1. Samuel Preston and Jessica Y Ho on how reduced life expectancy in the United States need not implicate the health care system. I pointed out a similar argument in an earlier post. Here's a more spirited defense from Gary Becker.
2. Richard Posner and Gary Becker on the obesity epidemic, both making interesting, but not completely persuasive arguments. Posner argues that the growth in obesity, as well as its correlation with education, can be explained by a lack of information about the harms of fatty or calorie-laden foods. He argues that this implies that prevention campaigns that warn people of the dangers of fatty foods (through, for example, calorie labeling) are the best way to tackle the obesity epidemic.
Becker does not buy this (taking a not-so-subtle sweep at behavioral economics along the way), arguing that a fully-informed rational agent model can explain trends in body-weight. In particular, he argues that the development of effective pharmacotherapy for diseases like diabetes, hypertension and coronary artery disease may dissuade individuals from giving up unhealthy foods since the future cost of consumption are attenuated. He also criticizes Posner's position that obese individuals confer externalities on other members of society.
3. The NBER has a set of links to video lectures by John List and Michael Kremer on field experiments in economics and in developing countries, respectively. I've seen the latter set and it is quite good.
2 comments:
The Posner/Becker debate on obesity is an interesting one. I think that fat people definitely subsidize skinny people at least in insurance pools. But as Becker points out, if health insurance plans charged differential premiums based on obesity, then skinny people wouldn't be faced with paying these subsidies to fat people. At the same time, their article neglects what we know about the causes of obesity and how they might effect policies would be considered fair. Its only fair to charge higher premiums to fat people if being fat is their choice rather than something that is beyond their own control. But I think Mark and Colleen's study in Millbank shows that people think about these policies differently than this.
I also just read the Becker response in (1). This should seem obvious to health economists because hes basically pointing out the potential for omitted variable bias when interpreting differences in Y (health) to be solely a function of a single X (the health care system).
Let alone the fact that its a cross-country comparison, countries are very different from one another in ways other than their health care system (as Becker points out, one example of this is behavior) and theres not that many developed countries to compare to the US.
College economics professors always say that it makes you think differently about news articles, political debates, etc. I think its definitely true.
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