Broken window fallacy. It's only "stimulating" the economy by taking money from the citizens and giving it to the defense contractors. If we cut our defense budget by 15%, we could pay for health care.
It would only be an example of the broken window fallacy in a world without externalities. The whole idea of the program is that the savings created by reducing the carbon emissions of the non-clunkers should offset the cost of destroying the clunkers. Whether that's the case is debatable.
(Obama was in the top 3 as well [quite the coup for someone who has not been in politics that long]).
Obama received record donations across the board. Since political money is grouped by employer, a side effect of this is that he appears to be one of the top recipients of money from every major corporation. Yet for some reason, I never hear people saying that he's a shill for the University of California (his largest 'donor'). And for the record, if you compare the per-capita employee donations for Fannie and Freddie to the per-capita donation for the U.S. as a whole, you'll find that it's a factor of two less. I'm tired of correcting this fallacy, and I get the impression I'm going to keep seeing these asinine comments until 2012.
The way that all invisibility cloaks work (at least theoretically) is that you create a structure whose materials parameters vary in such a way that it effectively performs a coordinate transformation, mapping points in the cloaked region to points outside of it. In real space, the wave curves around the object, but in transformed space, it still travels in a straight line. For electromagnetic cloaks, it is the permittivity (refractive index squared) of the structure that is engineered. I don't know much about earthquake cloaks, but I imagine that it's probably something like the shear modulus being varied.
Anyway, my point is that you can't simply overlap two separate cloaks and get one big one. The transformed geometry is a highly nonlinear function of material variation, so if you try to do that, neither cloak will work. Basically, these cloaks would have to have gaps between them to work, and since the energy of a cloak travels around its edges, it's conceivable that two cloaks separated by a narrow gap could channel energy from a large area through said gap. Anything built there would have serious problems.
When the cost of entry to the broadcast medium (the internet) is effectively zero, EVERYONE becomes a member of the press.
I'm reminded of a modified version of that quote from The Incredibles: "When everyone's a member of the press, no one is." Regardless of the medium, we will still need professional journalists to do investigative work (a naturally long and tedious process), because even the best journalist cannot put in the requisite hours if they have another job to do. Unfortunately, TV news does little to no investigative work, which means that when the newspapers die, a major vacuum will be left in the news business. I don't know what the solution is.
I don't think you can blame the White House for wanting to be the moderator of a discussion it enabled. Sure, if Congress was to set up an online discussion, it would be a lot more bipartisan, but they haven't. I'd bet that CmdrTaco reserves the right to delete anything he wants to on./ for any reason, and could even mod a post +10 Mega-Insightful if he wanted to.
I'm sure the EPA needs economists to evaluate the impact of its policies on the economy. Having said that, that doesn't mean that the opinion of said economists should have any weight whatsoever when it comes to evaluating the science of climate change. The fact remains that the author of the "quashed" report has never published a single paper relating to climatology and climate science, and has only worked as an economist for his entire career.
I'm a Ph.D. student in engineering at MIT with a substantial background in physics. Does that mean that when I have a fancy MIT Ph.D. on my resume in a few years, my opinion be given as much impact as someone who's studied climatology? I'd hope not.
Still, many of us choose to buy private health insurance as well, paying twice simply because the quality of NHS care is so poor.
Boo-frickin-hoo. The U.S. spent 17% of its GDP on health care in 2008; the UK spent 7.5% of its GDP in the same year. You can complain all you want about having to pay twice because the quality of the NHS is so poor, but the fact remains that when you pay twice, you're still paying less than us.
By the way, 30% of American health care costs go to feed the insurance bureaucracy. About 1% of NHS costs are bureaucratic. You only envy the American system because you're poorly informed.
That does not make it any more precise than Austrian theory. You should really read this [mises.org] paper. If that paper does not convince you that Austrian theory is precise, then there is no way that I can. I'm dead serious about this. I would love to include some of its quotes in this post, but they're too long.
I didn't read through that in its entirety, but I skimmed enough to get the gist of it. Unfortunately for you, it completely confirmed my suspicions, as it reads like a philosophy paper, talking about epistemology and Kantism. Though I was happy to see that it brought up my sticking point about verbal logic versus symbolic logic, it didn't refute it. Instead, it is simply dismissed by appealing to Occam's Razor (pg. 61), which is really a shame. For one thing, Occam's Razor isn't an absolute truth, only a guiding principle. For another, I would consider a system of 21 axioms defined precisely and symbolically to be far simpler than any system that requires the use of the English language, which is vague, filled with biases, and can have completely different meanings depending on who's doing the reading and who's doing the writing. The proof is in the pudding: if you gave me a week, I could write a computer program to parse the ZFC axioms and understand thousands of mathematical theorems. At the same time, millions of computer scientists have been toiling for fifty years trying to create a computer program that can understand the English language. So, I ask you: which description is simpler?
