Posted by Eliot Weinstein on January 26, 2010
From Reuters:
Bill Gates worries climate money robs health aid
Discussing the money pledged at the Copenhagen climate change summit last month, Gates wrote,
“I am concerned that some of this money will come from reducing other categories of foreign aid, especially health…If just 1 percent of the $100 billion goal came from vaccine funding, then 700,000 more children could die from preventable diseases.”
Also,
Taking the focus away from health aid could be bad for the environment in the long run, said Gates, “because improvements in health, including voluntary family planning, lead people to have smaller families, which in turn reduces the strain on the environment.”
Another discussion of Gates’ letter can be found here.
For more information about the trade-offs inherent in trying to solve global problems, read How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, edited by Bjorn Lomborg.
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Posted by Eliot Weinstein on January 24, 2010
Earlier this month, economist Steven Horwitz and his wife went shopping for new cell phones. Here is an amusing (to me, at least) anecdote taken from Horwitz’s blog post about the cell-phone-buying experience:
We were talking with the salesman (from whom we have bought every cellphone we’ve ever owned) about the pricing of Blackberrys and he pointed out that Jody’s Storm was half the price of my Tour, even though the Storm is the fancier model with a touch screen and the whole iPhone feel to it. He said “it might seem strange that the newer, fancier phone is cheaper” but before he could say anything, I quickly said “well I’m sure the Tour is in demand from business users who don’t want to learn the touch screen and want the latest of the more ‘traditional’ BB, while the Storm is for people like Jody who might get an iPhone or Droid instead.” He said “yup.”
I quickly replied: “it’s just like staying over a Saturday night for plane tickets – segmenting your market by price elasticity.” He gave me that sad, shake of the head that economists often get from people when we go geek.
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Posted by Eliot Weinstein on December 20, 2009
Although I’m somewhat late in posting this, here is an excellent passage from Megan McArdle, pondering the future of the Democratic Party:
I was talking to a libertarian friend yesterday who is a professor in the midwest, and we were marvelling at just how delusional many Obama voters seem to have been about what he was going to accomplish. Don’t get me wrong–I certainly don’t approve of everything Obama has done. But the guy got elected to be president of the United States, not Prime Minister of Sweden. Anyone who seriously entertained the notion that the procedural obstacles to enacting legislation in the United States would suddenly fall away–along with the essentially center-right politics of the American voter–is probably not mature enough to be driving.
I should note that McArdle often wrote approvingly of Barack Obama during the 2008 election. As someone who was deeply troubled by the fanaticism of many Obama supporters (especially here in Chicago) and the cult-like belief in “Hope” and “Change”, I should say “I told you so”, but that would be rude. Instead, I will say that I think President Obama is doing about as well as could reasonably have been expected given the problems he inherited from the Bush administration and the constraints of the office. In fact, my opinion of Obama is higher today than on election night last year, because of the many highly competent moderates he appointed or retained in crucial economic and national security posts. But as the passage quoted above illustrates, the problem is that the expectations placed on Obama going into his presidency weren’t reasonable, and the Democrats must now re-acclimate themselves to political reality.
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Posted by Eliot Weinstein on October 19, 2009
What do people around the world think of President Barack Obama being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize? According to a Wall Street Journal article on the fallout from Obama’s win, this might be a sign of the times:
When David Beckham was named “man of the match” in England’s World Cup qualifying soccer game this week despite playing for just 30 minutes, his coach, Fabio Capello, mocked the honor as being “like Obama getting the Nobel Prize.”
Megan McArdle adds:
Call me crazy, but I think that maybe to earn the Nobel prize, a million dollars, and all the associated prestige, you ought to have made efforts somewhat more heroic than chairing a meeting in which you said that you thought we ought to have fewer nuclear arms–even one in which you said that the US also thought we ought to have fewer nuclear arms. You should, I don’t know, deliver a deal or something.
For a more measured consideration of this particular issue, here are some arguments against and for Obama deserving the prize, courtesy of The Economist’s Democracy In America blog.
Well, at least John McCain has no problem with Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize…
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Posted by Eliot Weinstein on October 7, 2009
A few weeks ago, Senator Max Baucus (D-Montana), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, introduced a wide-ranging proposal to reform the US health care system. Today, the independent Congressional Budget Office released their score of the Baucus bill, as Marc Ambinder reports. The upshot is that the bill will cost $829 billion. That is less than expected, and if implemented, the Baucus plan would actually reduce the federal deficit by $81 billion.
