Thomas Lenard on the FCC; President Trump on Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae; Paul Krugman on stable coins; Noah Smith on productivity and costs in services
I'd propose an alternative read of Smith's data based on my own experience.
I think that with a lot of healthcare services people decide what spending target they want and then back solve to it. That's what I actually see happening when people running health plans make decisions.
So if I decide that I want my premium to be $X, I make whatever changes to the health plan are needed to hit that target (raise/lower copays, cover/not cover services, alter reimbursement rates for providers, require/not require referrals or step therapy, etc).
For decades people were willing let premium tick up faster than wages. Either because of the tax treatment or because health spending is more popular or whatever.
But as healthcare approached 17.X% of GDP, it just got to be too much. You can't run a business or a country with that kind of overhead. So the system started pushing back. Maybe that takes the form of say not being able to find a Medicare provider in NYC because the reimbursement rates are too low. Or maybe deductibles go up. Or the plan increases the paperwork burden to the point where people just give up and forego treatments.
I can buy that 17% is just the max our economy will tolerate (which BTW is still too high), but I don't necessarily buy that this has something to do with "productivity".
I have the same opinion just based on my personal experience of recent years. Things that used to be routinely done by my family physician during my yearly checkup disappeared including the checkup itself a couple of years ago. So, while I am not paying more in premiums, I am also getting less in services than I was in 2020. Now, this isn't a big deal to me personally since I am very healthy for my age but it will show up in NoahTalent's analysis as higher productivity. Is my situation unique? I don't think so since I note the same changes in some of my mother's healthcare as well.
I can’t help but think that the problem with arguments against crypto is that “not letting the government freeze your assets” is also illegal, but probably desirable. After seeing the Canadian government’s actions around protests and the UK basically jailing people for saying bad things, criminal activity is increasingly not immoral activity.
Well, you wouldn’t. It takes a lot of self reflection and careful analysis to start to realize that murder, theft, rape, and even usury are moral questions, and the laws regarding them are related to moral sentiments on those matters.
Casting insults is also a moral question but never criminal and rarely punishable (slander). And plenty of laws aren't about morality. They are typically focused on minimizing the harm we cause to ourselves and others, unevenly tempered with allowing individual freedom.
How many people do you judge their moral character based on crimes they commit? Very few I suspect. Even most criminals are often judged by more than their crimes, at least by those who know more about them. “Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.” I daresay Smith's book has very little relation to what is criminal or not.
So many arguments that people have involve using words in different ways and then (often unknowingly) talking past each other. So having said that ...
I think most criminal laws involve some sort of moral judgment. People often justify them on more utilitarian grounds, like minimizing harm, but morality comes in with "what is real harm" and "what harms are important". In some cultures, the harm caused by rape is not considered a big deal, morally pretty minor, whereas in America today, it is a biggie. Indeed, the definition of rape depends on moral judgments. At one point, what we would call rape within marriage was not defined as rape at all.
In many places at many times, the killing of a superior by an inferior was a big crime, while the killing of an inferior by a superior was a lesser offense, if it was an offense at all.
Again, in many times and places, conduct that was considered immoral was criminalized as harmful even when there was no obvious material harm to the person doing it. Drinking, gambling, fornicating, ... "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?"
Certainly, we still have some of that. Thus, a "hate crime" is punished more severely than the same conduct without the hate part.
All sounds reasonable, even if I lean a little differently. And perhaps I stated my case too strongly. In saying morality and criminality are correlated, I did not mean to say there was zero moral basis to what we assign criminality, simply that they don't really align. In your examples of what we would judge immoral laws, I would bet most people in those societies also see that. Maybe not always true, but mostly so. And just because the proponents give a moral reasoning, it doesn't mean that's why they've assigned criminality as they have. Morally questionable laws are often based on self-interest. Maybe the bigger complaint is that most of what we consider immoral is not made criminal for a variety of reasons.
Because of the socialization of loss due to lousy / lazy / lying risk assessments, your proposal is far better (limit Fannie to 30 yr, fixed rate, owner-occupied) homes.
