Links for 2011-03-22 [del.icio.us]

• Common Misconceptions of Economists | Economics | Politics | The American Scene
  As a whole.
• Another Round of Millman and Manzi | Economics | The American Scene
  If economics is not a science then neither is medicine nor geology.
• Jim and Noah’s Excellent Adventure, Part 1 | Economics | Politics | The American Scene
  But because they lack a robust understanding of the extraordinarily dense causal network that governs the system in question (using “causal” here in the operational sense of the ability to make accurate predictions about the difference between the world in which we execute an intervention as compared to the counterfactual world where we do not), they do not allow us to make reliable, non-obvious predictions about the result of proposed actions. This is closely related to my fundamental criticisms of economics and other social sciences – not that they can’t do this at all, but they have extremely limited ability to do so, and many social scientists (or often, social science popularizers) make wildly excessive claims about this capability. We ought, in my view, to premise our political economy around an accurate understanding of our ignorance.
• Would Universal Healthcare Coverage Actually Improve Health? | Politics | Economics | The American Scene
  To my knowledge, the only large-scale randomized experiment in the U.S. that has tested the actual effects on health of providing various kinds of healthcare financing was the RAND Health Insurance Experiment (HIE). In this experiment, thousands of families were randomly assigned to one of five different health insurance plans that ranged from something like a plan that provides free health care, to something like a pure catastrophic-only plan in which consumers pay out-of-pocket for day-to-day healthcare. The study tracked what exact health care services each group used, and how their health varied over a period of 3 – 5 years.

  …But as an observer of the health care debates, it always struck me as fascinating that the fact that the “best evidence we have” showed that providing health care coverage doesn’t actually improve average health wasn’t treated as more central.

• Is Economics a Discipline? – Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality with All Ten Tentacles
  DeLong disses the University Of Chicago in arguing that economics may not be a science.
• Yglesias » A Better Chart on Taxes and Inequality
  Taxes paid by income earned.
• A Quick Case for Charter Cities: Memo to the Gates Foundation, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
  A strong argument for Charter Cities.

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