Category: Uncategorized
Cash transfers vs. in-kind health care assistance
The benefit of Medicaid coverage received by a newly insured adult is less than half what that coverage costs taxpayers, which is about $5,500 a year.
The reason is simple: The uninsured already receive a substantial amount of health care, but pay for only a very small portion of it, especially when their medical bills are high.
We have estimated that 60 percent of government spending to expand Medicaid to new recipients ends up paying for care that the nominally uninsured already receive, courtesy of taxpayer dollars and hospital resources. In other words, from the recipient’s perspective the alternatives are $5,500 in cash or only about 40 percent of that — $2,200 — in health insurance benefits, on top of the care they were already receiving.
That is from Amy Finkelstein at the NYT.
Thursday assorted links
2. Endless Frontier Act update. And further information about changes at the NSF.
3. The massive decline in China’s Northeast.
4. Diem update (WSJ).
5. Shruti Rajagopalan and Alice Evans podcast on women in India, self-recommending.
Ezra Klein on UFOs
What if they turn out to be “a thing”? Here is one excerpt, to be clear this is not the only view or possibility he is putting forward:
One immediate effect, I suspect, would be a collapse in public trust. Decades of U.F.O. reports and conspiracies would take on a different cast. Governments would be seen as having withheld a profound truth from the public, whether or not they actually did. We already live in an age of conspiracy theories. Now the guardrails would truly shatter, because if U.F.O.s were real, despite decades of dismissals, who would remain trusted to say anything else was false? Certainly not the academics who’d laughed them off as nonsense, or the governments who would now be seen as liars.
And this:
One lesson of the pandemic is that humanity’s desire for normalcy is an underrated force, and there is no single mistake as common to political analysis as the constant belief that this or that event will finally change everything. If so many can deny or downplay a disease that’s killed millions, dismissing some unusual debris would be trivial. “An awful lot of people would basically shrug and it’d be in the news for three days,” Adrian Tchaikovsky, the science fiction writer, told me. “You can’t just say, ‘still no understanding of alien thing!’ every day. An awful lot of people would be very keen on continuing with their lives and routines no matter what.”
Excellent column, do read the whole thing (NYT).
Wednesday assorted links
China Straussian poem-sharing mistake of the day
Shares in Chinese food delivery giant Meituan have fallen sharply after its boss reportedly shared a 1,000-year-old poem on social media.
The Book Burning Pit by Zhang Jie was posted, then deleted, by the firm’s billionaire chief executive, Wang Xing.
The Tang dynasty poem was interpreted as a veiled criticism of President Xi Jinping’s government.
Meituan is currently under investigation over allegations of abusing its market dominance.
The company is one of China’s biggest takeaway food delivery and lifestyle services platforms and is backed by technology giant Tencent…
Despite the statement, Meituan’s Hong Kong-listed shares have fallen by around 14% since the market opened on Monday morning. Investors are jittery as Chinese business leaders who have been seen to criticise the government have found their companies come under intense scrutiny from authorities.
Here is the full story. Via Rich D.
The first date book walk out meme
Michele W. (citing @ogbrenna) asked on Twitter:
You’re on a first date with someone, and they tell you the name of their favorite book. You immediately leave. What’s the book?
This caused Atlas Shrugged to trend, and The Bible was another popular response. It is striking to me how, with a simple change of setting, and a shift in the mood affiliation of the example, how discrimination on the basis of religion suddenly is glorified and celebrated. Funny how few cited The Quran, or for that matter “The Hebrew Bible,” albeit for two very different reasons.
(By the way, I’ve been going around to many San Francisco book stores, and none of them carry the new Sarah Ruden translation of The Gospels, which is likely a significant work. I could feel people looking down on me as I asked for it. Part of me wanted to say “But this is Sarah Ruden,” but that would be making the problem only worse. Since I did not feel tempted to say “But this is God,” perhaps I am part of the problem.)
Why not email a bit with a potential date beforehand, if such matters are so important? Or is this meme a simple, never-to-be-enacted revenge fantasy for those who don’t quite have the options they might ideally prefer?
One thing the contemporary world definitely has not come to terms with is how much a highly feminized culture will be (rather strongly) enforcing new forms of discrimination, albeit cloaked under different and rhetorically emancipatory principles.
Addendum: Here is a statistics variant.
How are the major tech hubs evolving?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is the section on Miami:
In Miami and Miami Beach I had a wonderful time. But I don’t see the area as a new and budding tech center. Many tech entrepreneurs moved there during earlier phases of the pandemic, but many have since left. Perhaps the region is more of a place to spend tech money than to earn tech money.
The positives for southern Florida are clear: It is a major crossroads with significant connections to Latin America and the Caribbean, it is a fun place to live, Miami Mayor Francis X. Suarez is pro-tech, and there is no state income tax.
Yet that is not enough. Miami does not have a top-tier university, and the city does not have much of what I would call “nerd culture.” The city’s first language is arguably Spanish, but the tech world is mostly English, and its current ties to Asia are more important than possible future connections to Latin America.
Renowned venture capitalist Keith Rabois is in Miami and is a staunch advocate for the city. It would not be surprising if Miami developed a few significant tech companies due to his influence. Miami could also become more of a center for crypto wealth. If you’ve earned a billion dollars through Bitcoin, and live part of the year in Puerto Rico to avoid capital gains taxes, is there anywhere better to hang out and spend your wealth than Miami?
