Author: Jonathan

Betelgeuse meets the kaplooey effect?

BETELGEUSE SHRINKS

Betelgeuse, one of the brightest stars visible to the naked eye, has shrunk in diameter by more than 15 percent since 1993.

…

In 1921, Betelgeuse became the first star for which astronomers measured a size. Over the years, different interferometers, observing Betelgeuse over a wide range of wavelengths, have recorded diameters for the star that disagree with each other by as much as 30 percent. That’s not surprising because stars often look considerably bigger or smaller at different wavelengths. But the star hasn’t previously been found to vary significantly in size at any one wavelength, Townes says.

As hefty as 15 suns, Betelgeuse is nearing the end of its life and could soon go supernova. Continued close monitoring of Betelgeuse could lead to a better understanding of the evolution of massive stars near the end of their lifetime.

via Jorn Barger

I’m already socialized?

Ezra Klein continues his Health Care Reform for Beginners series this week with Health Care Reform for Beginners: The Many Flavors of the Public Plan and Health Reform for Beginners: The Difference Between Socialized Medicine, Single-Payer Health Care, and What We’ll Be Getting.

You’ll want to read them both, but here I want to focus on the pretty pictures.

4A1D80A1-453D-4CDB-8CCF-BEA973812CB8.jpg

On the evidence, the correct answer is “better”, but let’s move to the fun one. 30% of Americans polled think that I’m already getting socialized medicine (Blue Shield HMO, as it happens):

970E8905-AC1D-4736-88C4-AF3B4F26F071.jpg

Klein writes,

You’re reading that right. About 30 percent of Americans think HMOs are socialized medicine. Which implies a couple things. First, the term “socialized medicine” has been diluted beyond all meaning. Second, it’s no longer considered a terrifying outcome. And third, nothing that’s this amorphous — and actually preferred by a plurality of the population — is likely to prove a terribly effective attack against health reform. Socialized medicine has become such a stand-in for “not this system of medicine” that it’s begun to look good in comparison.

Michael Lewis on GPS

Fareed Zakaria interviewed Michael Lewis on GPS last Sunday. It’s one of the better takes on the underlying dysfunction of our financial system that I’ve heard.

Fareed sits down with author Michael Lewis to discuss the economic crisis. In his best-selling book “Liar’s Poker,” Lewis chronicles his days as a bond salesman at the investment bank Salomon Brothers, where the idea of the ‘mortgage-backed security’ was invented. Lewis talks to Fareed about the roots of the current crisis and the future of Wall Street.

America’s Socialism for the Rich: Corporate Welfarism

It’s time for another Joe Stiglitz post!

America’s Socialism for the Rich: Corporate Welfarism

By Joseph Stiglitz

With all the talk of “green shoots” of economic recovery, America’s banks are pushing back on efforts to regulate them. While politicians talk about their commitment to regulatory reform to prevent a recurrence of the crisis, this is one area where the devil really is in the details — and the banks will muster what muscle they have left to ensure that they have ample room to continue as they have in the past.

The old system worked well for the banks (if not for their shareholders), so why should they embrace change? Indeed, the efforts to rescue them devoted so little thought to the kind of post-crisis financial system we want that we will end up with a banking system that is less competitive, with the large banks that were too big too fail even larger.

… The Obama administration has, however, introduced a new concept: “too big to be financially restructured”. The administration argues that all hell would break loose if we tried to play by the usual rules with these big banks. Markets would panic. So, not only can’t we touch the bondholders, we can’t even touch the shareholders — even if most of the shares’ existing value merely reflects a bet on a government bailout.

I think this judgment is wrong. I think the Obama administration has succumbed to political pressure and scare-mongering by the big banks. As a result, the administration has confused bailing out the bankers and their shareholders with bailing out the banks.

… Some have called this new economic regime “socialism with American characteristics.” But socialism is concerned about ordinary individuals. By contrast, the United States has provided little help for the millions of Americans who are losing their homes. Workers who lose their jobs receive only 39 weeks of limited unemployment benefits, and are then left on their own. And, when they lose their jobs, most lose their health insurance, too.

