I don’t read the Washington Times a good deal but I liked this op-ed by Richard Rahn on public choice theory and why we never seem to solve any problems. Take poverty, for example:

The lack of “progress” is largely a result of endless redefinitions of what poverty is. The average U.S. “poor” family now has a large flat-screen color TV, air-conditioned living quarters and a dishwasher. Middle-class families did not have such luxuries 50 years ago.

or racial discrimination:

Racial discrimination is a case in point. By any objective measure, there was far more discrimination a half-century ago, but the amount of media time given to the discussion of racism appears to have grown substantially. Great progress has been made in reducing illiteracy, violence, infant mortality, etc. — yet many believe the world is getting worse, which leads to pessimism. The misinformation spread by the media indirectly causes the people and the political class to misallocate taxpayer dollars to “problems” that have been or are being solved when those resources should be more productively spent on real or more pressing problems.

Unlike Mr. Rahn I think that racial discrimination is a real and pressing problem but I agree with him that the success we’ve realized is being discounted while our failures are being exaggerated. It reminds me of an old description of golf: a game in which the player attempts to insert a ball into a hole with implements singularly unsuited to the task.

He cites just two reasons for the phenomenon he’s identified—the vested interests of those in the government given the tasks and moving the goalposts. But there are many others.

One of those other reasons is that success is poorly defined. Another is messianism, i.e. the objective is not solving problems but to look around continually for new problems to solve. Another is that virtue cannot be inculcated by remote control. Hiring a shabbos goy only makes you compliant with the law in a narrow, technical sense. You have not brought it into your heart.

Yet another is that not all problems can be solved—they are “wicked” problems, e.g. Israel and Palestine.

At Forbes Kenneth Rapoza provides a good, two sentence summary of the several rounds of tariffs and counter-tariffs the media are calling a “trade war”:

If the editorial board over at the WSJ and the FT and The Economist are right, then all this ends badly for both sides. If they are wrong, a better trade arrangement is worked out before it all goes to hell in a handbasket.

Before you can make a judgment about what effect the tariffs will have on the status quo ante, you should understand what it was. The old system encouraged consumption and the taking on of debt while increasing income inequality.

I believe in free trade with all my heart but what we’ve had isn’t free trade. Our average tariff rate is 5%; China’s is 25%. And that was before the first round of tariff increases between the two countries began. We subsidize some export goods, mostly agricultural, but we’re pikers by comparison with the Chinese. China has been dumping steel and aluminum made in government-owned plants for over a generation. I don’t believe there is any viable substitute in the U. S. for a diverse economy which includes robust heavy industry, light manufacturing, and agriculture along with service industries and finance. We should put policies in place which effectuate that even if it does raise prices and lowers GDP by a couple of points.

I want to commend james Capretta’s excellent article at RealClearPolicy, “How Congress Can Fix Its Trillion Dollar Accounting Error”, to your attention. It furnishes a description and history of the federal government’s role in lending. Here’s the meat of the article:

For instance, when the government issued guarantees for loans made by private sector banks, the federal budget would often show substantial initial savings from the issuance of the guarantees because the banks were required to pay up-front fees when loans were originated. The cost to the government of guaranteeing the loans was only recorded when payments were made to banks to cover losses associated with defaults. But these federal payments for loan defaults often took place many years after the loans originated and sometimes well beyond the five- or 10-year timeframe of the federal budget. Using cash accounting very often gave the misleading impression that issuing loan guarantees, even with lenient terms for the borrowers and the potential for large financial losses for the government, actually benefitted the federal budget.

By contrast, when the government lent money directly to borrowers, cash accounting made the transaction look artificially expensive. The government recorded the loan disbursement as an outlay and the repayments from borrowers as receipts, or negative outlays. For the many different types of loans with repayment periods beyond the timeframe of the budget, the initial outlay would far exceed the expected repayments occurring within the budget window, thus making the issuance of the direct loans look more expensive for the government than they really were.

