Must-Reads: December 15, 2015
- : Obamacare and the Cockroaches: “Zombie ideas are claims that should have been killed by evidence…” :: Still looking, without success, for conservatives at think tanks willing to be reality-based on health care…
- : How Climate Change Ate Conservatism’s Smartest Thinkers: “Like Clive Crook, Will Wilkinson, and Walter Russell Mead, Douthat doesn’t seriously engage with the evidence…” :: It is important to note that global warming is not unique here…
- : The Methodology of Empirical Macroeconomics: “Representative-agent models [do not] provide microfundations… do not solve the problem of aggregation; rather they assume that it can be ignored…” :: The combination of representative-agent modeling and utility-based “microfoundations” was always a game of intellectual Three-Card Monte…
- : When Economics Works and When it Doesn’t: “The efficient markets hypothesis… models… [of] sovereign debt crises…. I wish we’d put greater weight on stories of the second kind rather than the first. We’d have been better off…” :: There is an awful lot of bad right-wing economics. There is much less bad left-wing economics…
- : The Price Ain’t Right? Hospital Prices and Health Spending on the Privately Insured: “Health care spending per privately insured beneficiary varies by a factor of three…. The correlation… [with] Medicare… is only 0.14…” :: Yes. Constraining hospital and doctor-group market power is very important to creating a more efficient health-care system. Why do you ask?
- : Trying to Get a Grip on the “Gig Economy”: “The sharing economy… follows rather than causes the bulk of the increase in ‘independent contracting’…” :: When put that way, what we need is not a halfway house between W-2 employees and 1099 independent contractors, but more expansionary monetary and fiscal policy
- : Wreck Full of Ancient Roman ‘Ketchup’ Found : Discovery News
- : Keynesian-type analysis predicts a gradual recovery through internal devaluation…. The single currency isn’t totally unworkable. It’s just extremely costly…. There’s nothing in recent experience that should shock a Keynesian or cause deep self-doubt.”
- : Past climate treaties failed. So the Paris deal will try something radically different015-budget-agreement/)