Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Sorry to be off-topic, but the weblog is almost unreadable on my browser today. It's very W I D E and falls off the right edge. Help!

likewise

The real problem with the press corps is not its liberal bias. It is not its conservative bias. It's that its members are barely intelligent enough to tie their shoes.

God help America.

Charles, I beg to differ but only mildly. The real problem with the press corps is symbolized by Murphy's comment. That's not stupidity, that's myopia. They literally live in a different reality than the people they profess to serve (the public) and instead exist in a plastic-bubble like world of CW. When called on it by blogs, media critics or God forbid the public themselves, they tend to get snippy.

That’s a fair critique of the news coverage of Kerry’s plan.

I would like to know how much Kerry’s plan is going to cost me, and I don’t want that cost submerged into some kind of general tax increase. I want to see its cost as a line item in the budget. And I want some kind of confidence interval on the plan’s cost estimate. Remember Medicare turned out to be much more expensive than it’s proponents claimed in the mid 1960s. I also want to know if the Kerry plan applies to immigrants, both legal and illegal because this will tell me something about Kerry’s political ideology. Are we expected to subsidize the health of the whole world? If a Nicaraguan gets an expensive disease and manages to make his way across the border, does Kerry think we have to pay for it? And finally I want to know what Kerry expects from the people who are going to get this new coverage for free. Can they be just as fat and sedentary as they choose? Or is being fat a civil right in Kerry’s book? I don’t think CBS News wants me to know the answers to these questions. And I suspect (but do not know) that Kerry, Krugman and DeLong don’t want me to know as well.

Me? i'd like to see Kerry call for elmination of the wretched medicare drug benefit, so that he can have his cake (partial tax-cut rollback funds new health-care initiative) and eat it too (medicare drug benefit elimination removes a wretched piece of legislation from the books and demonstrates bona fides on fiscal discipline).

Meanwhile, A. Zarkov, i can't help but wonder, while reading your largely legitimate questions (although i mean, good grief, man do you really think that the government should be telling people that they are too fat?), did you pose them when Bush was pushing the medicare drug benefit?

A. Zarkov, I want to stand up for the the 3 or 4 Nicaraguan's with expensive diseases who come to America. Give them some medical care! I don't want to catch what they got.

Now, was there any other objection besides immigrant bashing?

'That's not stupidity, that's myopia.'

Do these so-called journalists read books in their spare time? Don't they have any intellectual curiosity whatsoever?

They behave like gossipy mean girls: "what's hot this week?", "Dubya said something funny", "Kerry is so lame, like you know?" "that's so yesterday". Or tragics following professional sports: "He's leading by 2 points with six months to go, this is really significant", "I heard he's a choker".

No reference to an external reality, no bothering to look at the evidence of what politicians claim, or apply rational thought processes.

I mean, these twits have college degrees? Your educational system must be in worse shape than I thought.

I pity you intelligent Americans, living in a country with such a braindead political and cultural life. Whenever I'm diappointed at the media in England or Australia, I say to myself 'well, at least it's nowhere near as bad as bad as America'.

If my fellow countryman elected someone like Bush for four more years, I'd be tempted to give up on them.

Well I think the press is worse in Italy (and I mean the papers that don't belong to the Prime minister).

Brad you were very kind to link to me.

fracas_futile: When I say “diseases,” I’m not necessarily thinking of infectious diseases, (which are relatively cheap to treat), I’m thinking of expensive degenerative diseases. For example a double hip replacement (the kind of thing you wait a year for in Canada) should certainly run up a bill in excess of $50,000. Do you think we in the US should be obligated to provide this for anyone who manages to get here, legally or illegally? How is this immigrant bashing? What invidious comment did I make about immigrants? And where do you get the numbers “3 or 4?” It stands to reason that a large number of people with expensive-to-treat degenerative diseases will make their way to our shores if we have an open ended program to treat them. I think this is a fair question, as it bears on the cost of the proposed program.

howard: I absolutely think the government should be telling people they are too fat. They are too fat. As I said in one of my other posts, about 2/3 of Americans have a body mass index (BMI) in excess of 25 (cutoff for being overweight), and about 20% have a BMI over 30 (cutoff for being obese). Excess weight is a significant risk factor for many expensive-to-treat degenerative diseases. Moreover, the average BMI has been steadily climbing since 1980 along with the incidence rates for a plethora of expensive-to-treat, chronic degenerative diseases. Are we to provide free treatment for diseases that many people can avoid by a lifestyle change? Don’t we risk creating a kind of medical moral hazard? Your point about the Medicare drug program is a good one. Should we pay for satins when (at least some) people can lower their cholesterol level with mere diet and exercise? Finally might the money spent of Kerry’s program be more effectively spent in bringing about lifestyle changes. Perhaps we don’t need more surgeons as much as we need more “thin.”

