Month: August 2009

by Patrick Appel

This is where the organic movement and I part ways:

Organic may or may not produce enough food to feed the world. It may or may not produce healthier food. It may or may not save the environment. Scientists will always grapple with these questions. None of these debates really matters. What matters is that organic does one thing that no other method of food production can claim to do: it works from the premise that nature has an economy all its own, an economy that transcends facts and figures, places nature ahead of short-term profit, and operates according to a logic that cannot be quantified. For those who believe that food should be produced without strict adherence to a balance sheet, comparative studies like the FSA's will mean next to nothing. What we're talking about here is spiritual, not statistical.

Food health, feeding the world's population, and the environment "don't really matter?" My problem with the spiritualization of food is it removes science from agriculture in the same way creationism removes science from evolution. I don't have a problem if you want to have a spiritual experience with your cheeseburger, but please don't pretend that this resolves or makes irrelevant substantive agricultural debates.

by Chris Bodenner

Allison demonstrates the dangers of legal drugs.

by Chris Bodenner

A US comparison would have been helpful, but you can find some related stats here.

(Hat tip: BF)

by Conor Clarke

Let me toss my hat in with Matt Yglesias and say that I don't quite know what Greg Mankiw has in mind when he writes that "We are all supply-siders now." The term "supply-side economics" has done a really bang-up job of shedding all meaningful definitional content over the past decade. But my sense is it usually refers to one of three claims, and not the one Greg has in mind.

Here's my quick and dirty taxonomy: The "strong" version of the supply side argument is that tax cuts will generate enough growth to increase tax revenue. (Not to be confused with the general Laffer Curve proposition that tax cuts can do this, which will probably be true under some circumstances — say, if a tax rate went from 100% to 99%.) The "semi-strong" version is that tax rates are the key factor governing economic growth. And the "weak" version is that the growth and efficiency generated by lower taxes is more important than the equality generated by redistribution. (The "weak" version pretty much just restates the big difference between the left and the right, so it's really quite general.)  

Anyway, I don't think anyone uses the term "supply-sider" how Greg Mankiw seems to be using the term — which is to describe someone who believes in the general proposition that taxes affect incentives. Everyone believes that! But I can assure Greg that all of us are not supply-siders.

by Patrick Appel

Scott Adams tries to beat the market:

Has anyone tracked the stocks of companies that donate to politicians to see if those companies beat the market averages? I’d like to see a stock fund comprised of companies that are donating the most money to politicians. If those companies do indeed outperform the market, I want in. Realistically, I don’t see this practice ever subsiding, so complaining does no good. Even voting for politicians who say they will fight it does no good. But making money from the companies who corrupt the system seems to make good sense to me. I see no reason that you and I shouldn’t get a taste of that action.

Here is a list of the top donors of all time. I’d be curious to see if there is any truth in Adams’ pipe dream.

by Patrick Appel

The long awaited CIA torture report is due out on Monday. Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff have a preview:

According to two sources—one who has read a draft of the paper and one who was briefed on it—the report describes how one detainee, suspected USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was threatened with a gun and a power drill during the course of CIA interrogation. According to the sources, who like others quoted in this article asked not to be named while discussing sensitive information, Nashiri's interrogators brandished the gun in an effort to convince him that he was going to be shot. Interrogators also turned on a power drill and held it near him. "The purpose was to scare him into giving [information] up," said one of the sources. A federal law banning the use of torture expressly forbids threatening a detainee with "imminent death."

The report also says, according to the sources, that a mock execution was staged in a room next to a detainee, during which a gunshot was fired in an effort to make the suspect believe that another prisoner had been killed. The inspector general's report alludes to more than one mock execution. 

Marcy Wheeler thinks this is why the torture tapes were destroyed, a plausible theory. After reading about Bush-era torture for years researching the subject for Andrew, I thought that I had lost the ability to be shocked, but this goes beyond what even I dreamt possible. The description above reminds me of nothing so much as the Iranian mock executions performed during the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Mark Bowden had a harrowing description of them in his latest book. The Iranians didn't threaten the Americans with drills, as far as I know. What we did actually sounds far worse.

By Patrick Appel

The Economist explains the limits of tough on crime by studying California:

Since [1976], California has passed around a thousand laws mandating tougher sentencing. Many have gone through the legislature, where politicians of both parties compete to be “toughest on crime”. Others have come directly from voters, who often bring a “crime-of-the-week mentality” to the ballot box, says Barry Krisberg, the president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a think-tank in Oakland. The result is a disaster, says Ms Petersilia. California spends $49,000 a year on each prisoner, almost twice the national average. But it still has the country’s worst rate of recidivism, with 70% of people who leave prison ending up back in it, compared with 40% in America as a whole.

Thoreau follows up.

by Patrick Appel

Joel Stein profiles the city:

If it’s this bad, why, then, does every Vegasite I meet still talk as if he or she is about to go on a winning streak? The people in Vegas aren’t nearly as depressed as those in far less devastated cities. “This is a town built on hopes and dreams, and people don’t give up hopes and dreams when there’s a recession,” says Neal Smatresk, executive vice president and provost at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Anyone who has ever stood at a craps table knows that losers always believe they’re one roll of the dice from starting a winning streak.

