Kenneth Arrow wrote a paper in 1963, Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care. This paper tends to appear in debates regarding whether healthcare can be left to the market (like bread), or if it should feature heavy state involvement. Here I explain what the paper says, and to what extent it is true.
So lets see what the paper says.
Well, first of all, Arrow doesn't intent for the paper to be anything more than "an exploratory and tentative study of the specific differentia of medical care…
Two month ago there was an interesting debate on the effects of inequality on economic growth in the otherwise boring Spanish blogosphere. Here is my contribution to the debate, translated from Spanish.
First, if you can read Spanish, and if you want to read the entire debate, read the posts linked here.
If not, the summary goes like this: There are recent studies by the OECD (Cingano, 2014) and the IMF (Ostry et al. 2014) that are cited to support the thesis that inequality does harm growth (And, it is the…
Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting.
Economics
Are US companies too short-term oriented?
No
A somewhat skeptical writeup by Noah Smith here
I wrote about this here
Also at the ASI
Summing up Noah Smith's thoughts on macroeconomics
How important was colonial trade for the rise of Europe?
Estimating the social return to higher education: evidence from longitudinal and repeated cross-sectional data
I believe that higher education is to a g…
I lost some time arguing with a bunch of these climate change skeptics, and I thought it would be interesting to share what happened here for future reference.
To give you some context, this happened in a political debate FB group. Someone posted a comment praising Trump for walking out the Paris Agreement. I immediately commented that global warming is real, and that it is man-caused.
This was met by the following:
Someone posted a picture of varying levels of CO2 throughout the millenia (Starting 600 mil…
Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting.
Physics
A defense of the reality of time
Is inflationary cosmology science?
Technology
Boom: The future of supersonic flight?
Sergio Canavero: Will his head transplants roll?
Lockheed compact fusion reactor design about 100 times larger than first plans
UK Tokamak Energy startup has a test fusion reactor
Philosophy
Acton, deontology, and risk: Against the multiplicative model
Assessing Greene's Epist…
Collection of papers and articles that I’ve spotted since my previous links post that seem interesting.
Psychology
Why more highly educated people are less into conspiracy theories
Neural correlates of political attitudes: emotion and ideology in the brain
Perhaps less dissimilar than initially thought
Education as liberation?
Education may increase political violence in poorer countries?
Child SES does not explain the IQ-mortality gradient
In Norway
Analytic cognitive style and cognitive ability …