Results for “age of em” 17238 found
*Before the Revolution*
The author is Daniel K. Richter and the subtitle is America’s Ancient Pasts. I admit I am a sucker for books on this topic, but so far it is one of my two or three favorite non-fiction titles of the year. Excerpt:
The end of the Chesapeake chiefs’ efforts to use prestige goods to build power in the traditional way resulted from a more basic factor than the violent refusal of the English to play along. Once substantial numbers of European and Native people began living near each other, it became virtually impossible for any chief to control the flow of goods to his people, even if, as Powhatan apparently tried to do, he redefined prestige in ever more esoteric directions. As early as January 1608 — only a few months after the establishment of Jamestown — Smith complained that ordinary colonists and visiting sailors were trading so much metal to ordinary Indians that corn and furs “could not be had for a pound of copper, which before was sold for an ounce.” Archaeological excavations confirm that the jewelers and metalworkers textbooks have long derided as useless appendages to the lazy Jamestown colonists worked busily to make copper and other metal items to trade with Native people. This might have been the colony’s only productive enterprise in its earliest years. All along the costs — and soon along the interior rivers — of eastern North America, this kind of unregulated trade between commoners was bad news for chiefs like Powhatan, whose power depended on European goods remaining rare and under their personal control. But the opportunities that such trade represented — for both Europeans and Native people — were enormous. Some chiefs found ways to turn the new conditions to their advantage. Others did not.
Definitely recommended. My favorite parts are about the agricultural revolutions experienced in native American societies, before the arrival of the colonists. Here is part of the Amazon summary:
Richter recovers the lives of a stunning array of peoples—Indians, Spaniards, French, Dutch, Africans, English—as they struggled with one another and with their own people for control of land and resources. Their struggles occurred in a global context and built upon the remains of what came before. Gradually and unpredictably, distinctive patterns of North American culture took shape on a continent where no one yet imagined there would be nations called the United States, Canada, or Mexico.
China Grave Bubble
I cannot afford to buy a house while I’m alive and now cannot afford to buy a grave for when I’m dead.
The soaring price of land in China is spreading to burial plots which now can cost more per square foot than luxury homes. And here:
Some Chinese call themselves fen nu (grave slaves), derived from fang nu (housing slaves) – those burdened with huge housing mortgages.
Hat tip: Helen Yang.
The Paul Ryan budget plan
I’ve now read it and here are a few comments:
1. The macro projections are very weak, not worth the time of criticism (more here).
2. Ryan nails our dysfunctional, “who is really responsible for paying for Medicaid?” structure. That said, I’ve long preferred the federalization of Medicaid. Block grants to the states may be better than the status quo, however (the size of those grants is a logically distinct question). Within state budgets, police and education are often the alternative to Medicaid costs. Are we so sure that Medicaid produces the maximum benefit for the money? Low-quality moralizing about the poor is not an answer to this question.
3. That said, Medicaid should be one of the last parts of the health care budget to cut. More of our health care aid should be like Medicaid, which is relatively cheap and also targeted at those who really need the assistance. The correct Medicaid decisions depend on other budget choices, but ideally Medicaid is low on the list of recommended cuts, even if it may require some cuts.
4. With either the block grants or the Medicare vouchers, I would urge maximum transparency. Health care costs are increasing by about five percent a year. That means a fixed value voucher loses about half its real value, in terms of command over health care resources, within fourteen years. (It’s a bit more complicated than that, since not all health care costs are proportional price increases to currently available services.) If that is the decision we are going to make, let us understand it as such. I would add that Ryan’s opponents don’t avoid this kind of dilemma nearly as much as they think they do.
5. It would be nice to have a scientific estimate of how much fixed value vouchers would lower the rate of growth of health care costs. I’m not convinced the effect here is large, but I’d like to see it studied more closely.
6. Ryan’s budget repeals ACA and thus in the semi-short run it could considerably increase Medicare costs. There is no reason why Ryan’s plan shouldn’t keep the most fiscally responsible aspects of ACA. Ryan exempts the current elderly from any Medicare cuts at all, see David Leonhardt’s remarks.