Sounds like a great deal then? Not so fast, says leading macroeconomist Greg Mankiw. Mankiw and Jim Capretta note that the Baucus plan structures subsidies to purchase insurance in such a way as to impose an effective tax on middle-income families. Under the Baucus plan, all individuals without health insurance would be required to purchase health insurance or pay a fine. The subsidies are designed to alleviate the financial strain of this requirement on the poor, but the subsidies phase out as family income increases. This creates a marginal tax on income, which Capretta calculates could reach 30% for families with incomes equal to twice the poverty line. Add that to existing income taxes, and the result is a strong disincentive towards higher income-earning for middle-class workers.
Do the benefits of covering millions of uninsured Americans at a reasonable price outweigh the costs of imposing a large tax burden on middle-income families? Decide for yourself, but let’s hope that the members of the Senate are being so measured in their deliberations.
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Posted by Eliot Weinstein on June 21, 2009
Last week’s Remark of the Week should have gone to Arnold Kling:
Getting people to reduce their use of medical services is the spinach of health care reform. Expanding insurance coverage is the dessert. The Democrats want to enact dessert now, and worry about spinach later.
Just something to keep in mind as you read or watch coverage of the incipient health care reform bill. Kling’s co-blogger Bryan Caplan adds more here.
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Posted by Eliot Weinstein on May 22, 2009
Earlier today, President Obama signed the Weapons System Acquisition Reforms Act, which overhauls the military procurement process to prevent waste and reduce cost overruns. As the president acknowledged in his remarks, the individual who most strongly advocated for this new law was his election opponent, Senator John McCain. McCain has worked to reduce waste in military spending for virtually all of his 22-year senatorial career, and he found agreement from Obama when he raised the issue during the 2008 presidential election campaign.
Obama estimates that procurement reform will “save taxpayers tens of billions of dollars”. Calling the reforms “long overdue”, the president argued that outdated and inadequate military spending rules would be replaced without compromising national security.
After signing the bill, Obama traveled to Annapolis, where he delivered the commencement address at the U.S. Naval Academy’s Class of 2009 graduation. Senator McCain was a member of the 30,000-person audience, as his son John Sidney McCain IV (known as “Jack”) was one of the graduates. Jack McCain received a Bachelor’s of Science and a commission as an ensign in the United States Navy, becoming the fourth McCain to graduate from the Naval Academy. Like all of the other graduates, the younger McCain shook hands with the president during the ceremony.
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Posted by Eliot Weinstein on April 26, 2009
One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers writes:
The idea that eradicating the drugs will solve the drug problem is the lie at the root of the War on Drugs. Drug addiction is never about the drug, it’s about people coming to grips with the pain of existence.
As they say, read the whole thing.
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Posted by Eliot Weinstein on February 22, 2009
This week’s Remark of the Week is from Mark Thompson:
By treating any and all social safety nets as irreversible steps on the Road to Serfdom, we [libertarians] allow liberals and progressives to shape those policies in ways that are inefficient, ineffective, and overbroad – even though Adam Smith, Hayek himself, and Friedman each advocated for a form of social safety net, demonstrating that social safety nets can be consistent with libertarianism.
Part of a continuing conversation about the future of libertarianism that includes, among others, Virginia Postrel, Will Wilkinson and Ross Douthat.
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Posted by Eliot Weinstein on February 21, 2009
At the end of last month, Rod Blagojevich, then the governor of the US State of Illinois, was removed from office by the Illinois State Senate. Earlier in January, Blagojevich had been impeached by the Illinois House of Representatives following his arrest in December on federal corruption charges.
I have previously criticized Blagojevich, who earned the lowest ever approval ratings of any public official even before his arrest, and I am glad that my home state now has a new governor, Pat Quinn. In addition to his corrupt dealings (which memorably included soliciting bribes from those interested in being named Barack Obama’s replacement in the US Senate), Blagojevich paralyzed the Illinois state government with his fiercely ideological governing style. In particular, he refused to compromise on substantive tax increases or major government service reductions even as the state faced a massive budget crisis and ran out of money to pay for its mass transit system. The situation was made all the more tragicomic because Blagojevich was a Democrat, the Democrats control both houses of the Illinois General Assembly, and the Illinois Republican Party has been too dysfunctional to offer up any real alternatives (Blagojevich was reelected in 2006 by over 1.5 million votes).
Although the vote to remove Blagojevich from office was unanimous, Jonathan Rauch believes that the impeachment and conviction process was flawed and that “too many corners were cut”. Marc Ambinder offers up a rebuttal written by Rich Miller.
