After I hit the “Publish” button I realized that this is the first leap day since I started blogging. Amazing that it’s been almost 4 years (since June 2004) and this is the first February 29th.
Month: February 2008
In an effort to get back into the writing habit after a very tumultuous few days – here’s something rather light.
I stumbled onto this video and it took me back to my time in Missouri where I first started seeing billboards from the Foundation for a Better Life. As the smiles and memories came floating back I began to wonder how such a foundation gets started, and wondered if there was anything that could be done to have a few more groups who have no goal in mind but to make the world a better place.
I’m sure that title sounds like a kind of heresy here in Utah, but I can’t help noticing in the last week that the supporters of Hillary Clinton are sounding very much like the supporters of Mitt Romney were sounding after the Florida primary (myself included). Unless they turn out to be less mistaken about the upcoming primaries than I was about February 5th they will soon have to adjust to the new reality in the Democratic party.
The Spectrum did a good job in Year-round Advantages of listing pluses and minuses to the idea of year-round school. Though the title says this is about the advantages they are good enough to acknowledge the well-known drawbacks. I also found the comments of stgeorgeteacher interesting in highlighting the difficulties that teachers can face with this kind of schedule.
As I read the article I began to think that while we are considering major changes to the structure of our education we might as well go all out and consider all the possibilities. What if we not only changed the schedule to have four separate blocks of classes each year but also changed the classes so that we have a higher degree of granularity in our grade levels. What if we replaced grades k – 6 with grades A – Z and students would have the chance to advance one grade during each block of classes. In one year a student could advance from grade D to grade H. There would be room for a student to be held back twice over 7 years and still get through all their grades before they arrive at middle school.
I leave it to readers to decide how serious I am about that particular proposal, but I’d like to know if there is any reason that we should not consider other proposals to change the system while we’re in the mood to discuss the issue of primary education.
Reach Upward nails it again when he talks about Serving Medical Customers.
One of the primary rules of economics is that suppliers do their best to supply what buyers actually demand. Who are the real buyers of medical services? Not you. Unless you pay for everything yourself or have only catastrophic insurance, you are not the buyer. . . The real buyers — the real power entities in purchasing medical services —are the government (via Medicare) and insurance companies.
Since suppliers provide what buyers demand, let’s ask ourselves what the real buyers of medical services demand. Do they demand the best possible medical outcome for each patient? Nope. It’s not possible for them to do that. So they design systems that aspire to that lofty goal. These systems seek to demand proof that proper procedures are being followed and tightly control what procedures will be covered.
Of course, to administer these systems, the government and insurers spawn massive bureaucracies of paper pushers. Medical practitioners actually serve their buyers quite well, supplying the desired paperwork. They report procedures that will bring payment. . .
Electronic Health Records (EHRs) have been touted as a way to improve the medical system. But it turns out that EHRs do not improve actual medical outcomes. This is because they are only a more efficient way of pushing paper around through the bureaucracy.
Every time I read anything about our health care system I come to the same conclusion – the best kind of insurance we could have would be catastrophic insurance that has incentives built in to reward consumers who avail themselves of preventive care. With the current push in Utah to provide universal coverage we cannot emphasize this issue too much. If we want to make the system better we must attack at the actual systemic problems (the shifting of the buyer role from individuals to corporations and government entities) rather than simply trying to massage the current system to assuage some acute and visible symptoms of systemic problems (the cost of health care and insurance).
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Just for Laura
I can just see Laura recommending Ten ways to find time for your family at Parent Hacks as daily reading for me until I can perfect it in my life. I think that numbers 2, 5, and 10 would be especially useful for me – not just for my family, but for everything I do.
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Imports and Jobs
I had asked whether our markets would be better served with a tit for tat approach to tariffs rather than a more dedicated insistence on free trade on imports. If I had any lingering doubts on the subject they were laid to rest after reading Why Politicians Are Wrong about Imports and Jobs. Unless the graph in that post is entirely fabricated the free markets are the beneficiaries if they import goods that have been subsidized by more closed markets at a lower price than they could produce themselves.
Admittedly the graph is a bit confusing with the vertical scale changing from the left side of the graph to the right, but the trend is that over the last 48 years imports have doubled while unemployment has been cut in half. While these imports might take specific jobs away from the country they do not reduce the total number of jobs. The turnover creates the added benefit of encouraging those in the workforce to keep improving themselves. The relative ease and complacency that would undoubtedly come from a static economy would guarantee that we would become less competitive in a global market.
Update 2/27/08: Thanks to the persistent questions of mackenzie I went back to look at the graph to see if I had missed anything. A more accurate reading of the graph (remember the confusion I talked about with the different vertical scales) shows that imports went from 4% to 16% of GDP (a four-fold increase, not double) and unemployment fell from 9% to 6% (it fell by one third rather than by one half). While the actual statistics have changed I think the conclusion remains that imports do not appear to adversely affect employment rates.
