We lost our unity.

Statistical methods and empirical research David A. Freedman‘s Statistical Models: Theory and Practice (2009) is a marvellous book. It should be mandatory reading for every serious social scientist — including economists and econometricians — who don’t want to succumb to ad hoc assumptions and unsupported statistical conclusions! In the social and behavioral sciences, far-reaching claims are often made for the superiority of advanced quantitative methods —...

During the – 1997 Asian financial crisis – when the IMF intervened and imposed harsh structural adjustment packages on the impacted countries (cuts in spending and interest rate hikes), we learned that IMF officials would swan in from Washington to, for example, Seoul, for a weekend, hole up in expensive hotels and by the end of the weekend profess to know everything about the country and what was good for it. Austerity followed. This is the way the IMF work. They apply mainstream New...

Charles Gaba at ACA Signups in Michigan has been doing the yeoman’s labor of tracking Medicaid, Chips (for children) and the ACA. A good blog to read. He is my go-to person for information on the ACA, etc. CMS releases June 2023 enrollment data: Medicaid/CHIP enrollment dropped another 1.2 million as #MedicaidUnwinding ramped up, ACA Signups, Charles Gaba via the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS): In June 2023, 92,614,205...

Blog We can’t let culture war push us off track to net zero Rishi Sunak has ripped up the UK’s consensus on net zero, let's pick up the pieces. By Alex Chapman 05 October 2023 The Prime Minister has decisively thrown off his ​“steady as we go”...

This is the upper end or the delivery of product and care of the healthcare food chain. If you want to improve healthcare delivery pricing, you might want to go down a couple of levels more also. The costs of pharma and healthcare supplies are areas to investigate. It may have a bit more of an impact. Rituxan at Medicare prices or private insurance prices. There is a price in between which can be achieved and better than today’s prices. A...

Wednesday (October 4, 2023) found more than 75,000 union employees of Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation’s largest not-for-profit health providers, walked off the job, marking the largest health care worker strike in US history. Kaiser Permanente unionized health care workers go on strike across dozens of locations, cnn.com, Samantha Delouya. Open Thread – NPs and PAs are Handling Primary Care Visits, Angry Bear...

Professorn som är Sveriges Doktor Pangloss Vem det är — och varför han är det — kan du läsa om i den här artikeln av yours truly i Magasinet Konkret.

We who like to imagine ourselves responsible for the public’s knowledge of society despise description and indeed despise the methods that are generally used for quantitative description. Our social indicators are simply disaggre­gated variables, ready for input to causal analysis. The notions of complex combinatoric description, of typologies based on multiple variables — these fill the average sociologist with disgust. Our disgust is disingenuous, for ease of computing has...

Finding the Money, a new film by Maren Poitras, follows economist Stephanie Kelton, research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, on an exploration of Modern Monetary Theory—the heterodox economic policy model that reframes our understanding of government funding, spending, and national debt. “An alternative story of money will revolutionize our conception of what we as a society believe we can afford and can achieve,” says the filmmaker. Bard economists featured in the...