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Economics of Health Care

Response to a Friend about Fear of Death

By David Henderson | Dec 14, 2020

My friend Ross Levatter sent me a thoughtful email challenging some aspects of my posts (here and here) on the risks we should fear. He gave me permission to post the whole thing. I also shared it with co-author Charley Hooper, who emailed me his thoughts. I’ll answer, and give Charley’s answer, after his letter. .. MORE

Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings

Open Borders: Pegg’s Essay Questions

By Bryan Caplan | Dec 14, 2020

IUPUI‘s Scott Pegg assigned Open Borders this semester, and kindly gave me permission to post the following essay questions on the book.  Enjoy! Please answer one of the following four questions. Because this is an open book, open time assignment, I expect to see some detail and specificity in your answers. References to Caplan and Weinersmith’s .. MORE

Economics of Health Care

Death panels, euthanasia, and the conservative embrace of herd immunity

By Scott Sumner | Dec 12, 2020

I don’t have an ax to grind here, but I’ve noticed an anomaly and wonder if commenters see the same issue. I’ve always thought of the left as being vaguely “pro-life” on issues like pollution control and national health care. The right seems “pro-life” in its opposition to Medicare “death panels”, euthanasia, and of course .. MORE

Economics of Health Care

Answer to a Reader on What We Should Fear

By David Henderson | Dec 11, 2020

I received the following letter last week and the author gave me permission to quote without using his name. Hi Dr. Henderson, My name is X, I’m a fan of your writing, so I wanted to thank you for your work and insight that I’ve been able to enjoy… I recently read your article “What .. MORE

Macroeconomics

That doesn’t mean what you think it means

By Scott Sumner | Dec 11, 2020

Over the past month, I’ve been trying to pin down exactly what’s wrong with Modern Monetary Theory. Or perhaps a less presumptuous way of putting it is that I’ve been trying to figure out what mainstream economists believe is wrong with MMT. Here I’ll list 6 MMT ideas. I’ll first explain the kernel of truth .. MORE

Economic Education

Simplifying the teaching of money

By Scott Sumner | Dec 10, 2020

JP Koning has a proposal for simplifying the teaching of basic monetary economics. He starts with this Venn diagram: Which he explains as follows: Monetary economists such as Nick Rowe and George Selgin have proposed, and I concur, that we just chuck store of value from the definition of money. But we are still left .. MORE

Entrepreneurship

Matt Zwolinski defends Herbert Spencer

By Alberto Mingardi | Dec 10, 2020

Matt Zwolinski, a philosophy professor at University of San Diego and a “bleeding heart” libertarian, is engaged in a gallant but—I am afraid—hopeless conversation on Twitter with “Existential Comics.” The latest of such comics deals with Herbert Spencer‘s visit to the U.S. and builds on Spencer’s well-known disappointment in meeting the culture of rampant free .. MORE

Labor Market

Yglesias’s Reasonably Strong Case for Way More Immigration

By David Henderson | Dec 10, 2020

As a long-time advocate of expanded immigration, I am delighted to have left/liberal Matthew Yglesias as an ally. Yglesias, who helped found online magazine Vox, is one of the rising stars in journalism and, especially, economic journalism. His latest book, One Billion Americans, advocates what the title says: we should change institutions so that we .. MORE

Labor Market

Does Letting People Work Constitute Assault on Workers?

By David Henderson | Dec 9, 2020

Dr. Sunetra Gupta and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, two of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, write: The Canadian COVID-19 lockdown strategy is the worst assault on the working class in many decades. Low-risk college students and young professionals are protected; such as lawyers, government employees, journalists, and scientists who can work from home; .. MORE

Behavioral Economics

Spencer and Prejudice

By Bryan Caplan | Dec 9, 2020

Herbert Spencer’s “From Freedom to Bondage” famously claims that “[T]he more things improve the louder become the exclamations about their badness.”  And he offered a bunch of great examples.  Inspired by Spencer’s insight, I recently turned to Google Ngram to look at long-run trends for six oft-named expressions of prejudice.         Notice: .. MORE

