- Alex Tabarrok reviews The Big Fail. Best sentence: “Anti-lockdown was probably the dominant expert opinion prior to COVID.”
- Biden invokes the Defense Production Act to stem drug shortages. This is a Cold War-era law that lets the government require private companies to make materials deemed necessary for national defense.
- Jason Furman on the 2017 Trump tax reform bill: It showed “taxes actually do matter,” adding that it provided “the most convincing estimates of the response of investment to corporate tax changes that I have ever seen.”
- Imagine getting medical-test results within minutes or seconds, before you leave the doctor’s office. That’s more likely for your dog than it is for you. (WSJ)
- Why cold symptoms are worse at night. (NYT)
Category: John C. Goodman
Wednesday Links
- Kaiser: the average annual premium for employer-sponsored family health insurance coverage was $23,968 in 2023.
- Study: Fentanyl “accounts for 90% of all opioid deaths… We show that a substantial amount of fentanyl smuggling occurs via legal trade flows.”
- In 2021, the U.S. spent $1,432 per capita on pharmaceuticals compared to only $517 in the UK. One reason: the value of a statistical life in the UK is pegged at £20,000 – £30,000, compared to $100,000 – $150,000 in the US.
- Headline I wish hadn’t seen: New York City will pay homeowners up to $395,00 to build an extra dwelling in their garage or basement to help ease the housing shortage.
- Gene Steuerle’s NYT piece on how much seniors get from the government’s elderly entitlement programs is no longer behind a paywall. Fascinating graphs.
Tuesday Links
- Why do hospitalizations increase in the last quarter of the year?
- Scientists use AI to find an antibiotic for a multidrug-resistant bacteria.
- Scientists have managed to preserve rat kidneys for 100 days. Apparently, that’s good news for humans.
- For medical student education, is a virtual cadaver as good (or better) than a real one?
- Are crisis pregnancy centers deceiving pregnant mothers?
Monday Links
- AI is better than Dear Abby. HT: Tyler
- Commonwealth Fund: having insurance doesn’t mean health care is affordable. Missing: the observation that Obamacare has made the problem worse.
- The meaning of the Cigna settlement with the government: Medicare Advantage plans should be held accountable for submitting accurate risk adjustment data.
- Which is better: for-profit or nonprofit? All the evidence, much of which Effective Altruists helped to compile, shows that nonprofits are much more likely to be fraudulent, or to simply fail to achieve their goals.
- Stanford University neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky makes two claims: one possibly true (there is no free will) and one very wrong (it is unfair to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior). The first claim is irrelevant because we experience the world as though we have free will, and we have no alternative to that. And, the reason to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior is the utilitarian desire to get more of the former and less of the latter.
- [This is also an example of the fallacy of the stolen concept. If you claim there is no good or bad behavior because there is no free will, you can’t turn around and use ethics to condemn the rewarding and the punishing.]