Abstract Providing terminally ill patients with access to experimental treatments, as allowed by recent “right to try” laws and “expanded access” programs, poses a variety of ethical questions. While practitioners and investigators may assume it is impossible to learn the effects of...

Recent tests for the convergence hypothesis derive from regressing average growth rates on initial levels: a negative initial level coefficient is interpreted as convergence. These tests turn out to be plagued by Francis Galton's classical fallacy of regression towards the mean. Using a dynamic...