Below is a fascinating statement issued by Physicians for a National Health Program, “a membership organization of over 15,000 physicians [which] supports a single-payer national health insurance program.” You should read the whole thing but, in a nutshell: The people who receive donated organs in the U.S. nearly always have health insurance, while a significant fraction of the people who . . .
Do you love the smell of libertarianism in the morning? If so, today is a good day for you. Ron Paul Last week we solicited your questions for Congressman Ron Paul. There was such a big response (more than 400 comments) that we have split Paul’s answers into two batches, the first of which is posted below. Thanks to Paul . . .
Doug Mills/The New York Times I was struck by the photo above, which accompanied a Times article about President-elect Obama‘s first news conference. Not only does it give us a good look at many of Obama’s economic advisers, but it’s a great study of photo-taking body language. Many photographers I know have nicknames for the way people stand when they’re . . .
Even if you hate daylight saving time, you tell yourself: Hey, I shouldn’t be so selfish, it’s good for the economy, or for the environment, or for farmers, or something. Right? Photo: macinate Well, um, perhaps not. Consider a new working paper, “Does Daylight Saving Time Save Energy? Evidence From a Natural Experiment in Indiana,” by Matthew J. Kotchen and . . .
Photo: Terren in Virginia There were so many wild cards in this past presidential election that surely scholars will be poring over it for years to come. In light of Obama‘s victory, I had a thought that may already be on some scholar’s mind, although the proof of this thesis will hardly be simple. It goes like this. For years, . . .
Sean Masaki Flynn Last week, we solicited your questions for Sean Masaki Flynn, author of Economics for Dummies. In his answers below, Flynn addresses the economics of education, the relationship between aikido and economics, the importance of understanding opportunity costs, and how good shoes and nice teeth signal reproductive fitness. (Disclosure: Flynn himself had braces.) While we didn’t post Flynn’s . . .
Photo: Joe Shlabotnik The other day I had a company come and remove two air conditioners from my office in order to clean them, store them for the winter, and return them in the spring. It wasn’t cheap: $269 for the first one and $249 for the second. But I like air conditioning, and I figured it was worthwhile to . . .
A few years back now, we wrote about the psychology professor Seth Roberts and his Shangri-La Diet, in which one attempts to lower the body’s set point by swallowing occasional shots of olive oil or sugar water. According to this article in Medical News Today (thanks, Jeff!), the olive-oil secret may truly lie in an appetite-killing fatty acid: A fatty . . .
From a reader named Eric Robinson comes this interesting bleg. (Click here for blegging information, and send your own requests here.) Photo: Uriba When I’m at a party and get asked what I do (I am an architect), I always hear one of the same five responses: + What kind of architecture do you do? + Hey, you can design . . .
So the bailout proposal before Congress seems to have been rejected because legislators were worried that voters back home saw it as a bailout of Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. Is such a fear rational? It may be that voters simply don’t understand or believe that a broader Wall Street failure could quickly trickle down and harm . . .
I’ve known several doctors who refused to read e-mail from patients. They said it was simply a bad use of their time. I also used to have a doctor who hated it whenever you came in and asked questions about some article you’d read in The Times about Lyme disease or some such. He’d get a pained look on his . . .
Wall Street has always been a legendary joke generator — with a specialty in gallows humor. So I ask our readers: in this very unfunny time, what are the Wall Street jokes of the moment? To prime the pump, I offer up something a wise gentleman told me the other night, prescribed to make all Americans feel a bit better: . . .
Photo: Odalaigh Whenever I travel in other wealthy countries, I am a bit embarrassed about the dollar bill’s insignificance compared to other countries’ smallest bills: a 5-pound note is worth $9; a 5-euro note is worth $7; a 1,000-yen note is worth $9. At the same time, no rich country has a coin as worthless as the U.S. penny. Imagine . . .
Suze Orman Earlier this week, we solicited your questions for Suze Orman. You asked about paying college debt, choosing a good retirement plan, and — especially with a week like this — how safe your money is. In her answers below, Orman also offers a question to ask whenever deciding what to do with your money: Is that normal? And . . .
Photo: procsilas A coalition of college presidents has been pushing states to lower the drinking age as a way to discourage problem drinking on campuses. But here’s one unintended consequence of teaching young people responsible drinking habits: it could make Social Security bankrupt faster. A 2004 study by Frank Sloan and Jan Ostermann at Duke University found that heavy drinkers . . .
