Another post on Unions

Erik Loomis is distressed by a piece in the Atlantic asking about the plastic surgery benefit for teachers in Buffalo, New York. Erik focuses on the fact that the teachers union is willing to give up the benefit if a new contract settlement can be reached and that there are many legitimate reasons to have reconstructive surgery available (e.g. a child who had serious facial damage after a car accident).

Jordan Weissmann, the author of the Atlantic article, focuses on the salaries of the teachers (mean of $52K) and the deadlock on contract negotiations. In some ways, I think everyone is missing the big picture. Teachers are professionals who work for a contract. We do not micromanage the compensation packages of hedge fund managers, either. It is true that teachers are paid directly by the government. But the carried interest exemption (which sets tax rates at 15%) is just as much of a decision to spend money.

After all, selectively taxing one group less is the same as a subsidy.

Put this another way, we could pay teachers less if we made their salaries exempt from income tax. Now this does not mean that specific benefits can't be renegotiated. Nor do I want to deny the reality of increasing health care costs (which are a problem everywhere in the United States right now) which can make benefits that were once reasonable seem excessive. But is it really constructive to focus on whether the teacher's health care plan is correctly designed as a matter of public policy. Or should be be looking at the long term drivers of malaise in our society.

Of course, looking at the long term drivers of malaise means facing up to our low tax rates (guarenteed to be a painful discussion) and dealing with the rate of growth in medical costs.

Reading assignments

Busy week but I wanted at least to throw out a few links to things I'd like to be writing about:

Felix Salmon's take on a subject is always appreciated, particularly when he's focusing on a topic we try to keep an eye on (like for-profit schools).

And staying on the education beat, Dana Goldstein collects almost two centuries worth of teacher-bashing.

The last few news cycles have brought lots of pieces about Bain. A few of them have been really interesting.

I've come across a site for the truly hardcore pop culture nerds, particularly those obsessed with stand-up comedy. There's even an intellectual property angle.

And I have got to make time for this.

Worthwhile Canadian Post

Go and read. The implications for long term care in Canada and the United States is a scary prospect given the retiring baby boom and the need to find ways to care for older adults.

Frontiers in Car development

Some interesting legal questions:

All told, the changes may not best the leap from horses to cars, but they are big enough to undermine many of the legal systems we rely on for things like insurance, not to mention criminal law. If a car doesn't require a driver, can a 12-year-old "drive" to his friend's house? Can a drunk person drive home from a bar? How will insurance work if people share driverless cars? Courts and legislators will be sorting those out for years to come.

Actually, I kind of like the idea of cars that can take home intoxicated people safely. Living in a community with a lot of college students, sub-urban road planning, and a lot of bars, I see a lot of accidents. I worry that some of them might have been prevented with better transportation options. Now, obviously, my preference would be improvements in public transit. But driverless cars might well be a good alternative for people who would like to go out but have limited options for coming home.

Tyler Cowen on Health Care

Tyler Cowen points out a potentially serious issue with health care costs.

The U.S. median wage for 2010 was $26,363. The average health care insurance premium today is over $15,000 and by 2021 it may be headed to $32,000 or so (admittedly that estimate is based on extrapolation). Therein lies the problem

Of course, to me this number just argues for single payer health care (which can bend the curve) and innovation to try and bring cost controls to the medical profession.  Now is it not contradictory to argue for both innovation and greater government  control?  In a sense it is, except that the market has formidable barriers to entry that cannot be easily be navigated.

So, for example, a team of nurses and a pharmacist could not form a company to treat twenty and thirty years for their minor health issues.  Nor do we have a clear distinction between major medical insurance (what if I end up in the ER) versus standard health care insurance (which removes the cost from the patient and is subsidized by the government).

On the other hand, maybe I am discounting the possible benefits of the exchanges?

Health Care on Nights and Weekends

Aaron Carroll has a smart point about the limitations of the current office visit model of health care.  He looks at the percentage of people who have trouble getting care on nights and weekends. It seems that we don't do especially well, even on international standards:

Yeah, we beat Canada. But we lose to almost every other country. Almost two thirds of Americans have trouble getting care on nights, weekends, and holidays. You know what? A significant amount of the week is filled with nights, weekends, and holidays. Especially if you don’t want to miss work. It’s fine to believe that people should try and see the doctor in the office. But if you want that to happen, then you need the office to be available. If retail clinics do a much better job in that respect, you can’t complain when people make use of them

I think that there are two points of interest here.  One, while Canada has a laudable health care system, it has flaws too and so a straight out effort to clone it might overlook opportunities to do better.

