We’re celebrating a happy birthday with dear friends. Not every culture celebrates these mile markers of life’s journey, but Americans have traditionally done so. This, I suspect, is related to optimistic expectations about our future. Some birthdays demarcate an important change in life status. The twelfth birthday is associated with Christian confirmation and the thirteenth […]
Read More
From The Wall Street Journal (January 4, 2011) The least surprising event of 2010 was that, in the wake of new federal limits on how credit-card issuers can price risk and adjust interest rates, more Americans had to go to payday lenders, pawn shops and local loan sharks in order to get credit. It’s simply […]
Read More
Former VP Dick Cheney recently announced that having suffered five heart attacks, he is interested in a heart transplant. I offer my best wishes for success—and for multiple reasons. In addition to prolonging his life, should his operation occur it will focus attention on reforming our thinking regarding organ transplants. This issue is economically and […]
Read More
Here is a story well known, but worth reviewing and appreciating. It’s one to share as environmental concerns grow. Its implications are increasingly important. Essentially, in ecology as in economics, many actions and beliefs are interdependent. It’s difficult to do one thing that doesn’t affect others. This has major ethical as well as environmental implications. […]
Read More
I have decided to devote my first Health Alert of the New Year to “tolerance” and “rational thought” — terms that are rarely conjoined. The next time you are in an argument with someone over a public policy, stop and ask yourself: Can you summarize your opponent’s position in words that he would recognize and […]
Read More
Christmas, the holiday celebrating the birth of Christ, is indeed a joyous time. Ironically, it began as an exercise in political extortion. The Roman rulers of the time are best understood as sedentary bandits. They provided order and some security from roving bandits in exchange for taxes levied and collected. A census was required to […]
Read More
From The New York Times For the past few years, there has been a strange motif running through my social life. I’d go out with some writers, and they’d start gushing about someone named Erica Brown. “She has an inner light,” one of them once said. I’d be out with my wife and some of […]
Read More
Here is Goodman’s Law for Efficient Purchasing: There is no such thing as a smart formula. A recent news articlereported Medicare paying $800 to rent a wheelchair that could have been purchased outright for $350. I sometimes wonder if health economists actually understand how other markets work. Let’s try a thought experiment. Suppose you ran […]
Read More
I find a persistent myth among many of those who consider themselves well informed about economics. Specifically, many believe that governmental agencies are by their nature inefficient, unresponsive, officious, and insensitive to citizens’ legitimate demands and expectations. The U.S. Postal Service and state driver’s license bureaus are standard examples. This criticism is silly and often […]
Read More
We’re 10 years into the future and you have terminal cancer. Still, all is not lost. Doctors in other countries are reporting successful remission of your type of cancer, using a drug originally approved in the United States for some other purpose. There are several journal articles that appear to back up these claims and […]
Read More