Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Without him, we wouldn't be here. Happy 25th Anniversary.

[A]s awful as Young's death is, her circumstances are hardly unique..... "According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 30 percent of 19-24 year olds are uninsured, more than any other group. Despite the conservative argument that young people are voluntarily refusing health coverage in favor of extra spending money, the reality is that high costs on the individual market put coverage out of reach.... Zachary Roth concluded, "[I]f Young's lack of insurance did contribute to her not seeking treatment sooner, it would be hard to find a starker or more compelling example of the need to fix our broken health insurance system. And the fact that she was a constituent of the man who's leading House Republicans' in their effort to block reform only underlines the point." In every modern democracy on the planet, those who get sick don't have to put off treatment because they lack coverage. It's time the United States join them.

I think this year must mark the fifteenth anniversary of my first letter to the Economist pointing out that the Big Mac is, in fact, not a homogeneous commodity worldwide - it differs from country to country in fat content, calorific value and even weight, according to local tastes. Thinking about it, the Big Mac Index can plausibly claim to be the major methodological forerunner of Freakonomics, as it combines the two methodological techniques of choosing "quirky" instruments more valuable for their amusement value than their validity, and not checking anything to see whether it's economically meaningful. Trivia point: Nick Leeson claimed to be able to distinguish the Big Macs sold in different SouthEast Asian countries in a blind test. I am not sure how the logistics of this one might have worked so it might be apocryphal.

The erosion of the Obama administration’s regulatory-reform plans has now begun in earnest: "At a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner announced that the administration had dropped one provision in its plan for a consumer financial protection agency — a requirement for banks and other financial services companies to offer “plain vanilla” products, like 30-year fixed mortgages and low-interest, low-fee credit cards. " There’s no good reason for this capitulation, except for the financial lobby has so effectively captured Congress that no reform would be able to get through with such a common-sense provision in place. This has nothing to do with the government “approving and disapproving a wide array of financial products”, it just says that anybody who wants to call themselves a bank should provide simple, basic banking products which aren’t prone to hidden fees and lucrative opacity. I fear that by the time Congress is done, the