I liked the sentiments expressed by Chad at UtahOpinions about paying a fair share for government. It’s easy to accuse those who advocate for smaller government of being stingy, selfish, or just not wanting to work for the best good of society, but many people feel like this:
Believe it or not I am proud to pay taxes to support our national interests (i.e. national security, immigration, roads, airports, etc.). But my pride ends there. . .
It is also a reminder to me why I joined the Republican party in the first place. As part of the Republican platform are these statements:
- I BELIEVE government must practice fiscal responsibility and allow individuals to keep more of the money they earn.
- I BELIEVE the proper role of government is to provide for the people only those critical functions that cannot be performed by individuals or private organizations and that the best government is that which governs least.
- I BELIEVE the most effective, responsible and responsive government is government closest to the people.
Huh? You mean Republicans stand for these principles? Well, at least I know I do and I thought Republicans did.
Chad does a nice job of breaking down how much he’s paying in taxes for various government programs. Like Chad I’m proud to pay my fair share for government. I won’t go to any lengths to minimize my tax burden, I just take whatever deductions are simplest and that makes it easy for me to forget why most people find tax season such a headache – I do my taxes in a matter of two hours because I don’t do any financial contortions to reduce my tax burden.
That does not stop me from doing anything I can to remind my representatives that I’m looking for government to do as little for me as possible – I’d rather be responsible for my own success or failure without paying for a government safety net (with all it’s inflations of inefficiency) for everyone regardless of the legitimacy of their need.
With the debate over the role of super-delegates and the delegates from Florida and Michigan in choosing their nominee, the Democratic Party finds itself in a no-win situation. Without the unpleasant idea that the super-delegates might have to publicly buck the democratic primary voters to give the nomination to Senator Clinton, we would not hear the Clinton Campaign calling to have the delegates in those states that she won (Clinton was the only major candidate on the ballot in Michigan) seated to make the race more level.
If the party chooses not to seat delegates from those states they open the door for Republicans to attack them for not backing up their “make every vote count” rhetoric.
If they do choose to seat delegates from Florida and Michigan they face a whole range of paths to bruise themselves. First – any delegate seating will undermine the authority of the party to affect the primary schedule (that power struggle is what started this whole mess). If they choose to accept that defeat they then have to choose how to seat the delegates. They can take the existing results and hear people cry fowl who chose not to vote, or who chose to vote in the Republican primary, based on the fact that their votes would not count in the selection of the Democratic nominee. If they chose to hold new primaries in those states they have to cover the costs or persuade the states to pay for a second election and they have to choose who to allow to participate. Michigan has open primaries so they run the risk of having people vote in their new primary who already voted in the Republican primary (the reverse of what Markos advocated as Michigan arrived). If they choose to limit their primaries in any way it can only be an arbitrary line.
Interestingly, if this same eternal nomination fight were happening in the GOP most of the problems outlined above would not exist because they chose to respond to the states that abandoned the party calendar by only stripping half their delegates so the original votes can stand and represent the votes taken without undermining party authority.
When I went searching for the Daily Kos link above, I thought it was funny to discover that Markos made many of the same arguments I just made on this issue. He recommends seating the delegates from both states and splitting them 50/50 between Obama and Clinton. Why don’t we just award an extra 200 delegates for each state that obeyed the party rules with the same 50/50 split condition while we’re at it? A 50/50 split is meaningless in deciding the nominee. It expands the pool of delegates, but adding 200 delegates to the delegate count of each candidate only means that there is a larger convention. Getting 1191 delegates to win the Republican nomination is just the same as getting 2025 delegates to win the Democratic nomination – the numbers may differ, but it all comes down to who gets 50% + 1. Besides that, the 50/50 split is unenforceable – either they have a choice, or they have no vote to cast. There’s no point in inflating the numbers to say “Welcome to the convention, check your seat for a number – odds vote for Clinton, evens vote for Obama.”
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Free Marketer’s Dilemma
I’m a proponent of the value of free markets and their ability to enrich people. The problem is that the free market only works in a closed system, in other words a free market is not favored when intersecting with markets which are being manipulated. The issue of how to compensate for intersecting our supposedly free market with other markets which impose duties and protective tariffs on imported good led me to think of the Prisoner’s dilemma from game theory.
Briefly, the prisoner’s dilemma is a situation where the results of your actions will vary depending on the actions of others over whom you have no control. If one market imposes tariffs and the other does not the market with tariffs benefits at the expense of the other market. If both markets impose tariffs then the playing field is level, but both are worse off than if neither of them impose tariffs.
Thankfully there may be a solution to the problem by studying the prisoners dilemma. Our economic interactions specifically resemble a specific form of the prisoner’s dilemma called The iterated prisoner’s dilemma. Under this specific variation the interactions are repeated so that the participants have a history of interactions. In a competition of computerized players the winning algorithm was one called “tit for tat” (later improved versions have been classed as “tit for tat with forgiveness”). This kind of a strategy encourages others to play nice without simply being a doormat for those who wish to use tariffs.
Does this sound like it would work in international economics?