Monday, August 24, 2009

mcardle takes leave of reason

Fortunately, it's only an MBA, but I think that Megan McArdle should have her U of C degree taken away for this (her thinking, however, is as rigorous as one would expect from a Penn undergrad):

http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/08/whos_crazy_now.php#comments

Sorry, bringing a gun to a large rally (while well within your rights) is not a real smart thing to do and t-shirts referencing "watering" the tree of liberty are implied threats of violence.

Previously, she had been an informed opposition voice, but here: she should pull her head out of her ass.

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Tort Refrom and Nudges

Over at andrewsullivan.com (of The Atlantic) there is an interesting back and forth going on about "Tort Reform" and health insurance as a legislative device.

My interest in this largely Republican meme (see Palin, Sarah who speaks about it somewhere I'd care not to link to) arose in reference to Thaler and Sunstein's _Nudge_ where they talk about tort reform not from a legislative perspective, but from an individual insurance one...

Why not charge for the right to sue regarding negligence claims (as opposed to assault and battery ones) in terms of insurance? Like limited tort in auto insurance (basically giving up the right to sue for those vague "neck injuries"), you pay less in premiums a month to stop suing for malpractice.

Unfortunately, Thaler and Sunstein are a bit vague on the implementation in practice (given that most of us "purchase" our insurance through our employer), but what if for medicare you were given the option of opting out of the right to sue and perhaps getting a small rebate (as in people who didn't would pay more for care) ? Would this save money? I'm unclear about the dynamics of implementation...

Friday, August 14, 2009

If you spend enough time...

...in the bowels of the internet, occasionally you find someone writing something smart.

Americans are Idiots About Health Care.

Idiots Win... Though They Voted for it the Last Time Around

File under: hypocrisy or the current Republican party...

By the way, HELP passed the final version of the amendment--the one that pays for voluntary counseling--by unanimous consent. In other words, every Republican present supported it.
See TNR

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

it's always nice to have someone agree with you

Sarah Palin Is Right, If By "Right," We Mean "Hallucinating"
from The New Republic

pace Allen

I watched the health-care "Town halls" last night on C-Span. Well, for as long as I could stomach it.

Fuck it. Danielle Allen's ideas are idiotic. These are not people with legitimate fears about the health-care plan. They are whack-jobs. The challenge is to find the people with legitimate concerns and debate them, while not allowing the whack jobs to dominate the discourse. But then Professor Allen's last book wasn't about tuning out whack jobs and actually governing... It was about political dialogue in the context of attic political theory.

I'm all for dialogue, even with people you don't want to dialogue with and there are people who have legitimate concerns... Unfortunately, you don't see a lot of them referred to in the current debates.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Addendum to my previous posts

Here's a legitimate reading of the Palin response:

http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/08/the_death_panel.php


and here's a brief reading of Aron:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=638912&contrassID=2&subContrassID=15&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y

Healthcare and Discussions

One of my intellectual idols is Raymond Aron. Less celebrated than Sartre or Camus-- he never really wrote a work that captured the public imagination-- nonetheless he was a prominent and courageous French public intellectual during a period of radical transformation in the country.

Aron was, by French definitions, center-right (in the United States that would probably mean he was a craven lefty, but I digress), but unlike most on the right he opposed the French involvement in Algeria and wanted to end the war. However, unlike Sartre, for example, he did not formulate his pleas in moral terms. Instead, he crafted his arguments in light of French self-interest. His harsh realpolitik was ridiculed on both sides, but when criticized for his base arguments by more morally inspired figures on the left, he responded with something like "I agree with all of those things, but I am aiming to convince those people who don't agree with me."

So when Danielle Allen (super smart, interesting, etc.) pens an editorial in the Washington Post about the real concerns reflected in shouts about death panels and how the left should respond... I think two or three things:

1. Thinking like Aron, I wonder if we shouldn't be shaping our rhetoric towards our opponents more.

2. Via this interview, I don't think the "unintended consequences" that Allen talks about are all that relevant or even that possible. The leap from death panels to living wills is so ridiculous that I don't see the connection...

and

2b. Wonder if you can have a legitimate Aron style moment of reasoning with the likes of Sarah Palin.

Indeed, I am all for pitching this plan to the opponents of it... However, I think the pitch should be to the opponents you can reason with rather than the wack-job of Wasilla.

p.s.

You've got this paragraph from Allen, judicious in content, form, style, etc.-- explaining that the Palins of the world are arguing from a position of their emotional response to how things might play out (and using William James to say-- hey sometimes we need to think how people might respond emotionally to things, how nice):
These activists do not claim that the proposed reforms include policies whose explicit purpose is to ration, nor do the more careful among them claim that the policies will establish panels to help people decide when to die. They are not arguing about the semantic content of the policies; that is, they are not arguing about the meaning of the words that are actually in the relevant drafts of bills. Instead, they are considering, as the pragmatist philosopher William James put it, "what conceivable effects of a practical kind the [policy] may involve -- what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must prepare."
Here's what Palin actually said:
The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Is Allen giving too much credit to Palin? Yes, of course she is. Does she have a point in giving too much credit to Palin? I don't think so, but maybe I'm wrong.

pps My frustration with this article from Allen lies in her (noble?) desire to look to reason as a corrective to these emotional responses. You can't reason with the emotional... A lesson the academy never seems to remember.

Friday, August 7, 2009

ARRA, Tax Cuts, Behavorial Economics

Andrew Sullivan writes:

The stimulus has worked modestly so far, partly because it was a two-year program and its earliest stimuli were tax cuts which people saved.
Actually, the jury is out on whether these tax cuts were saved. In one of the small nods to "behavioral economics" of the ARRA, the tax cuts were not structured as they typically are in these situations-- as lump sum "refunds." Rather they were small incremental refunds on each pay check. The theory (derived from research/experiments) being that consumers would spend more of it then they would if they received a lump sum (which are almost entirely saved).

I can't find the data details... I imagine they aren't yet available: hence the "jury is still out" rather than "Andrew Sullivan is wrong-- yet again-- about economics."

Sunday, August 2, 2009

sunday morning media musings...

Maureen Dowd-- you've got 24 inches of column space in the Sunday New York Times and you are running a publicity racket for "Julie and Julia" a movie that has so many commercials running for it that it is impossible to ignore... What a waste. If the Times gave a shit, they'd give the Sunday space to someone who isn't mailing it in.

Watched Mclaughlin group this morning... excepting the (accused) plagiarist Monica Crowley, I could see these same faces on these shows 20 years ago... One of the major reasons for the slow decline of the media is its insistence on recycling the same idiots...

also caught a little meet the press this morning... chuckled silently to myself when I realized the African-American Republican they trotted out was J.C. Watts... former representative. Eventually the Republicans will return... I think.

Is there a less engaging presence than David Gregory? Television equivalent of white-bread.

Saturday, August 1, 2009

nail on head

see:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/209817

a "modest" summary of our fucked-up health care system...