I largely take Miller’s side, noting that just because Blagojevich turned Illinois into a national laughingstock doesn’t automatically mean his removal was justified. But the former governor, as Miller notes, played fast-and-loose with the state constitution for years and was only arrested by the FBI after declaring on tape his intention to swap a US Senate seat for money and other political favors. Solicitation to bribery is a serious crime, but it is only the beginning of Blagojevich’s troubles. The former governor had a history of shady dealings, as his current mess comes after former Blagojevich fundraisers Tony Rezko and Stuart Levine were indicted and convicted of exchanging kickbacks for state business contracts. The federal indictment also lists the former governor’s attempts to bribe the Chicago Tribune into firing editors critical of him, and to extort money (in the form of campaign contributions) from a Chicago children’s hospital. It is for his earlier small abuses of power as well as for his more recent shockingly corrupt schemes that Blagojevich was impeached and removed from office.
Now a private citizen, Blagojevich still faces federal criminal charges. The federal prosecutor bringing the charges is Patrick Fitzgerald, a scrupulously honest US Attorney. Fitzgerald, while appointed by Republicans, has notably indicted and earned convictions of George Ryan (Blagojevich’s Republican predecessor as governor), “Scooter” Libby (Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff), and Conrad Black (a British Conservative politician and media tycoon). This record suggests that former governor Blagojevich will face a tough fight to beat the rap once his formal indictment begins later this year.
While it has sometimes been amusing to poke fun at Blagojevich’s pompous personality and to listen to the tape recordings of his brazen (and profanity-laden) criminal plans, it is hard to look back on his earlier years and try to find some small good that he brought to Illinois. The record is decidedly mixed. I am somewhat saddened to admit that I originally supported Blagojevich over his two rivals in the Democratic governor’s primary election of 2002, believing that he would be a moderate like his mentor Bill Clinton and that he would keep his promises to bring honesty and ethics reform to Illinois. Despite his two election victories, the people aren’t stupid (or at least can’t be fooled forever, to paraphrase Lincoln), and Blagojevich’s record-breaking low poll numbers reflected a profound desire to see him leave the governor’s mansion (which he rarely used, preferring a townhouse in Chicago and making the taxpayers foot the bill for private jet flights between Chicago and Springfield). Unfortunatley, Blagojevich leaves behind a legacy of taking political corruption to new heights–a legacy that has now ensnared Roland Burris, the new occupant of Obama’s former Senate seat. Fortunately, the people of Illinois–a state thrust into the spotlight by the election of its junior Senator to the Presidency and its bid to host the 2016 Olympic Games–won’t have old Blago to kick around anymore.
Posted in Law, Politics | 1 Comment »
Posted by Eliot Weinstein on January 17, 2009
In an interview with Glenn Beck on May 16, 2008 the inimitable actor William Shatner made many thoughtful if offbeat remarks about politics.
Early in the interview, Beck asked the former Captain Kirk about the zany obstreperousness of Star Trek fans. Shatner responded, “I mean, it was a fantasy, wasn’t it? It was just a television show.”
When pressed, Shatner assented to holding the belief that “almost every problem we have right now is due to overpopulation”. Shatner said that “…nature eventually will take care of that problem like they did, like nature does with animals.” He elaborated,
…how do we stop the overpopulation? I guess it’s by education and saying you’ve got to have less children, you can’t have all the children you want anymore. There’s a difference in the world now. Or nature will take care of it.
Shatner ascribes his views on the subject to a reading (40 years ago) of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted by Eliot Weinstein on January 7, 2009
Like a Doctor Who special, the three living former presidents of the United States reunited to hold a lunch meeting with the current president and the president-elect. George W. Bush hosted President-elect Barack Obama and former presidents Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Jimmy Carter at the White House earlier today.
Obama said he received “advice, good counsel, and fellowship” from this rare gathering of presidents, which culminated in a cool photo-op.
The BBC has the story and video here.
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Posted by Eliot Weinstein on January 1, 2009
Happy 2009 to my friends, family, and readers!
Regardless of how good or bad your 2008 was, I hope that your 2009 is better!
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Posted by Eliot Weinstein on December 31, 2008
Scott Adams, cartoonist and humorist best known as the creator of Dilbert, commissioned a survey of economists’ attitudes on current US political issues. The results came in just before the election (also see this CNN piece about the survey and Tyler Cowen’s quick summary and comment), and they don’t surprise me, but I am more interested in Adams’ continued small revelations about what he really believes (as opposed to irony or devil’s advocacy, tools he uses frequently). Here’s his personal view, also written shortly before the election:
I should pause here and confess my personal biases, since the messenger is part of the story. On social issues, I lean Libertarian, minus the crazy stuff.
