The Reality-Based Community

What Would a Health Reform Deal Look Like?

Don Taylor — Wed, 16 May 2012 20:28:47 +0000

A central claim of my book Balancing the Budget is a Progressive Priority is that slowing the rate of health care cost inflation is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition to our ever achieving a sustainable budget down the road (it will also take a tax increase). Further, it will be virtually impossible to [...]

The Laxative Free Virtual Colonoscopy

Matthew E. Kahn — Wed, 16 May 2012 04:29:41 +0000

The LA Times reports on a new strategy that should encourage more people to get screened but may further increase our expenditure on health care.

This Island of England Breeds Very Valiant Creatures

Keith Humphreys — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:46:40 +0000

I have gone through a spate of watching British movies that show the country in the 1940s and 1950s (e.g., The Long Arm and Green for Danger). And also, as I always like to do, I have been spending hours over tea listening to friends in their 70s, 80s and 90s tell me about their [...]

Living Below The Line

Keith Humphreys — Tue, 15 May 2012 08:13:55 +0000

Fresh from helping bring the life saving 24/7 sobriety programme to the UK, Baroness Anne Jenkin appeared on the popular British TV show “Come Dine with Me”, but with the twist that she had to feed all her guests at a total cost of only a few quid. She is part of the live below [...]

Romney and Gender at Liberty University — Sometimes it’s what’s not said that’s emblematic

Quincy Adams — Tue, 15 May 2012 07:01:13 +0000

Excluding various references to God, and two where his wife Ann served as a prop to introduce the actions of a man, Romney mentioned 19 people in his speech — all male. He claimed christianity builds “heroic souls” — but, you guessed it, he couldn’t imagine that any women’s souls were the equal of watergate [...]

Robert Frank at UCLA this Friday

Mark Kleiman — Tue, 15 May 2012 04:01:54 +0000

Korn Convocation Hall, Friday from 1-3, speaking on his new book, The Darwin Economy.

Keystone and Kelo

Mark Kleiman — Tue, 15 May 2012 03:57:49 +0000

The Keystone pipeline can't be built without taking private property rights by eminent domain. Where are the screams of outrage from the opponents of the Kelo decision?

Stewardship

Michael O'Hare — Mon, 14 May 2012 21:20:46 +0000

The Obama campaign is going after Romney’s qualification as a businessman, portraying his career at Bain as heartless looting, extracting wealth like pensions and health care from blue-collar workers rather than creating value and sharing. The new video is posted here (at the end of the story text), and it’s pretty heartrending. It also suggests [...]

Private LTC Insurance is Not the Answer for Most People

Don Taylor — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:57:31 +0000

(cross posted at freeforall) The WSJ has a good point/counter-point on the question “should you purchase private Long Term Care Insurance?” (h/t Brad Flansbaum). Mark Meiners argues for purchase by saying “you shouldn’t hope for the best” while Prescott Cole says “LTC insurance is too expensive, you should invest what you would spend on premiums.” [...]

Terrorizing Gay Males as a Group Activity

Keith Humphreys — Mon, 14 May 2012 07:07:50 +0000

In trying to explain why so many adolescent males (of all ages) do nasty things like Mitt Romney did to an effeminate looking male classmate, many people invoke what at root is a Freudian explanation: Males hate and terrorize gay males because they themselves are struggling to contain homosexual feelings. This intrapsychic explanation of anti-gay [...]

Lives of the Great LGBT Engineers

James Wimberley — Sun, 13 May 2012 22:22:05 +0000

Serendipity and tolerance in the rise of ARM processors.

What Do Liberal and Conservative Economists Agree About?

Matthew E. Kahn — Sun, 13 May 2012 15:30:33 +0000

Dean (Biden) Baker and Kevin (Dow 36000) Hassett have a very nice piece in today’s NY Times focused on new evidence documenting the long run costs of short run job loss due to recession. Unemployment raises suicide risk and divorce risk. The new empirical research pays careful attention to trying to establish whether the correlation [...]

Prenatal drug use, once again

Harold Pollack — Sun, 13 May 2012 13:32:37 +0000

A widely-covered article in the Journal of the American Medical Association documents the sharp rise in the number of newborns who were exposed to opiates during pregnancy. This and other research suggests that illicit drug use during pregnancy may be more common today than it was during the crack epidemic a quarter-century ago. Like other [...]

Le Grand Départ

Keith Humphreys — Sun, 13 May 2012 05:55:52 +0000

Unsurprisingly, French zillionaires are snapping up London estate agents and will soon be hopping the channel to escape the new government. It’s little more than 200 miles from Paris to London, and there is already a large French community and associated amenities in the British capitol. U.S. States face similar problems when they design taxes [...]

Quibble: “ultra-Orthodox”

Mark Kleiman — Sat, 12 May 2012 19:29:09 +0000

Hasidism was a mystical reaction against legalistic halachic orthodoxy. Calling Hasidim "ultra-Orthodox" is a little bit like calling Pentacostals "ultra-fundamentalist."

Mitt Romney, “boys-will-be-boys,” and juvenile justice

Mark Kleiman — Sat, 12 May 2012 17:56:52 +0000

What Romney's actions and words say about his character, and what reactions to them say about the character of the contemporary American right wing. If Romney can't be judged today by his actions at age 18, what's the justification for sentening 14-year-olds to Life without Parole?

Short Facebook and Don’t Buy California’s High Speed Rail Bonds

Matthew E. Kahn — Sat, 12 May 2012 16:08:37 +0000

For those who look to economists for investment advice, in two blog entries posted here , I suggest that you short Facebook stock and avoid investing in California’s high speed rail.

Wilson, Loury, and the varieties of “broken windows”

Mark Kleiman — Fri, 11 May 2012 23:27:38 +0000

Glenn Loury blames Jim Wilson for the excesses of "broken windows" policing. I (mostly) dissent.

Weekend Film Recommendation: The Hill

Keith Humphreys — Fri, 11 May 2012 18:33:15 +0000

Sidney Lumet‘s brutal, gripping 1965 movie “The Hill” opens with a solitary figure laboring up the man-made torture device that gives the film its title. In one of Oswald Morris’ many mesmerizing crane shots, the man collapses in the North African heat and then the camera begins to move slowly away, off into the distance, [...]

More green maps

James Wimberley — Fri, 11 May 2012 10:49:58 +0000

The growth in renewable electricity generation by US state.

A stumbling block for the blind

Mark Kleiman — Fri, 11 May 2012 01:00:41 +0000

Mitt Romney's schoolboy sense of humor included encouraging a blind teacher to walk into a closed door by pretending to open it for him.

Teacher appreciation week

Michael O'Hare — Thu, 10 May 2012 18:22:54 +0000

My “Art and Despair” seminar came up on our last unit, on resignation and acceptance, last week with Brahms’ Requiem, and we got into a discussion of immortality as a comfort in the face of death. I provoked them a little with Minsky’s question “Does the soul learn?” from The Society of Mind, and the [...]

Richard Grenell Should Move to Britain

Keith Humphreys — Thu, 10 May 2012 17:01:02 +0000

I am happy to see the Economist covering the wave of criminal justice innovation in the UK. I worked with allies on the package of reforms that are now the law of the land. It includes 24/7 sobriety and other Kleiman-esque swift-and-certain consequence approaches to offenders serving “community sentences” (the rough parallel of probation and [...]

The child is father to the man

Mark Kleiman — Thu, 10 May 2012 16:55:44 +0000

It would be absurd to hold Mitt Romney's participation in an especially vicious piece of high-school gay-baiting - leading a mob that tackled a closeted student and cut off his dyed-blond hair - against him now. But Romney's current reaction to the event is truly appalling. He's either an utterly shameless liar or a complete sociopath.

The Subsidy of Marriage by Social Security

Don Taylor — Thu, 10 May 2012 15:18:03 +0000

Josh Barro notes that marriage cannot be an entirely state issue because of the way in which it impacts things like Social Security and Medicare eligibility. Below is the majority of a post I wrote in September, 2011 on the subsidy of marriage provided by Social Security….. Gene Steurle and Stephanie Rennane have a nice [...]

China’s Exports of Solar Panel Equipment and the Rise of a “Green” New Jersey

Matthew E. Kahn — Thu, 10 May 2012 13:29:05 +0000

The NY Times reports; “Installers, often working through big-box chains like Home Depot or Lowe’s, are taking advantage of hefty tax breaks, creative financing techniques and a glut of cheap, Chinese-made panels to make solar power accessible to the mass market for the first time. The number of residential and commercial installations more than doubled over the [...]

Covering ex-prisoners: Another quiet benefit of health reform

Harold Pollack — Wed, 09 May 2012 22:35:27 +0000

This won’t matter politically, but the Affordable Care Act quietly improves public health by expanding coverage for hundreds of thousands of ex-prisoners and others under the control of the criminal justice system.

Who Said It?

Keith Humphreys — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:45:47 +0000

Legislators should have an ideological grounding and strong beliefs identifiable to their constituents…But ideology cannot be a substitute for a determination to think for yourself, for a willingness to study an issue objectively, and for the fortitude to sometimes disagree with your party or even your constituents. Like Edmund Burke, I believe leaders owe the [...]

If Obama Were Swiss

Keith Humphreys — Wed, 09 May 2012 05:24:59 +0000

No kidding, Michele Bachmann is now a Swiss citizen. Doug Mataconis wonders how Bachmann would react if a Democrat did something like this. Why wonder, when it’s more fun to speculate? What would Michele say if Obama became a Swiss citizen? “This is another example of the Swissification of men in the U.S.” “Let me [...]

More Misguided Drug Policy Commentary From Inside the Bubble

Keith Humphreys — Wed, 09 May 2012 04:50:05 +0000

Mike Riggs of Reason Magazine rages: The administration has so few reforms worth touting in the post-drug-war drug war that you’ve probably heard them both several times: It reduced (but did not eliminate) the sentencing disparity for crack cocaine and regular cocaine, and it’s encouraged the use of drug courts over regular courts. That. Is. [...]