Human Events offers a list based on a poll of conservatives.  Social Security comes in first, number five is "contraceptive funding."  Foreign policy aside, what should such a list look like?

At the top I will put our aggregate of health care policies, including Medicare, but without pretending that removing any one of them would solve the major problems.  Many smaller decisions, taken together, have painted us into a box where the incentives are for cost-escalation and burden-shifting at the same time. 

It is hard for me to see social security as such a huge villain.  I’m not going to push Ricardian neutrality, but a lot of it is just dollars slushing back and forth.  It would be better as a welfare program but as is I just don’t see how it has wrecked us.

Farm subsidies are terrible but quantitatively they don’t amount to much in the broader scheme of things.  Therefore my second pick is the aggregate burden of many small regulations.  As with health care, we have no single identifiable villain.  Again many small policies, taken together, make entrepreneurship less dynamic and lower long-run economic growth.  "Small steps toward a much worse world," as they say.

My third pick is the public quasi-monopoly on education.

Your ideas?

Sitting in the dentist’s chair yesterday, and knowing I will return tomorrow (don’t worry, it is only root canal work), I realized I had nothing to read.  So I started thinking about the immediate incentives of the dentist, or lack thereof.

I have a very good dentist, but surely there is variation in the willingness of a dentist, across patients, to try harder and do a better job. 

When there is no incentive at all, perhaps the dentist does not try hard enough to alleviate your pain.  Yes there is long-run reputation, but Daniel Kahneman and others find that the duration of a pain has little bearing on your memory of that pain.  So patient reports, as they are filtered into the marketplace, are an imperfect signal.  Furthermore for any given average reputation your dentist seeks, you still want to receive relatively favorable treatment within the distribution of patients.

You might pay a bonus at the end of the visit, if you thought the performance of the dentist was especially good.  But then the dentist might put you though too little pain.  "Fragmented tooth?  Don’t worry, you can ignore it."

Last year I stopped going to a dentist who put me through too much unnecessary pain while cleaning my teeth.

Perhaps you should pretend you are a dentist yourself?  (Toward that end, here is a dental dictionary.)  Or a lawyer?  Should you talk about the breadth of your social circle?

With my new dentist, I pretend to have no fear.  And at the end of the visit I said what a great job she did.  I expect better performance by supporting her self-image as a good dentist and I find high-powered incentives difficult to apply.

But might I improve on this approach?  Comments are open…