Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
Tag: economics
-
In my previous post on Obamacare commenter Paul has suggested I’m putting too much faith in government intervention to reduce inequality or contain costs. I’m about to go away for the weekend so don’t have much time to attend to my blog (nor may I next week, when classes start) but here’s a pair of…
-
My weekly TOC from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) contains some interesting articles about cost containment in health care, including some discussion about what Obamacare might or might not do to contain costs, based on lessons from Massachusetts (RomneyCare?). Apparently the Affordable Care Act contains some quite innovative and also potentially punitive measures…
-
China’s rapid economic rise has been the topic of much debate over the past few years, and I think that this rise has some implications for western political economic theorists that are quite fun to explore. The orthodox view of China’s rise seems to be that it is going to continue to grow rapidly for…
-
I stumbled on an article in the New England Journal of Medicine this morning that discusses the “broccoli defense” against plans to make purchasing of health insurance mandatory in the USA. I think the article is behind a paywall so there’s no point in offering a link, but anyway it’s fundamentally pretty uninteresting. However, it…
-
This is a cute example of the power of hindsight. Today’s Guardian has a discussion of the christmas tree that appeared in front of Downing St: you can read David Cameron’s twit about it here[1]. The Guardian helpfully points out that Cameron got a rare “tall” tree, once again proving inequality is a potent force…
-
Now the world’s population has reached 7 billion, there is some talk of the consequences for the planet, and as always happens at this time attention has turned to Japan’s ageing population. This is usually seen as a bad thing for Japan, with various predictions of population crash and economic catastrophe for the world’s second…
-
In looking at the cost-effectiveness of health interventions in fantasy communities we have shown that the infinite lifespan of elves creates analytical problems, and other commenters have suggested that the cost-effectiveness of clerical interventions to reduce infant mortality should be balanced against the need for clerics to go to war. Well, Professor John Quiggin at…
-
Australia has a compulsory superannuation scheme, and I have questions about it. These questions have been floating around in my head for a while, but the catalyst for thinking about them this week was this article by Brian Toohey, which I discovered through the Australian political blog Larvatus Prodeo. I’ve always been a supporter of…
-
This semester I’m teaching a course on Global Crime and Public Health as a special lecture series (in fact I should be preparing material now instead of posting here). This course represents a culmination of 15 years’ research experience in the service of a general model of what constitutes a “good” response to the public…
Compromise and Conceit 