John McCain gave us the details of his healthcare plan yesterday. (You can find details here or here.) There’s more to like here than I would have thought–although it’s far from a good plan. Here are the details:
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Apr 302008
I was pretty critical of McCain’s support for a “gas-tax holiday”, and I’m pretty disappointed in Clinton’s support of the idea. As I said before, the gas-tax holiday just doesn’t make any sense if you think about it. It’s an extremely small amount of money ($0.18 on the gallon translates to about $10 per month for the average driver). And it rewards the precise behavior that we ought to be discouraging: consuming gasoline. But that being said, energy prices are such that lower-middle class and poor families are feeling pinched–especially by their transportation and utility budgets. It is perfectly understandable for politicians to do something to help. Which is why, if they are smart, they will turn to the lowly bus pass.
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I read a very interesting book this weekend on the plane, Robert Frank and Philip Cook’s “Winner take all society” and I thought it was relevant enough to issues that Leftfielders talk about that it would be worth reviewing, even though we don’t typically do book reviews on this site.
According to Frank and Cook, there are two types of economic systems. In the standard system a worker’s rewards are proportional to the amount that he produces. So, if Mike makes 10% more widgets than I do, and we’re paid by the widget, then Mike makes a 10% higher salary than I do. This is the system that almost all of economics is concerned with. A second system is a “winner take all” market. In this system, the person who is the most productive makes all of the profit (or in more complex versions, a disproportionate share of the profit), and the rest get nearly nothing. So, if Mike is a 10% better poker player than I am, at the end of the day he has the entire pot of chips.
Frank and Cook argue two central theses: 1) The standard economic models do not work for winner take all markets and 2) Winner take all markets are increasingly prevalent in todays society. The conjunction of these points leads to a set of policy recommendations that differ from what comes from more prominent economic theory. I’m going to basically outline their logic below: Continue reading »
Apr 262008
This week is Passover. Passover is challenging under the best of circumstances because of the food restrictions. This year its doubly bad because I’m at a conference and don’t have access to a kitchen, so I really can’t eat much at all. Other people at the conference have noticed that I’m not eating, and have asked about it, and I tell them that its Passover. Here’s the odd part – these are all educated people, either with PhDs, or on the road to getting one. And yet, at least 50% of them have said “oh, you have to wait until sundown to eat”.
No. That’s Ramadan. Passover is 8 days where you can’t eat anything with leavening agents. Its a Jewish holiday. Ramadan is where you can’t eat anything from sunup to sundown for about a month. Its an Islamic holiday. Both holidays are highly important to their respective cultures, and so you’d think that information about them would have entered public consciousness. I have found it astounding that such educated people have been so culturally illiterate.
I suppose that being raised in a Jewish household, things seem obvious to me that people outside of the Jewish culture wouldn’t know. But are the notions of what people do on Passover really that obscured to the general public?
Apr 252008
John McCain believes that the government response to Hurricane Katrina was “disgraceful”. In a speech yesterday he faulted FEMA’s organization, it’s leadership, and President Bush’s response in particular. It was the kind of speech you would expect of someone who was severely disappointed in how the leadership of his own party responded to one of the largest natural disasters in American history. Unfortunately for McCain, he was one of those leaders.
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