Asymptosis

He really said that. I guess people take their kids to annual checkups because they want to signal their high status to others.

This is totally in keeping with Jonathan Haidt’s findings: on measures that “have anything to do with compassion,” libertarians are at the very bottom of the political spectrum.

Likewise Tyler Cowen’s paean to autism, whose defining characteristic is an inability to empathize with other humans.

You’ll constantly hear libertarians claiming that their ideas and policies would be “good for the poor,” but given their measured failure of empathy and compassion, you have to wonder whether those claims might merely constitute false status signaling in a species for which empathy and compassion are hard-coded values.

I really should stop donating page views to the Koch Brothers-funded GMU/Mercatus cabal (and you’ll notice I don’t provide a link here; you can Google it if you wish). But it’s like watching a very well-choreographed train wreck: it’s hard to look away.

Update: I find that some obvious googles don’t turn up Kling’s post, so here’s a link with a “nofollow” tag so the post doesn’t get any Google juice from it.

Lane Kenworthy once again gives us one of those graphs that encapsulates a whole global scenario, over four decades:

Yeah: we’re #1.

Edit: just to note that while we were on the high end of the spending pack until about 1980, we were within the normal range. It’s only since then that things really went off the tracks.

America’s inefficient health-care system: another look « Consider the Evidence.

Yes. And yes.

Krugman agrees:

Its the Health Care Costs, Stupid – NYTimes.com.

The key graphic:

For those who don’t click on links that say “Source,” click here:

Medicare Versus Private Insurance: The Data – NYTimes.com

No, this is not about lead-footed Starsky and Hutch-style car chases by law enforcement.

Rather, it’s about damned convincing evidence that unleaded gasoline (introduced in the U.S. in the 70s) is largely responsible for the huge decline in crime rates since the early 90s. (Update: it continues.) Even more convincing than (but not precluding) Levitt’s Roe v Wade hypothesis.

Short story: we spent fifty years quite literally poisoning the minds of our children — especially inner-city and low-income children. The damage is permanent.

Researcher Rick Nevin is getting some well-deserved press (Washington Post, Wall Street Journal) for his cross-country analyses of lead exposure and crime. (Worth noting: he first published this research in 1999.)

Here’s a picture; you can eyeball the correlations yourself. The researchers, naturally, analyze the correlations more systematically.

Here’s more, consumption of lead in gasoline in the USA, in thousands of metric tons (click for source):

See also the work of Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, who claims that half the decline in crime resulted from less lead in the environment (hence in little kids’ heads).

Robert Waldmann (hat tip!) at Angry Bear is looking at the latest data from the UK, where they went unleaded thirteen years later, so the effects should be showing up now. They seem to be:

the total number of violent crimes was basically identical in 2004/5 2005/6 and 2006/7 then declined about 17% by 2009/10. The predicted peak of 2007 corresponds about as precisely to the data as is conceivable.

From the WaPo article:

Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes, for example, were built over the Dan Ryan Expressway, with 150,000 cars going by each day. Eighteen years after the project opened in 1962, one study found that its residents were 22 times more likely to be murderers than people living elsewhere in Chicago.

Nevin’s finding implies a double tragedy for America’s inner cities: Thousands of children in these neighborhoods were poisoned by lead in the first three quarters of the last century. Large numbers of them then became the targets, in the last quarter, of Giuliani-style law enforcement policies.

We’re seeing it in spades: the history of tetraethyl lead (read it and weep) is a tragic textbook case of market/profit interests eviscerating the commons and making us all (including the rich) far worse off, in the name of “the invisible hand” making us all better off.

That ebil gubmint man with his heavy-handed regulations impinging on honest businesspeople (who are just trying to make a buck, for everyone’s benefit) sure did have a pernicious effect, huh?

Conservatives love to point out that our employer-based health insurance system is a result of wage controls under FDR. Since employers weren’t able to attract workers with higher wages, they started offering benefits instead — notably health insurance.

