CapitalistImperialistPig

Greg Mankiw, George Will and others of the economic right are very worried about the inefficiencies that partial socialization of health care will introduce. Paul Krugman notes that they are ignoring important theoretical evidence in their arguments. Let me just add that the evidence of many years experience in nearly every other advanced country offers little or no support to the fears of the right. Krugman: Um, economists have known for 45 years — ever since Kenneth Arrow’s seminal paper — that the standard competitive market model just doesn’t work for health care: adverse selection and moral hazard are so central to the enterprise that nobody, nobody expects free-market principles to be enough. To act all wide-eyed and innocent about these problems at this late date is either remarkably ignorant or simply disingenuous. I'll take ignorant and disingenuous for George Will.

The result was hardly a surprise, but it was doubly disappointing after jumping to a two goal lead in the first half. More excruciating was US play for the last 45 minutes. After playing confidently and aggressivel for the first 30 minutes, the US dropped more and more into a defensive crouch. During the second 45, the US rarely got three successive touches on the ball. Their strategy seemed to be letting the Brazillians control the ball 100% of the time and 90 % of the pitch, while letting them get shot after shot on the goal while hoping to dodge the ball. For twenty minutes they played like a top five team - for forty, they played like a number 200 team.

The US House passed an anti-climate change bill this week. It would be a gross exaggeration to call it a good bill. It's a silly patchwork of compromises and giveaways to special interests, and it's not likely to be very effective either. On the other hand, despite the hysteria being whipped up by the fringers , it's not likely to have significant adverse economic consequences anytime real soon either. So what value, if any, does it have? It's a semi-symbolic start, which, if it proves useful, could be turned into something useful. Nonetheless, anything with so many moving parts is likely to pose potential problems, so the future needs to monitor it carefully. Personally, I would have much preferred a more direct "carbon added" tax. Aside from greenhouse warming, there are lots of other good reasons for decreasing our carbon use (it's running low, it makes the country vulnerable foreign suppliers whose interests run contrary to ours, and it's su...

I suppose that I should be thinking about some of the many serious topics that are fermenting today (climate legislation, health care, or Iran) or maybe even about some of the current gossip (Farrah, Michael, or the sex lives of Carolina politicians), but I caught and got caught up in most of a NOVA program on The Music Gene last night. A lot of ground was covered, but one I noted was that music stimulated the reward center of the brain, the same center stimulated by sex and certain drugs. So, as one investigator noted, sex, drugs, and rock and roll go together neurologically as well as in popular culture. Speaking of culture, it is obvious that different cultures have different musical styles and produce different kinds of music. How much of our appreciation of music is conditioned and guided by these cultural norms? Maybe not as much as we would suspect. One of the more interesting experiments took modern western music to some primitive peoples with a very different type of mu...

Paul Krugman (somewhere) argues that we need the government option to use its bargaining power to save us money (and that's good). Somewhere else, Tyler Cowen (and Milton Friedman, from the beyond) argue that the government, through its monopoly power, can force savings, and that's bad (I guess because the government is thereby taking money away from deserving cardiologists and hospital corporations). Hmmm. I think I will go with Krugman.

Don't cry for me Argentina Governor Sanford does contrition better than some of his colleagues. Either that, or he has learned from their mistakes. The impressive thing to me is how fast these guys find remorse and repentance after they get caught.

Ray Kurzweil is an inventor and author whose books and inventions have made him rich. He is now devoting himself to prophesy and promotion of what he calls The Singularity. Newsweek, in its new incarnation, has a long profile of the man and his vision. Ray Kurzweil's wildest dream is to be turned into a cyborg—a flesh-and-blood human enhanced with tiny embedded computers, a man-machine hybrid with billions of microscopic nanobots coursing through his bloodstream. And there's a moment, halfway through a conversation in his office in Wellesley, Mass., when I start to think that Kurzweil's transformation has already begun. It's the way he talks—in a flat, robotic monotone. Maybe it's just because he's been giving the same spiel, over and over, for years now. He does 70 speeches annually at $30,000 a pop, and draws crowds of adoring fans who worship him as a kind of prophet. Kurzweil is a legend in the world of computer geeks, an inventor, author and computer scie...