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Category Archive for 'Unintended Consequences'

So, many drink companies have replaced their plastic straws with paper ones. No biggie I guess, I don’t use straws. But for some, the other benefit of a plastic straw seems to have been that it is easier to jam a hard plastic straw through a rigid lid than a floppy paper straw. One of […]

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Can’t Wait

In a most delightful lunch conversation with one of my most cherished colleagues today, he commented: I’m really looking forward to seeing someone write a paper about how the evolution of womens’ rights has led to the rise in obesity. That wasn’t nearly his most interesting observation.

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In my inbox this morning is this working paper: Should Hospitals Keep Their Patients Longer? The Role ofInpatient and Outpatient Care in Reducing Readmissionsby Ann P. Bartel, Carri W. Chan, Song-Hee (Hailey) Kim  –  #20499 (HC HE PE)Twenty percent of Medicare patients are readmitted to the hospital within 30 days of discharge, resulting in substantial costs […]

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A site I enjoy reading is John Hanger’s. Like many others, Mr. Hanger claims to be non-ideological, but no one really can adhere to that standard. I can’t. But I don’t pretend to and I do try my best to be honest about when I AM being that way and when I am trying NOT […]

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I usually hate infographics and here is another one just littered with reasons to go crazy. But focus only on the very bottom: The changes Brill suggests would allow the US to provide better care at lower costs without substituting the kind of government-provider system typical in comparison countries. Holy smokes. This is the previous […]

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Assume our preference for redistribution is fixed and that there is an inherent and unchanging desire in the population to equalize incomes, for whatever reason you wish to believe we have that feeling. I for one do not share this belief, nor am I rich. In any case, I believe that one reason folks like […]

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At the time of this writing (a week prior to publication) the total death toll from Sandy is 110. I have always found these figures hard to comprehend, because taken literally one would think that the deaths are caused by people being swept up in 110mph winds, but that is not typically what happens. We […]

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Can a good thing be turned into a bad thing. It appears that Americans are responding to the taxes, exhortations, health risks and other anti-smoking efforts and have actually been reducing their smoking at rates faster than experts initially calculated. So what’s the problem? Some of you are old enough to remember the tobacco boondoggle […]

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I just finished reading a new NBER paper that talks about how subsidies for “green” products can be “welfare improving” if people have systematically biased beliefs or other misperceptions about how energy efficient their purchase of durables really is. Here is the paper. Here is the abstract: We show how the traditional logic of Pigouvian […]

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Guess what year this is referring to? I slightly edited it from the original. … villages in the lower Yangtze became congested hives of small … factories, attracting workers from other parts of China and spewing (wintercow: nice choice of words, huh) out goods at frightening (wintercow: nice choice of words, huh) volume. Yuengang merchants […]

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