Are Peace and Happiness Overrated?

In defending New York’s last-place ranking in the U.S. state happiness index, Harry Lime writes:

We’re from the Harry Lime school. If you’ve seen the film classic “The Third Man,” you will remember that character’s admonition: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.

“In Switzerland they had brotherly love. They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

HT: James Choi

What’s in Paul Kurgman’s name?

Here’s an interesting poll: When Rasmusssen Reports telephoned voters and asked them if they could give an opinion about Paul Krugman, 55% said they don’t know enough about him to give even a “soft opinion.” Those who did have an opinion of Krugman were evenly divided with 22% favoring him and 22% not favoring him. 4% voiced a “very favorable” opinion and 6% voiced a “very unfavorable” view toward him.

But here is where it gets interesting: When asked about “New York Times columnist Paul Krugman” rather than simply “Paul Kurgman,” the numbers shifted significantly. Once identified with the New York Times, his unfavorable ratings increased 15 points to 37% while those who expressed “very unfavorable” views toward him more than tripled. Krugman’s favorable ratings, on the other hand, only increased three points to 25%.

‘NBA Age Limits Are a Scam’

From Newser:

The NBA’s minimum draft age of 19, with one year of college—and a new proposal to make it 20—is nothing but a cynical ploy by pro basketball and the NCAA that “hasn’t helped players in any way,” Buzz Bissinger writes. Players can easily sail through a year of college without accruing any educational benefits whatsoever. But that doesn’t matter to the collegiate and pro coaches—for them it’s a moneymaker, and a moneysaver.

You see, Bissinger writes in the New York Times, college teams get to fill arenas with bankable talent that might otherwise have gone directly pro. Conversely, pro teams get players with free training from their schools. Meanwhile, all the anecdotal evidence that high schoolers just aren’t ready for the big leagues is phooey, he writes. They get into less trouble, and have better stats than their older colleagues. They’re just being ripped off harder. “The right decision would be to abolish the NBA age limit” and “stop jumping into the same Jacuzzi” with the NCAA.

Record number of older Americans seeking employment

According to an article from today’s New York Times, there are currently more Americans 65 and older in the job market than at any time in American history: 6.6 million, compared with 4.1 million in 2001.

Less well known, the article points out, is that almost 500,000 workers 65 and older want to work but are unable to find employment. This is more than five times the level earlier this decade and the highest rate of unemployment for the group since the Great Depression.

While this paints an ugly picture, the unemployment rate for Americans 65 and older remains lower than for other Americas–6.7 percent compared 9.8 percent in the general population. But even the 6.7 percent is more than double the level two years ago and much higher than the 1.9 percent rate earlier this decade.

Moreover, unemployed  workers 65 and older  remain jobless longer.: 36.5 weeks on average, 40 percent longer than for job seekers in general.

Calories and Freedom

The City of New York has passed a new law mandating that any restaurant meeting certain criteria post calorie information prominently near menus. The law essentially targets chains and franchises, so the fast food industry is the one most affected. The New York Times reports on a study conducted to test whether or not this law actually had a positive effect:

The study, by several professors at New York University and Yale, tracked customers at four fast-food chains — McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken — in poor neighborhoods of New York City where there are high rates of obesity.

It found that about half the customers noticed the calorie counts, which were prominently posted on menu boards. About 28 percent of those who noticed them said the information had influenced their ordering, and 9 out of 10 of those said they had made healthier choices as a result.

But when the researchers checked receipts afterward, they found that people had, in fact, ordered slightly more calories than the typical customer had before the labeling law went into effect, in July 2008.

…For customers in New York City, orders had a mean of 846 calories after the labeling law took effect. Before the law took effect, it was 825 calories. In Newark, customers ordered about 825 calories before and after.

The results, according to the New York Times, had little affect on nutrition and public health experts who “said it was not a reason to abandon calorie posting.”

Regardless of its ability to alter behavior, this law is abhorrent. Beyond the nanny-state mentality of trying to influence people’s behavior, we have a major violation of property rights with this law. Each of these restaurants is the private property of an individual or, in the case of a corporation, individuals (the shareholders). No government – federal, state, or local – holds the right to mandate what an individual does with his/her private property. The government of New York City has decided that it is wrong to eat too many calories, they have now enforced their morality on businesses by mandating the posting of these calories. Would we allow the government to mandate the posting of the Ten Commandments in private establishments? Of course not. But most people have a skewed view of what it is for a government to legislate morality – this crime of the state is not limited to religion.

Moving beyond the philosophical, let us look at the practical. These types of laws do not work and are subjective in nature. The chart below illustrates the exact uselessness of these new calorie posting laws.

The fact is that business have every incentive to provide what their customers demand. If customers were actually concerned with calories, business would label their food (as many already do voluntarily). When the government mandates that money be spent by business on a product or service that customers do not want, this is a deadweight loss. But don’t take my word for it. Milton Friedman also weighed in on the subject years ago:

…and the government also prevents useful information from being passed on. Let me give you this simplest example- aspirin, you know and I know that you’re well advised to take an aspirin every other day to reduce the danger of heart attack. But that’s not allowed to be stated on an aspirin package… FDA prohibits it, they control the information that can be stated on a label. Now there are some libertarian manufacturers of drugs who have proposed, who tried to push through the idea that they can put on their thing, this is what the FDA says and this is what we say- choose. And they’re not being allowed to do it. So that if customers really wanted to know about the ingredient, it would be in the self-interest of the people producing it to put it on their packages. Those packages that had the ingredients on it would be more attractive to consumers than those that didn’t. But now, it’s always a mystery to me why people think that some experts in a Washington office who don’t know you, don’t know me, don’t know our children, know better than you and I do what we want to have on our packages and what we want our children to know.

