economics
mikethemadbiologist | April 24, 2007I've invented a new unit of time, the Samuelson Unit, which is the length of time required for the Social Security system to become 'bankrupt.' Oddly enough, Social Security is always DOOMED roughly 34 years from the time of the estimate. In other words, Social Security is doing fine, and will continue to be solvent. Today, the NY Times had a pretty picture illustrating the Samuelson Unit in its full glory*:
Notice that the estimate every year has been that Social Security will be unable to meet its benefits 30-38 years out...for the last fourteen years. Got it? I loves me my Samuelson…
mikethemadbiologist | April 24, 2007Named after economist Robert Samuelson, who, along with the Concord Coalition, is fighting the Glorious War on Social Security. It's inspired by the Friedman Unit, named after NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who predicted for several years running that the "next six months" will be critical in Iraq. So what's a Samuelson Unit?
The length of time it takes for the Social Security Trust Fund to go bankrupt. As Atrios puts it:
Well, another year and not much has changed. Last year they said Social Security could pay full scheduled benefits without any program changes until 2040, and now it…
mikethemadbiologist | April 20, 2007Hopefully, talking about Social Security will be marginally less inflamatory than evolution or global warming, and it illustrates many of the points made in various discussions. First, though, I want to clear the deck about some misconceptions about Social Security (I have a lot of the links here and here, so I won't repeat them below):
1) Social Security will most likely be solvent in perpetuity without any need for tax increases or benefit cuts. No, really. For even marginal tax or benefit alterations, the economy has to grow at a rate about 20% lower than the average U.S. historical…
mikethemadbiologist | April 16, 2007I found two good posts about taxes: one describes why we need them, and the other describes how much of your taxes go to pay for something you probably don't even think about.
First, the 'mystery' budget item: servicing the interest payments on the federal debt. From hilzoy (italics mine):
Total Receipts: 2,407
Total Outlays: 2654
Total Deficit: 248
Total Spent On Debt Service: 405.9
-- Yes, that's right: had we simply paid our bills on time, more or less, we would not only not be running a deficit, we would have $157.9 billion dollars to either refund to taxpayers or spend on some new…
mikethemadbiologist | April 11, 2007No, not those hideous boots! The Ug99 black stem rust fungus, a strain of Puccinia graminis. It doesn't kill people directly, but it could wipe out much of the world's wheat crop. As always, the developing world will probably be hit the hardest. And it's a potential failure of surveillance.
First, what the Ug99 fungus is:
The disease is Ug99, a virulent strain of black stem rust fungus (Puccinia graminis), discovered in Uganda in 1999. Since the Green Revolution, farmers everywhere have grown wheat varieties that resist stem rust, but Ug99 has evolved to take advantage of those varieties…
mikethemadbiologist | April 6, 2007The AFL-CIO has a very interesting website site that calculates how much CEOs are paid relative to the average U.S. worker. While useful, for many economic conservatives, it won't matter at all, since, well, that's why they're conservatives. But I've devised my own comparison that will matter to even the most doctrinaire conservative:
The annual salary of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve ($186,000).
Since the average CEO of a Standard & Poor 500 company makes $14.78 million, that means that the average CEO makes 79 times more than the Fed Chairman.
I would argue that most…
mikethemadbiologist | March 23, 2007The subprime loan disaster is starting to hit suburbia. And as you might guess, the taxpayer is left to pick up the externalized costs of lenders. From the NY Times (italics mine):
In a sign of the spreading economic fallout of mortgage foreclosures, several suburbs of Cleveland, one of the nation's hardest-hit cities, are spending millions of dollars to maintain vacant houses as they try to contain blight and real-estate panic.
In suburbs like this one, officials are installing alarms, fixing broken windows and mowing lawns at the vacant houses in hopes of preventing a snowball effect, in…
mikethemadbiologist | March 17, 2007By 'End Times', I'm not referring to the significant global decrease in food production, or the Far East trade war over sand (I'm not kidding--Indonesia has declared a sand embargo against Singapore). Putting those two news items together does have an apocalyptic feel to it. No, what I'm referring to is that mortgage foreclosures and homeowner vacancies have reached record highs (also see here).
Over at Tapped, Dana Goldstein describes a cause of the phenomenon:
The story is always the same: clever marketing campaigns prey on families in blighted neighborhoods, promising them the American…
kcontreary | February 28, 2007Over at The Frontal Cortex, Jonah has a blog referring to a WSJ article impugning economic jurisdiction in questions outside the traditional bounds of economics. Specifically, the article cites a paper recently publicized by Cornell University claiming to establish a causal link between early childhood television viewing and autism. The thrust of the article is that the statistical tools used by economists are ill-equipped to address such questions and should be treated as suspect by the natural sciences.
The answer, as with all things, is a bit of yes and a bit of no.
I would like to begin…
mikethemadbiologist | February 19, 2007If you thought Bernie Kerik was bad, wait until you hear about Republican presidential hopeful Rudi Giuliani's new best friend: Paul Singer, a long time Republican campaign contributor who has pledged to raise $15 million for Giuliani. The phrase "vulture capitalist" might sound trite, but when you hear how Singer made (and still makes) his fortune, you'll agree there's no other way to describe it.