All that said, I do not see Miami as a serious contender to be a major tech center.
Comments on NYC and the Bay Area then follow…
Tuesday assorted links
*Peace, Poverty and Betrayal*
The author is Roderick Matthews, and the subtitle is A New History of British India. This book has been highly controversial for its supposed “whitewashing” of British rule in India, but so far I find it insightful and indeed revelatory. It is to date my favorite book this year, most of all conceptual but also remarkably well-informed historically. Here is one excerpt:
Ultimately, we should condemn [British] colonialism not because it was self-glorifying and arrogant, but because it was small-minded and fearful.
Colonial rule was undoubtedly heavily responsible for the fact that India remainder both poor and backward — but the high Rah hid a subtler hypocrisy, in the way that Indian landlords, for a muddle of humanitarian and political reasons, were denied the scope that their British counterparts had allowed themselves. British landowners drove their tenants off the land and adopted new methods of husbandry to increase profitability, which allowed them to create the agricultural surplus that stimulated the industrial revolution, and provided Britain with a float of national wealth to pay for colonial adventures. Rural India remained overmanned and underproductive.
This short charge sheet differs from the extensive accusations made by modern left-leaning historians, who recognize economic exploitation but choose instead to emphasize cultural issues, especially the bureaucratization of Indian society and the introduction of capitalist norms. This is hardly fair, because the progressive middle classes in India would have done broadly the same things if they could. Almost nothing of the imperial administrative agenda was undone in independent India. However, it is true that the modernization process was rushed and defective. It was too self-interested, and the guiding hands were not indigenous. Something similar might have emerged, but with a more Indian face. We cannot know.
I will be covering this book more, but so far strongly recommended. It is no accident that the author, while an experienced Indian historian, is not an academic.
Network Structure in Small Groups and Survival in Disasters
I wonder if this kind of result might apply to more than just disasters:
People in disaster and emergency situations (e.g., building fires) tend to adhere to the social obligations and expectations that are embedded in their preexisting roles and relationships. Accordingly, people survive or perish in groups—specifically, alongside those to whom they were connected before the situation emerged. This article uses social network analysis to expand on this collective behavior account. Specifically, we consider structural heterogeneity with respect to the internal configurations of social ties that compose small groups facing these situations together. Some groups are composed of cohesive subsets of members who can split off from each other during evacuation without violating their group’s internal role-based expectations. We argue that groups that possess this “breakaway” structure can respond to emergencies more flexibly. We explore this using data from the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire of 1977, which killed 165 people. Our data include 303 groups (“parties”) that consisted of 746 people who were present in the dining room where most of the fatalities occurred. Fatality rates were significantly lower in groups that were internally structured such that they could split up in different ways during the escape while still maintaining their strongest social bonds.
That is from Benjamin Cornwell and Jing-Mao Ho, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Sunday assorted links
Elon on SNL
He started by declaring that he speaks in a monotone and “has Asperger’s,” was funny and self-assured during the rest of the introduction, brought his mom on stage, and later played a variety of roles, including murderer, awkward guy at a party, a Mario character (Wario), and an Icelandic TV producer. He played a financial analyst repeatedly asked to explain “What is Dogecoin?” (Dogecoin was down significantly during the evening). The final skit was a gold-mining motif, something like “why are we panning for this gold when we can just invent our own currency?” Elon’s plan was to dig a tunnel to get at the bad guys. I enjoyed his line: “And I like self-driving horses, which are just…horses.”
He was funnier than any of the professional comedians.
Is there anything in American business history even vaguely comparable to this event?
Saturday assorted links
1. Furman and Powell on labor markets. And monopsony oops.
4. Jean Monnet, guerrilla bureaucrat.
6. “Last year, more anti-Asian hate crimes were reported to police in Vancouver, a city of 700,000 people, than in the top 10 most populous U.S. cities combined.” Note however that data standards may not be uniform! Still…
New results on Work from Home
Emphasis is added by TC:
Using personnel and analytics data from over 10,000 skilled professionals at a large Asian IT services company, we compare productivity before and during the work from home [WFH] period of the Covid-19 pandemic. Total hours worked increased by roughly 30%, including a rise of 18% in working after normal business hours. Average output did not significantly change. Therefore, productivity fell by about 20%. Time spent on coordination activities and meetings increased, but uninterrupted work hours shrank considerably. Employees also spent less time networking, and received less coaching and 1:1 meetings with supervisors. These findings suggest that communication and coordination costs increased substantially during WFH, and constituted an important source of the decline in productivity. Employees with children living at home increased hours worked more than those without children at home, and suffered a bigger decline in productivity than those without children.
That is from a new paper by Michael Gibbs, Friederike Mengel, and Christoph Siemroth.
*Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment*
That is the new and very interesting book by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein. Think of “noise” as the new major problem rather than bias. Here is one excerpt:
…we presented our findings to the senior managers of an asset management firm, prompting them to run their own exploratory noise audit. they asked forty-two experienced investors in the firm to estimate the fair value of a stock (the price at which investors would be indifferent to buying or selling). The investors based their analysis on a one-page description of the business; the data included ismplified profits and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow statements for the past three years and projections for the next two. median noise, measured in the same way as in the insurance company, was 41%. Such large differences among investors in the same firm, using the same valuation methods, cannot be good news.
I will be covering this book more soon, you can pre-order it here. And here Tim Harford does FT lunch with Kahneman, self-recommending.