If my question does not involve actors, then I would ask the physicist. But if the physicist tried to create a mathematical equation to model human behavior, and the philosopher points out that even though the equation is mathematically correct, it does not map onto human action that way the physicist believes it does, I would go with the philosopher. The physicist may continue to build upon his equation, but all of his conclusions will be wrong, because his foundation is flawed.
I don't much like talking about epistemology (too much philosophy), but you are absolutely right about the fact that the model itself may not be accurate. As I mentioned in my last post (and actually, something Rothbard mentions in that paper you linked to), the thing that sets Austrianomics apart from every other scientific discipline is the fact that it relies on empirical axioms rather than abstract ones, and this abundance of empirical axioms makes it imprecise and fallacious. The other disciplines still require a degree of empiricism, but they have reduced it substantially by tacking on the empirical axioms at the end of the logical chain, making them (almost) logically error-proof.
It might help if I used an example. In classical mechanics, as in all physics, the axioms of ZFC are held to be true. From them, you can construct the idea of real numbers, calculus, etc. in a completely symbolic and error-free approach. The only empirical axiom is that the positions of all particles are identified with a multidimensional real function of time, whose values obey the differential equation known as Newton's third law. Now, ZFC doesn't know what "position," "particles," "momentum," "energy," "forces," etc. are, because those things only exist in the real world. Is the model correct? No, because general relativity and quantum mechanics are better descriptors of the world. (Regardless, it's still useful.) More importantly, is it self-consistent? Almost* definitely. I cannot say the same about Austrianomics, because its verbal nature makes it so ill-posed that it's not even wrong.
I'm not saying that Keynesians and Chicago school economists are using the right model, but at least they tackle the problem with the right epistemological viewpoint. Now, you may object to my view of what is "right," but I would argue that this battle already played itself out when physics became the most successful descriptor of the universe we know, and philosophy became an esot
It's an easy correlation, dipfuck. Malpractice caps are a reaction to insanely high medical costs. That explains the correlation very simply, doesn't it? Go cry in the corner.
I don't know why I'm responding, but as I pointed out, not only is there not a correlation between states with low costs and states with malpractice caps, but there also isn't a correlation between the rate at which costs are increasing. Texas implemented its cap in 2003, and its costs have risen at a rate higher than anyone's since.
As for the rest of your post, your evidence is still anecdotal, and while your speculation sounds like it could be correct, the lack of a rate vs. cap correlation still disproves it. Besides, doctors do not have a good "big-picture" idea of where the money is going anyway. That New Yorker reporter I mentioned earlier talked to the two hospital administrators in McAllen, and they had no idea that they have the highest costs in the country/world. Then they got really defensive and offered no explanations as to why their costs are so high. The kind of doctor that sets up shop in McAllen and profits from referrals doesn't see most of the costs of that transaction, because they get only get a relatively small fee.
The vast majority of Austrian economists predicted that we would have a very deep recession, way back when most mainstream economists were still talking about the possibility of a "slowdown" in the housing sector, which might spread to the rest of the economy. You can spew as much bullshit as you want, but you can't change that fact. The mainstream was wrong, and the Austrians were right.
They're always predicting deep recessions in the near future. When one eventually happens, it doesn't mean they were right. Right now, I see them predicting hyperinflation; we'll see if that actually happens or not.
You can't disprove a priori knowledge with "quantitative assessment". In other words, no amount of empirical evidence will ever disprove the Pythagorean theorem.
No, it won't. But Austrian theorems do not have the same level of precision as mathematical ones, making them ambiguous and faulty. I didn't label specifics because frankly, there's too many to count. I've read the first chapter of Rothbard's "Man, the Economy, and State," and I was able to think of hundreds of counterexamples to the alleged proofs, or special cases that are unadressed, or words left undefined and therefore subject to interpretation.
Let's start with what is ostensibly the fundamental 'axiom' of Austrianomics: humans act. Well, what is a "human?" Is it just an adult person? What about children? What about the mentally retarded? What about the comatose? Does a corporation (which has legal personage) count as a human? If so, are its employees and stockholders "more" than human, because they are themselves human and are part of another human? These are not unimportant questions, because even one special case completely invalidates everything else. It's like those "proofs" of 0=1, which ultimately relies on the ability to divide by zero.
