Hat tip: Charlie Brown, for the cartoon and the title.
Whew.
9 years ago
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
A new perspective on overlapping generations models
Hat tip: Charlie Brown, for the cartoon and the title.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Friday, January 1, 2010
Warsh on health care reform
David Warsh notes that the bill that seems likely to emerge in the end will have a bipartisan pedigree.
My thought, based on a relatively casual understanding of what is in the bill, is that it is a muddle all around. There are things to like, such as the coverage mandate and the increased coverage and, if it survives, the partial reduction in the health insurance subsidy.
There are things to dislike, such as the fraudulent accounting and the absence of any serious efforts to control expenditures. The flip side of this, to some extent, is that the bill is unlikely to decrease medical innovation, at least in the short and medium run, and might even give it a boost. The bill also helps move the system away from first dollar coverage.
Missing in all the kerfuffle was an opportunity to fix the prescription drug benefit - a good potential source of financing for the increased coverage - and to improve on Medicare and Medicaid by dumping them in favor of the mandatory, regulated private coverage to be imposed on the non-poor and non-old. Also missing are efforts to increase the domestic supply of doctors and nurses and/or to move functions away from both to less expensive nurses aides and other staff whose supply is not artificially limited. That is a very simple form of cost control and would have the side benefit of reducing the flow of medical personnel from developing countries to the US.
And we can be thankful for the absence of a public option; try as I might, I cannot think why the left imagines that this is a good idea.
My thought, based on a relatively casual understanding of what is in the bill, is that it is a muddle all around. There are things to like, such as the coverage mandate and the increased coverage and, if it survives, the partial reduction in the health insurance subsidy.
There are things to dislike, such as the fraudulent accounting and the absence of any serious efforts to control expenditures. The flip side of this, to some extent, is that the bill is unlikely to decrease medical innovation, at least in the short and medium run, and might even give it a boost. The bill also helps move the system away from first dollar coverage.
Missing in all the kerfuffle was an opportunity to fix the prescription drug benefit - a good potential source of financing for the increased coverage - and to improve on Medicare and Medicaid by dumping them in favor of the mandatory, regulated private coverage to be imposed on the non-poor and non-old. Also missing are efforts to increase the domestic supply of doctors and nurses and/or to move functions away from both to less expensive nurses aides and other staff whose supply is not artificially limited. That is a very simple form of cost control and would have the side benefit of reducing the flow of medical personnel from developing countries to the US.
And we can be thankful for the absence of a public option; try as I might, I cannot think why the left imagines that this is a good idea.
Job market starts early
Congrats to Jon Lanning, who finished his Ph.D. at Michigan a couple of years ago, and just took a job at Bryn Mawr.
A fine way to start the New Year!
A fine way to start the New Year!
Pro-natalist policies and the downard sloping demand curve for babies
Denmark seems to have found a pro-natalist policy that actually works: fully subsidized IVF.
That's a free paper idea, folks. Please send me a draft when it is done!
Hat tip: Lars Skipper
It would be interesting to see a comparison of fully subsidized IVF with some of the other tax and transfer based pro-natalist policies on a $ per baby basis. I suspect that the additional babies induced by IVF also end up in families with higher levels of education and income, which has implications for the social cost-benefit calculation.The latest figures from the country’s fertility databases show that 8 percent of children are born with help from fertility treatment or about 5000 a year. By comparison, 3.5 percent of Norwegian and 2 percent of English children are born as a result of the treatment.
Lone Schmidt, a fertility researcher at University of Copenhagen, said Denmark topped the European rates because of the many fertility clinics here. The clinics are also more accessible, with short waiting lists and have a high quality of treatment, she said.‘Its got nothing to do with Danes having lower fertility than those in other countries,” Schmidt told Berlingske Tidende, adding it was free for Danish people to receive treatment, unlike in many other countries.
That's a free paper idea, folks. Please send me a draft when it is done!
Hat tip: Lars Skipper
Grading
I don't think this is how my teaching assistant graded the finals for my undergraduate econometrics class, but we have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy so I will never know.
Movie: Avatar
Avatar is worth seeing for the visuals alone, which will set a new standard going forward.
The setup will irritate some people as it embodies many of the usual Hollywood political and social enthusiasms: corporations are evil, the military is evil, scientists are noble and good and the noble savage native good guys are pantheists who seem not to have any private property (nor, indeed, do they seem to ever do useful work of any sort). About the only thing that could be said against the natives is that they have hereditary rulers and that a couple of the young male ones are a bit headstrong. The movie would have had more depth if the natives had some moral diversity to match that of the humans.
There are some obvious oddities in the story - e.g. why do the natives have a well-developed ritual for transferring souls from their human bodies to their avatar bodies when presumably the issue has never come up before, why don't the soldiers wear their breathing apparatus when flying helicopters full of easily broken glass windows, why would the main character be sent out in his avatar to interact with the natives without any training, and so on - but the plot, and everything else, is really secondary to the truly astounding visuals.
Fine NYT review here.
Recommend for the visuals. Be sure to find a comfy chair as this one lasts a long time.
The setup will irritate some people as it embodies many of the usual Hollywood political and social enthusiasms: corporations are evil, the military is evil, scientists are noble and good and the noble savage native good guys are pantheists who seem not to have any private property (nor, indeed, do they seem to ever do useful work of any sort). About the only thing that could be said against the natives is that they have hereditary rulers and that a couple of the young male ones are a bit headstrong. The movie would have had more depth if the natives had some moral diversity to match that of the humans.
There are some obvious oddities in the story - e.g. why do the natives have a well-developed ritual for transferring souls from their human bodies to their avatar bodies when presumably the issue has never come up before, why don't the soldiers wear their breathing apparatus when flying helicopters full of easily broken glass windows, why would the main character be sent out in his avatar to interact with the natives without any training, and so on - but the plot, and everything else, is really secondary to the truly astounding visuals.
Fine NYT review here.
Recommend for the visuals. Be sure to find a comfy chair as this one lasts a long time.
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