Why markets can’t cure healthcare - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

Why markets can’t cure healthcare - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com: "Judging both from comments on this blog and from some of my mail, a significant number of Americans believe that the answer to our health care problems — indeed, the only answer — is to rely on the free market. Quite a few seem to believe that this view reflects the lessons of economic theory.

Not so."

Is the threat of speculation a reason to shun cap and trade? - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

Is the threat of speculation a reason to shun cap and trade? - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com: "But there’s also, it seems, growing opposition to cap-and-trade from people who should be on the side of progress — but whose reaction is basically “Eek! Markets!Wall Street! Speculation! Bad!”

We don’t need this.

So let me talk a bit about why this reaction is 99% wrong, and bad for the planet."

Socialized Rationing of Burmese Language Education

Matthew Yglesias » Home Page: "If you’re a parent in Montgomery County Maryland, you pay taxes to the county and you get to send your kids to very good public schools. But even though the schools are good, they won’t just do anything you want. Your kid can learn Spanish at government expense, but the taxpayers won’t foot the bill for your kid to learn Burmese. But you don’t normally hear anyone say that the presence of a “public option” for elementary and secondary education involves “rationing” of foreign language instruction. If people have the means and want to arrange private lessons for their children of various kinds nobody is stopping them."

Economist's View

Economist's View: "Setting aside the particulars of the California case and whether or not the IOUs are actually functioning as money - that's debatable - very, very generally, the federal government has a budget constraint just like everyone else, well sort of like everyone else anyway -- most of us can't levy taxes or print money. Federal government finances must satisfy

G - T = ΔM + ΔB,

where Δ means 'change in,' G is government spending, T is taxes, M is the money supply, and B is bonds. The left-hand side is the deficit, and the right-hand is how it is financed. Thus, when G is greater than T so that there is a deficit in a given budget period, it must be financed by printing new money (ΔM) or issuing new bonds (ΔB)."

Economic View - The Invisible Hand, Trumped by Darwin? - NYTimes.com

Economic View - The Invisible Hand, Trumped by Darwin? - NYTimes.com: "IF asked to identify the intellectual founder of their discipline, most economists today would probably cite Adam Smith. But that will change. Economists’ forecasts generally aren’t worth much, but I’ll offer one that even my youngest colleagues won’t survive to refute: If we posed the same question 100 years from now, most economists would instead cite Charles Darwin."

Matthew Yglesias » Home Page

Matthew Yglesias » Home Page: "One issue with a lot of health care commentary (Michael Kinsley’s correctly maligned column for example) is that the concept of “cost” is somewhat ambiguous in a lot of these contexts. For example, on one way of looking at things, an initiative that raises $90 billion in tax revenue, reduces private health expenditures by $100 billion, and then provides equivalent services for $90 billion is very expensive. It costs ninety billion dollars! From another way of looking at it, though, it’s an initiative that saves $10 billion.

That’s the question of whether we’re talking about cost to the government, or cost in some more general sense.

Another issue has to do with value. If we cut $1 billion worth of regular pediatric care for poor children, that will “save money.” But that’s not the same as cutting $1 billion worth of unnecessary treatments for senior citizens out of Medicare. The latter would be a genuine saving; the former would just be denying useful services to people.

Pure fiscal cost to the government is an important thing to keep our eye on. Among other things, we need tax revenues to be adequate to cover the pure fiscal cost. At the same time, I think it’s a little perverse to view it as the main thing to worry about."

Matthew Yglesias » Home Page

Matthew Yglesias » Home Page: "

Here’s some historical data on female life expectancy in Russia:

...the dread U.S.S.R. actually did a perfectly decent job of providing the sort of goods—health care, basic education, subways, nuclear missiles, vast prison camps, satellite launch vehicles—that in most democracies are provided by the state. It did a bad job of providing things like appealing clothing, consumer electronics, popular entertainments, cars, etc. that are generally provided by the private sector. In Cuba everyone’s dirt poor and generally leave crappy lives with few goods, but the literacy rate is high and the state of public health is excellent considering the poor overall economic situation. And even in the United States, about half of health care is financed by the state—a free market approach to senior citizens would be a disaster."