America has expanded its corporate safety net in unprecedented ways, from commercial banks to investment banks, then to insurance, and now to automobiles, with no end in sight. In truth, this is not socialism, but an extension of long standing corporate welfarism. The rich and powerful turn to the government to help them whenever they can, while needy individuals get little social protection.

We need to break up the too-big-to-fail banks; there is no evidence that these behemoths deliver societal benefits that are commensurate with the costs they have imposed on others. And, if we don’t break them up, then we have to severely limit what they do. They can’t be allowed to do what they did in the past — gamble at others’ expenses.

This raises another problem with America’s too-big-to-fail, too-big-to-be-restructured banks: they are too politically powerful. Their lobbying efforts worked well, first to deregulate, and then to have taxpayers pay for the cleanup. Their hope is that it will work once again to keep them free to do as they please, regardless of the risks for taxpayers and the economy. We cannot afford to let that happen.

Obama reads Pragmatos

Well, he reads some of what Pragmatos reads, anyway.

The NY Times reports that Obama has taken notice of the Atul Gawande’s article on regional health-care-cost disparities across the US.

President Obama recently summoned aides to the Oval Office to discuss a magazine article investigating why the border town of McAllen, Tex., was the country’s most expensive place for health care. The article became required reading in the White House, with Mr. Obama even citing it at a meeting last week with two dozen Democratic senators.

“He came into the meeting with that article having affected his thinking dramatically,” said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. “He, in effect, took that article and put it in front of a big group of senators and said, ‘This is what we’ve got to fix.’ ”

There’s pushback, of course.

[Dr. Michael L. Langberg, senior vice president of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center] endorsed the goal of covering the uninsured, but said, “We do not believe that rushing to make large cuts in Medicare payments to hospitals is the right way to fund that coverage.” The Dartmouth team has cited Cedars-Sinai as having very high Medicare spending per beneficiary.

If you haven’t read Gawande’s piece, now’s the time.

No to boldly mayor

The Washington Post quotes SCOTUS nominee Sonia Sotomayor: “each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister.”

Have we established that split infinities are perfectly grammatical only to have them declared unconstitutional?

I’m looking forward to the ruling on distinguishing necessary from unnecessary uses of the passive voice. Something like this, perhaps, channeling Potter Stewart?

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within the shorthand description “unnecessary”; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the sentence involved in this case is not that.

Do as we say

Glenn Greenwald.

Hillary Clinton demands China investigate and disclose its past abuses

On behalf of the Obama administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a statement this week regarding the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, and demanded that China do the following (h/t sysprog):

A China that has made enormous progress economically, and that is emerging to take its rightful place in global leadership, should examine openly the darker events of its past and provide a public accounting of those killed, detained or missing, both to learn and to heal.

Compare that moving defense of transparency to what the Obama administration — as I wrote about earlier today — is currently doing in Congress in trying to round up enough Democratic votes to vest the Pentagon with a new secrecy power, whereby it can unilaterally suppress all photographic evidence relating to our own abuse of detainees.  Or compare it to our current President’s repeated insistence that we Look to the Future, Not the Past and his fervent opposition even to a Truth Commission.

What’s there even to say about this?  I didn’t think it was possible to top — for pure irony and hypocrisy — the Bush State Department’s 2006 condemnation of Russia for engaging in illegal warrantless eavesdropping on its own citizens and failing to impose accountability on those who did that.  But Clinton’s righteous injunction to China about the need for “examining openly the darker events of [China]’s past” — “both the learn and to heal” — comes very close.

Milton Friedman on radical reform

This nice quote from Milton Friedman (in the context of overhauling the Federal Reserve, as it happens) was recently quoted in the context of health care reform, specifically in support of considering single-payer systems. I’d add democratic reforms such as proportional representation to the list.

