The Angry Bear

Via Kevin MD Dr. Kenneth Lin writes another article on disappearing rural medical care.  this is part of the article… I recently attended a conference in Savannah, Georgia sponsored by the Association for Prevention Teaching and Research. Since I haven’t spent much time in Georgia outside of Savannah and Atlanta, the welcoming plenary on improving health outcomes for the state’s rural and underserved populations was eye-opening. According to Dr. Keisha...

NYT has an interesting article that might provide readers with the details of not only immigration but labor, food supply, agriculture in a mixed reaction to such issues.  I also wonder if planting went smoothly, for instance, as the details of lives get lost in the simplicities of bumper sticker, all or none politics.  This is of course only one small sector of of an economy affected by immigration but sometimes a story offers much insight if I ask the right...

Via Journel of American Medical Association (JAMA) is an invitation us to keep looking at the plight of rural hospitals in light of decreasing rural population. Dr. Diana Mason writes: But other rural communities, home to nearly 20% of the US population, are not so fortunate. Since 2010, 78 of the more than 2150 rural nonspecialty US hospitals have closed. While the closure rate has recently declined, the proportion of financially struggling rural hospitals...

Video series for “Rethinking Investment Incentives” As regular readers will recall, I contributed to the Columbia Center for Sustainable Investment’s book, Rethinking Investment Incentives: Trends and Policy Options (Columbia University Press, 2016). Now, the editors have put together a series of video teasers for most of the individual chapters, all of which can be seen here. As I wrote before, the book offers the perspectives of numerous experts in the...

Here is a working paper by Leonie Gerhards and Michael Kosfeld entitled I (Don’t) Like You! But Who Cares? Gender Differences in Same Sex and Mixed Sex Teams. The abstract reads as follows: We study the effect of likability on female and male team behavior in a lab experiment. Extending a two-player public goods game and a minimum effort game by an additional pre-play stage that informs team members about their mutual likability we find that female teams...

May industrial production: no change in trend This was a post I meant to put up Friday, but was pre-empted by the important housing news. May industrial production came in unchanged. But that didn’t stop Doomers, who had been silent about April’s big increase in manufacturing, from trumpeting its 0.4% decline (go ahead, just try to find their acknowledgement of April’s good number. You won’t.). So, let’s put industrial production in perspective. First, here...

I am always curious about why certain people make it a mission to get rid of things. I think it truly is about Addison Mitchell McConnell trying to erase the accomplishments of what the first black President Barack Obama did as the president. I did some rather easy digging and pulled up Wikipedia. here is what they said about Mitch. As a youth, Addison (Mitch) McConnell overcame polio. He received “government-provided healthcare” in Warm Springs saving him...

Diane Ravitch points to the New York State legislature in her blog this week. NY is a Blue State having gone Dem in presidential elections; however, the state legislature is divided with the Dems controlling the Assembly and Repubs the Senate. What makes the New York state legislature interesting is the emergence of a Blue Dog Democrat segment of the State Assembly, which sides with the Senate Republicans on various issues. Blue Dogs (which I kind of like as...

This is a Big Deal: housing permits and starts now a long leading negative I’ll have more to say next week, but let me just drop this right now: this morning’s housing report was a Big Deal. FRED doesn’t have the graphs yet, but here are the numbers from the Census Bureau cite. Graph of starts and permits: Note both have turned down significantly this year. Table of housing starts: The three month rolling average of starts, which smooths out the...