Rienhardt on Professional Licensing

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From the article:

Organized medicine invariably opposes wider scopes of practice and independent practice of nonphysician health professionals, ostensibly not to protect economic turf but to protect the quality of patient care. Curiously, one rarely finds those to be protected by this paternalism vocally on organized medicine’s side.

Not many economists today are buying the medical profession’s position on this issue. More typically, economists lean toward Friedman’s more cynical view. They regard professional licensure of any kind – almost always proposed by the very professionals or occupations to be licensed – mainly as a means to endow the licensees with monopolistic market power.

Source: Uwe E. Reinhardt, "The Dubious Case for Professional Licensing," The New York Times, October 11, 2013

Austerity: Spending Cuts vs. Tax Increases

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Source: Salim Furth, "Look Closer: Tax Increases, Not Spending Cuts, Are the Harmful Austerity," The Foundry, October 24, 2013

McArdle on the Pretense of Knowledge

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from the article:

You occasionally hear conservatives sneer about Obama’s socialist tendencies, but if anything, I think it is the lessons of free-market economics that have undone him. Obama surrounded himself with policy folks who thought a great deal about incentives; the whole idea of the insurance-market reforms is that if you line up all the insurance incentives just so, the market will, like a well-tuned machine, produce exactly the results we want. They were open to discussing which levers might be incorrectly aligned. But it doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that there is much more to markets, and policy, than just twiddling levers. It’s no accident that their greatest policy successes came from Treasury banking programs for which twiddling the financial levers really is pretty much all you need to do . . . or that some of their greatest failures came when they tried to transfer those programs into industries such as cars, where success or failure relies on a lot more than simple math.

Don’t get me wrong: I believe that the White House understood that implementation matters -- intellectually. But I do not think they understood it viscerally, because the president prefers to surround himself with talkers and designers rather than doers

Source: Megan McArdle, "Obamacare's Big Thinkers Forgot to Bring in the Doers," bloomberg.com, October 28, 2013

Water Innovation in Israel

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Source: Tyler Cowen, "The New Israeli Export: Water Technology, marginalrevolution.com, October 29, 2013

Bourdreaux on the Superiority of Markets

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Source: Don Boudreaux, "A Simple Phrase for Unleashing Complex, Beneficial Processes," cafehayek.com, October 27, 2013

Ridley on the Good Results of Global Warming

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Source: Matt Ridley, "The Net Benefits of Climate Change Till 2080," rationaloptimist.com,  October 23, 2013

Higgs on Regime Uncertainty

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Source: Robert Higgs, "Government Spending and Regime Uncertainty—a Clarification," The Beacon Blog, October 17, 2013

Will on Madisonian Politics

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This is the wisest thing I have seen about the politics of September's government shutdown. Nice summary of classical liberalism.

Source: George Will, "What Obama and the Tea Party Have in Common," The Washington Post, October 18, 2013.

Raising the Debt Limit

Generational Theft

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from the article:
. . .while today's 65-year-olds will receive on average net lifetime benefits of $327,400, children born now will suffer net lifetime losses of $420,600 as they struggle to pay the bills of aging Americans.

Source: James Freeman, "Stanley Druckenmiller: How Washington Really Redistributes Income," The Wall Street Journal, October 19, 2013

How to Effectively Practice the Piano

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Relate this to Malcomb Gladwell's 10,000 hours (see below -- August 22)

Source: Stephen Hough, "The Practice of Practicing,"The Telegraph, October 14, 2013

Obama Care as a Hayekian Moment

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Source: Steven Hayward, "The Obamacare Rollout Debacle Is A Hayekian 'Teaching Moment,'" Forbes, October 15, 2013.

100 Charts

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Source: Matthew Boesler, "Wall Street's Brightest Minds Reveal The Most Important Charts in the World," Business Insider, October 9, 2013

California as a Feudal Society

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Once famous as a land of opportunity, the Golden State is now awash in inequality, growing poverty, and downward mobility that’s practically medieval

Source, Joel, Kotkin, "California’s New Feudalism Benefits a Few at the Expense of the Multitude," thedailybeast.com, October 5, 2013

Perry on the Most Dangerous Drugs

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Alcohol is by far the No. 1 most dangerous drug

Source: Mark Perry, "What does Science Tell Us About the Relative Dangers of Drugs?"' Carpe Diem, October 7, 2013

Tough Teachers

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Source: Joanne Lipmann, "Why Tough Teachers Get Good Results," The Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2013, p. C1

Consumption and Inequality

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The advantage of measuring equality and inequality using consumption rather than income.

 

Source: Aparna Mathur, "The Inequality Illusion," AEI Policy Studies, September 27, 2013

Caplin's Ideological Turing Test

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From the article:

In a Turing Test, a computer tries to pass for human:

A human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each emulating human responses. All participants are separated from one another. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test.

and

. . . at the meta-level, (Paul Krugman is) on to something. Mill states it well: "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that."  If someone can correctly explain a position but continue to disagree with it, that position is less likely to be correct.  And if ability to correctly explain a position leads almost automatically to agreement with it, that position is more likely to be correct.  (See free trade).  It's not a perfect criterion, of course, especially for highly idiosyncratic views.  But the ability to pass ideological Turing tests - to state opposing views as clearly and persuasively as their proponents - is a genuine symptom of objectivity and wisdom.

Source: Bryan Caplan, "The Ideological Turing Test," econlog.com, June 20, 2011