Macroeconomics

Krugman on the effect of increased money growth

By Scott Sumner | Dec 9, 2020

Tim Peach directed me to a graph in Paul Krugman’s International Economics textbook (coauthored with Maurice Obstfeld and Marc J. Melitz.) It’s a very elegant display of the long run effect of an acceleration in the money supply growth rate (and roughly describes the US economy from 1963-73): Here’s how to read these graphs.  Graph .. MORE

Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings

Similarity Between Socialism and Fascism: An Illustration

By Pierre Lemieux | Dec 9, 2020

Fortunately, socialism and fascism are not the only two political alternatives, for neither is attractive. Moreover, a well-kept secret is how similar the two ideologies are. Substituting socialism for fascism in many statements from fascists would bring instant approval from socialists. Many antifa agitators would be surprised to realize that they are doing fascism unknowingly, .. MORE

Economics of Health Care

We Could Have Had the Vaccine in Early Spring at the Latest

By David Henderson | Dec 8, 2020

You may be surprised to learn that of the trio of long-awaited coronavirus vaccines, the most promising, Moderna’s mRNA-1273, which reported a 94.5 percent efficacy rate on November 16, had been designed by January 13. This was just two days after the genetic sequence had been made public in an act of scientific and humanitarian .. MORE

Cost-benefit Analysis

What Should We Fear Most and What Should We Do About It?

By David Henderson | Dec 7, 2020

Some acquaintances recently paddled surfboards and kayaks into the Pacific to disperse a relative’s ashes where he loved to surf. During the memorial service, one brother of the deceased expressed concern about the risk from sharks. The image of an aggressive shark in the deep ocean is graphic and terrifying, but the risk of mundane .. MORE

Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings

Pope Francis ♥ Mariana Mazzucato

By Alberto Mingardi | Dec 6, 2020

Pope Francis is an amazingly productive author. On October 3 he released a new encyclical letter (All Brothers), now he published a new book, Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future. We learn from UCL that the Pope commends in the book Mariana Mazzucato’s work and that in the book: The Pope … .. MORE

Politics and Economics

When regulators engage in “white lies”

By Scott Sumner | Dec 5, 2020

Regulators are supposed to protect us from making foolish decisions. When doing so, they often believe the public interest is served by promoting “white lies’, that is, false statements that are intended to be for our own good. If fact, the short run benefits of white lies are almost always outweighed by their much bigger .. MORE

Labor Market

A 1972 Memory of Walter Williams

By David Henderson | Dec 5, 2020

Who are those guys? In December 1972, I was in southern Ontario for Christmas after a fairly successful first quarter in the Ph.D. program at UCLA. I had Christmas with my friend and fellow Canadian UCLAer, Harry Watson, at his mom’s (“mum’s” to Canadians) place in Brantford. We knew that the 1972 American Economic Association .. MORE

Central Planning

Vaccines’ Last Hurdle: Central Planners

By David Henderson | Dec 4, 2020

  Urgently needed drugs developed under Operation Warp Speed are at the mercy of officials working at “bureaucrat speed.” I rarely like the titles that editors choose for my op/eds and articles. But this title that my Hoover editor chose is way better than mine. Here are the first three paragraphs of “Vaccines’ Last Hurdle: .. MORE

Liberty

Freedom, the Harm Principle, and the COVID Vaccine

By G. Patrick Lynch | Dec 4, 2020

2020 has gone from being an all bad news year, to what I guess can be described as a good news/bad news kind of year.  The good news?  We have several very promising vaccines that should be available fairly soon – in fact in record time.  The bad news is that public distrust about the .. MORE

Finance

George Soros and the Difficulties of Macro-investing

By Alberto Mingardi | Dec 4, 2020

I receive this from my friend Antonio Foglia. It seemed brilliant and worth sharing (with his permission). Last night I saw the documentary on George Soros directed by Bob Dylan’s son. To explain how Macro investing works, George explains in an old interview that he was once skiing in St. Moritz and had picked up .. MORE

Fiscal Policy

Relief, not stimulus

By Scott Sumner | Dec 3, 2020

In a rare bit of good news out of DC, it seems as though the “stimulus” part of the new fiscal package may be dropped: Direct cash payments to most American households were one of the most popular and efficient measures Congress enacted as part of its response to the coronavirus pandemic earlier this year, .. MORE