In contrast, the Pythagorean theorem can be expressed in a purely symbolic manner, derived only from the 21 axioms that include those of ZFC, first-order logic, and equality axioms. It requires no interpretation on the part of the reader, because a computer can understand them. Likewise, physics, chemistry, and Keynesian economics don't try to construct an axiomatic system to describe the world, because they ultimately use the same axioms mathematicians do, and the only other assumptions they make are in the construction of a mapping from the real world onto the mathematical one.
A good way to put it is that Austrianomics is to mainstream economics as philosophy is to physics. The fundamental difference between philosophy and physics is that in physics, the logic used to described the universe is separated from the model save for a few scant mappings, but in philosophy, the logic and the model are one. I think you'd agree that Austrianomics and mainstream economics share a similar relationship. While philosophers pondered the nature of the universe for millennia, they ultimately got nowhere, because their propositions were based on shaky definitions and uncertainties. It wasn't until Isaac Newton got down to business and invented physics that people began to make predictions which coherently described reality.
So, I ask you: if you wanted to send something into space, would you ask a philosopher, or would you ask a physicist?
I posted something similar to this below, but to put it mildly, your assertion that malpractice litigation/insurance and "defensive medicine" are driving up costs simply isn't supported by the data. All the best estimates for the actual litigation and insurance put it at about 0.5% of our total costs.* As for defensive medicine, while that is undoubtedly more difficult to quantify, 22 states have some form of malpractice cap, so we can see how well medical costs and quality correlate to those caps. Unfortunately, while the numbers of doctors in those state varies in a statistically significant way, neither the quality nor the costs do. In fact, Texas spends more money than any other state, despite their ridiculously strict $250k caps. (You could literally be wrongly castrated by a doctor in Texas and get no more than $250k.) Even worse, their costs are going up faster than any other state.
* Anderson, Gerard F., Peter S. Hussey, Bianca K. Frogner, and Hugh R. Waters. "Health Spending In The United States And The Rest Of The Industrialized World." Health Aff 24, no. 4 (July 1, 2005): 903-914.
As someone who knows many doctors, I will tell you flat out that if that figure includes malpractice insurance it's either a flat out lie, or product of ridiculously bad methodology.
Or maybe you shouldn't rely on the anecdotal testimony of a small group of people who make up only one part of the sizable cost structure of the whole health care system? Even if there was something wrong with the study (which you only stated, but did not demonstrate), how do you attribute the negative correlation between malpractice caps and health spending?
Well, what you have to realize is costs roughly ten times as much for a doctor to see a patient in an ER, compared to a comparable visit at an office. So, if you assumed equal visit lengths, it would take ten bullshit visits to balance out one non-preventative ER visit. But at the same time, those bullshit visits only waste a few minutes of the doctor's time, while a more serious condition might take hours or days. When you factor in the time difference, it becomes no contest.
The 0.5% figure already includes* the cost of malpractice insurance: as you noted, the actual malpractice damages are even less. Besides, as I already pointed out, Texas has practically eliminated malpractice suits with their bogus tort laws, and yet their costs are climbing faster than anyone's. I'm just speculating, but I wonder if the Texas tort law hasn't created a perverse incentive. Namely, the doctors that are moving there to take advantage of the malpractice situation are the ones more concerned about money than patients; i.e., the type of doctor driving the cost of care up. At the same time, a doctor could accidentally cut off your genitals in Texas, for which you could get at most $250k. (Yes, this just happened to someone, though luckily not in Texas.)
* Anderson, Gerard F., Peter S. Hussey, Bianca K. Frogner, and Hugh R. Waters. "Health Spending In The United States And The Rest Of The Industrialized World." Health Aff 24, no. 4 (July 1, 2005): 903-914.
Since every developed country other than the U.S. has some form of universal health care, whatever country you were in must have been a developing country. So what was it? Mexico? India? China? Somalia? Regardless, I'm sure it was a place where the prices are very different in general from what they are here. I suspect that you left out the name of the country on purpose, so we couldn't compare them.
But there's also a flip side to this: people who are uninsured or underinsured don't want to spend a lot of money on a doctor's visit, so they neglect conditions that are easy to treat early on and end up having to go to the ER when the condition becomes more serious. Preventative medicine is a major cost saver.