… it is worth discussing radical changes, not in the expectation that they will be adopted promptly but for two other reasons. One is to construct an ideal goal, so that incremental changes can be judged by whether they move the institutional structure toward or away from that ideal. The other reason is very different. It is so that if a crisis requiring or facilitating radical change does arise, alternatives will be available that have been carefully developed and fully explored.

Cheaper, better health care

Read this fascinating (and rather encouraging, if anyone pays attention [somebody did; see update below]) article by Atul Gawande on, among other things, the enormous difference in health care costs from community to community. Oddly, many communities with the best care also have the lowest costs, and not just by a few percent. Why?

THE COST CONUNDRUM
What a Texas town can teach us about health care.
by Atul Gawande

… When you look across the spectrum from Grand Junction to McAllen—and the almost threefold difference in the costs of care—you come to realize that we are witnessing a battle for the soul of American medicine. Somewhere in the United States at this moment, a patient with chest pain, or a tumor, or a cough is seeing a doctor. And the damning question we have to ask is whether the doctor is set up to meet the needs of the patient, first and foremost, or to maximize revenue.

There is no insurance system that will make the two aims match perfectly. But having a system that does so much to misalign them has proved disastrous. As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients. Both practices have made for serious problems. …

Or is it discouraging? Gawande concludes:

Something even more worrisome is going on as well. In the war over the culture of medicine—the war over whether our country’s anchor model will be Mayo or McAllen—the Mayo model is losing. In the sharpest economic downturn that our health system has faced in half a century, many people in medicine don’t see why they should do the hard work of organizing themselves in ways that reduce waste and improve quality if it means sacrificing revenue.

In El Paso, the for-profit health-care executive told me, a few leading physicians recently followed McAllen’s lead and opened their own centers for surgery and imaging. When I was in Tulsa a few months ago, a fellow-surgeon explained how he had made up for lost revenue by shifting his operations for well-insured patients to a specialty hospital that he partially owned while keeping his poor and uninsured patients at a nonprofit hospital in town. Even in Grand Junction, Michael Pramenko told me, “some of the doctors are beginning to complain about ‘leaving money on the table.’ ”

As America struggles to extend health-care coverage while curbing health-care costs, we face a decision that is more important than whether we have a public-insurance option, more important than whether we will have a single-payer system in the long run or a mixture of public and private insurance, as we do now. The decision is whether we are going to reward the leaders who are trying to build a new generation of Mayos and Grand Junctions. If we don’t, McAllen won’t be an outlier. It will be our future.

Update: The NY Times reports that Obama has taken notice of this piece (Gawande’s, presumably, not mine).

President Obama recently summoned aides to the Oval Office to discuss a magazine article investigating why the border town of McAllen, Tex., was the country’s most expensive place for health care. The article became required reading in the White House, with Mr. Obama even citing it at a meeting last week with two dozen Democratic senators.

“He came into the meeting with that article having affected his thinking dramatically,” said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon. “He, in effect, took that article and put it in front of a big group of senators and said, ‘This is what we’ve got to fix.’”

There’s pushback, of course.

[Dr. Michael L. Langberg, senior vice president of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center] endorsed the goal of covering the uninsured, but said, “We do not believe that rushing to make large cuts in Medicare payments to hospitals is the right way to fund that coverage.” The Dartmouth team has cited Cedars-Sinai as having very high Medicare spending per beneficiary.

Recovering the lituus

‘Lost’ music instrument recreated

lituusNew software has enabled researchers to recreate a long forgotten musical instrument called the Lituus.
The 2.7m (8.5ft) long trumpet-like instrument fell out of use some 300 years ago.

Bach’s motet (a choral musical composition) “O Jesu Christ, meins lebens licht” was one of the last pieces of music written for the Lituus.

Now, for the first time, this 18th Century composition has been played as it might have been heard.

