In a week when we took on the issues of health care and immigration, our most contentious issue turned out to be the complexity of arithmetic. We also touched on some odd Christmas gifts and the solutions to some old puzzles.
I’ll be back, of course, on Monday. But to tide you over the weekend, you might want to check out the interview with John Allison, the former CEO of BB&T, which is part of the “What Went Wrong” series over at BigThink. Needless to say, I can find parts to disagree with, but overall I think it’s one of the most insightful interviews yet in this series. A choice quote:
If you want to really think about what happened in the housing crises, it was a government policy, through Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and affordable housing policies, what they call the community reinvestment act, etc., that created a massive misallocation of credit. If the government gets into allocating credit over time it will make sure we aren’t as productive as we should be. So the government regulations usually in the end look like credit allocations usually to those that are politically favored at the expense of making sure credit is allocated to the most productive segments in the economy. So I think government regulation in the long term is almost always destructive.
There is a particular reform that’s badly needed, but almost never talked about. We should stop the AMA from limiting the number of new doctors. They decide essentially how many slots exist for new medical students, and they rarely allow a new school to open. When a given school raises the number of new students, they threaten to revoke the schools accreditation. This obviously creates a shortage of doctors, which drives up their salaries. Also, since more people are competing for a limited number of medical school slots, the price of medical school is driven up. The cost of someone’s education is eventually passed on to their customers (at least on average).
Even with a giant health care debate raging, I almost never hear of this reform. It would obviously reduce the cost of health care and increase the availability of doctors. Of course, the AMA justifies the limit by insisting that they are “only accepting quality applicants.” But I know for a fact that schools reject thousands of qualified applicants a year, and some students get rejected one year and admitted the next. (?!) Quality control my butt. They’re fully aware that their limiting of new doctors drives up salaries. There’s actually a chapter on this in “Capitalism and Freedom,” and Friedman’s arguments are still true today.
Are you familiar with this, Professor Landsburg? I’m sort of surprised this topic hasn’t come up on this blog, but as I said before, I rarely see it anywhere.
GregS: I quite entirely agree with you. I’ll put this on my to-blog-about list.
Not a comment on healthcare, but not sure where to put it.
I’m troubled by your assertion, Professor Landsburg, Chapter 7, On What There Obviously Is, Page 68, “That’s free will, and you’ve got it, and you know you’ve got it.” Psychology is replete with examples of behavior under the control of variables of which the individual is not aware–let alone things that were “obvious” until they were found to be not so. Tor Norretranders has an epynomious book, _The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size_, (1998) in which free will is posited to be an illusion. Behavior is run off quite automatically under the control of internal and external stimuli, while consciousness trots along behind (by a half second) claiming credit. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_User_Illusion.
Edward Downie: Thanks for this. I did read the Norretranders book when it first came out, but I’m afraid my memory of it is vague; I should pull it off the shelf and have another look at it.
Whether or not this counts as a refutation of free will of course depends on what “free will” means; I think one could make a pretty good argument that the *sensation* of having free will *is* free will. (I also think one could make a pretty good argument to the contrary.) But regardless of how one uses words, the interesting question (or so it seems to me at this moment) is whether there is a useful macro-level description of behavior in which it is useful to invoke volitions as causal. I take Norretranders to be coming down on the side of something like a “no” answer to that question, and again I think I should reread it.
I don’t suppose you’ve discovered Bloggingheads.tv, have you? It’s a podcasting site for bloggers. There exists very little video/audio of you on the web, Professor Landsburg. Anyway, that website is one of the few places I’ve seen true honest conversations/debates happen. (There’s no audience to pander to, and no advertiser to please.) I, for one, would watch a Steven Landsburg bloggingheads video.
This is off-topic, and contrary to the Christmas spirit, but wrt to the earlier post on Red Cloud: today is the 153rd anniversary of the Battle of the Hundred Slain. The battle started at about noon Mountain time, I believe.