There should be changes in the interest deduction stuff, so that house payments become a 30% (or 20%) tax credit, payment plus interest, with some lifetime maximum. Like 10 times prior year median wage. This limits the tax reduction per owner.
An alternate limit might be 100% of the nominal value of each house, first mortgage. So that title insurance goes along with recording the amount of mortgage & sales price. After that first and subsequent owners get tax breaks equal to the cost of building the house, it loses eligibility for tax credits. This will hugely encourage new building. But lots of folks won't like some aspects of it.
Arnold says he doesn't hate everything Trump does, but does hate this. Can anybody recall something Arnold explicitly liked that Trump has done? I remain a Kling critic on his Trump criticism.
I haven't read all of Lenard's op-ed due to the WSJ paywall. Lenard has been a leading proponent of using 'spectrum fees' to create incentives for federal agencies (especially DOD) to economize on their use of spectrum so that federal spectrum can be reallocated to the private sector. The implicit assumption behind this proposal is that federal agencies have incentives to economize on the use of non-spectrum resources because they have to pay for them. If that were true, why do we need DOGE? I don't have a problem with closing the FCC, but it is hard to see why shifting some of the FCC's functions to the Commerce Department would be an improvement.
Protip: you can usually get around the WSJ paywall with archive dot today. (It doesn't work for the Substack paywall, though. I do wish Substack offered a Netflix-like option.)
Service inflation - comparing the quality of my knee ACL repair in the 80s, my other knee 10+ years later, and my daughter's in the 2010s is not possible with any accuracy. Any comparison is at least 90% subjective. Same goes for a 25" CRT TV vs the much larger flat screens of today. Or b&w TVs of further back. Going even further back you'd be comparing TVs to radios, phonographs, and pianos. Sure.
I read some histories of the early days of radio, the only one I remember by name was Rebels On The Air by Jesse Walker. They all told the same general story.
Early spectrum assignment was by amateurs in pursuit of a replacement for long distance phone calls, and courts had begun developing common law property rights in frequencies. Then the first commercial radio networks smelled a shortcut and got Commerce Secretary Hoover (the one who became President soon after) to push through legislation creating the FCC's predecessor and assigning station frequencies by cronyism.
I'd propose an alternative read of Smith's data based on my own experience.
I think that with a lot of healthcare services people decide what spending target they want and then back solve to it. That's what I actually see happening when people running health plans make decisions.
So if I decide that I want my premium to be $X, I make whatever changes to the health plan are needed to hit that target (raise/lower copays, cover/not cover services, alter reimbursement rates for providers, require/not require referrals or step therapy, etc).
For decades people were willing let premium tick up faster than wages. Either because of the tax treatment or because health spending is more popular or whatever.
But as healthcare approached 17.X% of GDP, it just got to be too much. You can't run a business or a country with that kind of overhead. So the system started pushing back. Maybe that takes the form of say not being able to find a Medicare provider in NYC because the reimbursement rates are too low. Or maybe deductibles go up. Or the plan increases the paperwork burden to the point where people just give up and forego treatments.
I can buy that 17% is just the max our economy will tolerate (which BTW is still too high), but I don't necessarily buy that this has something to do with "productivity".
I have the same opinion just based on my personal experience of recent years. Things that used to be routinely done by my family physician during my yearly checkup disappeared including the checkup itself a couple of years ago. So, while I am not paying more in premiums, I am also getting less in services than I was in 2020. Now, this isn't a big deal to me personally since I am very healthy for my age but it will show up in NoahTalent's analysis as higher productivity. Is my situation unique? I don't think so since I note the same changes in some of my mother's healthcare as well.
I can’t help but think that the problem with arguments against crypto is that “not letting the government freeze your assets” is also illegal, but probably desirable. After seeing the Canadian government’s actions around protests and the UK basically jailing people for saying bad things, criminal activity is increasingly not immoral activity.
I don't think criminality has ever been about morality. There's some correlation but even that is pretty low.
Well, you wouldn’t. It takes a lot of self reflection and careful analysis to start to realize that murder, theft, rape, and even usury are moral questions, and the laws regarding them are related to moral sentiments on those matters.