Moneywise, I can’t support a candidate who promises to tax the bejeezus out of my bracket, give the windfall to a bunch of clowns with a 14 percent approval rating (Congress), and hope they spend it wisely.
Unfortunately, the alternative to the guy who promises to pillage my wallet is a lukewarm cadaver. I’m in trouble either way.
I wonder if Adams is pleased with the outcome of the election…
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Posted by Eliot Weinstein on November 5, 2008
Yesterday, Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States of America.
Congratulations to President-elect Obama, to Vice-President-elect Joe Biden, and to their campaign staff and volunteers on their victory, and for running the most disciplined, organized, and efficient political campaign in national history.
Congratulations as well to John McCain for persevering in this hard-fought contest, which featured a remarkable comeback in the primary elections, and a difficult campaign trail where McCain was often at odds with his own supporters.
As the eyes of the world turned to America last night, our country was admirably represented by McCain and Obama as they delivered, respectively, the best concession speech and the best victory speech of the modern era.
For better or for worse, we will soon close the book on the era of President George W. Bush. The people of the United States, be they Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Independents, or None-of-the-Aboves, will be judged by our peers abroad (and by our descendants) not for the vagaries of the campaign, but for what is accomplished from this day forward. As former Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush, Sr. said in a rare joint charity appearance, “No one can change what happened. But we can all change what happens next.” Now the real work begins.
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Posted by Eliot Weinstein on October 27, 2008
As linked in the previous post, Israel is currently in the midst of a(nother) political upheaval. Over the summer, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was forced to tender his resignation due to corruption investigations. Primary elections for his Kadima party, which currently heads a shaky coalition government, resulted in a victory for Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who was given a fixed amount of time to re-organize a governing coalition with herself as Prime Minister. The negotiations went down to the wire, but they have ended in deadlock. The centrist Kadima party reached tentative agreements with the center-left parties Labor and Meretz, but Kadima leaders were unable to gain enough parties to constitute a majority in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. Livni has acknowledged this, putting the country on track for elections in early 2009. Olmert will continue to serve as Prime Minister until a new government is formed after the elections.
Although the coalition negotiations were complex, Livni’s failure to form a government ultimately rested on the unwillingness of two religious-affiliated parties that tenuously supported Olmert, Shas and United Torah Judaism, to join Livni’s new coalition. From my perspective, the key to their intransigence was opposition to the concessions accompanying further peace negotiations:
“…[Shas Chairman] Yishai was told as soon as the negotiations started that Livni would not accept a coalition agreement that excluded Jerusalem from the political talks with the Palestinians…”
Unfortunately, the revitalized Kadima led by the diplomatically-inclined Livni–who possesses the desire and wherewithal to press ahead with major negotiations that could complete the outlines of a two-state solution–may never get the chance to lead Israel. Elections could benefit the center-right (currently opposition) Likud party, led by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as easily as the informal Kadima-Labor-Meretz alliance. Likud is known to favor a reversal of the current Kadima government’s policies of removing Jewish settlers from the Palestinian Territories and offering land swaps to compensate the Palestinians for Israeli annexations. While an increased Knesset margin for Kadima and/or Labor could put peace talks back on track after the election (by March?), a Likud victory would almost certainly shut down negotiations, possibly causing military retrenchment by both Israelis and Palestinians.
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Posted by Eliot Weinstein on September 24, 2008
Posted in Economics, Politics | 1 Comment »
Posted by Eliot Weinstein on September 15, 2008
Posted in Economics | 1 Comment »
Posted by Eliot Weinstein on September 8, 2008
And by “the man”, I mean search engines.
Earlier today, I was searching the online archives of The Economist (the British newsweekly) to see if they printed an obituary for Welsh poet Ronald Stuart Thomas, who died a few months before I began reading that publication. The Economist now allows users to search the archives either via Google Custom Search or via their own internal search. Using Google for “Ronald Stuart Thomas” only returns a dozen or so unrelated results (or zero, searching for exact wording). Much to my surprise, using their internal search gives me either zero or one result, but also this:
No further comments, except that it turns out they did not run an obituary for R.S. Thomas in The Economist.
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Posted by Eliot Weinstein on September 1, 2008
This week’s winner is previous winner Tyler Cowen, a prominent blogger and economist specializing in government, culture, and the arts.
I don’t have a lot of faith in the exact predictive powers of climate models, or for that matter economic models, but uncertainty about outcomes should make us worry more not less. Uncertainty usually has two tails, not just one.
