Best of xkcd: Natural Parenting
So long as I link to his terms of use Randall Munroe says it is OK to post his xkcd cartoons on this blog. Now that I subscribe to his cartoon feed (and his blog), I may do so more often. I’m thinking it’ll be a weekend thing, like this:
The Art of Thought Experiments
Ezra Klein cooked up a good one.
Imagine that John McCain had won the 2008 election [and] … decided to co-opt a longtime Democratic priority and reform the health-care system.
… How many Republicans would support the bill if it were their party that looked likely to benefit? How many House Democrats would stick with the plan if it was taxing some benefits and had no public option and a Republican president had his name on it? And if you think that the differences in vote composition would be dramatic — and I do — then what does that say about the usefulness of evaluating legislative fights on grounds of policy disagreements?
Maybe it isn’t so much that Congress is the graveyard for good ideas but that it isn’t even about ideas. They can only get through the iron gate by coincidentally being politically viable (for which the party affiliation of the president matters). I think I’ve just about said that before.
How The Health Summit Helps Pass Reform
I’ve been reading commentary about the President’s health summit last night and this morning and there seems to be confusion about what this was meant to achieve. Most everyone knows that bipartisanship was not going to suddenly break out yesterday, so what was the point? It seems clear to me that the summit was designed to help corral Democratic votes, first in the House for the Senate bill and then in the Senate for amendments through reconciliation.
Did it succeed? The biggest problem was that House Democrats from swing districts were too frightened by Republican opposition to vote. The summit did two things for them. First it redefined the debate from Democratic leadership against moderate Democrats to all Democrats against all Republicans. This appeals to moderate Democratic partisanship and helps motivate the Democratic base. Second it role played the Democratic-Republican issue debate at length, so individual members could see how it’s done. The President didn’t have to decisively win the debate, he just had to demonstrate that the issue is not a loser for Democrats. Given that no Republican votes are needed, that’s probably going to be enough to pass the bill.
WordPress Plug-In Plug: Editorial Calendar
If you’re not a WordPress blogger, this post may not be of much interest to you. In that case, try this one from the archives.
A friend from my Go playing days, Zack Grossbart, is also a skilled programmer and IT project manager. He’s led a team in building a WordPress plug-in called Editorial Calendar that is worthy of praise. In fact, it is the only plug-in I desired before I knew about it.
A problem that I (and Zack) recognized with the standard WordPress blog administration product is that the only way to view a collection of posts (past and future) is in one long list. If one schedules posts far into the future, as I do, a list is a very difficult way to manage them. You can’t quickly see which weeks or months are relatively full or empty. You can’t tell if your posts are on weekends or weekdays. Moving posts to different dates is a pain.
It occurred to me months ago that a standard calendar view would be far better. That’s what one would use if one blogged by pencil and paper, if that made any sense. That’s because it is intuitive. It leverages our natural ability to comprehend and reason spatially. When I learned Zack and company were building just that I was thrilled. Now that I’m using it, I’m very satisfied.
The Editorial Calendar allows one to view posts on a calendar (of course), to drag them from one day to another, to edit posts right from the calendar view, and to click on a date to enter a new post. How sensible! It ought to be in the standard WordPress implementation. Until it is, you can use it as a plug-in.
For more on the Editorial Calendar, visit its page, Zack’s blog entries about it, and watch the following short YouTube video.
How To Talk About Health Reform
A recent On Point episode is worth listening to if you want to learn how to talk about health reform (pro, not con). It is a good skill to have nowadays. I find health reform comes up a lot at social events. That could be just me though (now why would that be?).
In particular, listen for Uwe Reinhardt. He enters 15 or so minutes into the show (that’s a guess) and stays on to the end, along with other guests. Reinhardt knows how to talk about health reform. What I mean by that is he understands the issues and, more importantly, he can explain them simply.
That’s not easy, at least not for me. I get the issues, but finding the right way to talk about them is a challenge for me. That’s why I write and don’t go on the radio or TV (not that I’m asked much). So, I really appreciate listening to Reinhardt and others who can talk the talk.
Summetric Equilibrium
What do you call a negotiation game when neither side has any intention to negotiate?
Employer-Based Health Insurance: Setting Employees’ Share
The 2009 Kaiser/HRET employer health benefits survey found that employees pay 17% of the $4,824 annual premium for single coverage and 27% of the $13,375 annual premium for family coverage (all average figures). What determines the employee proportion of the premium?
A plausible purpose of the employee contribution is to take advantage of employee price-sensitivity. All other things equal, the higher the premium faced by an employee, the less likely it is that employee will purchase coverage. A firm can reduce its health care costs to the extent it is successful using price signals to encourage its workers to drop coverage, shift coverage to a less expensive plan within the firm, or to shift coverage to a spouse’s plan from another firm.