7. Over a ten-year time horizon, the Ryan plan increases the debt rather than decreasing it. Take that as a sign of how hard fiscal reform is going to be.
8. As I’ve already blogged, the vouchers idea won’t help cut health care costs. Let’s create some multiple public options within Medicare, some of which would allow people to trade health care benefits for cash. Democrats are supposed to be “pro-choice,” right? Or is that only for abortion?
9. I’m all for cutting the corporate income tax, but 35 to 25 percent isn’t impressive. Let’s eliminate it altogether.
10. There’s not nearly enough on reforming the dysfunctional supply-side of our health care institutions. Nor does science or basic research receive much discussion.
11. The plan does some strange things, such as repeal Dodd-Frank resolution authority, which most people, even Dodd-Frank critics, think is a good idea. Ezra summarizes the entire list of budget changes.
12. The more the Democrats criticize this plan, the more it helps Ryan and the more it hurts the Democrats. It reframes sticker shock, and the entire debate, simply to argue about $6 trillion in budget cuts.
13. #12 is the bottom line here, since the plan is not intended to be enacted into law. Points #1-11 pale in comparison to #12-13.
Here is Reihan, and Megan, and Ezra on the CBO.
Do private vouchers help control health care costs?
Basically not. Austin Frakt writes:
Why is the market-based Advantage voucher system not helping to control Medicare costs? The answer is that health care cost control is tough, technically and politically. Provider groups typically resist it. When it pertains to Medicare, beneficiaries resist it too. By adding another private-sector layer to the program–health insurers–the Advantage program invites a third source of political pressure. Rent-seeking by providers and insurers, as well as the power of the beneficiary constituency, align in their encouragement of higher Advantage payments. Congress, apparently, is willing to yield to that encouragement.
So, it’s really no surprise that Advantage plans have not, to date, been part of a Medicare cost control solution. Congress has not consistently been willing to say no to the combination of powerful interests that advocate for higher payments to private plans. Given the track record, it is also not unreasonable to conclude the mandatory voucher program Ryan advocates wouldn’t save money either. As Krugman suggests, it could even be worse because in time 100% of beneficiaries would be enrolled in vouchers, not the 24 percent that are enrolled today.
The politics of Medicare are such that Ryan’s idea, paying for care entirely through private plans, costs more. That’s not due to a market failure, but a political one. Congress likes to spend money; insurers, providers and beneficiaries like to receive it. Congress spends even more when it can satisfy those interests under the guise of a seemingly pro-market, pro-competitive program.
Yglesias and Krugman have a good public choice critique of this aspect of the Ryan plan. Ezra says the Ryan plan will end up reviving Simpson-Bowles, and more comment here. Here is praise for the Ryan plan from Chris Edwards. Here is Arnold Kling on morality.
The way to turn the Ryan plan into genuine cost control is to offer people a choice of 5-10 “public options,” some of which involve converting future Medicare benefits into current or future cash.
Will the government shut down?
Here are the Bookmaker’s odds:
Will the U.S. Congress reach an agreement on the federal spending cut bill for the rest of the fiscal year before March 4th?
YES -140 58%
NO -110 47%[The +/- Indicates the Return on the Wager. The percentage is the likelihood that response will occur. For Example: Betting on the candidate least likely to win would earn the most amount of money, should that happen.]
For the pointer I thank Samuel Arbesman. Why is there no InTrade.com market?
Addendum: InTrade now shows a 39 percent chance of a shutdown before the end of June.
Choice-based Medicare cost controls
Let’s say it’s 2027 and I’ve just turned 65. I fill out a Medicare application on-line and opt for a plan with superior heart coverage (my father died of a heart attack), not too much knee coverage and physical therapy (my job doesn’t require heavy lifting), no cancer heroics (my mother turned them down and I wish to follow her example), and lots of long-term disability.
Is that so terrible an approach? Is it obviously worse than having the Medicare Advisory Board make all of those choices for me?