Progressive's simply don't understand economics, most libertarians I know make it a point to study economics in detail.
You mean they study Austrian economics, a system decidedly out of the economics mainstream and without much intellectual merit. Austrian economics rejects most quantitative assessment of principles and instead relies on 'praexology,' essentially an axiomatic system that appears on its face to be sound, but is actually extremely superficial and non-rigorous, and is thus subject to error. Its axioms are ambiguous, its terms ill-defined. If you don't believe me, show one of their foundational books to a mathematician and watch as you are laughed out of the room. Unfortunately, one false premise in an axiomatic systems causes the whole thing to fall flat on its face, which Austrian economics does quite regularly. In other words, the whole of Austrian economics is a pseudo-logic designed to support the (previously held) libertarian beliefs of its founders.
Bad news: your 15% figure is out of date. We're now spending 17% of our GDP on health care, and if the trend of the 2000s continues, we'll be at 30% by 2020.
Unfortunately, the Republicans will oppose any type of health care legislation, because the truth is that they don't think anything's wrong. Most won't admit it, or will make the wholly unsubstantiated claim that malpractice insurance is the only thing wrong with our system. This is despite the fact that all estimates put tort at least than 0.5% of our health spending. Of course, while the effects of 'defensive medicine' are tougher to estimate, there's fortunately empirical proof showing that it makes no difference. Texas has the strictest malpractice tort limits in the country (you can get at most $250k, even in cases of gross negligence causing permanent disability or death), causing malpractice claims to plummet, yet their health spending increases have continued to outpace the rest of the country in the six years since it was passed. So much, in fact, that Texas now spends more than any other state for decidedly mediocre results. Essentially, it's a microcosm of the U.S. as a whole.
There was a great article in the New Yorker a few weeks ago wherein a reporter visited McAllen, Texas, home of the largest health care spending in the world. What he found was a perfect example of what we see across the country: when doctors treat their practice as a revenue generator, costs go way up, and quality actually suffers. The doctors think that they're doing their best for their patients, but they subconsciously make more referrals when it brings in money. It's long, but it's definitely worth the read.
I know for a fact that the digital version of every channel in St. Louis comes in nice and strong with plain old rabbit ears, because I installed my parents' tuner two years ago. However, my parents actually live in the city, and none of those channels are the aforementioned 12, 17, 19, 20, 28, 48, or 55. Also, Springfield, Illinois is a good 90 miles away from St. Louis, so I'm guessing that the letter-writer must use a repeater to get the St. Louis channels. IIRC, repeater stations aren't required to switch to digital, which would explain why the writer can't pick them up.
Are you aware that the federal government is now the majority shareholder in GM? Therefore, any patents that GM obtains will now be owned (indirectly) by us. If the federal government successfully sells its stock through an IPO in a couple years, as they are planning to do, we'll get that money back.
No, phonons are indeed quantum mechanical. (A phonon is essentially the joint wavefunction describing many different nuclei in a solid.) The main difference that I see between this setup and a black hole is in the "vacuum" from which particles are created. In a solid, phonons are typically created by a myriad of scattering events. Two electrons could scatter off each other, an electron could scatter off a nucleus, a photon of visible light could make dozens of phonons, etc. Near a black hole, though, virtual pairs need to be created spontaneously from the vacuum. So, the upshot is that while the general mechanism is the same in both cases, I would guess that phonons in a BEC are created far more frequently than virtual pairs near a black hole.
Planck's and Einstein's explanations for blackbody radiation and the photoelectric effect are generally not considered to be quantum mechanics. Essentially, they were phenomenological explanations for strange experimental data, and were not any sort of coherent, all-encompassing idea. Together with Bohr's model for the hydrogen atom, they are collectively referred to as the old quantum theory. Actual quantum mechanics got its start with Heisenberg's matrix mechanics and Schrodinger's differential equation formalism. Their formalisms (which are equivalent) are what tied all of the disparate, baseless predictions of the old quantum theory together with a neat little bow we now call quantum mechanics.
But the GP should make no mistake: quantum mechanics began making useful predictions immediately. I suspect that they've simply mixed up QM and relativity, for it was relativity that was a "beautiful" theory without much experimental backing. At the time, it could do basically one thing: predict the anomalous precession of Mercury. That's why Einstein never won a Nobel Prize for his work on relativity, even though it was one of the biggest game-changers in the history of physics.
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Broken window fallacy. It's only "stimulating" the economy by taking money from the citizens and giving it to the defense contractors. If we cut our defense budget by 15%, we could pay for health care.
