Monthly Archives: November 2017

Hansonian medical checkups

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Toshiaki Iizuka, Katsuhiko Nishiyama, Brian Chen, and Karen Eggleston write,

despite the significant increase in medical care utilization at the borderline threshold, we find no evidence that the additional care improves health outcomes. This is true both for intermediate health measures and for predicted risks of mortality and serious complications. Thus, we find no evidence that DM-related medical care is cost-effective around this threshold. The results hold both in the shortrun (one year after a checkup) as well as in the medium-run (three years after a checkup). These results suggest that the threshold may need to be reexamined from the perspective of cost-effectiveness.

DM is diabetes mellitus.

Provocative sentences about information overload

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From James Williams, in an interview by Brian Gallagher.

What’s happened is, really rapidly, we’ve undergone this tectonic shift, this inversion between information and attention. Most of the systems that we have in society—whether it’s news, advertising, even our legal systems—still assume an environment of information scarcity. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but it doesn’t necessarily protect freedom of attention. There wasn’t really anything obstructing people’s attention at the time it was written. Back in an information-scarce environment, the role of a newspaper was to bring you information—your problem was lacking it. Now it’s the opposite. We have too much.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Think of this as an environment that rewards the most clever spammers.

Sentences about autonomous vehicles

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Joshua Gans writes,

Consider, for a moment, the notion that human error could be completely eliminated by having autonomous vehicles. Would we need car airbags? Would we need seat belts? Would we need the car to be reinforced to withstand high impact collisions? Would we need crumple zones? I could go on. Would we need road barriers? Would we need steet lights? Now think about the costs of all of those things and you can see how they add up.

Today, we think that human driving is normal and autonomous vehicles are frightening. At some time in the future we will transition rapidly to the opposite point of view. Gans alludes to that in his conclusion.

The wisdom of Jean Tirole

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I promised a longer report on Economics for the Common Good, and here it is.

There are two books that I would like from Tirole. One is on the peculiar features of the French economy. The other is on the role of imperfect information in industrial organization, finance, and regulation. Perhaps the latter can be found in one or more of the books he has already written.

Relative to what I would like, this latest book has interesting sections that are too terse and uninteresting sections that are too long.

If you are willing to wade through the entire book, you will find some really nice passages. For example, on p. 22-23, he writes,

diverging perceptions of medicine and economics are easy to explain. In medicine, the victims of secondary effects are for the most part the same people who are being treated. . .In economics, the victims of secondary effects are rarely the same people who received the original treatment. . .An economist is obliged to think about invisible victims as well, and so the public sometimes accuses the economist of being indifferent to the sufferings of the visible victims.

Yes, this is the “seen and the unseen,” but it helps to explain the hostility toward standard economic analysis of the minimum wage, rent control, and price gouging.

More excerpts to tantalize you below the fold. Continue reading →