Over the next few days you will read a lot of “downgrade and dismiss” directed at Paul Ryan and his plan and indeed it is quite possible his proposal is not a workable one (I haven’t read it yet). But don’t fall for the downgrade and dismiss bait, keep on returning to the question of how much individual choice should be allowed into health care cost control. Why not divvy up the cost control work between the Board and some degree of individual choice across Medicare benefits? You don’t have to combine that choice with the cost-increasing aspects of Medicare Advantage-like plans.
Many ACA defenders simply do not want to enter into a debate where the framing is “we’re all for cost control, when it comes to Medicare benefit selection it’s a question of government board vs. individual choice.”
I can think of a few reasons why individual choice will sometimes fail as a method of cost control:
1. Individuals have serious misconceptions about the science, or the badness of a particular condition, even in light of government or other third-party advice. Or perhaps individuals simply do not understand the nature of all of the choices at hand.
2. Perhaps an individual will choose “no coverage for lung cancer,” but the government cannot precommit to the outcome of no coverage. Of course as cost control becomes more pressing, we’ll have to learn precommitment for at least some issues, one way or the other, so this cannot be a decisive objection. The entire premise behind the discussion is that we cannot cover all treatments through government subsidy.
3. Over time, perhaps a government Board can rebalance the mix of coverage better than an individual can. People age, possibly lose some mental faculties, science advances, costs change, and so on.
Those are good arguments. They are good arguments for a mixed system. They are not good arguments for ruling out all individual choice of benefits. They are not good arguments for ruling out a scenario like that outlined in the first paragraph of this blog post.
Here is Megan McArdle on the difference between boards and individual choice:
It seems quite likely to me that vouchers are going to be better at controlling health care cost growth than a central committee. Every committee decision that cuts off a potentially useful treatment (and I’m afraid it can’t all be back surgery and hormone replacement therapy) will trigger a lobbying explosion from affected groups. Each treatment is a decision with a small marginal cost to the taxpayer; it’s in aggregate that they become expensive. Which means that the congressional tendency is always going to be to override–and while there are supposed to be structural barriers against this in the bill, they aren’t very strong . . .
Whereas if you put the decision about what treatments to cover in the hands of the patient, the lobbying you face is to increase the overall value of the voucher. To be sure, this will have a larger (and therefore more powerful) group behind it. But it will also come with an enormous pricetag, making it much harder for our politicians to rationalize the decision.
There are lots of comments from Reihan here. Ezra associates the Ryan reforms with Medicare Advantage. Maybe so, and maybe that’s bad, but we return to how much individual choice should we allow into health care cost control, with or without the cost-increasing aspects of the Ryan plan.
We shouldn’t let “downgrade and dismiss” distract our attention from that fundamental question about individual choice.
General principles for evaluating Medicare reforms
You’ll be hearing lots about the Paul Ryan entitlement reform proposals, but here are a few more general points to keep in mind:
1. As health care develops, it becomes impossible for Medicare (or Medicaid) to cover every treatment.
2. One reform option has government experts rule which treatments are eligible for coverage, with varying degrees of Congressional input.
3. Another option is to let individuals choose in advance which treatments they will be covered for, and which not.
4. #3 can but need not be bundled with voucher and privatization ideas. Without privatization, the government offers people different Medicare packages and they choose one over the others. Government may also recommend a Medicare benefits package for an individual, without requiring that it be chosen.
5. Most plausible policy reforms involve some mix of expert restrictions (#2 )and individual choices (#3) and the real question is to figure out the right mix of the two approaches. When evaluating #2, do keep in mind the potential input of Congress, if only as a background threat.
6. Does individual choice (#3) make more sense for nursing homes and dental care (preferences really matter?), but maybe expert judgment (#2) makes more sense for cancer treatments (expertise really matters?)? I am not endorsing that comparison, it is simply an example to illustrate the issue at hand.
7. If #5 isn’t being addressed, you’re probably just getting polemics. Obligatory citation of David Hume, commit it to the flames, etc.
What determined the playing length of an audio CD?
