Editorial advisory boards were an early attempt to stave off the disreputable reputation off comics. The best known of these was Fawcett's which included Admiral Byrd and Elanor B. Roosevelt (the daughter-in-law of Teddy, not the wife of Franklin), but True Comics also managed some notable names including George Gallup.
Koleman Strumpf, an economics professor at the University of Kansas, says these markets have been around since the beginning of our democracy and were especially popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.I wonder if this was an international phenomena.
"There was a period in the early part of the 20th century when this market literally existed right outside Wall Street," Strumpf says. It was outdoors, right on the curb, so it became known as the "curb market." "People would actively bet on all sorts of elections," he says. "And for sure, in the period right about now in October, there [were] huge amounts of betting activity."
Political betting was also an important tool for newspapers before the era of public opinion polling. Outlets would report on the action to get a sense of which candidate was winning.
A journalist reporting on the market "would list not only what the prices were, to give you an idea who was leading," Strumpf says, but "would also list who was making these investments or bets."
That meant that readers would know if the bets were being placed by specific traders — or by politicos from the New York Democratic political machine Tammany Hall, Strumpf says.
As I have outlined over my last two OECD health data spending posts, Canada is one of the world’s biggest per capita spenders when it comes to total health spending – the sum of both public and private. Indeed, both public and private health spending have grown in tandem over the last few decades. In US PPP$ in 2010 for the 34 OECD countries, Canada ranks seventh in terms of total health spending per person. Yet, it comes to physicians per capita, it ranks 26th. We rank 25th in the number of total hospital beds per capita, 25th in the number of nurses per capita, 21st for CT scanners and 20th for MRI units. While we are in the top ten per capita spenders, we are never in the top ten for any of these five health care resource indicators.While I am not sure I completely accept the idea of Iceland as a great comparator, either, it is pretty clear that the Canadian approach is still pretty expensive relative to the other first world countries.
I'm often asked what one education reform I think would make the biggest impact on American students' achievement. I don't like this question. The real answer--vastly decrease poverty--isn't going to happen anytime soonIt may not be in the cards, but poverty and the knock-on effects of poverty are hard to ignore in the context of United States education policy. It simply connects to too many different pieces. Neighborhood funding models for schools mean poor neighborhoods end up with under-resourced schools. High rates of incarceration increase issues like single parent families and foster care families. Lack of trust in social institutions makes short term planning much more rational.
Robert Kiyosaki, author of the bestselling Rich, Dad, Poor Dad series of financial advice books, is offering his fans yet another lesson in how the rich are different than you and me: they file for bankruptcy not because of ill health or unemployment related issues, but instead as a strategic business move.Kiyosaki is among the worst but he's not all that unrepresentative. If you feel up to it, the next time you're in a big bookstore take some time to browse the business section. Here and there, you'll find something interesting and intelligent or at least, helpful, but for the most part you'll encounter three profoundly embarrassing genres:
Rich Global LLC, one of the corporate arms Kiyosaki has done business under, filed for bankruptcy protection in August, after it was ordered to pay just under $24 million to the Learning Annex and its chairman Bill Zanker.
Kiyosaki was one of the small-time wealth guru mountebanks who made it to the big-time in the aughts by telling his forever falling behind audience that they could get ahead, they just had not learned how. The shtick behind the Rich Dad books was that Kiyosaki was sharing secret money-making strategies of the wealthy with his wage slave readers. The tips ran the gamut from ridiculous to illegal and downright hurtful and included advocating for insider trading, arguing for the purchase of multiple real estate properties with little or no money down and telling followers they could purchase stocks on margin via unfunded brokerage accounts.
"Being able to delay gratification—in this case to wait 15 difficult minutes to earn a second marshmallow—not only reflects a child's capacity for self-control, it also reflects their belief about the practicality of waiting," says [researcher Celeste] Kidd. "Delaying gratification is only the rational choice if the child believes a second marshmallow is likely to be delivered after a reasonably short delay."How about the poor irresponsible spenders who are hopelessly bad with money? According to Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard that's not the case.
Mullainathan claims that although planning is a central part of poverty, poor people are better at making financial decisions than the rich and middle class.
“If you go and stop people at a supermarket and ask them for their receipt and say, ‘Hey how much did you just spend,' middle class shoppers have no idea. The poor know what they just spent," he said.What about on the other side? Are the well off and educated consistently better with their finances? Perhaps not: (via Thoma)
But college-educated people were more likely than those with high school or less education to be above this 40 percent threshold - considered to be a risky amount of debt for most households.Another, more amusing example, comes from some of the same think tanks and pundits who promote the inequality-reflects-ability narrative. It's the idea that a small increase in the top marginal rate would create a large hardship on those close to the cutoff.
But as she observed the children week after week, she began to question the task as a marker of innate ability alone. "If you are used to getting things taken away from you, not waiting is the rational choice. Then it occurred to me that the marshmallow task might be correlated with something else that the child already knows—like having a stable environment."This is a massive finding for two reasons. One, it gets at the issue of trust and how important it is t be able to trust your fellows in order for society to function. In a low trust environment, there is a serious risk of perverse incentives (and it is easy to forget this). This may be especially true of issues like employment contracts -- if you can't trust employers to keep their part of the implicit social contract then it is hard to defer gratification.
Summers mentioned that for all the valid complaints that one hears about the state of American college education, there's a clear demand for it on the international stage so we must be doing something right. Many more foreign students come here to study than we send abroad, notwithstanding the generally higher cost structure of the American higher education sector.I actually think that this can be one of the weaknesses of market signals. Reputation persists even after fundementals have changed. The classic example of this, in my view, is the American Car Industry. If one were to go to Detroit in 1968 and talk about how bad decisions might eventually catch up with them, they would look silly. But when these decisions actually did catch up with them the damage was very hard to reverse.
Brooks says Obama's plan to do this with price controls is doomed for political economy reasons. A politically powerful coalition of elderly people and health care providers will block it. That's certainly plausible. But what's the alternative?
Brooks says the alternative is to insert an additional layer of rent-seekers into the dynamic by contracting Medicare services out to private health insurance companies.This approach always assumes two things: 1) that there is a functional market that can set prices independent of the insurance system. How many elderly patients pay out of pocket for major medical services in the United States and then brag about the transparent pricing? 2) that there are real efficiencies to be gained by a private firm that could not be availed by the government. Notice that the insurers are not the providers, we already have private hospitals. So the efficiency would have to come from somewhere else. For example, that the firm could simply billing procedures to reduce administrative overhead. But medical billing tends to be complicated and needing to interface with a lot of different systems/reporting structures reduces efficiency. Or they could set prices more saccurately, but then they are just another panel of experts that is not accountable to the electorate.
We assume that workers can simultaneously work as entrepreneurs (so that there is no occupational choice). This implies that each individual receives wage income in addition to income from entrepreneurship[.]This basically, all by itself, destroys the link between their model and real world experience. How many people do you know are able to do these two things at the same time? How can the time spent in your garage inventing Apple computers not reduce your ability to work at a demanding corporate job? How many people can draw a full wage and benefits while working for themselves on a small start-up? Can we really believe that there is no financial sacrifice at all?
Also, the authors assume that entrepreneurs do not put up any of their own wealth as startup capital for their ventures, and they assume no heterogeneity between worker/entrepreneurs. This means that it is just as easy - and no more risky - for a poor person to start a successful company as for a rich person to do so.