Casting insults is also a moral question but never criminal and rarely punishable (slander). And plenty of laws aren't about morality. They are typically focused on minimizing the harm we cause to ourselves and others, unevenly tempered with allowing individual freedom.
How many people do you judge their moral character based on crimes they commit? Very few I suspect. Even most criminals are often judged by more than their crimes, at least by those who know more about them. “Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.” I daresay Smith's book has very little relation to what is criminal or not.
So many arguments that people have involve using words in different ways and then (often unknowingly) talking past each other. So having said that ...
I think most criminal laws involve some sort of moral judgment. People often justify them on more utilitarian grounds, like minimizing harm, but morality comes in with "what is real harm" and "what harms are important". In some cultures, the harm caused by rape is not considered a big deal, morally pretty minor, whereas in America today, it is a biggie. Indeed, the definition of rape depends on moral judgments. At one point, what we would call rape within marriage was not defined as rape at all.
In many places at many times, the killing of a superior by an inferior was a big crime, while the killing of an inferior by a superior was a lesser offense, if it was an offense at all.
Again, in many times and places, conduct that was considered immoral was criminalized as harmful even when there was no obvious material harm to the person doing it. Drinking, gambling, fornicating, ... "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?"
Certainly, we still have some of that. Thus, a "hate crime" is punished more severely than the same conduct without the hate part.
All sounds reasonable, even if I lean a little differently. And perhaps I stated my case too strongly. In saying morality and criminality are correlated, I did not mean to say there was zero moral basis to what we assign criminality, simply that they don't really align. In your examples of what we would judge immoral laws, I would bet most people in those societies also see that. Maybe not always true, but mostly so. And just because the proponents give a moral reasoning, it doesn't mean that's why they've assigned criminality as they have. Morally questionable laws are often based on self-interest. Maybe the bigger complaint is that most of what we consider immoral is not made criminal for a variety of reasons.
Because of the socialization of loss due to lousy / lazy / lying risk assessments, your proposal is far better (limit Fannie to 30 yr, fixed rate, owner-occupied) homes.
There should be changes in the interest deduction stuff, so that house payments become a 30% (or 20%) tax credit, payment plus interest, with some lifetime maximum. Like 10 times prior year median wage. This limits the tax reduction per owner.
An alternate limit might be 100% of the nominal value of each house, first mortgage. So that title insurance goes along with recording the amount of mortgage & sales price. After that first and subsequent owners get tax breaks equal to the cost of building the house, it loses eligibility for tax credits. This will hugely encourage new building. But lots of folks won't like some aspects of it.
Arnold says he doesn't hate everything Trump does, but does hate this. Can anybody recall something Arnold explicitly liked that Trump has done? I remain a Kling critic on his Trump criticism.
I haven't read all of Lenard's op-ed due to the WSJ paywall. Lenard has been a leading proponent of using 'spectrum fees' to create incentives for federal agencies (especially DOD) to economize on their use of spectrum so that federal spectrum can be reallocated to the private sector. The implicit assumption behind this proposal is that federal agencies have incentives to economize on the use of non-spectrum resources because they have to pay for them. If that were true, why do we need DOGE? I don't have a problem with closing the FCC, but it is hard to see why shifting some of the FCC's functions to the Commerce Department would be an improvement.
Protip: you can usually get around the WSJ paywall with archive dot today. (It doesn't work for the Substack paywall, though. I do wish Substack offered a Netflix-like option.)
Service inflation - comparing the quality of my knee ACL repair in the 80s, my other knee 10+ years later, and my daughter's in the 2010s is not possible with any accuracy. Any comparison is at least 90% subjective. Same goes for a 25" CRT TV vs the much larger flat screens of today. Or b&w TVs of further back. Going even further back you'd be comparing TVs to radios, phonographs, and pianos. Sure.
I read some histories of the early days of radio, the only one I remember by name was Rebels On The Air by Jesse Walker. They all told the same general story.
Early spectrum assignment was by amateurs in pursuit of a replacement for long distance phone calls, and courts had begun developing common law property rights in frequencies. Then the first commercial radio networks smelled a shortcut and got Commerce Secretary Hoover (the one who became President soon after) to push through legislation creating the FCC's predecessor and assigning station frequencies by cronyism.