Not long ago, I wrote about the sad state of financial literacy in the U.S., and how some people, like Annamaria Lusardi of Dartmouth, are proposing widespread education to fix the problem. But in a brief Money magazine Q&A, Lauren Willis, who teaches financial-products regulation at Loyola Law School, says that’s a waste of time. Excerpts: Q: What’s so bad . . .
Suze Orman If you’ve ever tried to give yourself a bit of financial literacy, you’ve probably come across something on the subject by Suze Orman. And if you’ve read some of Orman’s books, you may know about her first job as a waitress in Berkeley and how she got swindled out of an early investment, which made her want to . . .
David Zetland David Zetland, the S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Postdoctoral Fellow in Natural Resource Economics and Political Economy at U.C. Berkeley, blogged here earlier this week about the economics of water. This is his second of two posts on the subject. Oil and Water By David Zetland A Guest Post Over the past few months, newspapers, blogs, and television screens have been . . .
It is always fun to see language grow. (No, I don’t mean menu language.) One of my favorite rising words is “kindergarchy,” described here by Joseph Epstein as “rule by children,” a condition whereby “children have gone from background to foreground figures in domestic life, with more and more attention centered on them, their upbringing, their small accomplishments, their right . . .
It has been argued previously here that John McCain, among others, seems to harbor a pronounced dislike for economists. Well, you don’t even have to be a politician to hate economists. Via Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing, here’s a fascinating bit from an old paper by Robert Frank, Tom Gilovich (best known for his hot-hand refutation, and this fun book), and . . .
Dan Glickman We recently solicited your questions for Dan Glickman, C.E.O. of the Motion Picture Association of America. In his answers below, he discusses, among other topics, the source of his piracy figures and why the ratings board isn’t the “morality police.” He also tells us what he thinks of the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which critiqued . . .
It is amazing to me that in the several days after it was announced that the second-ever woman was nominated for a major-party vice-president slot, so much of the news has concerned her and her daughter’s reproductive activities. Part of the reason to have a female candidate in the first place is presumably to be an advocate for women’s rights, . . .
Photo: Secretly Ironic Are there more guns in the U.S. or more opinions about guns? Hard to say. This blog has featured a variety of posts about guns in the past; today we present a quorum with a very narrow focus: what are some good ideas to cut gun deaths? Let’s put aside for a moment the standard discussions about . . .
Brock Lesnar Last Friday, we solicited your questions for U.F.C. fighter Brock Lesnar. The next day he won his fight against Heath Herring — and mocked him when he was down. According to Sports Illustrated‘s Ben Fowlkes, a “pro wrestling-style heel” like Lesnar “is exactly what the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s heavyweight division needs right now. … Thanks to Lesnar, watching . . .
Photo: Peter Katz On a forum at the Chicago outpost of City-Data.com, a certain JohnDoe2008 asked suburbanites: Why do you like suburbs over [the] city? Be honest please, I never understood it, still don’t. I might have serious problems, because I hate even looking at pictures of suburbs. Respondents cited backyards, quiet and cheap living, and congestion-free commutes — the . . .
Let’s begin with two questions: 1. Do you consider yourself financially literate? 2. If so, how did you get that way? And now, a third question: 3. How important is widespread financial literacy to the health of a modern society? Before you answer the first question, take this little quiz, borrowed from the website of Annamaria Lusardi, a professor of . . .
I recently blogged about whether we form our opinions more from information than experience. The starting point was a passage in David McCullough‘s book The Great Bridge, and he was comparing modern Americans with our 19th-century counterparts. I was interested not just as a historical comparison but because the information/experience question is compelling in its own right. Consider a doctor, . . .
Last week, I learned two important things. They both happened as the result of a post I wrote about various errors, typographical and otherwise. I noted that the excellent Economist magazine dropped an “r” from the word “pastries,” inadvertently rendering it “pasties.” Well, The Economist was not wrong but I sure was. Many readers informed me that a pasty (pl.: . . .
It doesn’t seem fair that one person can be so good at so many things. Nathan Myhrvold is one such person. He is probably still best known as the former chief technology officer of Microsoft. These days, he runs an invention company and spends his free time digging up dinosaur bones, experimenting with old and new cooking methods, and taking . . .
We recently featured a Q&A with Julie Salamon, author of Hospital, and last week Julie wrote her first guest post for us. Here is her second. It touches on a subject of great interest to me, something we hope to address empirically in future writing: the cost/benefit dilemma of end-of-life medical care. End of Days A Guest Post by Julie . . .
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