Researchers from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the University of Edinburgh collaborated on the study. …

IOZ: Abolish Everything

Rather than, say, distinguish between civil and sacramental marriage, or between marriage and civil union, IOZ suggests that the government get out of the marriage/union business altogether. It’s an attractive idea, though it seems to me that there are some enforceable rights associated with marriage that would need to take some other form. Presumably many property-related matters could be handled by contract. What else?

Abolish Everything

A few days ago a friend of mine expressed the not-uncommon view that rather than advocating for gay marriage, we should fight to “get the government out of the marriage business.” I agreed. Yes, he mused, what we really need are universally available civil unions.

This is the moderately more radical position of some gay activists who see in the fight for access to civil marriage an unfortunate kind of assimilationism, an attempt to gain access to one of the very institutions of bourgeois, heteronormative, and patriarchal oppression that have for so long stood in the way of real liberation, and yet many of these same activists will then quickly turn to the benefits of civil unions, marriages in all but name really, made available to all.

But it seems to me that if you advocate for civil unions, you accept by implication that the government does have a compelling interest in the private social and economic arrangements of its citizens, because however such unions might be styled, they will in the end provide benefits and privileges to people in certain types of relationships not available to others, and will moreover continue to privilege some fairly traditional familial norms of cohabitation and economic interdependence over, for instance, living a single life.

And if you accept that the government has such an interest, then you accept the government’s right to discriminate between those relationships which do or do not live up that interest, which are or are not in the best interests of a stable, moral, sustainable society.

The real radical position is neither that the government should let gays marry nor that it should transform civil marriage into civil unions to avoid the trouble of terminology. It is instead that the government should get out of the marriage business altogether, and convey no additional privileges (nor duties nor obligations) on anyone for any kind of relationship or domestic arrangement.

Proposition 8 decision a pyrrhic victory?

This is, more or less, a repeat of a comment that I left at Jonathan Turley’s post on the California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8 (opinion here).

Turley writes, “I have long supported doing away with the term “marriage” in favor of a uniform civil union standard for all couples regardless of gender.”

I’ve been reading the opinion, and it seems to me that the court has, in effect, granted exactly that result, once the implications of the decision are worked out. The opinions are very clear that in the view of the court the only thing that Prop 8 accomplishes is to reserve the name “marriage” to opposite-sex unions, and that the substance of the courts Marriage Cases decision (which legalized same-sex unions) is untouched.

It’s easy, it seems to this non-lawyer, to read the opinion as all but inviting an action to forbid the state to use the term “marriage” to make any civil distinction at all.

Here’s an sample of the opinion language:

Nor does Proposition 8 fundamentally alter the meaning and substance of state constitutional equal protection principles as articulated in that opinion. Instead, the measure carves out a narrow and limited exception to these state constitutional rights, reserving the official designation of the term “marriage” for the union of opposite-sex couples as a matter of state constitutional law, but leaving undisturbed all of the other extremely significant substantive aspects of a same-sex couple’s state constitutional right to establish an officially recognized and protected family relationship and the guarantee of equal protection of the laws.

This is both unsubtle and unanimous. If the state reserves any substantive right to marriage, Prop 8 requires, according to the opinion, that the state may no longer use the term “marriage” in connection that right or privilege.

I’m not disputing the fact that many of us would like to have the term “marriage” back. But in the meantime, the state of affairs in California is profoundly different than it was before Marriage Cases, and Prop 8 has not touched the substance of that difference. So says the Supreme Court of California.

The Crisis and How to Deal with It

NYRB (longish).

The Crisis and How to Deal with It

Following are excerpts from a symposium on the economic crisis presented by The New York Review of Books and PEN World Voices at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on April 30. The participants were former senator Bill Bradley, Niall Ferguson, Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, George Soros, and Robin Wells, with Jeff Madrick as moderator.

—The Editors

A bit of Krugman:

… As I’ve written, we need a boring banking sector again. All of this high finance has turned out to be just destructive, and that’s partly a matter of regulation. But in the political economy there was also a vicious circle. Because as the financial sector got increasingly bloated its political clout also grew. So, in fact, deregulation bred bloated finance, which bred more deregulation, which bred this monster that ate the world economy.

