Assorted links
2. Why we are not living in Western civilization (video).
3. Tim Harford's tips for writing non-fiction; I agree.
4. Contrarian claims about performance enhancers in baseball; caveat emptor.
5. Bastiat and Say on fiscal stimulus (though I don't think they would favor ARRA as a whole).
Department of Yikes
According to USA Today:
Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.
These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Thus, if these numbers are to be believed, federal workers on average earn in wages and compensation 50% more than workers in the private sector doing the same job. Bear in mind that the federal workers are paid by the private sector workers. We can't all be insiders.
The figures do seem large to me, however, and they do not correct for a variety of factors such as age or experience so take them with a grain of salt.
Much cheaper, almost as good
Here is part of the problem behind health care cost control, from the Annals of Internal Medicine:
Under conditions of constrained resources, cost-saving innovations may improve overall outcomes, even when they are slightly less effective than available options, by permitting more efficient reallocation of resources. The authors systematically reviewed all MEDLINE-cited cost–utility analyses written in English from 2002 to 2007 to identify and describe cost- and quality-decreasing medical innovations that might offer favorable “decrementally” cost-effective tradeoffs–defined as saving at least $100 000 per quality-adjusted life-year lost. Of 2128 cost-effectiveness ratios from 887 publications, only 9 comparisons (0.4% of total) described 8 innovations that were deemed to be decrementally cost-effective. Examples included percutaneous coronary intervention (instead of coronary artery bypass graft) for multivessel coronary disease, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (instead of electroconvulsive therapy) for drug-resistant major depression, watchful waiting for inguinal hernias, and hemodialyzer sterilization and reuse. On a per-patient basis, these innovations yielded savings from $122 to almost $12 000 but losses of 0.001 to 0.021 quality-adjusted life-years (approximately 8 hours to 1 week). These findings demonstrate the rarity of decrementally cost-effective innovations in the medical literature.
Let me just repeat that last sentence: "These findings demonstrate the rarity of decrementally cost-effective innovations in the medical literature."
Markets in everything
The German municipality of Niederzimmern does not have the money to fix potholes. They are now selling the right to fix the road to anyone. In return, the owner of the fixed pothole can put on the road a text of her choice.
The link is here and I thank Henry Farrell for the pointer.
What I’ve been reading
1. The Weeping Goldsmith: Discoveries in the Land of Myanmar, by W. John Kress. The subtitle sounds so intriguing and then you discover its about the search for rare plants. But it turns out to be even better than you thought at first. It's a wonderful introduction to Myanmar, the idea of a scientific quest, and some aspects of botany. The photographs are beautiful too. I very much like books which serve up surprising combinations, as this one does.
2. Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists. The color plates are beautiful and favor artworks with large numbers of massed individuals. The book itself is mostly excerpts of classic texts and it doesn't have much insight into…lists.
3. Gridlock: Why We're Stuck in Traffic and What To Do About It, by Randall O'Toole. This Cato book is mostly an attack on transportation planning, including a critique of high-speed rail subsidies.
4. Why Translation Matters, by Edith Grossman. Short but self-recommending. It is part of the "(Why X Matters)" series. Here is one good review.
5. No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage's 4'33", by Kyle Gann. There are over twenty-four recordings of this piece and skeptics can consider that an attempt at competitive rent exhaustion. Yet probably none of those have come close to David Tudor's presentation of the work at its premiere.
6. Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity, by Sam Miller. Bombay had its book, now Delhi has its. Recommended, it captures the feel of the place.
Ezra Klein interviews Paul Ryan
EK: And since then, the Congress has stopped it from cutting doctor payments seven times since then. I went back through the record, and you voted for five of those delays.
PR: Oh, yeah! I think we should fix the thing. Don't get me wrong.
That has to do with the Medicare payments "fix," which Congress keeps postponing, often with Ryan's support. There is much more here. Cutting spending is hard!
Here are recent developments on cost containment in the health care bill.
The auction begins
I thank Paul Sherman and Loren Poulsen and Eliot Williams for the pointer; a related link is here.