It would only be an example of the broken window fallacy in a world without externalities. The whole idea of the program is that the savings created by reducing the carbon emissions of the non-clunkers should offset the cost of destroying the clunkers. Whether that's the case is debatable.
(Obama was in the top 3 as well [quite the coup for someone who has not been in politics that long]).
Obama received record donations across the board. Since political money is grouped by employer, a side effect of this is that he appears to be one of the top recipients of money from every major corporation. Yet for some reason, I never hear people saying that he's a shill for the University of California (his largest 'donor'). And for the record, if you compare the per-capita employee donations for Fannie and Freddie to the per-capita donation for the U.S. as a whole, you'll find that it's a factor of two less. I'm tired of correcting this fallacy, and I get the impression I'm going to keep seeing these asinine comments until 2012.
The way that all invisibility cloaks work (at least theoretically) is that you create a structure whose materials parameters vary in such a way that it effectively performs a coordinate transformation, mapping points in the cloaked region to points outside of it. In real space, the wave curves around the object, but in transformed space, it still travels in a straight line. For electromagnetic cloaks, it is the permittivity (refractive index squared) of the structure that is engineered. I don't know much about earthquake cloaks, but I imagine that it's probably something like the shear modulus being varied.
Anyway, my point is that you can't simply overlap two separate cloaks and get one big one. The transformed geometry is a highly nonlinear function of material variation, so if you try to do that, neither cloak will work. Basically, these cloaks would have to have gaps between them to work, and since the energy of a cloak travels around its edges, it's conceivable that two cloaks separated by a narrow gap could channel energy from a large area through said gap. Anything built there would have serious problems.
When the cost of entry to the broadcast medium (the internet) is effectively zero, EVERYONE becomes a member of the press.
I'm reminded of a modified version of that quote from The Incredibles: "When everyone's a member of the press, no one is." Regardless of the medium, we will still need professional journalists to do investigative work (a naturally long and tedious process), because even the best journalist cannot put in the requisite hours if they have another job to do. Unfortunately, TV news does little to no investigative work, which means that when the newspapers die, a major vacuum will be left in the news business. I don't know what the solution is.
I don't think you can blame the White House for wanting to be the moderator of a discussion it enabled. Sure, if Congress was to set up an online discussion, it would be a lot more bipartisan, but they haven't. I'd bet that CmdrTaco reserves the right to delete anything he wants to on ./ for any reason, and could even mod a post +10 Mega-Insightful if he wanted to.
I'm sure the EPA needs economists to evaluate the impact of its policies on the economy. Having said that, that doesn't mean that the opinion of said economists should have any weight whatsoever when it comes to evaluating the science of climate change. The fact remains that the author of the "quashed" report has never published a single paper relating to climatology and climate science, and has only worked as an economist for his entire career.
I'm a Ph.D. student in engineering at MIT with a substantial background in physics. Does that mean that when I have a fancy MIT Ph.D. on my resume in a few years, my opinion be given as much impact as someone who's studied climatology? I'd hope not.
Still, many of us choose to buy private health insurance as well, paying twice simply because the quality of NHS care is so poor.
Boo-frickin-hoo. The U.S. spent 17% of its GDP on health care in 2008; the UK spent 7.5% of its GDP in the same year. You can complain all you want about having to pay twice because the quality of the NHS is so poor, but the fact remains that when you pay twice, you're still paying less than us.
By the way, 30% of American health care costs go to feed the insurance bureaucracy. About 1% of NHS costs are bureaucratic. You only envy the American system because you're poorly informed.
You can't make a comment like this and not tell us what they thought you did.
That does not make it any more precise than Austrian theory. You should really read this [mises.org] paper. If that paper does not convince you that Austrian theory is precise, then there is no way that I can. I'm dead serious about this. I would love to include some of its quotes in this post, but they're too long.
I didn't read through that in its entirety, but I skimmed enough to get the gist of it. Unfortunately for you, it completely confirmed my suspicions, as it reads like a philosophy paper, talking about epistemology and Kantism. Though I was happy to see that it brought up my sticking point about verbal logic versus symbolic logic, it didn't refute it. Instead, it is simply dismissed by appealing to Occam's Razor (pg. 61), which is really a shame. For one thing, Occam's Razor isn't an absolute truth, only a guiding principle. For another, I would consider a system of 21 axioms defined precisely and symbolically to be far simpler than any system that requires the use of the English language, which is vague, filled with biases, and can have completely different meanings depending on who's doing the reading and who's doing the writing. The proof is in the pudding: if you gave me a week, I could write a computer program to parse the ZFC axioms and understand thousands of mathematical theorems. At the same time, millions of computer scientists have been toiling for fifty years trying to create a computer program that can understand the English language. So, I ask you: which description is simpler?
If my question does not involve actors, then I would ask the physicist. But if the physicist tried to create a mathematical equation to model human behavior, and the philosopher points out that even though the equation is mathematically correct, it does not map onto human action that way the physicist believes it does, I would go with the philosopher. The physicist may continue to build upon his equation, but all of his conclusions will be wrong, because his foundation is flawed.
I don't much like talking about epistemology (too much philosophy), but you are absolutely right about the fact that the model itself may not be accurate. As I mentioned in my last post (and actually, something Rothbard mentions in that paper you linked to), the thing that sets Austrianomics apart from every other scientific discipline is the fact that it relies on empirical axioms rather than abstract ones, and this abundance of empirical axioms makes it imprecise and fallacious. The other disciplines still require a degree of empiricism, but they have reduced it substantially by tacking on the empirical axioms at the end of the logical chain, making them (almost) logically error-proof.
It might help if I used an example. In classical mechanics, as in all physics, the axioms of ZFC are held to be true. From them, you can construct the idea of real numbers, calculus, etc. in a completely symbolic and error-free approach. The only empirical axiom is that the positions of all particles are identified with a multidimensional real function of time, whose values obey the differential equation known as Newton's third law. Now, ZFC doesn't know what "position," "particles," "momentum," "energy," "forces," etc. are, because those things only exist in the real world. Is the model correct? No, because general relativity and quantum mechanics are better descriptors of the world. (Regardless, it's still useful.) More importantly, is it self-consistent? Almost* definitely. I cannot say the same about Austrianomics, because its verbal nature makes it so ill-posed that it's not even wrong.
I'm not saying that Keynesians and Chicago school economists are using the right model, but at least they tackle the problem with the right epistemological viewpoint. Now, you may object to my view of what is "right," but I would argue that this battle already played itself out when physics became the most successful descriptor of the universe we know, and philosophy became an esot
It's an easy correlation, dipfuck. Malpractice caps are a reaction to insanely high medical costs. That explains the correlation very simply, doesn't it? Go cry in the corner.
I don't know why I'm responding, but as I pointed out, not only is there not a correlation between states with low costs and states with malpractice caps, but there also isn't a correlation between the rate at which costs are increasing. Texas implemented its cap in 2003, and its costs have risen at a rate higher than anyone's since.
As for the rest of your post, your evidence is still anecdotal, and while your speculation sounds like it could be correct, the lack of a rate vs. cap correlation still disproves it. Besides, doctors do not have a good "big-picture" idea of where the money is going anyway. That New Yorker reporter I mentioned earlier talked to the two hospital administrators in McAllen, and they had no idea that they have the highest costs in the country/world. Then they got really defensive and offered no explanations as to why their costs are so high. The kind of doctor that sets up shop in McAllen and profits from referrals doesn't see most of the costs of that transaction, because they get only get a relatively small fee.
The vast majority of Austrian economists predicted that we would have a very deep recession, way back when most mainstream economists were still talking about the possibility of a "slowdown" in the housing sector, which might spread to the rest of the economy. You can spew as much bullshit as you want, but you can't change that fact. The mainstream was wrong, and the Austrians were right.
They're always predicting deep recessions in the near future. When one eventually happens, it doesn't mean they were right. Right now, I see them predicting hyperinflation; we'll see if that actually happens or not.
You can't disprove a priori knowledge with "quantitative assessment". In other words, no amount of empirical evidence will ever disprove the Pythagorean theorem.
No, it won't. But Austrian theorems do not have the same level of precision as mathematical ones, making them ambiguous and faulty. I didn't label specifics because frankly, there's too many to count. I've read the first chapter of Rothbard's "Man, the Economy, and State," and I was able to think of hundreds of counterexamples to the alleged proofs, or special cases that are unadressed, or words left undefined and therefore subject to interpretation.
Let's start with what is ostensibly the fundamental 'axiom' of Austrianomics: humans act. Well, what is a "human?" Is it just an adult person? What about children? What about the mentally retarded? What about the comatose? Does a corporation (which has legal personage) count as a human? If so, are its employees and stockholders "more" than human, because they are themselves human and are part of another human? These are not unimportant questions, because even one special case completely invalidates everything else. It's like those "proofs" of 0=1, which ultimately relies on the ability to divide by zero.
In contrast, the Pythagorean theorem can be expressed in a purely symbolic manner, derived only from the 21 axioms that include those of ZFC, first-order logic, and equality axioms. It requires no interpretation on the part of the reader, because a computer can understand them. Likewise, physics, chemistry, and Keynesian economics don't try to construct an axiomatic system to describe the world, because they ultimately use the same axioms mathematicians do, and the only other assumptions they make are in the construction of a mapping from the real world onto the mathematical one.
A good way to put it is that Austrianomics is to mainstream economics as philosophy is to physics. The fundamental difference between philosophy and physics is that in physics, the logic used to described the universe is separated from the model save for a few scant mappings, but in philosophy, the logic and the model are one. I think you'd agree that Austrianomics and mainstream economics share a similar relationship. While philosophers pondered the nature of the universe for millennia, they ultimately got nowhere, because their propositions were based on shaky definitions and uncertainties. It wasn't until Isaac Newton got down to business and invented physics that people began to make predictions which coherently described reality.
So, I ask you: if you wanted to send something into space, would you ask a philosopher, or would you ask a physicist?
I posted something similar to this below, but to put it mildly, your assertion that malpractice litigation/insurance and "defensive medicine" are driving up costs simply isn't supported by the data. All the best estimates for the actual litigation and insurance put it at about 0.5% of our total costs.* As for defensive medicine, while that is undoubtedly more difficult to quantify, 22 states have some form of malpractice cap, so we can see how well medical costs and quality correlate to those caps. Unfortunately, while the numbers of doctors in those state varies in a statistically significant way, neither the quality nor the costs do. In fact, Texas spends more money than any other state, despite their ridiculously strict $250k caps. (You could literally be wrongly castrated by a doctor in Texas and get no more than $250k.) Even worse, their costs are going up faster than any other state.
* Anderson, Gerard F., Peter S. Hussey, Bianca K. Frogner, and Hugh R. Waters. "Health Spending In The United States And The Rest Of The Industrialized World." Health Aff 24, no. 4 (July 1, 2005): 903-914.
As someone who knows many doctors, I will tell you flat out that if that figure includes malpractice insurance it's either a flat out lie, or product of ridiculously bad methodology.
Or maybe you shouldn't rely on the anecdotal testimony of a small group of people who make up only one part of the sizable cost structure of the whole health care system? Even if there was something wrong with the study (which you only stated, but did not demonstrate), how do you attribute the negative correlation between malpractice caps and health spending?
Well, what you have to realize is costs roughly ten times as much for a doctor to see a patient in an ER, compared to a comparable visit at an office. So, if you assumed equal visit lengths, it would take ten bullshit visits to balance out one non-preventative ER visit. But at the same time, those bullshit visits only waste a few minutes of the doctor's time, while a more serious condition might take hours or days. When you factor in the time difference, it becomes no contest.
The 0.5% figure already includes* the cost of malpractice insurance: as you noted, the actual malpractice damages are even less. Besides, as I already pointed out, Texas has practically eliminated malpractice suits with their bogus tort laws, and yet their costs are climbing faster than anyone's. I'm just speculating, but I wonder if the Texas tort law hasn't created a perverse incentive. Namely, the doctors that are moving there to take advantage of the malpractice situation are the ones more concerned about money than patients; i.e., the type of doctor driving the cost of care up. At the same time, a doctor could accidentally cut off your genitals in Texas, for which you could get at most $250k. (Yes, this just happened to someone, though luckily not in Texas.)
* Anderson, Gerard F., Peter S. Hussey, Bianca K. Frogner, and Hugh R. Waters. "Health Spending In The United States And The Rest Of The Industrialized World." Health Aff 24, no. 4 (July 1, 2005): 903-914.
Since every developed country other than the U.S. has some form of universal health care, whatever country you were in must have been a developing country. So what was it? Mexico? India? China? Somalia? Regardless, I'm sure it was a place where the prices are very different in general from what they are here. I suspect that you left out the name of the country on purpose, so we couldn't compare them.
But there's also a flip side to this: people who are uninsured or underinsured don't want to spend a lot of money on a doctor's visit, so they neglect conditions that are easy to treat early on and end up having to go to the ER when the condition becomes more serious. Preventative medicine is a major cost saver.
Progressive's simply don't understand economics, most libertarians I know make it a point to study economics in detail.
You mean they study Austrian economics, a system decidedly out of the economics mainstream and without much intellectual merit. Austrian economics rejects most quantitative assessment of principles and instead relies on 'praexology,' essentially an axiomatic system that appears on its face to be sound, but is actually extremely superficial and non-rigorous, and is thus subject to error. Its axioms are ambiguous, its terms ill-defined. If you don't believe me, show one of their foundational books to a mathematician and watch as you are laughed out of the room. Unfortunately, one false premise in an axiomatic systems causes the whole thing to fall flat on its face, which Austrian economics does quite regularly. In other words, the whole of Austrian economics is a pseudo-logic designed to support the (previously held) libertarian beliefs of its founders.
Bad news: your 15% figure is out of date. We're now spending 17% of our GDP on health care, and if the trend of the 2000s continues, we'll be at 30% by 2020.
Unfortunately, the Republicans will oppose any type of health care legislation, because the truth is that they don't think anything's wrong. Most won't admit it, or will make the wholly unsubstantiated claim that malpractice insurance is the only thing wrong with our system. This is despite the fact that all estimates put tort at least than 0.5% of our health spending. Of course, while the effects of 'defensive medicine' are tougher to estimate, there's fortunately empirical proof showing that it makes no difference. Texas has the strictest malpractice tort limits in the country (you can get at most $250k, even in cases of gross negligence causing permanent disability or death), causing malpractice claims to plummet, yet their health spending increases have continued to outpace the rest of the country in the six years since it was passed. So much, in fact, that Texas now spends more than any other state for decidedly mediocre results. Essentially, it's a microcosm of the U.S. as a whole.
There was a great article in the New Yorker a few weeks ago wherein a reporter visited McAllen, Texas, home of the largest health care spending in the world. What he found was a perfect example of what we see across the country: when doctors treat their practice as a revenue generator, costs go way up, and quality actually suffers. The doctors think that they're doing their best for their patients, but they subconsciously make more referrals when it brings in money. It's long, but it's definitely worth the read.
Fun fact: Escape from New York was actually filmed in East St. Louis. Apparently, post-apocalyptic New York is actually in western Illinois.
I know for a fact that the digital version of every channel in St. Louis comes in nice and strong with plain old rabbit ears, because I installed my parents' tuner two years ago. However, my parents actually live in the city, and none of those channels are the aforementioned 12, 17, 19, 20, 28, 48, or 55. Also, Springfield, Illinois is a good 90 miles away from St. Louis, so I'm guessing that the letter-writer must use a repeater to get the St. Louis channels. IIRC, repeater stations aren't required to switch to digital, which would explain why the writer can't pick them up.
Are you aware that the federal government is now the majority shareholder in GM? Therefore, any patents that GM obtains will now be owned (indirectly) by us. If the federal government successfully sells its stock through an IPO in a couple years, as they are planning to do, we'll get that money back.
No, phonons are indeed quantum mechanical. (A phonon is essentially the joint wavefunction describing many different nuclei in a solid.) The main difference that I see between this setup and a black hole is in the "vacuum" from which particles are created. In a solid, phonons are typically created by a myriad of scattering events. Two electrons could scatter off each other, an electron could scatter off a nucleus, a photon of visible light could make dozens of phonons, etc. Near a black hole, though, virtual pairs need to be created spontaneously from the vacuum. So, the upshot is that while the general mechanism is the same in both cases, I would guess that phonons in a BEC are created far more frequently than virtual pairs near a black hole.
Planck's and Einstein's explanations for blackbody radiation and the photoelectric effect are generally not considered to be quantum mechanics. Essentially, they were phenomenological explanations for strange experimental data, and were not any sort of coherent, all-encompassing idea. Together with Bohr's model for the hydrogen atom, they are collectively referred to as the old quantum theory. Actual quantum mechanics got its start with Heisenberg's matrix mechanics and Schrodinger's differential equation formalism. Their formalisms (which are equivalent) are what tied all of the disparate, baseless predictions of the old quantum theory together with a neat little bow we now call quantum mechanics.
But the GP should make no mistake: quantum mechanics began making useful predictions immediately. I suspect that they've simply mixed up QM and relativity, for it was relativity that was a "beautiful" theory without much experimental backing. At the time, it could do basically one thing: predict the anomalous precession of Mercury. That's why Einstein never won a Nobel Prize for his work on relativity, even though it was one of the biggest game-changers in the history of physics.