Dranove, Spier, and Baker (2000) developed a theoretical model that explains employees’ contribution levels as a source of encouragement on the part of employers for their workers to obtain coverage from their spouses’ employer. The authors found confirming evidence for their model with empirical estimates using 1993-1994 establishment data from at least one employer in each of ten states. The employee proportion of total premium is explained by firm and work force characteristics plausibly related to likelihood of spousal coverage including firm size, proportion of work force that is female, age distribution, full/part time breakdown, union status, wage distribution, flexible spending account offer, and premium level.
Gruber and McKnight (2003) also found empirical evidence based on the 1982-1996 versions of the Current Population Survey to support the hypothesis that as employees’ outside options increase their share of contributions rise. With 1997-2001 MEPS-IC data, Vistnes, Morrisey, and Jensen (2006) found a positive relationship between the proportion of two-earner spouses in the local labor market and employee premium contributions.
Abraham, Vogt, and Gaynor (2006/2007) applied MEPS-IC (1996) data to the question of how households choose among their employer-based insurance options. They found that employee contribution, marital status, wealth, household size, sector (federal vs. non-federal government), number of offers, types of offers (i.e. degree of choice of providers), cost sharing, and income are relevant to the choice. Estimates of own-price elasticity revealed that households are more sensitive to changes in price of plans with the least provider network restrictions. The investigators also note that motivating workers to exit employer plans by increasing the employee contribution may also cause the employer’s risk pool to become more adverse. The resulting higher premiums will partially offset the savings from fewer covered lives.
Finally the authors also consider instances in which firms offer a financial incentive for employees not to enroll in offered coverage (according to the 2009 Kaiser/HRET employer health benefits survey 18% of firms offer incentives for employees to decline coverage). They found that providing a $1,000 payment to workers in one- (two-) offer households is associated with a reduction of 13.3% in the average probability of taking up coverage.
Employer-sponsored health insurance is a good deal for workers, due to the tax subsidy. But the association of health insurance with employment places yet another entity–the employer–between the individual and the health care they obtain. Employers’ interests therefore exert an influence on employee behavior through price signals. That provides an opportunity for another layer of distortion in the health care system, and one that is likely to be with us for a while.
References
J Abraham, W Vogt, M Gaynor. (2006/2007). How Do Households Choose Their Employer-Based Health Insurance. Inquiry 43:315-332.
D Dranove, K Spier, L Baker. (2000). ‘Competition’ Among Employers Offering Health Insurance. Journal of Health Economics 19:121-140.
J Gruber, R McKnight. (2003). Why Did Employee Health Insurance Contributions Rise? Journal of Health Economics 22: 1085-1104.
The Kaiser Family Foundation and Health Research & Educational Trust. (2009). Employer Health Benefits: Annual Survey.
J Vistnes, M Morrisey, G Jensen. (2006). Employer Choices of Family Premium Sharing. International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics 6(1):25-47.
Yale’s Psych 123: Food for Thought
We spend a lot of time thinking about food at my house. We read about food. In particular we are fond of Michael Pollan’s work on the subject. So, we’re very aware of the dysfunctions of food culture, economics, politics, and policy, particularly in the U.S. (for thoughtful posts in those areas visit Ezra Klein’s Food Archive).
So it seemed likely I’d enjoy Yale Psych 123, Kelly Brownell’s course on the psychology, biology, and politics of food. And I did. But I recommend starting with Pollan’s books The Botany of Desire, In Defense of Food, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma (I see he now has another book on food I haven’t yet read: Food Rules). They will provide most of the background that Brownell covers in the first half of his course but in a personal, narrative style that I found a little more engaging. With Pollan’s work as background, you can jump to lecture 12 of Psych 123.
I admit I listen to podcats in general and Open Yale Courses (OYC) content in particular for entertainment, not just for information. (All my reviews of OYC offerings are under the Yale tag.) Brownell’s course is packed with information and took a more entertaining turn in the second half in which his passion for his subject comes to the fore. His strong opinions about food policy are evident in later lectures, and a good way to entertain is to take a strong position.
Two parts of the class stood out as particularly interesting to me. The first occurred in the seventh lecture when Brownell described the starvation that occurred during the World War II siege of Leningrad. He read from The Great Starvation Experiment by Todd Tucker, which is worthy of a lengthy quote:
It was November 1941. The people of Leningrad were beginning the hungry winter, the coldest winter ever in the city with a proud history of miserably cold winters. … Hitler formulated an elegant plan, … [a] siege [that] would last 872 days….
As the siege dragged on, the temperatures plummeted to -40 degrees. The people collectively remembered that some wallpaper paste was made from potatoes. Wallpaper was stripped away from the living rooms and parlors of Leningrad, the paste scraped into pots and boiled into soup, a soup that tasted much more like paste then potatoes. Leather too could be boiled into a gelatinous mess that could briefly satisfy the sharpest pangs of hunger.