Assorted links
2. High-risk pools as a reform.
3. Recent account of Haiti, moving.
4. Myths about Russian demographics.
5. Have virtual worlds peaked?
6. Wisdom from William Galston (though I don't like the headline).
Test your moral intuitions, Kunming edition
This was a truly strange article, not only for its content but also for its odd shifts in tone. It seems that in China there is a theme park of dwarfs who perform for tourists; this reader felt he had stepped into a Brian Barry article. Here is one sample of what goes on:
And there is the Swan Lake parody, a crowd pleaser in which male dwarfs dress up in pink tights and tutus and wiggle their derrières.
“The first time I wore that, I felt really awkward,” said Chen Ruan, 20, who used to collect refuse with his parents. “But then I got up on stage and people liked it. People were applauding and I felt proud.”
So is this morally OK? Among other things, the article suggests that this theme park is raising the status of dwarfs, and the disabled, in China, at least relative to how things had been. You'll note that Chen Ruan, cited above, used to pick up refuse.
Is it better or worse that some of the dwarfs seem to enjoy the work? In this kind of "few other good employment options, culture of face-saving and honor, don't insult the boss to prestigious foreigners" setting, are there any employee reports that a reporter actually could trust and pass along at face value? What is the proper moral stance of a journalist toward a story like this one?
By the way, the piece claims that the park is not (yet?) profitable.
Los Angeles fact of the day
Not since the Beach Boys were in peach fuzz and crew cuts has it been so safe to live and play in the City of Angels. Believe it: you are more likely to be murdered in Columbus, Ohio, or Tulsa, Okla., than in the nation’s second most populous city.
Even Omaha, Nebraska now has a higher murder rate. Here is more.
Counterintuitive stories
This one is from Canada:
Muslim group moves to ban burka
"Considering the fact that women are in fact forbidden from wearing burkas in the grand mosque in Mecca, Islam's holiest site, it hardly makes sense that the practice should be permitted in Canada, she said."
The proposed ban comes on the heels of reports that Sheikh Mohamed Tantawi, dean of Egypt's al-Azhar university and the country's highest Muslim authority, is poised to issue a fatwa, or religious edict, against the garments.
Sentences to ponder
The insurance commissioners in 11 states are elected. Under the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, insurers will now be able to finance the election campaigns of those who will be their regulators. Among other powers these state insurance regulators have authority over rates and policy forms.
That's a letter to The New York Times.
Addendum: See the comment by Michael Yuri.
Markets in everything the culture that is Japan
Authentic Japan Airline outfits sell for as much as £11,000 on the black market.
The explanation for the high price is here. If you read the final sentence of the article you will see that this is perhaps one of the few prices that rises with deflation.
For the pointer I thank Ryan Briggs.
Assorted links
1. Incentives still matter on the supply side.
3. Bruce Bartlett criticizes spending caps.
4. Why is there no Jewish Narnia?
5. Will Yao Ming's baby be American and is that a betrayal?
6. Why did economic models fail to predict the medal count in this year's Olympics?
7. Some rules for graduate students; I mostly agree.
Paul Krugman on Chile
He writes (and check out the graph):
Actually, as you can see from the chart above, what happened was this: Chile had a huge economic crisis in the early 70s, which was, yes, partly due to Allende and the accompanying turmoil. Then the country experienced a recovery driven in large part by massive capital inflows, which mostly consisted of making up the lost ground. Then there was a huge crisis again in the early 1980s – part of the broader Latin debt crisis, but Chile was hit much worse than other major players. It wasn’t until the late 1980s, by which time the hard-line free-market policies had been considerably softened, that Chile finally moved definitively ahead of where it had been in the early 70s.
Krugman views this analysis as taking away some credit from Milton Friedman and the Chicago School. Given his recent writings on the Euro, it is odd what he doesn't mention, namely that the Chilean catastrophe of 1982-3 stemmed in large part from a Chilean overvaluation of the currency, rooted in a peg to the rising U.S. dollar. Milton Friedman, of course, recommended floating exchange rates.
It's also incorrect to argue that the boom starting in the late 1980s stemmed from the considerable softening of hard-line free-market policies. More accurately, Chile increased its international credibility by becoming democratic, while showing that elections would likely leave the core economic reforms intact.
You would do better to read my post on the economic legacy of Pinochet. There are significant qualifications to the story of Chile as "free market miracle," but they're not the ones Krugman makes.