Romney's FL defense of MA health insurance overhaul

I was really impressed by Mitt Romney's defense of his health insurance overhaul in Massachusetts during the Florida debate last Thursday, as reported by NPR.

2011Q4 GDP advance estimate

A newspaper headline today reads "fastest growth in 18 months." Here's a graphic showing quarterly log real GDP (red line with circles) and CBO's estimate of potential real GDP (blue).  The economy "went south" and hasn't exactly come back, has it!  By these measures, we're looking at an output gap of about –7%.

Economic Geography

Today Paul Krugman's column presents a view of the recent Times piece on Apple and outsourced jobs consistent with his earlier work on economic geography that helped win him the Nobel prize. I'd summarize the argument as having to do with physical capital: in addition to quantity and quality, the location of plants and infrastructure can also be important. Less clear to me (but maybe it's in his work somewhere) is what role human capital plays in all of this. Harvard's Ed Glaeser has written extensively about that sort of thing, but I think his emphasis is less on manufacturing than on the idea economy.

Homeownership and neighborhood externalities

When I read Greg Mankiw's op-ed on the tax code, I started thinking about the tax preference for homeownership through the mortgage interest deduction. Not too long ago I tweeted about how a windy night on a Brooklyn street full of rental units resulted in a veritable cyclone of trash. My point being that when everyone's renting, nobody hauls their trash to the curbs themselves, and nobody does anything about it when the workers who do didn't do a good job. A classic tragedy of the commons.

Needless to say, just because somebody is a homeowner wouldn't guarantee they wouldn't free-ride on their neighbors and let their own trash fly free as a bird.

But here's another perspective I found today, in which litter and other indicators of neighborhood risk causes low homeownership rather than the reverse, which is probably the more traditional perspective. It raised the obvious question in my mind of where the litter comes from in the first place, but it could be proximity to commercial strips or commuting hubs, I suppose.

Summers on evolving higher ed

In the Times, Larry Summers opines about the structure of college learning and future trends, with plenty of provocative perspectives. It's hard to disagree with the notion that teaching collaborative analysis rather than individual demonstration of knowledge would probably be a better fit of the needs and the technology. But under conditions of large student-to-instructor ratios, the free-rider problem would be made a lot worse by such endeavors. I wouldn't suggest that the current passive-learning model really gets this particularly right either, but it's hard to see how assigning credit based solely on group projects could ever get the incentives right for students without a lot of monitoring.

More evidence of flat obesity trends(?)

The release of the NHANES data is an biennial event, and I wrote about it in 2010 too. This year, the same picture has emerged, as summarized by NPR, of obesity rates based on BMI that are not statistically distinguishable from recent earlier rates.

Here's a time series plot of the obesity rates, meaning a BMI ≥ 30, and (in recent years) their 95% confidence intervals.  The sources are Flegal et al. (JAMA 2002, 2010, 2012), Ogden et al. (JAMA 2006). For the 2005-2006 data, I averaged male and female data from Tables 4 and 5 in Flegal et al. (JAMA 2010).

Does this picture make it appear that obesity prevalence is slowing down?

DHS Survey on Afghanistan

This NPR article reports on the controversies surrounding the November 2011 release of the 2010 Demographic and Health Survey of Afghanistan. The 2010 period life tables appear on page 114 of the final report and reveal the shocker:  life expectancy at birth (e0) is estimated at 64.2 for females and 63.6 for males, up about 20 years from the previous "measure" from around 2002.