That is true even of Sheldon Adelson, who has lost more during this recession than anyone else on the planet.

The 76-year-old chairman of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., which owns the Venetian hotel, the Sands Expo and Convention Center and the Venetian Macao, was in 2007 and ’08 the third richest person in the world, with — by his estimate — a net worth of $40 billion. By February of this year, he said he had lost $36.5 billion — more than the GDP of half of the countries in the world. In the years before that slide, banks were begging him to take their money, given his massive success in building the first Vegas-style hotel and casino in Macao, China, in 2004. Adelson didn’t hesitate, taking all he could get and building an entire mini-Vegas in Macao called the Cotai Strip, along with huge casinos in Singapore; he also doubled his Vegas space by adding the Palazzo to his Venetian hotel. In a short time, he has accumulated a debt-to-earnings ratio of 6.8 to 1 in the U.S. Then the loans stopped coming, and his stock price sank from $144 to $1.42 in March. (It now hovers at about $12.)

by Patrick Appel

An Illinois doctor writes:

The guy who said he is Professional Liability Insurance Underwriter, specializing in Physician Malpractice said, "There was a period in 2004 and 2005 where there were only 4 Neurosurgeons practicing in the entire state because several fled to Indiana." This is complete nonsense. We had more than 4 at Northwestern, alone, and there are 4 other med schools (U of Chicago Med School, U of Illinois Medical School, Chicago Medical School, Rush Medical School) all of which have multiple neurosurgeons, as well as a private neurosurgical practice (Chicago Institute of Neurosurgery and Neuroresearch) that takes up an entire hospital and has numerous neurosurgeons. And this does not count the entire rest of the state.

A law professor writes:

Which do you think kills  more people every year—medical practice or automobile accidents? If you said automobile accidents, you’d be wrong, and by a lot. According to the Institute of Medicine, as much as twice as many people are killed through medical malpractice. Yet medical malpractice is one of the least commonly pursued claims, with fewer than 10% of patients who have suffered an uncompensated injury filing suit. We don’t a have a medical malpractice litigation problem. We have a medical malpractice problem.

It is true that “tort reform” increases insurance company profits. It sometimes (but not always) also reduces doctors’ premiums. But it does so at the expense of the most seriously-injured patients. The right way to cut down on insurance costs is to cut down on malpractice. “Tort reform” that insulates doctors and insurance companies from the financial consequences of medical malpractice is precisely the wrong strategy.

Joanne Doroshow, Executive Director of Center for Justice & Democracy and Co-founder of Americans for Insurance Reform e-mails:

As a consumer group that has worked on medical malpractice insurance issues for many years, we can assure you that eliminating every single medical malpractice lawsuit in the country, including every legitimate suit, will barely make a dent on overall health care costs. Our most recent report on this, True Risk, finds this, (pdf) definitively.

To quote from the actuary J. Robert Hunter, who is Director of Insurance for the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), former Commissioner of Insurance for the State of Texas, and former Federal Insurance Administrator under Presidents Carter and Ford:

Thirty years of inflation-adjusted data show that medical malpractice premiums are the lowest they have been in this entire period. This is in no small part due to the fact that claims have fallen like a rock, down 45 percent since 2000. The periodic premium spikes we see in the data are not related to claims but to the economic cycle of insurers and to drops in investment income. Since prices have not declined as much as claims have, medical malpractice insurer profits are higher than the rest of the property casualty industry, which has been remarkably profitable over the last five years.

Our study also shows that states that have passed severe medical malpractice tort restrictions on victims of medical error have rate changes similar to those states that haven't adopted these harsh measures. Finally, our research makes clear that medical malpractice claims and premiums have almost no impact on the cost of health care. Medical malpractice premiums are less than one-half of one percent of overall health care costs, and medical malpractice claims are a mere one-fifth of one percent of health care costs. If Congress completely eliminated every single medical malpractice lawsuit, including all legitimate cases, as part of health care reform, overall health care costs would hardly change, but the costs of medical error and hospital-induced injury would remain and someone else would have to pay.

As far as so-called "defensive medicine," every government study that has looked into the issue finds it unsubstantiated. See here.

Another reader passes along this tort reform CBO report from 2004, which is a helpful non-partisan examination of the evidence.

by Patrick Appel

Gregg Easterbrook has a point:

While the fixed vote in Iran received extensive international attention, the world paid no notice to an honest election in Indonesia — the world’s largest Muslim nation. As recently as the 1970s, Indonesia was a repressive military dictatorship; gradually it has become a democracy with a civil-society basis and freedom of speech, plus strong economic growth. And America did not force this outcome on Indonesia or, for that matter, have anything to do with what happened — Indonesians made their nation a democracy entirely on their own. Why do the same politicians and pundits who have limitless breath to denounce the troubled Muslim nations say nothing about the success story of Muslim Indonesia? Islamist fanatics hate freedom in Indonesia as much as they hate it in the United States and Europe, and have committed awful crimes against Indonesia democracy. But the world only notices Indonesia when a bomb goes off there — how about some notice for social and economic progress?

(Hat tip: Freddie)