Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A Facebook friend who tirelessly advocates for anything that the Democratic Party tells him is “progressive” has found something he doesn’t like: Bernie Sanders’s single-payer system or “Medicare-for-all.”

• friend: What Hillary was saying: “The details very quickly get very messy.”
• me: Why would it be hard to implement? Medicare already has rates that it will pay for every medical service. Medicare and Medicaid are already about half of total health care spending in the U.S. Why couldn’t they double their transaction volume, most of which is handled by computer systems that double in performance every couple of years?
• friend: … Sanders is proposing to vastly expand the public’s risk margin by creating an untested system. I find that worrisome. I wouldn’t want to wait for weeks because a new system was full of glitches. Would you? What if your private health insurance option were taken away from your family by government fiat. How would you feel about that?
• me: Medicare/Medicaid is already running half of American health care. If it is unacceptably bad for the people already on it (50+ million on Medicare alone; see kff.org for 2012 data; plus another 72 million on Medicaid and CHIP) then we should probably do something about that. Countries that have single-payer systems don’t “take away” by fiat or otherwise the option to purchase health care or health insurance privately. They just make it unpopular (since most people prefer to use the system that they’ve already paid for via their taxes). Given that the U.S. has the worst of all possible health care systems, I don’t think that there is any chance of a Sanders plan making it worse. As I note in http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/health-care-reform, Americans would probably be better off if we shut down most of our health care system entirely.
• friend: I have worked fairly extensively in healthcare for going on 25 years, and it is definitely my opinion that there are many worse systems. For example, I worked with a British team not too long ago from a public hospital in a large city. The degree of staff alienation in that institution was truly tragic.

 

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The Collapse of 2008 was caused to some extent by Americans’ fondness for low teaser mortgage rates that, a few years later, rose to unpayable levels. I’m wondering if the same thing has happened with health insurance. Obamacare rates were remarkably reasonable the first time that I checked. They’ve been going up dramatically faster than the official government inflation rate here in Massachusetts. This WSJ article, based on this full table of data, indicates that Massachusetts is not alone:

the Department of Health and Human Services announced that health-insurance premiums on the Affordable Care Act exchanges rose an average of 9% between 2015 and 2016.

The findings [when looking at all exchanges]: Nationally, premiums for individual health plans increased on average between 2015 and 2016 by 14.9%.

I’m wondering if we’ve done the same thing with health insurance that we did with mortgages. We signed up for a deal that we could afford but the numbers were available for only a few initial years.

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A voter whose primary source of news is NPR said that, after months of hearing about Ted Cruz on the radio, she had formed an impression of him as an uneducated Bible-thumper. She was shocked to learn from Wikipedia that Cruz attended Princeton and then Harvard Law School and that he had argued cases at the Supreme Court (“Cruz has authored 70 United States Supreme Court briefs and presented 43 oral arguments, including nine before the United States Supreme Court.[41][47][54] Cruz’s record of having argued before the Supreme Court nine times is more than any practicing lawyer in Texas or any current member of Congress.)

[Note that this posting is not about the merits of Cruz per se, especially given that I think that no Republican has a realistic chance of winning, but rather about how the media portrays Cruz.]

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Christine Ortiz, an MIT materials science professor and dean, is starting a new university. This article makes it sound as though nearly all of the money will be spent on real estate and administration because there will be a physical campus in the Boston area. What about the teachers? Here’s a great exchange:

Q. Prestige is a very important factor in higher education. Do you worry that you’ll have trouble attracting top scholars and academics because it’s so new and untested?

A. There are so many talented doctoral students and postdocs that are unable to secure jobs in academia. I can name like 100 right now … but there are not just enough jobs at prestigious university. So I know there is a plethora and a pool out there of potential faculty and faculty who would want to be part of a really innovative model and want to be part of a transdisciplinary community. And I’ve gotten hundreds of responses from potential students already saying, When can I apply?

Q. What about tenure? Will your university have that?

A. My thinking at this point is very much moving away from tenure. I’m going to really investigate alternative models, and really there are a number of alternative models that are being used. At this point, tenure seems like a great mismatch with the system that we’re thinking about.

In other words, all adjuncts all the time. I am going to follow this start-up with interest!

[Separately, Professor Ortiz may not realize what a world of hurt she can get into with the state government:

Q. Will it have the word university in it?

A. Unclear at this time.

About 16 years ago we started “ArsDigita University” as a free one-year post-baccalaureate non-degree program in CS. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts assigned a state worker essentially full-time to the job of threatening us with litigation if we did not change the name. It seems that one cannot be a “university” if one does not issue graduate degrees. We responded with “Since we’re not charging money for this we can call it whatever we want, especially give that the first sentence of our home page says that there is no degree at all.” The battle went on for at least 1.5 years before the Commonwealth lost interest in us.]

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Given that Bernie Sanders only recently joined the Democratic Party (previously identifying as “socialist,” not a popular brand name for most Americans) and that only about half as much money has been spent to promote Mr. Sanders compared to Ms. Clinton, does the more or less equal vote tally actually represent a defeat for Hillary Clinton?

