Subscribe to Excerpts
Subscribe by Email
Not a bit of it. I’d be inclined to make a moral claim on behalf of some of HuffPo’s worker-bees, but not for those of us who merely droned on.
Archive for February, 2011
February 14th, 2011
There is any easy way to reduce federal spending by $47 billion a year — it’s so easy, in fact, that no one can consider it.
February 14th, 2011
Category: Affordable Care Act, Health Care
Alison Galbraith and colleagues have produced a nice Health Affairs paper whose title kindof speaks for itself: “Nearly half of families in high-deductible health plans whose members have chronic conditions face substantial financial burden.” I don’t have time to offer detailed commentary today. Fortunately Aaron Carroll has already written much of what I would have [...]
February 14th, 2011
Category: Uncategorized
According to this new paper , girls had the highest probability of surving the Titanic disaster. The authors claim that this extreme case study highlights that “selfishness” cannot explain this core fact. Why didn’t a higher percentage of prime age men survive? As you might remember, Dora Costa and I have published a paper about U.S [...]
February 13th, 2011
Category: Blogging
Interesting development: Huffington Post is being sold to AOL for almost a third of a billion dollars when it built a chunk of its reputation and content from unpaid contributors (Harold Pollack and Mark Kleiman among them, I believe). I wonder so will ask publicly: Mark, Harold, do you believe any of this loot should [...]
February 13th, 2011
Category: Uncategorized
Buildings and infrastructure represent durable capital but they require ongoing maintenance and eventually they will be replaced. Climate change increases the risk of nasty weather events that increase the wear and tear on such past investments. Think of the Metrodome collapse in December 2010. This article neatly lays out some of the issues moving forward [...]
February 13th, 2011
Category: Politics and Leadership
Many politicians, activists and journalists are embracing the myth that the path to a balanced budget lies through cuts in discretionary programs. As David Brooks notes, rather than grapple with the reality that Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and interest on the debt are rapidly becoming the bulk of federal spending, some elected officials are proposing [...]
February 12th, 2011
Category: Affordable Care Act, Politics and Leadership
As health reform is implemented, there will be other glitches through good-faith bipartisan negotiation. Our currently polarized politics makes it hard to address or even to acknowledge this basic reality. Recent memories of bad-faith negotiations doesn’t make this any easier.
February 12th, 2011
Category: Health and Medicine, Personal moment
A few impressions after a loved-one’s hospital stay.
February 12th, 2011
Category: Uncategorized
Are we smart enough to enjoy the benefits of genetically modified crops while figuring out how to minimize the unintended social costs? In this cross-post, I report on a recent corn case study.