FCRA was a major advance because it instituted accrual accounting for most credit programs. Under accrual accounting, the federal budget records the net subsidy cost of a direct loan or loan guarantee at the time the loan is originated based on the present value of all future financial flows from the transaction. Present value calculations use discount rates to assign a value in today’s terms to a receipt or a payment that is scheduled to occur in a future year. The purpose of accrual accounting is to capture the government’s all-in net exposure (or profit) after taking into account all of the disbursements and receipts. With accrual accounting, direct loan and loan guarantees get assessed using an identical methodology, which allows for a fairer comparison of the competing approaches. Further, using accrual accounting for credit programs allows for more useful comparisons with the budgetary costs of the government’s traditional spending programs.

The defect in the present system is that FCRA is required to use Treasury interest rates rather than market rates, effectively subsidizing lending. The broad effect of the reform would be to increase interest rates over substantial range of loans—everything for which there is a federal credit program. Today that includes almost all borrowing.

I think that the general thrust of that reform is good but don’t ignore the knock-on effects. Subsidized student loans allow individuals who otherwise couldn’t afford to go to college to do so but it also allows people to shoulder debts they can never repay and can’t discharge in bankruptcy. Subsidized home loans allow people who otherwise couldn’t afford to purchase a home to do so but it also raises the price of houses. The web of effects is so great I doubt they can be untangled. We don’t really know what effect requiring FCRA to use market rates would have. It could rectify the relationship between supply and demand. Or it could drive universities out of business. Or both.

If this report noted in the Mail is correct:

A shocking study has revealed 90 per cent of the world’s plastic waste comes from just 10 rivers in Asia and Africa.

As governments around the world rush to address the global problem of plastic pollution in the oceans, researchers have now pinpointed the river systems that carry the majority of it out to sea.

About five trillion pounds is floating in the sea, and targeting the major sources – such as the Yangtze and the Ganges – could almost halve it, scientists claim.

and

The Yangtze has been estimated in previous research to dump some 727 million pounds of plastic into the sea each year.

The Ganges River in India is responsible for even more – about 1.2 billion pounds.

A combination of the Xi, Dong and Zhujiang Rivers (233 million lbs per year) in China as well as four Indonesian rivers: the Brantas (85 million lbs annually), Solo (71 million pounds per year), Serayu (37 million lbs per year) and Progo (28 million lbs per year), are all large contributors.

I don’t interpret that as saying that the U. S. is off the hook. We’re enormously overwrapped, overpackaged, and we don’t recycle nearly enough. But it also suggests to me even if the U. S. didn’t produce any plastic waste at all there would still be a problem and it’s a problem that follows a pattern.

What struck me most about this article is how much of our policy and politics as it relates to the rest of the world is based on some combination of patronization, romanticism, and nostalgia. Any country that throws over a billion pounds of plastic into a single river isn’t a poor country any more. It’s a wasteful middle class country.

I’m not even going to bother quoting the editorials at the NYT, WP, and WSJ on Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment as associate justice of the Supreme Court. It’s the usual suspects.

It strongly looks as though, true to his word, Trump has appointed a replacement for Scalia, an experienced jurist with considerable intellectual heft. The protesters aren’t protesting Kavanaugh’s appointment. They’re protesting that Trump has an appointment to make.

I want to put down three markers for what I think are likely to happen in the coming months and years, one trivially easy and the other two a bit stronger.

First, Kavanaugh will be confirmed, probably before September 1.

Second, neither Roe v. Wade nor Obergefell v. Hodges will be overturned within the next five years, if ever.

Third, it is possible that the Court will revise the “undue burden” standard, introduced after Roe (I don’t remember the name of the case).

I hope that this appointment returns issues like abortion, the limits of presidential power, and so on to the political sphere but I don’t have my hopes up. The Supreme Court is the least democratic branch of government and it’s ever so much easier to get your way by fiat than by persuasion.