Cowen’s comment illustrates why, although I am somewhat skeptical of many claims associated with anthropogenic climate change and very skeptical of the specific predictions of most climate modelers, I favor moderate but immediate action to reduce carbon emissions and to prepare fail-safe measures for climate-related natural disasters. Provided, of course, that we can listen to economists as well as climate scientists and design policies with cost-benefit analysis in mind. On this subject, see William Nordhaus’ excellent book A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming and Freeman Dyson’s comments in his essay/review of that book.
Happy Labor Day to all my readers, and on this US holiday the thoughts and prayers of myself and my relatives go out to the residents of the Gulf Coast who have been separated from their homes, friends, and families by the hurricane-related evacuation.
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Posted by Eliot Weinstein on August 23, 2008
As said before, I’ve missed a lot of cool stuff on the Internets due to not feeling well, but I’m back and swinging for the fences.
1. A profile of Reihan Salam, from the Daily Star’s Forum monthly.
2. In defense of the new X-Files movie, by David Cox. I haven’t seen it yet, but I will eventually. My mom and her sister got me hooked on The X-Files TV series midway through its original broadcast (yes, the show went downhill in the last two seasons, but the previous X-Files movie was decent).
3. The Official Browseable Time Line of Internet Memes.
4. The fall of Hillary Clinton, meticulously explained in Joshua Green’s Atlantic Monthly feature.
5. According to a reliable first-hand account, American Airlines (and possibly other carriers as well) now charges a $100 fee if you take a pet in a carrier cage aboard the plane as a carry-on item.
6. The controversy over the University of Chicago’s proposed Milton Friedman Institute continues, as reported by my friend and former teacher Adam Kissel. Elsewhere, Brad DeLong, a top UC-Berkeley economist of center-left political affiliation (served in the Clinton administration, known for his constant attacks on the current president and Republicans in general), defends the MFI from its critics on the (academic) far-left.
7. On the behavior of lobbyists.
8. On the behavior of Internet trolls.
9. A detailed report on Barack Obama’s economic beliefs and policies, by David Leonhardt, forthcoming in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. Here is a good companion piece from MIT’s Technology Review, a profile of Austan Goolsbee, the University of Chicago professor who is Senator Obama’s top economic adviser.
10. My friend David Munk has resumed writing his mostly-about-music-blog, The Telharmonium. Here is his recent post about finding good running music.
11. Devin Pogue, my neighbor back when I was in high school and all-around nice guy, is engaged. I missed the news because I was ill, as mentioned in my previous post. Sorry I’m late saying this, but congratulations to Devin and his fiancée Sarah Ruggles!!!
12. Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has an excellent post on why you should listen to economists, even if they can’t correctly predict specific economic indicators that far into the future (à la Taleb). Adams (I believe he is speaking non-ironically) also reveals himself to be a hybrid-centrist technocratic “market pragmatist” (to use the term I coined), who favors the left on social issues and the right on economic issues, and who opposes large-scale government interventions in either sphere for practical reasons rather than out of any particular small-government or anti-government ideology.
Posted in Festival of Links | 1 Comment »
Posted by Eliot Weinstein on August 10, 2008
The clear winner of the Remark of the Week for August 4 through August 10 is Roger Ebert.
The ["Sex and the City"] ladies should fill their flasks with cosmopolitans, go to see “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2” and cry their hearts out with futile regret for their misspent lives.
That’s from Ebert’s movie review for “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2″. He gave that film 3 Stars, while rating the “Sex and the City” movie from earlier this year at 2 Stars.
Yes, I often read Ebert’s reviews of movies that I would never actually be interested in seeing. In my own estimation, I have two clear reasons for this behavior: 1) Ebert is the mainstream movie critic whose recommendations closest match my own tastes, and 2) He is an exceptional writer, the first ever to win a Pulitzer Prize for film criticism, who frequently deploys clever and memorable phrases to share the highlights and lowlights of his movie-viewing. While he certainly has “off days”–reviews where he is clearly uninterested and forcing himself to write, oversimplifying in the process–and has had more since his recent illness, Ebert’s reviews of excellent or “classic” movies as well as those of movies he greatly dislikes are works of art. He even wrote a review of “Wet Hot American Summer” in verse, which can be sung to the tune of “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah”.
On a somewhat-related note, prolific musician Isaac Hayes–the original “Soul Man”–died earlier today.
On a unrelated note, I apologize for the gap in posting. I haven’t been feeling well the past three weeks due to an injury I sustained right around the time of the Modus Operandi show described in the July 17 post (which went awesomely, at least from this bass player’s viewpoint). Fortunately, I am almost completely better, and I am returning to a more normal schedule, which will include more time providing my readers (whoever you are) with links and commentary.
Only 12 weeks (and change) until Election Day!
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