Must-Reads:
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Angus Deaton: US inequality and the Pareto Criterion: “There is much to be said for equality of opportunity, and for not penalizing people for the success that comes from their own hard work. Yet… the United States is in fact not particularly good at actually delivering equal opportunities…. Look at the correlation between earnings of fathers and sons…. In the United States, the correlation is 0.5, which is the highest of the OECD countries and is exceeded only by those of China and a handful of countries where there appears to be the least equality of opportunity. Even if we believe that equality of opportunity is what we want, and don’t care about inequality of outcomes, the two tend to go together, which suggests that inequality itself is a barrier to equal opportunity.”
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Bob Forester: Daily Kos: I signed up for health insurance, told my GOP Congressman about it, and made the local news: “My healthcare saga began in 2002…. No longer did I have a group plan selected by an employer. I had to shop for my own coverage. At first it was easy…. But each year the dreaded renewal letter arrived, and the premiums increased by leaps and bounds…. But the big shock was yet to come… renewal letter… $756 instead of $463–a staggering 63% increase…. I applied for a very-high-deductible plan that would keep my monthly payment in the $400 range. Given that I was still insured, the insurance folks got a copy of the blood test, which they proceeded to search line by line…. Out of two pages of data, there was a single thyroid reading was outside of “normal” range (side note: there’s nothing wrong with my thyroid; it was simply their excuse to make me pay that outrageous premium). They’d found their so-called preexisting condition, and denied me access to the new plan with the lower premium. With the help of my doctor, who wrote a letter on my behalf, I appealed…. ‘It wasn’t a government bureaucrat that came between me and my doctor; it was an insurance-company bureaucrat.’…”
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Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee: The Second Machine Age: “Now comes the second machine age. Computers and one digital advances are doing for mental power… what the steam engine and its descendants did for muscle power… to blow past previous limitations…. Whether or not the new machine age bends the curve as dramatically as Watt’s steam engine, it is a very big deal indeed…”
Continue reading “Things to Read on the Evening of December 26, 2013”