Let’s also consider momentum. Bernie Sanders was not considered a serious candidate a year ago but now he collects roughly the same number of votes as Hillary Clinton. More voters will now take the time to learn about Sanders and some of those will become his supporters? If he adds those to the roughly 50 percent share he has already… he could actually win?

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Last weekend, I spent some time in the company of at least 4800 “mega-rich”:

 

(The hotel in Chicago has more than 1600 rooms.)

Are the mega-rich controlling the 2016 presidential election?

“Which Presidential Candidates Are Winning the Money Race” (New York Times, February 1, 2016) shows that Hillary Clinton has raised more than twice as much as Bernie Sanders and Jeb Bush is the top choice of rich Republican-oriented donors. Donald Trump, meanwhile, has spent less than nearly all other candidates and raised $0 from “Super PACS.”

Now the results from Iowa are available. The voters were equally fond of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Jeb Bush received less than 3 percent of the vote.

Are the mega-rich controlling the election in some other way that isn’t measured by candidate fundraising and/or PAC spending? Or is it safe to say that Americans are not reliable puppets for the Koch brothers and the Clintons’ Wall Street and Silicon Valley friends?

[Separately, it seems that there is no reason to abandon my policy of (mostly) ignoring Donald Trump. He attracted less than 25 percent of one party’s vote and if any of the professional politicians quit the race their supporters will presumably be most likely to choose another professional politician, e.g., Ted Cruz. Maybe readers can explain why so many Americans, and even a lot of Europeans, wanted to talk about Trump-the-Candidate 24/7.]

Related:

• “Why bother to read news about the 2016 presidential election?” (April 2015 posting that failed to anticipate Bernie Sanders’s popularity)
• Donald Trump proves the “white male privilege” theory?
• Iowa family law (for calculating child support profits from any post-election sexual encounters between high-income visitors and natives)

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Department of Engineering Ideas that Work Great on Paper: “Do Planes Really Need Life Vests?” (WSJ, January 20, 2016) says “[life jackets] are so difficult to find under seats and put on securely in an emergency that only 33 passengers of 150 aboard US Airways Flight 1549 had a life vest after the plane splashed down in the Hudson River in 2009. Only four people managed to properly don their life vest, securing the waist strap so it wouldn’t pop off.”

[Separately, the article adds more weight to the legends of the crew: “Both Capt. Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger and First Officer Jeffrey Skiles said they realized passengers had evacuated without life vests, so they grabbed a bunch from the cabin and handed them out after evacuating.” (Let’s also give three cheers to the WSJ reporter for not implying than an A320 is a single-pilot aircraft.)]

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“Do Elite Colleges Lead to Higher Salaries? Only for Some Professions” is a WSJ article by Eric Eide and Michael Hilmer, academic authors who studied the link between prestige of undergrad institution and mid-career earnings.

CS grads from four wildly disparate schools in a chart ended up earning roughly the same by mid-career. Here’s what the authors had to say about science/tech fields in general:

What we found startled us. For STEM-related majors, average earnings don’t vary much among the college categories. For example, we find no statistically significant differences in average earnings for science majors between selective schools and either midtier or less-selective schools. Likewise, there’s no significant earnings difference between engineering graduates from selective and less-selective colleges, and only a marginally significant difference between selective and midtier colleges.

Our findings are crucial for families to understand because chasing a prestigious STEM degree can leave students burdened with huge amounts of unnecessary debt. Financial aid can certainly help, but for many families, the cost of education can still differ dramatically across schools. For example, if an engineering student chose to attend the University of Pennsylvania instead of Texas A&M, the average starting salary would differ by less than $1,000, but the tuition difference would be over $167,000. At that slightly higher salary, you’d have to work for more than 150 years before you make up for that vast tuition difference.

The authors didn’t look at programmers without degrees. I wonder what they would have found if they’d studied people who started coding at age 18 rather than spend four years in college. Perhaps they would have significantly out-earned the college grads due to always having four additional years of work experience.

[Separately, the researchers may have left out an important factor: the wealth level of potential mates at different universities. From the introduction to Real World Divorce:

“When young people ask me about the law as a career,” said one litigator, “I tell them that in this country whom they choose to have sex with and where they have sex will have a bigger effect on their income than whether they attend college and what they choose as a career.”

From the history of divorce chapter:

What Weitzman did not predict is the tremendous variation in child support profits from state to state, despite the fact that federal law requires each state to follow a similar procedure in developing child support guidelines. How profitable can it be? A professor of economics in Massachusetts, a typical “winner take all” state, said “The best career advice that I could give to a female freshman would be to drop out and stop paying tuition. Get pregnant with a medical doctor this year. Get pregnant with a business executive two years from now. Get pregnant with a law firm partner two years after that. She’ll have three healthy kids and a much higher after-tax income than nearly all of our graduates in economics.”