By 1943 the siege entered its second year, all the animals, wallpaper paste, and leather had been consumed. The people descended into a rare kind of hunger, a hunger that tested even the most fundamental taboos, people began eating corpses. …
By the beginning of 1944 as even corpses and children became scarce there were reports of people cutting off their own body parts and eating them in a desperate attempt to stave off hunger. The Red Army broke through the German lines on January 27, 1944 and the siege was lifted. In all, a million Soviets had starved to death in that city, more then a thousand per day. People were forbidden both officially and unofficially, from ever speaking of the cannibalism that took place during the siege. The Soviets had learned, to a frightening extent, how much the availability of food allows civilization to occur.
That’s powerful stuff. Much less powerful but just as interesting is the guest lecture by Stephen Teret (number 19), an expert in the application of litigation as a tool for the promotion of public health. He’s a very entertaining lecturer and tells some humorous stories. Listen to his lecture alone for a bit of edu-fun.
I also like one of Brownell’s final assignments. He asks students to write and try to publish an op-ed on a food-related issue. As someone who believes in the power of the 650-word blog post/op-ed, I think this is an excellent assignment. If you can’t make the case for one idea in a piece of that length you’ll have a hard time getting anyone to pay attention to you. (I write this with awareness that this post is approaching 900 words. We can’t win them all.) If any of Brownell’s future students wish to publish their op-ed on this blog, send it my way and I’ll consider it.
Throughout the class, but particularly in the final lectures, there is much made about the parallels in the evolution of culture and policy between food/obesity and other threats to public health like guns, alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes. Brownell and other champions for better nutrition through policy view victories in other arenas as models for what might one day be achieved for food.
Perhaps. But food is fundamentally different from those other threats. Everyone must eat. Not everyone must use a gun, drink alcohol, use drugs, or smoke. Moreover, food choices are intricately bound with socio-economic and cultural forces in ways that differ from some of the other threats mentioned. For these reasons, changing the culture and policy of food will be more challenging than that of, say, cigarettes. I’m glad folks like Brownell and Pollan are trying, but I think victory is a long way off. A good first step is for more people to pay attention to their work, including you.
Obama’s New Democratic Populism
There is something new going on in the Democratic Party. The President’s top domestic priority, health reform, ran into determined and increasingly effective Republican obstruction and misinformation. Opinion polls registered growing public opposition built on the foundation of Republican attacks. The Democrats lost a special election in a normally safe seat. Democratic Senators and Representatives panicked and loudly expressed their desire to seek compromise with Republicans and/or abandon the issue. How did the President react?
He could have moved rightward, adopting a Republican issue (tort reform?) as his own and intentionally antagonizing Democratic liberals. Bill Clinton was notorious among Democrats for maneuvers like this (remember “triangulation”?). He could have fired his cabinet, making a clean break with an unsuccessful team. That move helped seal Jimmy Carter’s fate in 1980. Instead, Obama stuck to his original plan, carefully designed from the beginning to reach for major policy goals while maximizing interest group support. He tweaked his position to add popular cosmetic elements (insurance company rate review) and eliminate unpopular ones (cornhusker kickback). Then he stage-managed a confrontation with Republicans to emphasize the shallowness of their appeals to bipartisanship. When he calls the question, chances are he’ll have the votes.
Two things are striking about this response: its confidence and its populism. Barack Obama trained as a community organizer in Chicago. He spent years training community leaders to use the power of populist confrontations to win concrete, lasting policy achievements. That’s how community organizations are built. He also knows that most of his supporters are motivated by symbolic issues with an easily identifiable villain (like ending the anti-trust exemption for insurance companies), so he should campaign on those instead of on the policy elements that will actually have the biggest impact (exchanges and subsidies). Furthermore, he apparently understands that Independents want to see an open process with bipartisan intent, but, again, the policy specifics don’t matter as much to them. So the recipe for success is clear: build an interest group coalition around concrete, winnable issues, emphasize populist components in the campaign, make highly visible overtures to Republicans, and then set up confrontations with entrenched opponents on your terms.
As a candidate Barack Obama promised to change politics. Few thought this was what he meant, but as a former organizer myself this is definitely change I can believe in.
How Many Spaces Between Sentences?
This is a bit of silliness you won’t see often here. Skip it if you’re in a serious mood. Don’t skip it if what you are serious about is typesetting.
How many spaces should one put between sentences? My co-bloggers Ian and Steve both use two. See those huge gaps in their posts (Steve’s and Ian’s)? I do! (No I’m not bitter about it.)
I dropped the double-space habit years ago and am firmly in the one-space camp (no rocket ships). I’m so firmly in that camp that when I co-author papers, grant proposals, and other writing endeavors I frequently edit out all those extra spaces that the two-spacers think are required (global find/replace makes this trivial).
Maybe you weren’t even aware of this debate. Wikipedia has lengthy entry on the subject.
The use of a single space after the concluding punctuation of a sentence is the modern convention for professional typesetting, final, and published work (e.g. books, journals, and periodicals).[11][12][13][14] The use of a double space after a sentence has reversed nearly completely, primarily because of the widespread use of proportional fonts.[15][16]
What’s your opinion? Are you in the we-are-right-dammit-one-space-camp or the if-it-was-good-enough-for-grandpa-two-space-group?
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