Category Archives: Social policy

Testing, Testing, Testing

Health, Social policy

If we’re not willing to remain sheltered in place indefinitely, and if we’re not willing to lose up to a million lives to the coronavirus, the alternative is massive testing followed by contact tracing. Nobel Prize-winning economist Dr. Paul Romer of NYU claims to have done the math to determine how much testing we must do to bring the virus under control and keep it there. He is interviewed by Dr. Aaron Carroll for his weekly podcast, Healthcare Triage.

In the interview, they refer to R0 (“R zero”), which refers to the rate of transmission of the disease. If R0 equals 1, each person with the virus infects exactly one other person. If R0 is greater than 1, the disease spreads exponentially. If R0 is less than 1, the disease eventually dies out. Romer believes he has determined how much testing we need to do to keep R0 below 1.

You may have noticed that in my last post, I referred to the possibility of losing up to 2 million lives in order to achieve herd immunity.  This was assuming a mortality rate of 1%.  Romer assumes a mortality rate of .5%; hence he arrives at a figure of 1 million deaths.  Of course, the true mortality rate is unknown.

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“There’ll Be More Death”

What We Can Learn From Denmark

Health, Social policy, ,

When we think about the current situation in Washington, it’s hard to believe that government can ever provide efficiently for the needs of the majority of our citizens. Yet, obviously, it doesn’t have to be this way. Other countries seem to manage. For example, a July 2017 study by the Commonwealth Fund compared the United States health care system to ten other high-income countries.

This chart plots health care spending (left to right) in relation to health care performance (top to bottom), an index which combines five dimensions—care process, access, administrative efficiency, equity, and health care outcomes. As you can see, we spend far more on health care that the other countries, yet we have poorer health outcomes. While life expectancy in the U. S. had been improving for several decades, it is now declining in some populations, in part due to the opioid crisis.

As an illustration of how things could be different, I recommend taking six minutes to watch this video by Joshua Holland, with animation by Rob Pybus, comparing life in Denmark, the second happiest country in the world, to life in the United States, the 15th happiest.

You can find the text of the video here. If you’d like to compare economic and social outcomes in the U. S. and Denmark more closely, check out the 17 charts in this article.

You may have noticed that this post has the same theme as Michael Moore’s 2015 documentary film, Where to Invade Next. For a longer (and funnier) look at what we can learn from the rest of the world, I highly recommend it.

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Don’t Worry, Be Happy

Reforms as Experiments

Reforms as Experiments

Economics, Social policy,

It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.

Justice Louis Brandeis, New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann

It looks as though we are about to once again embark on a national program of deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, and austerity for everyone else. So how has that worked out so far? Economist Robert Reich explains.

Social psychologist Donald Campbell, in a 1969 paper entitled “Reforms as Experiments,” argued that we ought to try out various social policies, carefully evaluating the results, and repeat only those that are successful. Of course, Reich’s comparison is not really an experiment. California, Kansas and Texas were not randomly assigned to conditions of austerity or public investment, and even if they had been, there were many pre-existing differences between the three states. Nevertheless, prevailing evidence argues strongly against conservative economics and in favor of public investment as a long-term strategy.

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The Cost of Climate Inaction

The Invisible Hand