Singer was the inventor of what are known as "vulture funds." A vulture fund buys discounted international loans from developing countries and then sues the country and forces it to repay the…
mikethemadbiologist | February 11, 2007In light of El Jefe Maximo's State of the Union speech, where he discussed Social Security privatization, I've dredged from the archives this very short post about a side of Social Security that is completely ingored in the whole debate.
Roughly one-third of all Social Security payouts go to the disabled. One thing I haven't heard in all of the discussion about private Social Security accounts is how these accounts would work for the disabled. Suppose you're 45, middle class, and unable to work anymore. How much could your private account be worth? Maybe the privatizers haven't answered this…
mikethemadbiologist | February 9, 2007I'm at a meeting in D.C. about antibiotic resistance, so I've left the Blogerator 9000 to fire up this post from the archives about a drug company executive's explanation of how drugs are priced. It's remarkable--and frustrating--that nobody has picked up on the basic message: drug prices are consumer driven, not R&D expenditure driven.
This is a headline from the June 1st, 2005 edition of ScripNews (subscription only; so I'm a little behind in my reading-what scientist isn't?). Here's the punchline for lazy stupids that don't like to read: the head of Pfizer has admitted that the cost…
mikethemadbiologist | January 31, 2007Not that it seems to help. But, by way of Gadflyer.com, I came across this table which lists national weekly gas prices.
2006 is the only year from 1993-2006 where gas prices dropped in the first week of November and then rose dramatically (one percent per week). Every other year prices either flat-lined or continued to decrease. Just something to think about...
retrospectacle | January 29, 2007A law and economics professor at Vanderbilt, Dr. Joni Hersch, has recently published an interesting paper comparing the incomes of 2,084 legal immigants to the USA to their skin tone. Perhaps unsurprisingly, persons with lighter skintones were found to make more money on average than darker-skinned persons; in fact, 8-15% more. Taller immigrants made more than shorter ones, with a 1% increase in income for every extra inch of height.
Hersch took into consideration other factors that could affect wages, such as English-language proficiency, education, occupation, race or country of origin,…
mikethemadbiologist | January 24, 2007No, I'm not referring to Bush's State of the Union, but Senator James Webb's response. What's interesting is how hard he hit the economics:
There are two areas where our respective parties have largely stood in contradiction, and I want to take a few minutes to address them tonight. The first relates to how we see the health of our economy - how we measure it, and how we ensure that its benefits are properly shared among all Americans....
When one looks at the health of our economy, it's almost as if we are living in two different countries. Some say that things have never been better. The…
mikethemadbiologist | January 23, 2007Let's just say, for sake of argument, that Bush's proposed tax plan for healthcare would actually lower premiums. There's something rather obvious that his plan seems to miss.
If insurers make less money through premiums, they will find other ways to recoup their diminished income.
How would they do this? Here are three ways, all of which are happening now, so they can't be viewed as far-fetched:
1) People with pre-existing conditions won't be accepted by private plans.
2) More and more procedures will be defined as 'non-essential', so they will not be covered (note: this also includes…
retrospectacle | January 18, 2007I came across a fascinating post over at Econobrowser about the striking correlations between a) and area's wealth and its proximity to oceans and rivers and b) an islands wealth and the time it spent as a European colony. Needless to say, both are positively correlated. Below the fold is a map of "global weath" as a function of GDP per kilometer. Interesting stuff, and very telling about the burgeoning economies of several notable "developing" nations. But how does this line up with global pollution?
(Click below the fold to view global wealth map and pollution map.)
This map assigns a…
mikethemadbiologist | January 15, 2007You'll hear a lot today about Martin Luther King and race. But what you won't hear nearly as much about, particularly from conservatives, is his views on economic justice. I think that his views on race were inseparable from his economic views which were based on a universal call for justice and equality for all. From a speech he gave to striking sanitation workers in Memphis on March 18, 1968 (italics mine):
My dear friends, my dear friend James Lawson, and all of these dedicated and distinguished ministers of the Gospel assembled here tonight, to all of the sanitation workers and their…
mikethemadbiologist | December 31, 2006Finally, there might be a Democrat who speaks my language about deficits and budgets. From Tapped (italics and bold mine):
I think the honest answer to this question is that there's a tension between our desire to eliminate the deficit and create a stronger economic foundation and eliminate some of the debt our children will inherit, there's a tension between that deficit and our need to invest and make America stronger for the 21st century.
I think that, if we're honest, you cannot it, it's just common sense in the math, have universal health care, and invest in energy, and make a serious…
mikethemadbiologist | December 22, 2006At a recent conference I attended (pdf file), one speaker (Dominique Monnet) presented a very interesting observation about the relationship between the number of different antibiotics available and the amount of antibiotics prescribed.
Quite simply, as the number of potential competiting drugs increases, the amount of drugs prescribed increases:
(from here; the y-axis is the number of daily doses per 1000 residents)
There are at least two reasons for this pattern:
1) Advertising aimed at doctors and hospitals is more likely to increase use simply because doctors will be influenced to use…