For Dr. Friedman’s entire discussion on the FDA, see our recent post.

Is Greece One of the Richest Countries in the World?

If you take into account the scope of the underground economy in Greece, the nation becomes among the richest in the world. Accroding to the CIA Factbook, the per capita income of Greece stands at $32,000 a year on a purchasing power parity basis. But according to a New York Times article, the Greek underground economy is equal to 30 percent of GDP, increasing the true per capita income to approximately $41,600. This places the Greek GDP 6 percent above the $39,100 income reported for Canada.

Health Care and Life Expectancy

The Daily Mail writes,

More than 100 top doctors have signed an open letter to U.S. senators to counter ‘lies’ about the National Health Service.

…The doctors, including former president of the Royal College of Physicians Sir George Alberti and Professor Alan Maryon-Davis, president of the UK Faculty of Public Health, and patient groups, used their letter to point out that life expectancy is longer in the UK than the U.S. – showing, they claimed, it is a better system.

Pointing to a relatively lower American life expectancy as proof of a flawed health care system is a false argument.  “The problem with such international comparisons, Greg Mankiw explains, “is that there are a lot of differences among nations beyond their health systems. To make comparisons in health outcomes, you need to control for other variables. Without such controls, the simple correlations have little meaning.”

As John Stossel explains,

The WHO judged a country’s quality of health on life expectancy. But that’s a lousy measure of a health-care system. Many things that cause premature death have nothing do with medical care. We have far more fatal transportation accidents than other countries. That’s not a health-care problem. Similarly, our homicide rate is 10 times higher than in the U.K., eight times higher than in France, and five times greater than in Canada. When you adjust for these “fatal injury” rates, U.S. life expectancy is actually higher than in nearly every other industrialized nation.

Nobel laureate Gary Becker makes a similar argument:

National differences in life expectancies are a highly imperfect indicator of the effectiveness of health delivery systems. For example, life styles are important contributors to health, and the US fares poorly on many life style indicators, such as incidence of overweight and obese men, women, and teenagers. To get around such problems, some analysts compare not life expectancies but survival rates from different diseases. The US health system tends to look pretty good on these comparisons.

A study published in Lancet Oncology in 2007 calculates cancer survival rates for both men and women in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union as a whole. The study claims that the most important determinants of cancer survival are early diagnosis, early treatment, and access to the best drugs, and that the United States does very well on all three criteria. Early diagnosis helps survival, but it may also distort the comparisons of five or even ten-year survival rates. In any case, the calculated five-year survival rates are much better in the US: they are about 65% for both men and women, while they are much lower in the other countries, especially for men. These apparent advantages in cancer survival rates are large enough to be worth a lot to persons having access to the American health system.

Several measures of the quality of life also favor the US. For example, hip and knee replacements, and cataract surgery, are far more readily available in the US than in Europe.

For even more on this, I highly recommend reading Greg Mankiw’s New York Times Op-Ed ‘Beyond Those Health Care Numbers.’

Support for ObamaCare Declines

The GOP has a rundown of various polls and articles that show declining support for President Obama’s health care agenda. To its credit, the GOP refrained from using only articles from friendly news sites. The sources include The New York Times, USA Today, The Associated Press, and others.

Disclaimer: neither my colleague nor I are, by any stretch of the imagination whatsoever, Republicans.

Profit Concerns Push Drug Companies to Tackle Cancer

A new article in the New York Times explains that major drug companies are pouring their fortunes into cancer research at an unprecedented level. According to Andrew Pollack,”two industry trends are driving the push.”

Recent scientific discoveries have suggested new targets for cancer drug researchers to attack. And as drug companies see profits beginning to wane from mainstays like Lipitor, the high prices that cancer drugs can command have become an irresistible lure.

In other words, drug companies are investing in cancer research in attempt to secure higher profits. They are not, however, seeking treatments for the “public good.” Nevertheless, out of what some label as “greed,” the drug companies could potentially save millions of lives. This is what Adam Smith called “The Invisible Hand:”

As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.

Boudreaux on Ted Kennedy’s Canonization

In a brilliantly penned letter to the New York Times, Donald J. Boudreaux writes:

Ted Kennedy’s canonization is too much.  Every day brings the deaths of thousands of people, the vast majority of whom are known only to their families and friends.  These people aren’t mourned by politicians, reporters, or the general public.

Yet almost every one of these unheralded persons has been more productive than has Ted Kennedy – or Chuck Grassley, Nancy Pelosi, the Georges Bush, or any other politician you name, whether he or she be still breathing or buried.

Who installed the windows in my house?  I don’t know.  Yet he provided value to me and never forced his hand into my wallet or his nose into my eating habits.  Who will fly the plane that will carry me home tomorrow from Michigan to Virginia?  I have no idea.  Yet that pilot will render unto me (and dozens of others) a valuable service in exchange for funds that I voluntarily paid to his or her employer.  That pilot doesn’t force me to fly.  Nor does he or she presume to know better than I do what is best for my family and me.

Who caught the fish that I will eat tonight?  Who trucked it from the sea to my hotel?  Who will cook that fish?  Who designed the dishwasher that cleaned the plate and utensils that I will use?

I know almost none of the millions of people whose daily efforts make possible my life and that of countless other Americans.  These people don’t hatch grand plans for arrogantly re-working society.  They offer only to deal voluntarily with me and with others, never pretending – unlike Mr. Kennedy – to be endowed with a mysterious genius and a saintly inspiration justifying haughty intrusions into the affairs of others.

Politicians are mortals.  But as their greedy lust for power and glory reveals, they are mortals especially flawed.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux