Links to Consider, 9/10
Rob Henderson cites research on female aggression; Lynn Kiesling on social roots of progress; Richard Samuelson on Jews vs. Progressives; David Hyman and Charles Silver on Medicare malincentives
More physically attractive women are disproportionately targets of aggression from other women. In one study on adolescent females and males, attractiveness increased females’ odds of incurring same-sex aggression by 35 percent and decreased males’ by 25 percent. (source).
The link takes you to a very expensive book. I am mentioning this in case it occurs to me in the future to want to say something about it. If I don’t note it now I will forget where I saw it.
I'm not exactly in the same place as Thiel because I wouldn't go so far as to say that we have technological stagnation, although I agree that the primary limitations on progress are social and policy factors. I'm also not in the same place as Smil even though I think he's absolutely correct that the clean energy transition will take decades, much longer than many hope and wish. Even though technological change is costly and time-consuming, I think Smil is mistaken to say that the vibrant creativity of the 19th century cannot be repeated.
The tension between risk and reward, stagnation and progress, will shape the future trajectory of technological development and its impact on global society. Ultimately, Askonas argues, technological stagnation is a choice—a result of the priorities and policies that societies choose to adopt. Stagnation is a choice.
That is a conclusion to a long and interesting essay on Vaclav Smil’s thesis that current hopes for technology are mostly hype.
In the Enlightenment, Voltaire’s hatred of Jews and Judaism is notorious. Other leading Enlightened thinkers, such as Diderot, D’Holbach, and Kant, expressed similarly hostile views of Jews and/or Judaism. Some Enlightened thinkers who expressed such views also opposed the oppression of Jews. Their hope, or perhaps expectation, was that once Jews ceased to be walled off from the mainstream of European culture, they would cease to be warped by Judaism; they would become less Jewish and, in their view, more decent.
The Enlightenment/progressive outlook was favorable to the emancipation of Jews. But it does not like Jewish mysticism or Jewish tribalism. Samuelson sees an inherent conflict between Jewish tradition and the progressive vision of universal brotherhood, toleration, with science displacing religious dogma.
But I do not think that this explains antisemitism on the left today. If people on the left were dedicated above all to fighting tribalism, mysticism, and traditionalism, then they would direct their ire against Muslims even more than against Jews.
I think that the oppressor-oppressed framing, and the characterization of Jews as inherently in the oppressor category, is the key to Jew-hatred on today’s left.
David Hyman and Charles Silver write,
Rather than pay providers, Congress should give Medicare money directly to enrollees, as it does with Social Security. The government should deposit each enrollee’s subsidy into a health savings account, letting seniors decide what they need and how much they are willing to pay. By reducing the government’s role, this reform would eliminate most forms of healthcare fraud, waste, and abuse immediately, saving hundreds of billions of dollars.
But this would no longer be health insurance. Medicare recipients who are healthy would receive the same amount as others who are in need of expensive treatment.
It is actually quite tricky to come up with a system that provides genuine insurance to people who might require expensive treatment and also does not open up the system to being gamed by providers, insurance companies, and/or patients. The second half of my book, Crisis of Abundance, makes one proposal, which is too complex to describe here. John Cochrane has another proposal that is not easy to describe, involving “insurance against becoming uninsurable.”
substacks referenced above:
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I don't understand why Hyman/Silver suggest going straight to "nothing but HSA" rather than the kind of straightforward "HSA + High Deductible" insurance that usually comes with HSAs?
I read the article and they don't seem to address that at all.
I've been on the HSA+HDI sort of plan for years and it's pretty straightforward and easy to understand what's going to happen. You have an incentive to save, and the insurance plays an actual insurance function.
Instead of that, they seem to be suggesting dumping Monopoly money amounts into the stock market via HSAs and then just letting the chips fall where they may. That doesn't seem like a particularly well thought out idea.
So much so that I just question their wisdom in general.
Medicare Advantage already does what your last link suggests, in effect. It's become and will continue to become the entire Medicare market. We get a set amount based on the Risk Score whenever a member enrolls in our plan.
Of course the insurance offerings that plans can concoct are regulated. Each regulation having its own story for good or ill.
Plans can already basically return some of the money as cash to members (Part B Buyback, Spendables cards). If you could do more while covering less, it would probably just turn into a race after the healthy people. It already is.
It doesn't necessarily do anything for health costs. If I can upcode more, then I have more revenue to have a bigger cash giveback. I do suppose cash is a better use of marginal dollars then lower copays, but government is never going to let the copays get high enough that people complain, and anyway it would destroy your STAR ratings. Mostly this stuff just moves around risk between plans that aren't wildly different in their benefits, some plan is still getting stuck with the high spenders.
The only thing that would really move the needle is if we let people pass money onto their kids in exchange for just letting themselves die. It's all that Hospital and LTC spend at the end that is very expensive and low ROI, but someone else is paying for it so why not.
There is a great deal of turmoil in the Medicare (and other government insurance) markets. Lots of post COVID claims trend and of course the IRA is a dumpster fire.