A recent study by from Stanford as found that a significant number of physicians are suffering from burnout and/or depression which can contribute to serious medical errors. From ABC News:

Fifty-five percent of doctors reported symptoms of burnout, 33 percent had high levels of fatigue, and 6.5 percent had thoughts of killing themselves in the last year. According to the study, doctors have 3 to 5 times the suicide rate of the general public.

Medical errors are more than twice as likely if a doctor has signs of burnout, and 38 percent more likely if they have signs of fatigue. This was consistent even in workplaces with different safety levels.

“A physician with burnout in a work unit with a safety grade of A has similar rates of error as a non-burnout physician in a unit with safety-grades much lower,” lead author, Dr. Daniel Tawfik, MD, MS instructor of pediatrics and critical care at Stanford University, told to ABC News.

The remarks on the suicide rate among physicians are not particularly surprising. Those have been reported for the last half century along with high rates of alcoholism and/or drug abuse.

I have no ability to “reality check” those findings; I merely pass them along. If true, they’re concerning.

Something else I’ve mentioned from time to time is the number of physicians presently taking antidepressants. We don’t really have any idea how many are doing so but I don’t believe there’s anything in the studies that have been done of antidepressant use which would suggest that patients taking them are performing at peak intellectual capacity. This is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. In my view physicians taking psycho-active drugs are ethically obligated to disclose that to their patients.

There are a few more observations on this subject here and here from the NCBI.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the implementing body of the Chemical Weapons Convention, has released its interim report on the incident at Douma last April. Here’s a snippet from its findings:

OPCW designated labs conducted analysis of prioritised samples. The results show that no organophosphorous nerve agents or their degradation products were detected in the environmental samples or in the plasma samples taken from alleged casualties.

They did find traces of “chlorinated organic chemicals”, e.g. carbon tetrachloride, chloroform, and certain insecticides, as well as Sucralose and Zoloft.

The OPCW is about as unbiased as can be found, indeed, if anything it’s biased the other way. I think this should be receiving more attention.

There’s remarkably little to comment on again. I think the major media outlets have outrage fatigue.

I was a bit surprised to see this passage:

There are no simple solutions to high drug prices, which are primarily a function of the nation’s patent and drug safety laws. Companies that can bring effective and innovative therapies to market are rewarded with a limited period of strong pricing power. The purpose of these laws is to encourage companies to take the necessary risks to research and develop products that can deliver substantial health benefits to patients. The only way to hold down prices without simultaneously compromising the incentive for medical progress is to encourage more product competition where that is possible while also allowing purchasers to combine their buying power in order to increase their leverage with the manufacturers of patented products.

in James Carpetta’s recent piece on price restraint in pharmaceuticals at RealClearPolicy. Although I agree with it in broad, general terms, I think there are other alternatives than those.

First off, I’d like to see a little empirical evidence to support the theory. The theory is as he stated it—that patents encourage more R&D. Do they really? Or do they suppress it? Or are they unrelated to R&D spending? You substantiate a theory with evidence. If the evidence doesn’t actually support the theory, the theory is wrong no matter how attractive. I think there’s reason to doubt the theory for a simple reason: R&D spending by pharmaceutical companies rises with inflation not with revenue. If revenue were actually an incentive for increased R&D spending, you’d think it would rise with revenue. Here’s an alternative theory: the subsidies are incentivizing lobbying rather than research.

Here’s an alternative. I realize this is heresy but the federal government could be employing more researchers directly and doing more of its own research. That isn’t as outlandish as it sounds. 50 years ago the federal government was much more in the goods and services production business than it is now. Now the federal government mostly outsources stuff like that. That’s not a law of nature.

Here’s yet another alternative. Change our patent law to expire after a certain amount of revenue has been realized rather than after a certain amount of time has elapsed. That’s completely constitutional—the constitution just says that a patent needs to be limited in duration not that it be fixed in duration.