1. Is information flat? A neo-Austrian analysis.
2. The economics of 3-D movies.
3. One view of U.S. life expectancy.
4. Healthy banks may lend to the FDIC.
5. Students for Liberty regional conferences.
Assorted links
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Re the life expectancy piece: if the US policy was to be more preventive, would we soon be banned from driving motorcycles and cars, and even participating in high-contact sports? I am not sure our health outcomes would look as bad if we factored these in as well.
The life expectancy piece offers a sort of testable hypothesis: as US (and Canadian) smoking rates have plummeted from above European rates to below, we should see it show up in the life expectancy numbers reasonably soon. It has already shown up in the lung cancer rates.
Demographics matter. Look at Okinawa, which mainly uses Chinese herbal medicine yet produces an obscene number of centenarians.
As far as I am concerned the debate about who has better health does not matter. By some measures the US is better and by other measures different countries are better. I conclude there is essentially no big difference in health care outcomes.
Rather, the question is why do we spend 50% more to get essentially the same outcomes? I’ll even concede that the US system may be marginally better. But that margin does not at all offset the massively higher expenditures in the US.
Libertarians like to blame third party payment systems.
But other countries also have third party payment systems,
so that explanation does not pass the smell test.
In some countries, like the UK, they obviously realize lower expenses by rationing care, but the UK is the exception not the general rule among the OECD countries. Most other countries ration much less than in the UK or the US. the US rations and just because it is by price does not mean that it is not rationing.
Is not the extra money spent likely producer surplus? There are several studies that purport to measure the value of extra health, and despite the 50% number cited as “extra costs” i would bet there is still consumer surplus. The benefits of the extra costs are that this money goes to American industries that use the information from market prices to determine what products are worth investing in. Government dictation of prices will cost more than the savings they create through lost growth of health-care employment and innovation.
Can the economics of supply and demand, which are shown on an X-Y graph, apply to a 3D movie?
The key thing is that our understandings change and grow — e.g. see the work of Gerald Edelman and Thomas Kuhn.
And each change in understanding creates new constellations of “information” or “data”.
And we can’t even call a individuals private understanding “information” or “data” — we only get to that within with the development of certain social practices in specialized communities — see the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Kuhn, and Friedrich Hayek.
So “information” and “data” are context and community dependent — and superseded by changes and advances in understandings.
Dan Klein’s work here is important stuff. Klein writes:
Knowledge consists of the triad: information, interpretation, and judgment. Information is the reading of the facts through a working interpretation. Much of modern political economy has miscarried by discoursing as though interpretation were symmetric and final. This move has the effect of flattening knowledge down to information – here dubbed “knowledge flat-talk.† Economic prosperity depends greatly on discovery, but discovery is often a transcending of the working interpretation, not merely the acquisition of new information. Models typically assume that the modeler’s working interpretation is common knowledge. But often the sets of relevant knowledge of the relevant actors do not approximate the common knowledge assumption. We need better understanding and appreciation of asymmetric interpretation and its dynamics.
Spencer: “the question is why do we spend 50% more to get essentially the same outcomes?”
A few answers:
1. The goals of medical care providers are to cure the sick, heal the injured, and reduce pain and sufferring. That’s not at all the same thing as a goal to increase life expectancy.
2. We spend more because we have much more to spend. So we demand more timely service and other conveniences that have nothing to do with life expectancy or even to do with the goals I listed above.
3. The human inputs to the health care providers – the health of the patients being treated – are not the same in all nations being measured. Lifestyle differences and perhaps genetics are more important factors than quality of health care.
4. Neither U.S. lawyers nor U.S. plaintiffs are liable for the costs incurred by defendants in unsuccessful lawsuits. So U.S. hospitals and physicians incur much more defensive medicine costs than do nations with socialized medicine. By contrast, many OECD nations operate under a loser-pays system of law.
spencer: “the UK is the exception not the general rule among the OECD countries. Most other countries ration much less than in the UK or the US.”
How do you know this? All scarce goods must be rationed somehow. Do you have any evidence to offer showing that health care is rationed less in Europe?
According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS):
“The United States uses more of the newest medical technologies and performs several invasive procedures (such as coronary bypasses and angioplasties) more frequently than the average OECD country.”
If the CRS is correct, then OECD nations are rationing new medical technologies and invasive procedures more than the U.S.
Banks directly lending to FDIC? Queue complete regulatory capture in 1, 2, 3.
Nothing new is automatically an improvement. We spend billions of dollars pretending it is, but it ain’t.
In addition to behavioral diversity, including bad habits, we have a lot of genetic variation in the US, so even if we could wave a magic wand and do everything right the first time, it would still be wrong for a lot of people.
When the improvements going forward for the US is personalized medicine, the reformers want to go in the direction of uniformity and conformity. High medical spending is one cost of freedom of genetics and habits.
The other improvement is to de-socialize our medical system rather than further stringing everyone together and reinforcing the belief that other peoples’ freedom directly impacts me. It only does if I have no choice on whether or not to join their insurance plan.
for Spencer and Jon J:
Dr. Thomas Boehm, a German medical researcher, pointed out in 2005:
“The total R&D expenditure in the EU was 1.99 per cent of GDP in 2002, whereas in Japan it was 2.98 per cent (2000) and in the USA 2.80 per cent.”
Whether or not that medical research spending was beneficial is another issue. Dr. Boehm does show that the U.S. invests much more in medical research than Europe, and that explains some of the overall medical spending difference between U.S. and Europe.
Economist Randall Parker makes this point:
Americans do not live longer than people in other countries in part because the innovations that get funded in America get used around the world.
http://www.npr.org/news/specials/longevity/
Minnesota is ranked #2. Do we really think that the Mayo clinic treats the whole state? Or, is it more likely that a healthier population is easier to treat in a systematic way and that a more methodical approach to medicine causes less wear-and-tear on the quality of the medical system and less interventions cost less money? My brother-in-law down the road was a doctor on salary (until he got out because he hated it). Are all the salaried doctors as good as Mayo, have they accounted for that?
In other words, how do we know that the environment didn’t create Mayo instead of the other way around?
It’s obvious from this graph
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/07/dont-blame-canada.php
From this paper
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030260
That it is not just country differences that matter, but genetic differences. If you are of German descent, you have a German healthcare system. Your body. So, the reformers now are left with only the argument that healthcare costs too much on an absolute scale. But, I guess I still haven’t proven that whatever they feel like tinkering with will mess up the system.
Someone else posted it, I forget who.
So the only question that remains, is if the libs really want people to win the egalitarian health lottery to make up for bad genetics, the Scotch-Irish are first in line.
Where’s my reparations?!?
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