I recently read Frank Freidel’s biography of FDR, and the whole story became clear.

The post-Pearl Harbor economic surge was causing rapid inflation.

By March, 1942, food cost almost 5 percent, and clothing 7.7 percent, more than on the day of Pearl Harbor; the cost of living had risen 15 percent since September 1939. [Leon] Henderson predicted prices might rise 23 percent more by the end of 1942. The nation, as Roosevelt well realized, was reaching  the critical point where, as a result of price increases, demands for wage increases could force spiraling inflation.

Roosevelt was desperate to prevent that eventuality.

Heavier taxes to drain excess buying power were imperative. [This is not complicated; see Abba Lerner on "Functional Finance."]

Conservatives in Congress (then as now) were rabidly anti-tax — gotta protect the monied class — but despite their supposed free-market ideology, they were willing to impose wage controls. (Big surprise.) Roosevelt was able to get this second- or third-best solution through Congress.

So the wage controls that resulted in our ridiculous employer-based health-insurance system were a direct result of conservatives’ hypocrisy.

And now, notwithstanding Ryan’s obviously-never-gonna-happen voucher feint, conservatives have demonstrated themselves to be dead-set on maintaining the status quo of employer-based private health insurance (they had six years of unfettered control, did nothing about it…) — the very “historical accident” that they so bemoan, and that they are responsible for inflicting on the nation.

I’ve been just as frustrated as other progressives with the Obama administration’s lack of … progressivity. And I’ve been befuddled by why it hasn’t happened. Why didn’t he take the lead on redesigning our health-insurance system, for instance, instead taking the politically bruising months-long course of delegating its drafting to Congress?

Here’s a possiblity.

Obama — constitutional law professor that he is — is at his very core a constitutional conservative. He believes that laws should be created by Congress, not the executive branch. And unlike so-called conservatives on the right, he’s ready to live by those convictions, sacrificing both short term policy goals and political considerations on the altar of those beliefs.

I think it’s quite possible that when the biographies are written, when the historians get a chance to go through the presidential papers and interview key members of the administration, that constitutional conservatism will emerge as at least one of Obama’s defining characteristics as president.

But I’m not sure. What do you think?

Via: Medical Billing And Coding

PAWLENTY: I like Paul Ryan’s plan directionally. I don’t think it’s fully filled out in terms of the fact that we still have to address Social Security and when we issue our plan later in this process, it will have some differences[...]

VOLSKY: Do you support the Medicare cuts in his plan that he keeps from Obamacare?

PAWLENTY: Anybody else have a question besides this guy?

Just can’t make this stuff up…

via Wonk Room » Pawlenty Dodges Question About Paul Ryan’s Medicare Cuts.

James Kwak explains why Paul Ryan’s notion for vouchers replacing Medicare doesn’t work:

If you are forty years old and healthy now, you simply cannot insure yourself against the risk that you will be uninsurably unhealthy when you are sixty-five.

You retire, and you lose your health insurance. But you’ll have vouchers, right? You can use them to buy private insurance. (This assuming — if you’ve gotten sick before that date — that the Obamacare rule re: pre-existing conditions is still in force.)

That’s fine as long as you can, in fact, buy that private policy with the vouchers provided.

But as Kwak also points out:

According to the CBO, if you turn 65 in 2030, that voucher will pay for 32 percent of your total health care costs, including private insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses.

And we’re not talking about shiftless lazy good-for-nothings who’ve failed to save for retirement:

This is not a poverty problem. If you have a major illness, you will not be able to pay for all of your medical care without insurance unless you are truly, deeply rich; being merely affluent or “high net worth” won’t cut it.

Ryan’s “plan” is smoke and mirrors. Or perhaps more a propos: loaves and fishes.

Best line of the week (with a couple of elisions by moi):

Any effort to reduce government spending on health care … is intolerable socialism, and any effort to increase government spending on health care … is also intolerable socialism.

via Yglesias » Making Sense of the Rationing Switcheroo.