Choosing a college where fellow undergraduates disproportionately come from rich families and where the campus is located in a state featuring the highest profits from short-term marriages and/or out-of-wedlock pregnancies could result in a high return on the tuition investment. It is easier to meet and have sex with a rich college kid if one is a student at the same college. (See also “Assembling a longer-term annuity from child support via frozen embryos”) Of course, majoring in CS is probably not the best choice if one is going to pursue wealth through sexual encounters…]

 

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I haven’t followed Donald Trump too closely due to my dual theories that

1) an amateur cannot win a party’s nomination

2) a Republican cannot win a general election with a large turnout

This analysis of the Trump phenomenon by a Washington insider is interesting, however, even if Trump himself is not. Here are some excerpts:

Consider the conservative nonprofit establishment, which seems to employ most right-of-center adults in Washington. Over the past 40 years, how much donated money have all those think tanks and foundations consumed? Billions, certainly. (Someone better at math and less prone to melancholy should probably figure out the precise number.) Has America become more conservative over that same period? Come on. Most of that cash went to self-perpetuation: Salaries, bonuses, retirement funds, medical, dental, lunches, car services, leases on high-end office space, retreats in Mexico, more fundraising. Unless you were the direct beneficiary of any of that, you’d have to consider it wasted.

Pretty embarrassing. And yet they’re not embarrassed. Many of those same overpaid, underperforming tax-exempt sinecure-holders are now demanding that Trump be stopped. Why? Because, as his critics have noted in a rising chorus of hysteria, Trump represents “an existential threat to conservatism.”

Let that sink in. Conservative voters are being scolded for supporting a candidate they consider conservative because it would be bad for conservatism? And by the way, the people doing the scolding? They’re the ones who’ve been advocating for open borders, and nation-building in countries whose populations hate us, and trade deals that eliminated jobs while enriching their donors, all while implicitly mocking the base for its worries about abortion and gay marriage and the pace of demographic change. Now they’re telling their voters to shut up and obey, and if they don’t, they’re liberal.

If you live in an affluent ZIP code, it’s hard to see a downside to mass low-wage immigration. Your kids don’t go to public school. You don’t take the bus or use the emergency room for health care. No immigrant is competing for your job. (The day Hondurans start getting hired as green energy lobbyists is the day my neighbors become nativists.) Plus, you get cheap servants, and get to feel welcoming and virtuous while paying them less per hour than your kids make at a summer job on Nantucket. It’s all good.

Separately from this fun piece of writing… I think that Trump’s relative popularity can be attributed to the fact that the professional politicians in the Republican race are so numerous. Thus the multiple professionals, who are barely distinguishable to the average voter, each get only a fraction of the people who want to vote for a professional politician while Trump gets 100 percent of the voters who prefer an amateur.

[Separately, let’s not forget that if that Nantucket job results in a pregnancy with a high-income visitor, there could be 23 years of lucrative payments (minimum total: $1 million, tax-free) under Massachusetts family law or a $250,000 to $500,000 abortion sale.]

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A friend’s Facebook status:

This is what inequality looks like: Yesterday I’m accosted in the Whole Foods parking lot by a woman asking me for a dollar to buy a sandwich. I grumpily refused. A poignant moment for me, another rejection out of too many to count for her. What a world [frowny emoticon] [link to Atlantic article on rich bastards worldwide]

This guy is a software engineer married to a Harvard professor. His household income is approximately $300,000 per year. He tirelessly advocates on Facebook for higher taxes on the “wealthy” and for the election of Bernie Sanders. Yet he apparently refused to redistribute 1/300,000th of his household’s income to the beggar. In other words, he rejected a 0.00033… percent increase in his personal tax rate.

[You might reasonably ask why there are beggars in Cambridge, Massachusetts given that a non-working adult can get a free apartment, free food, free health care, etc. Certainly there are poor families receiving packages of assistance that work out to more than $100,000 per year after tax, e.g., starting with free occupancy of an apartment with a market value of $5,000 per month. However, a person who has not been favored by the various government poverty ministries and/or is bad at paperwork might find himself or herself with only free health care.]

I asked about the apparent logical contradiction between his political advocacy and his personal actions. He responded with “A $1.00 donation to a random bum in a parking lot is not equivalent to a tax increase.” His friend who is also a passionate Bernie Sanders supporter added “I have been trained to wonder if panhandlers use monetary donations to prolong unhealthy dependence of substances” to explain why he won’t give money voluntarily.

I then asked “Why couldn’t a welfare recipient just as easily use the taxpayer cash to ‘prolong unhealthy dependence of substances’? If you give me a free apartment, free food, and free health care, what stops me from spending the day doing whatever I want, e.g., smoking crack?” Neither he nor his fellow Bernie Sanders supporter had an answer for that. Instead they talked about wanting to “give people a guaranteed minimum income.” I responded with “Why not start with the woman at Whole Foods then? Her current guaranteed minimum income is $0 (though she may be able to receive an array of goods and services, such as food, housing, and medical care). If you gave her $1 then her guaranteed minimum income would be $1.”

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