Winter’s Haven

Here’s an important bulletin on “rescission” (the retroactive cancellation of individual health insurance policies) from the it’s-much-much-worse-than-we-ever-imagined department.
the probability of having your [health insurance] policy torn up given a massively expensive condition is pushing 50%. One in two.
Assuming for the moment that that is correct, there’s really only one word to properly describe individual [...]

Paul Krugman has written a very clear, short overview of the Democratic health reform proposal. One observation: I can’t think of a single reason why anyone who supports the proposal should prefer it to an out-and-out single-payer system.
Instead of simply taxing people and paying their medical bills, the government will mandate that everyone buy “private” [...]

The amount of money which American public schools waste is a major problem. In fact, it’s an utter catastrophe, albeit one that most people are completely unaware of. Andrew Coulson lays out the magnitude of this disaster:

In 1974-75, California spent $1,373 per pupil on k-12 public schooling. By 2006-07, it was spending $10,937. Adjusting the earlier [...]

The Economist magazine presents some useful data on military spending by the world’s biggest powers. Per person, Israel spends the most on its military, followed by the United States. Most developed states spend less than half of what the US does per person.
However, if one asks how much a state ought to spend on defense, [...]

In the wake of the news that NICE approved acupuncture and chiropractic treatments for lower back pain, Daniel Davies has written a fantastic article at Crooked Timber on how politics makes it much more difficult to rationally evaluate the effectiveness of treatments on the evidence.
Doing science is hard to begin with. When large amounts of [...]

That is the title of a Wired article about peaceniks and the remotely controlled attack aircraft used by the US Air Force. For a moment I thought that a bunch of hard-core pacifists had gone out and bought Stinger missiles. Just because it’s ethically consistent for pacifists to blow up unmanned drones doesn’t make the [...]

Some insightful observations from my favorite Marxist:

2. The Left is not proposing any viable alternative to capitalism. Whereas vulgar libertarians have their Econ 101, the [G20] protestors have nothing, bar a few money cranks and moralistic bleating about greed.What’s unforgivable here is that there are alternatives. But no-one’s interested. Why don’t we hear about market [...]

On the Wired science blog, Brandon Keim argues that Bush’s stem cell policy was neither anti-science nor crassly political, but rather followed from a legitimate ethical dispute.
Keim says that “there are plenty of examples of the Bush administration skewing scientific facts for political ends, the ban on stem cell funding wasn’t one of them.”, from [...]

I’ve been meaning to lay out my views on this question for a long time, but now Will Wilkinson has done it for me, and probably done a better job of it than I would have.
His post is a bit long, however, so let me summarize. Some very real market failures lead to underinvestment [...]

Kellogg Drops Phelps
Would you want YOUR KIDS to become pot-smoking Olympic gold medalists?!?