Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Milton Friedman is one of the 20th century’s most renowned economists. The International Herald Tribune has an informative obituary (“Milton Friedman…“) in yesterday’s paper. Below are some selected excerpts from the article. Friedman’s most famous book is Capitalism and Freedom. One of the major tenets of the book is that “you have to have economic…
As I well know, technical command of high-level calculus and mathematical modeling are prerequisites to success in 21st century graduate schools of economics. Economists generally create a mathematical model of how they believe the world functions and solve the equations to find the optimum (i.e.: quantity, price, tax rate, etc.). Perfect information is often assumed.…
In his book Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking how we pay for health care, Arnold Kling gives an example of how economists view non-monetary costs in medical care setting. “Most people do not like to go to a doctor, undergo medical procedures, or stay in a hospital. However, economists do not see this as offsetting the…
In order to prevent fraud, such as in the case of Eric Poehlman, economists use a peer-review system consisting of referee reports. The referee reports evaluate the merit of a paper and offer suggestions of how to improve the article. Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution gives some good tips on the best way to write referee…
David Cutler and Richard Zeckhauser review “The anatomy of health insurance” in chapter 11 of the Handbook of Health Economics. The chapter provides an overview of the economics field’s insight regarding health insurance. The authors summarize the literature’s findings into 5 main lessons listed below: Risk spreading versus incentives: Health insurance involves a fundamental tradeoff…
Which health state is better? Of course everyone knows that it is better to be healthy then sick, but what if you were faced with the following choice: Scenario A: being too sick to prepare your own meals or dress yourself, but are able to move around the house without fear, Scenario B: being able…
What is economic growth? How can it be understood? One concise explanatino is given by Brad DeLong in an article for Wired (“The Real Shopping Cart Revolution“). In the article, DeLong compares the relative price of flour now to the relative price in the fifteenth to seventeenth and concludes that modern man is 430 times richer…
The 2006-2007 Global Competitiveness Report has been released by World Economic Forum. The rankings can be found at the World Economic Forum website (PDF). “The rankings are drawn from a combination of publicly available hard data and the results of the Executive Opinion Survey, a comprehensive annual survey conducted by the World Economic Forum, together…
In 5 years, the oldest baby boomers will hit 65 years old. As the boomers begin to retire, this enormous cohort will start to sell off their financial assets in order to finance consumption in their non-working years. One begins to wonder if there will be a stock market crash since equities demand may drop significantly. …
Ten days ago, MedPageToday ran an article (“Hefty Bank Account…“) which claimed that people who have more money are healthier. Using the 2000 Census American Community Survey, the study finds that “a 55-year-old man making about $49,500 per year is 44% more likely to have a functional disability than his neighbor making $57,800 a year.” This…