The Political Economist

A recent paper published in PNAS by Princeton professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton (last year's Nobel prize winner ) reported a stunning finding: there has been a significant increase in mortality and morbidity among middle-aged non-Hispanic white men and women in the US over the past 15 years . The causes have been attributed to suicide, and drug and alcohol abuse. The graphs below summarize the findings: Mortality in selected countries, 1990-2013. USW stands for US white. USH stands for US hispanics. Source: Case & Deaton (2015) "Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Vol. 112(49) December 8th 2015. Mortality by cause, US white non-Hispanics, 49-54. Source: Case & Deaton (2015) "Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112(49) Dec...

From TED talks comes this excellent presentation delivered by Hans Rosling , a professor of global health at Karolinska Institute (the institution that decides upon the Nobel prize in medicine). The focus of his talk is on disproving the myths about the developing world, which is, according to Rosling, actually quickly closing the gap with the rich countries and is moving forward the same direction (following the same pattern) of the Western world. They are now where the West was some 40-50 years ago. Basically he claims, and I agree, that we shouldn't generalize aid policies towards one area, since within this area there are huge within and across-country inequalities. The same policy on curing diseases cannot be applied towards the top income groups in South Africa and the low income groups in Nigeria (as he mentions in the video; or in this great slideshow: Africa is not a country! ). There's many more good points being made, so I recommend the video:  He has a few m...

or Could the Tiebout model be used to solve problems in health insurance? After the first part introduced the ‘voting with feet’ concept and touched upon migration patterns in the US to see whether this story actually holds, the second part will ask whether the voting with feet concept can be applied to the problem of US health care provision.  The individual mandate and the health insurance debate was one of the key points that will characterize Obama’s presidency. While arguments in favour suggest the individual mandate is necessary to address the adverse selection problem in the health insurance market (a classical paternalist approach), arguments against usually touch upon individual liberty issues of forcing upon the people to purchase insurance when they choose not to. There is also an interesting argument from Cochrane that the supposed market failure in the health insurance market exists due to over-regulation of that market (or in other words due to government fa...