The second is that these visits don't even have to be expensive.  Nurses in small retail clinics (you do not even have to have a medical doctor) could diagnose a lot of minor conditions, refer patients to emergency rooms in a crisis, and give instructions for minor care.  Now consider that Pharmacies are open 24 hours in a lot of places.  They have a medical professional with a doctorate behind the counter who is an expert on medications.  Why could pharmacists not prescribe based on the Nurse's diagnosis.  Both pharmacists and nurses are cheaper than medical doctors, used to shift work, and highly trained professionals.

Why could they not do a lot more to simultaneously reduce costs (as clinics are inexpensive, provide an alternative to hyper-expensive emergency rooms, and could get patients seen faster) and improve service (would you spend $75 to get easy treatment for an infection at 11 pm on a Saturday night?).

Why aren't me trying out these sorts of innovations?

Thinking about past and future

while listening to an Austrian techno-musician do dance mixes of the great Lil Hardin Armstrong.

I thought I was done with IP stories for a while

But I can't let this one pass unnoted. From Propublica (via Felix Salmon):

Right now, if you want to read the published results of the biomedical research that your own tax dollars paid for, all you have to do is visit the digital archive [1] of the National Institutes of Health. There you’ll find thousands of articles on the latest discoveries in medicine and disease, all free of charge.

A new bill in Congress wants to make you pay for that, thank you very much. The Research Works Act [2] would prohibit the NIH from requiring scientists to submit their articles to the online database. Taxpayers would have to shell out $15 to $35 [3] to get behind a publisher’s paid site to read the full research results. A Scientific American blog said it amounts to paying twice.

Things I wish I had time to write about -- the growth fetish

Felix Salmon has an excellent post that uses Bain as a jumping off point to raise points like this:

Private equity is by no means unique in this respect: it happens at pretty much every public company, too. John Gapper, today, has a column about the way it destroys values at struggling technology companies:

Most public companies are run by people who hate folding ’em, and instead keep returning to the shareholders and bondholders for more chips…

Few senior executives, when debating options for a technology company in decline, admit defeat and run it modestly. Instead, they cast around for businesses to buy, or try to hurdle the chasm with what they have got. Sometimes they succeed but often they don’t, wasting a lot of money along the way.

It goes against their instincts to concede that the odds are so stacked against them that it is not worth the gamble. Mr Perez would have faced a hostile audience if he’d admitted it to the citizens of Rochester, Kodak’s company town in New York, but its investors would have benefited.

At many companies, then, both public and private, the optimal course of action is a modest one — run the business so that it makes a reasonable profit, and can continue to operate indefinitely. If you chase after growth, you often end up in bankruptcy: that’s one reason why the oldest companies in the world are all family-run. Families, unlike public companies or private-equity shops, don’t need growth: they’re more interested in looking after their business over the very, very long run.

If I had time, I'd really like to explore the connection between this and an earlier OE post on the growth fetish:

It's obvious that our economy is suffering from a lack of growth but for a while now I've come to suspect that in a more limited but still dangerous sense we also overvalue growth and that this bias has distorted the market and sometimes encouraged executives to pursue suboptimal strategies (such as Border's attempt to expand into the British market).

Think of it this way, if we ignore all those questions about stakeholders and the larger impact of a company, you can boil the value of a business down to a single scalar: just take the profits over the lifetime of a company and apply an appropriate discount function (not trivial but certainly doable). The goal of a company's management is to maximize this number and the goal of the market is to assign a price to the company that accurately reflects that number.

The first part of the hypothesis is that there are different possible growth curves associated with a business and, ignoring the unlikely possibility of a tie, there is a particular curve that optimizes profits for a particular business. In other words, some companies are better off growing rapidly; some are better off with slow or deferred growth; some are better off simply staying at the same level; and some are better off being allowed to slowly contract.

It's not difficult to come up with examples of ill-conceived expansions. Growth almost always entails numerous risks for an established company. Costs increase and generally debt does as well. Scalability is usually a concern. And perhaps most importantly, growth usually entails moving into an area where you probably don't know what the hell you're doing. I recall Peter Lynch (certainly a fan of growth stocks) warning investors to put off buying into chains until the businesses had demonstrated the ability to set up successful operations in other cities.

But the idea of getting in on a fast-growing company is still tremendously attractive, appealing enough to unduly influence people's judgement (and no, I don't see any reason to mangle a sentence just to keep an infinitive in one piece). For reasons that merit a post of their own (GE will be mentioned), that natural bias toward growth companies has metastasised into a pervasive fetish.

This bias does more than inflate the prices of certain stocks; it pressures people running companies to make all sorts of bad decisions from moving into markets where you don't belong (Borders) to pumping up market share with unprofitable customers (Groupon) to overpaying for acquisitions (too many examples to mention).

As mentioned before we need to speed up the growth of our economy, but those pro-growth policies have to start with a realistic vision of how business works and a reasonable expectation of what we can expect growth to do (not, for example, to alleviate the need for more saving and a good social safety net). Fantasies of easy and unlimited wealth are part of what got us into this mess. They certainly aren't going to help us get out of it.

Things I wish I had time to write about -- the future that was

Check out this fascinating series of predictions from the Saturday Evening Post circa 1900:

Photographs will reproduce all of nature’s colors… [They will be transmitted] from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence, snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later.

Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world. A husband in the middle of the Atlantic will be able to converse with his wife sitting in her boudoir in Chicago. We will be able to telephone to China quite as readily as we now talk from New York to Brooklyn.

Man will see around the world. Persons and things of all kinds will be brought within focus of cameras connected electrically with screens at opposite ends of circuits, thousands of miles at a span.

Rising early to build the furnace fire will be a task of the olden times. Homes will have no chimneys, because no smoke will be created within their walls.

Refrigerators will keep great quantities of food fresh for long intervals.

Fast-flying refrigerators on land and sea will bring delicious fruits from the tropics and southern temperate zone within a few days. The farmers of South America… whose seasons are directly opposite to ours, will thus supply us in winter with fresh summer foods which cannot be grown here.

Once again a knowledge of obscure pop culture saves the day

Impressionist Will Jordan used to do a routine built around the idea of a threat, an actor kept under contract because of a resemblance to one of the studio's stars. The point of a threat was two-fold: to give the studios a ready replacement if a star dropped out and to let the stars know that they could be replaced.

I was reminded of threats when I came across this section of Felix Salmon's latest instalment of the adventures of Ben Stein:

But my favorite bit of the complaint is where he complains that the ad which did end up running, featuring Peter Morici, is “an explicit misappropriation of Ben Stein’s likeness and persona, which is an explicit violation of Ben Stein’s rights of privacy and of publicity, barred by California law”.

In other words, this ad, while it might look to all the world as though it features a real economist who’s much more qualified on such matters than Ben Stein, is in fact an illegal violation of Ben Stein’s privacy, which uses the likeness of Ben Stein. Maybe Stein thinks that Morici should wear a long blonde wig, or something, to make him look less Stein-esque?

According to most science fiction shows, androids of the future should have no problem with "seven minutes"

Nice Observation

This post was hoisted from the comments in Megan McArdle's website and it makes a point that we often forget: the eventual chance of death is 100% and the hazard of death is tightly associated with how long you have lived so far.  Once you make it out of childhood, many people live their 20's and 30's free of serious health concerns.  It's not atypical to find such people, at least.  One the other hand, how common is it for 80 year olds to not have at least one health issue that effects either risk of death or quality of life?

With this special offer, you can watch the Super Bowl on your laptop absolutely for free!!

Well, free is a small stretch. You will need an HDTV tuner stick, but those are cheap (you can probably find one for thirty and change) and most come with a small but surprisingly effective antenna. Plug it into your USB port and you're good to go.

I recently heard a technology reporter talking about how big it would be when someone finally figured out a commercially viable way for people to watch the Super Bowl on their computers. It struck me as a perfect ddulite moment, gushing over an anticipated technology while ignoring an existing one that had all the same essential features.

This tendency to prefer next year's toy to this year's tool is one of the ddulites' costliest traits because it leaves good, useful technology under-recognized and under-utilized. Waiting for the next big thing (like hydrogen fuel-cells or geo-engineering) can cause us to put off implementing existing technologies (plug-in hybrids, ground-source heating and cooling, etc.).

What I don't like about this graph

Don't get me wrong. This Wikipedia graph carries a lot of information -- I use it all the time -- but there's a counter-intuitive quality about it that bothers me and I have no idea how to fix it.

The problem is that changes in the x-axis mean more or less the opposite of changes in the y-axis. Smaller intervals between new laws and larger jumps in duration both indicate increased copyright protection.

This wouldn't be a problem if we were plotting these with a line -- with lines we're used to thinking in terms of slope -- but here the natural impulse is to think in terms of area, thus making the 1976 and 1998 laws look like fairly minor changes.

One more complaint, all but one of the states had copyright laws before 1790 so the law passed that year was more of a formalization than an extension. For most of the states, there was a period of almost fifty years without a major extension. The twenty-two year interval before the 1998 act really was exceptionally short.