The other thing not to miss is the importance of a strong social safety net. By most accounts, most projections say that the European Union is going to have a somewhat deeper recession this year than the United States. So in terms of macromanagement, they’re actually doing a poor job, and there are various reasons for that: the European Central Bank is too conservative, Europeans have been too slow to do fiscal stimulus. But the human suffering is going to be much greater on this side of the Atlantic because Europeans don’t lose their health care when they lose their jobs. They don’t find themselves with essentially no support once their trivial unemployment check has fallen off. We have nothing underneath. When Americans lose their jobs, they fall into the abyss. That does not happen in other advanced countries, it does not happen, I want to say, in civilized countries.

And there are people who say we should not be worrying about things like universal health care in the crisis, we need to solve the crisis. But this is exactly the time when the importance of having a decent social safety net is driven home to everybody, which makes it a very good time to actually move ahead on these other things. …

The Only Sure Way to Fund Universal Health Care

Tax employee health benefits, says Robert Reich.

The Only Sure Way to Fund Universal Health Care

… But, face it, it’s become a crazy system. You’re not eligible for these benefits when you and your family are likely to need them most – when you lose your job and your income plummets. And these days, as we’re witnessing, no job is safe. The system also distorts the labor market. It prevents lots of people from changing jobs for fear they’ll lose their health insurance, or won’t get the benefits they do now. And it invites employers to game the system by seeking young, healthy employees who pose low risks of ill health and will therefore keep insurance costs low, while rejecting older ones who are likely to have more costly health needs. The system also encourages employers to try to push married employees onto their spouses’s health insurance plan so that the spouse’s employer bears the cost. …

Can You Find Twelve Errors in Ben Stein’s Column?

Go ahead and peek at the answers.

Can You Find Twelve Errors in Ben Stein’s Column?

People who get upset over the appearance of Ben Stein’s columns in the Sunday NYT simply fail to understand their purpose. They are not to be treated as serious analysis of the economy or economic issues.

Rather, Stein’s columns are meant to be treated like a puzzle. Readers are supposed to find all the various inaccurate statements and outright errors that appear in each column. They are like the game where two pictures are juxtaposed and the reader is supposed to find the twelve subtle differences between the pictures.

Let’s see how many of the errors we can find in today’s piece, which is supposedly reflecting backward from 2089 on the collapse of the U.S. economy:

…

—Dean Baker

Krugman worries about California

A snippet from a longer column. It’s no less worrying to us living here.

State of Paralysis

… What’s really alarming about California, however, is the political system’s inability to rise to the occasion.

Despite the economic slump, despite irresponsible policies that have doubled the state’s debt burden since Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor, California has immense human and financial resources. It should not be in fiscal crisis; it should not be on the verge of cutting essential public services and denying health coverage to almost a million children. But it is — and you have to wonder if California’s political paralysis foreshadows the future of the nation as a whole.

… But the California precedent still has me rattled. Who would have thought that America’s largest state, a state whose economy is larger than that of all but a few nations, could so easily become a banana republic? …

Bill Hedrington reformatted

A while back I pointed to a website publishing Bill Hedrington’s collected poems. For the last week or so, Michael Smith and I have been updating the site, and I think you’ll find the new edition a nice improvement. The PDF is redone as well. Go. Read.

The Voices

I was born on the downhill side,
late in the year, in early December,
in the light’s heavy dip and hesitation,
when the old peoples prayed for beginning
in the snow-salted fields
and scattered bitterness of corn stalks;
but though I came fatly of that gaunt race,
though it was a different end and today that day,
the fields untracked by supplicants,
the corncribs many, and full,
still I carry their disappointed dead
buried in my body,
and am the outspoken child
of the silent generations of my cells—
for O, they call with the old voices,
in a millennium length of words,
in the thousand year cries of the dead,
that their lean voices, lost to these fields,
may be gathered up and justified in me.

—Bill Hedrington, ca. 1968