Here is one account:
Sony had initially preferred a smaller diameter, but soon after the beginning of the collaboration started to argue vehemently for a diameter of 120mm. Sony’s argument was simple and compelling: to maximize the consumer appear of a switch to the new technology, any major piece of music needed to fit on a single CD…Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was quickly identified as the point of reference — according to some accounts, it was the favorite piece of Sony vice-president Norio Ohga’s wife. And thorough research identified the 1951 recording by the orchestra of the Bayreuther Festspiele under Wilhelm Furtwängler, at seventy-four minutes, as the slowest performance of the Ninth Symphony on record. And so, according to the official history, Sony and Philips top executives agreed in their May 1980 meeting that “a diameter of 12 centimeters was required for this playing time.”
That is from the new and interesting book by Tim Büthe and Walter Mattli, The New Global Rulers: The Privatization of Regulation in the World Economy, the book’s home page, with free chapter one, is here. Speaking of which, Garth Saloner is another very good South African economist and he is now Dean of Stanford Business School.
The Matchmaker
The Boston Globe’s Leon Neyfakh has a good piece on Alvin Roth:
Roth has always been interested in the idea that sophisticated theories can be used to solve practical problems. As a graduate student at Stanford University, he earned a doctorate in operations research, which uses math to help organizations run more smoothly. Roth was just 19 when he started at Stanford, having quit high school without graduating at the age of 16 and finished Columbia University in three years. At just 22, he got a job as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and in 1977, at just 25, he was granted tenure there….
In the years since, Roth has emerged as a rare figure in the academic world: a theorist willing to dive into real-world problems and fix them. After helping the med students, he designed a better way to assign children to public schools — the system now used by both Boston and New York. He also helped invent a system for matching kidney donors with patients, dramatically increasing the number of donations that take place each year. More recently, he and one of his students have been talking with Teach for America about improving the system it uses to deploy volunteers around the country.
… Inspired by Roth’s work, these rising economists are also setting their sights on real-world problems. Some are looking at dating websites; others are interested in how universities could do better at scheduling their students’ classes. Like Roth, all of them envision a world in which economists, as unlikely as it may seem, are recognized as society’s mechanics.
One minor note, kidney exchanges are great but I wouldn’t describe the increases as “dramatic.” We will need, in addition, other ideas to alleviate the shortage of transplant organs.
Healthy living vouchers: will they work?
Matt Ridley writes:
Drawing a direct analogy with the effect of vouchers in the education system, Messrs. Seeman and Luciani suggest “healthy-living vouchers” [TC: book is here] that could be redeemed from different (certified) places—gyms, diet classes, vegetable sellers and more. Education vouchers, they point out, are generally disliked by rich whites as being bad for poor blacks—and generally liked by poor blacks. A bottom-up solution empowers people better than top-down government fiat.
So instead of spending large sums on ads to shame us into better eating habits, spend the money on vouchers handed out to the overweight and let them find whatever provider of goods or services best meets their particular dieting needs. After all, the root causes of obesity are multifarious and new ones are being added all the time—such as diet sodas, gut bacteria, genes, sleep apnea, leptin levels, medication, depression, poverty and peer pressure. So the solutions need to be multipronged, too. What works for you may not work for me.
A few points:
1. How exactly does one identify who deserves the voucher? Or does everyone get them? (Do we at this point need another middleclass entitlement?) How much does the price of the good stuff go up?
2. The vouchers can be resold on secondary markets, as food stamps often are.
3. Portfolio effects: the unhealthy person might go to the gym with a voucher and then “make it up” by performing more of the unhealthy behaviors as recompense.
4. Income effects: if the voucher boosts the real income of the unhealthy person, they may well end up buying more stuff which is bad for them. I don’t see that the proposal calls for a simultaneous, income-neutral scheme of taxation. Buying more bad stuff and also more good stuff is not a wash, which brings us to:
5. It is easier to destroy than to preserve health, which suggests limiting the bad, or persuading individuals to limit the bad, will create more health benefits than encouraging the good.
I’m all for creative thinking here, but it’s hard to see this proposal working. If nothing else, though, it shows why this problem is so hard to solve.
Assorted links
1. National serviceman needs maid to carry his backpack (Singapore, Adam Smith, decline of martial virtue, via Chris F. Masse).
2. Paul Krugman on the 1921 recovery.
3. Robin Hanson and Brian Christian.
4. Unemployment duration still going up.
5. Brad DeLong, slouching toward recalculation. And his response.
The Hayek Twitter game
The game: Take a sentence or two on Hayek’s clause and qualification ridden Germanic prose, and turn it into a 144 character twitter feed.
Example. Here’s a brief passage from Hayek 1976 essay “Socialism and Science” posted a few days ago in the comments by Richard Ebeling:
“A society in which everyone is organized as a member of some group to force government to help him get what he wants is self-destructive. There is no way from preventing some from feeling that they have been treated unjustly — that feeling is bound to be wide spread in any social order — but arrangements which enable groups of disgruntled people to extort satisfaction of their claims — or in the recognition of an ‘entitlement’, to use the new-fangled phrase — make any society unmanageable.”
And here it is as a 144 character twitter feed:
When everyone is organized to force government to get them what they want, many will be left feeling that they have been treated unjustly.
Ho hum! I would have done “Rent-seeking groups lead to perceptions of unfairness.”
My favorite things South Africa
Torr writes to me:
Please will you consider doing a “favorite things South Africa” on Marginal Revolution. I’m also curious: have you ever visited South Africa?
I have yet to go, but here is what I admire so far:
1. Visual artist (you can’t quite call him a painter): William Kentridge. He is one of the contemporary artists who is both a realist and has a lot of the emotional power of the classics. His extraordinary body of work spans film, drawings, prints, and mixed media. Here are some images.
2. Home design: I am an admirer of the Ndebele, some photos of their colorful homes are here. They are better represented in picture books than on the web.
3. Movies: I don’t know many. I enjoyed The Gods Must be Crazy, even though some might find it slightly offensive. Nonetheless I hand the prize to District 9 for its interesting take on ethnic politics, its deconstruction and mock of Afrikaaner settler myths, and its commentary on how South Africans view Zimbabwean immigrants to their country.
4. Movie, set in: Zulu, 1964 with Michael Caine.
5. Novels: My favorite Coetzee is Disgrace, though I like most of them very much, including the early Life and Times of Michael K and Waiting for the Barbarians and the later semi-autobiographical works. Nadine Gordimer I find unreadable, call the fault mine. Same with Alan Paton. A dark horse pick is Trionf. Agaat sits in my pile, waiting for the trip of the right length.
6. Music: Where to start? Malanthini, for one. As for mbqanga collections, The Indestructible Beat of Soweto series is consistently excellent. Singing in an Open Space, Zulu Rhythm and Harmony 1962-1982 is a favorite. Random gospel and jazz collections often repay the purchase price and in general random CD purchases in these areas bring high expected returns.
7. Economists: Ludwig Lachmann was an early teacher of mine and I owe him my interest in post Keynesianism and also financial fragility hypotheses. G.F Thirlby remains underrated. W.H. Hutt was one of the most perceptive critics of Keynes and his insights still are not absorbed into the Keynesian mainstream. His book on the economics of the colour bar remains a liberal classic. Who am I forgetting?
The bottom line: There’s a lot here. Here are previous MR posts about South Africa.
Ireland fact of the day
Irish Life and Permanent is expected to require more than €3 billion – about 30 times its market value – to meet worst-case mortgage losses estimated in the tests.
Here is more. Once the Irish government takes majority ownership in this company, virtually the entire Irish banking system will have been nationalized, with no prospect of re-privatization in sight. Some of the stress tests, by the way, are based on data taken from Nevada.
In my pile and out the door
1. Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires, An Eighteenth Century History. The story of the Johnstones, in Scotland and around the globe. It appears to have lots of useful information, but it is too far from my current interests for me to read it now.
2. Robin Fox, The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind. Great themes, namely Hayek plus Levi-Strauss. But it’s too diffuse for me to get a handle on.
3. John Gray, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death. A bunch of weird guys, in the early 20th century, thought they could cheat death but they couldn’t! And it all has something to do with H.G. Wells and a Russian spy. When is the cutting polemic against rationalism going to fall? It doesn’t, and when the book ends it feels as if it is only one-third over. The mood is wistful. I recall once predicting to Jim Buchanan that Gray would someday end up converting to Roman Catholicism. This one is now in the hands of Robin Hanson.