Among the Central and Eastern Europe Candidate Countries Poland supposedly is the one where the agricultural sector poses the most difficult adjustment problems in the course of EU accession. Not only do serious structural deficiencies call the sector’s international competitiveness into question (PETRICK et al. 2002). Also the gap in living standards between urban and rural groups of the Polish population gives rise to worries. It already brought about an increasingly negative attitude among rural citizens towards the whole accession process, which may well endanger social peace in the entire country.
The results of the most recent parliamentary elections which strengthened extreme anti-EU positions supported by parties with a largely rural clientele bear lively testimony to this. All this will make negotiations on the agricultural chapter of the accession talks scheduled for early 2002 even more complicated and politically sensitive.
I would like to introduce this collection of papers with a tribute to Sir Richard Doll, who died in 2005 at the grand old age of 92. Julian Peto and I went to talk to him about vitamin D while he was still fit and well.
Doll had shown that a four-monthly oral doseof 100,000 IUs vitamin D3 reduced fractures in people over 65 [1]. The study, undertaken with Daksha Trivedi and Kay Tee Khaw, also showed a non-significant reduction in mortality in the subjects who took vitamin D. Impressed by these results, and believing that vitamin D probably had beneficial effects other than those on bone, Doll himself took a monthly vitamin D tablet equivalent to about 1,000 IUs per day. In fact the tablet he was taking was vitamin D2, which only has one-third the potency of D3. High-dose vitamin D preparations are only available on prescription in the UK and are all formulated with D2. Most clinicians are not aware of the important difference in potency between D2 and D3.
The patterns in which individuals interact have important consequences. One notable phenomenon is social learning, which occurs when asymmetrically informed individuals observe the choices of others before making their own choices. This process can lead to information cascades in which the ability to learn from others ceases quickly, implying little information aggregation. However, casual empiricism suggests that such inefficiency is unlikely: many people making similar decisions over time are unlikely to be continually wrong.
