewhere (though Britain shows signs of following America’s lead). Perhaps cultural differences—the last refuge of the defeated economist—are at play. Economists used to believe that once workers earned enough to provide for their basic needs and allow for a few luxuries, their incentive to work would be eroded, like lions relaxing after a kill. But humans are more susceptible to advertising than lions. Perhaps clever marketing has ensured that “basic needs”—for a shower with built-in TV, for a rocket-propelled car— expand continuously. Shopping is already one of America’s most popular pastimes. But it requires money—hence more work and less leisure.

Or try this: the television is not very good, and baseball and hockey keep being wiped out by strikes. Perhaps Wilde was right. Maybe Americans have nothing better to do.

The adage “like a kid at heart” may be truer than we think, since new research is showing that grown-ups are more immature than ever. Specifically, it seems a growing number of people are retaining the behaviors and attitudes associated with youth. As a consequence, many older people simply never achieve mental adulthood, according to a leading expert on evolutionary psychiatry. Among scientists, the phenomenon is called psychological neoteny.

The theory’s creator is Bruce Charlton, a professor in the School of Biology at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Charlton explained that humans have an inherent attraction to physical youth, since it can be a sign of fertility, health and vitality. In the mid-20th century, however, another force kicked in, due to increasing need for individuals to change jobs, learn new skills, move to new places and make new friends. A child-like flexibility of attitudes, behaviors and knowledge is probably adaptive to the increased instability of the modern world. Formal education now extends well past physical maturity, leaving students with minds that are, he said, “unfinished”. When formal education continues into the early twenties, it probably, to an extent, counteracts the attainment of psychological maturity, which would otherwise occur at about this age.

Charlton pointed out the past cultures often marked the advent of adulthood with initiation ceremonies. While the human mind responds to new information over the course of any individual’s lifetime, Charlton argues that past physical environments were more stable and allowed for a state of psychological maturity. In hunter-gatherer societies, that maturity was probably achieved during a person’s late teens or early twenties. By contrast, many modern adults fail to attain this maturity, and such failure is common and indeed characteristic of highly educated and, on the whole, effective and socially valuable people. People such as academics, teachers, scientists and many other professionals are often strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence in the sense of being unpredictable, unbalanced in priorities, and tending to overreact.

Charlton added that since modern cultures now favor cognitive flexibility, “immature” people tend to thrive and succeed, and have set the tone not only for contemporary life, but also for the future, when it is possible our genes may even change as a result of the psychological shift. The faults of youth are retained along with the virtues, he believes. These include short attention span, sensation and novelty-seeking, short cycles of arbitrary fashion and a sense of cultural shallowness. At least youthfulness is no longer restricted to youth, he said, due to overall improvements in food and healthcare, along with cosmetic technologies.

David Brooks, a social commentator and a columnist at The New York Times, has documented a somewhat related phenomenon concerning the current blurring of the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture, which Charlton believes is a version of psychological neoteny. Brooks believes such individuals have lost the wisdom and maturity of their bourgeois predecessors due to more emphasis placed on expertise, flexibility and vitality.

There is nothing like the suggestion of a cancer risk to scare a parent, especially one of the over-educated, eco-conscious type. So you can imagine the reaction when a recent USA Today investigation of air quality around the nation’s schools singled out those in the smugly green village of Berkeley, Calif, as being among the worst in the country. The city’s public high school, as well as a number of daycare centers, preschools, elementary and middle schools, fell in the lowest 10%. Industrial pollution in our town had supposedly turned students into living science experiments breathing in a laboratory’s worth of heavy metals like manganese, chromium and nickel each day. This happens in a city that requires school cafeterias to serve organic meals. Great, I thought, organic lunch, toxic campus.

Since December, when the report came out, the mayor, neighborhood activists and various parent-teacher associations have engaged in a fierce battle over its validity: over the guilt of the steel-casting factory on the western edge of town, over union jobs versus children’s health and over what, if anything, ought to be done. With all sides presenting their own experts armed with conflicting scientific studies, whom should parents believe?

Is there truly a threat here, we asked one another as we dropped off our kids, and if so, how great is it? And how does it compare with the other, seemingly perpetual health scares we confront, like panic over lead in synthetic athletic fields? Rather than just another weird episode in the town that brought you protesting environmentalists, this latest drama is a trial for how today’s parents perceive risk, how we try to keep our kids safe—whether it’s possible to keep them safe—in what feels like an increasingly threatening world. It raises the question of what, in our time, “safe” could even mean.

“There’s no way around the uncertainty,” says Kimberly Thompson, president of Kid Risk, a nonprofit group that studies children’s health. “That means your choices can matter, but it also means you aren’t going to know if they do.” A 2004 report in the journal Pediatrics explained that nervous parents have more to fear from fire, car accidents and drowning than from toxic chemical exposure. To which I say: Well, obviously. But such concrete hazards are beside the point. It’s the dangers parents can’t—and may never— quantify that occur all of sudden. That’s why I’ve rid my cupboard of microwave food packed in bags coated with a potential cancer-causing substance, but although I’ve lived blocks from a major fault line (地质断层) for more than 12 years, I still haven’t bolted our bookcases to the living room wall.