Teensie little question:

Is this the same CBS Evening News "The Issues" series that began their piece entitled "Taxes" by quoting a nice man named Dennis Cariello, not otherwise identified in the story?

Somehow managing to leave out ...

* Cariello's current position as the President of the New York Young Republicans Club?
* And his previous service as the Treasurer of the New York Young Republicans Club?
* And General Counsel of the New York Young Republicans Club?
* And Treasurer of the Society of Republican Citizens?
* And the fact that his smiling face is the very first thing on the "GOP Live" page of the 2004 Republican National Convention website?

That CBS Evening News "The Issues" series? Yes?

Hm ... would these be the same CBS Evening News people who were too chickensh*t to respond to questions about how they came across this Cariello gentleman?

Those CBS Evening News folks?

The ones who quietly "updated" the story a week later with a footnote admitting the deception?

Gee. I guess they aren't very far along in reading either.

So sad.

A. Zarkov, let me phrase my question a tad better. I don't mind if the government notes reality; i don't mind if the government encourage people to live a healthy lifestyle; but i do mind if government health care is rationed by your body mass. is that truly what you think?

howard: Let me put it this way. Would you want to pay for someone’s dentistry if he refused to brush his teeth? If we give some people free medical care why is it unreasonable to expect those same people to at least cooperate in promoting their own good health? If they refuse to cooperate, why should they receive the benefit? I don’t see how this is “rationing.” Yes I know it’s hard to lose weight, but why should life always to be easy? It might be hard, but it’s not impossible. One way or another, we will have to face this problem in the future because even children are fat today, and many develop diabetes which means a lifetime of expensive care.

howard: A further clarification. I’m not proposing we limit the benefit to people below a specified BMI. I am proposing we require the subscribers to this new program to at put their BMI on a downward trajectory.

What A. Zarkov is talking about falls under the category of 'preventative medicine'. It is the sort of thing which countries with socialized health care systems do so well. It is very cheap to provide basic health maintenance by regular checkups and vaccinations. However, it only works if EVERYBODY is covered.

Our health care system is terrible at providing adequate follow up, health care maintenance because of our chaotic private health insurance system which by definition intentionally leaves out people who can't pay. Those are the people who show up 20 years later to a public hospital with a diabetic coma, and cost US taxpayers big money in hospital bills.

So, despite A. Zarkov's professed penuriance, he seems to be quite penny wise and pound foolish. Of course, he also has not mentioned anything about how Bush's health care policy will address any of these very important issues that he brings up.

There are issues of patient compliance involved in preventative medicine that simply providing national health insurance would not solve. What you didn't mention is that many of those systems explicitly ration health care so that, for instance, someone obese or currently smoking can't even be placed on the wait list for certain procedures until those problems are rectified. Those who think that socialized medicine is going to be cost effective without draconian measures such as those mentioned by A. Zarkov are deluding themselves.

non economist:

“It is very cheap to provide basic health maintenance by regular checkups and vaccinations. However, it only works if EVERYBODY is covered.”

Actually mass screening for conditions is not terribly cost effective, or in many cases that useful. Put another way, what do we gain by mass testing of symptom-free people? In most cases, not much. Take mammograms as an example. They work with x-rays, but the tumor has to have calcified to be visible, and by then it’s frequently too late. MRI and ultrasound don’t have the resolution. (But with advanced array signal processing we think we can make ultrasound sound work, stay tuned.) Colonoscopy is very useful for mass screening of people over 40 (colon cancer increases with the fourth power of age), but they are expensive and a lot of people are so spooked by the procedure they won’t submit. Even a doctor friend (a person near 60) absolutely refuses to get one even though she tells her patients to get scoped. It’s a real problem. Measuring blood pressure is a good idea, and you don’t need a government program to do that yourself. But overall, checkups for everyone won’t improve public health nearly as much as getting people to stop smoking, lose weight, exercise, and change their diets. If you really want to help people as opposed to winning elections, concentrate on these lifestyle changes first. Then you won’t have to spend as much later on because fewer people will get sick in the first place.

A lot of people who “can’t pay” end up in a diabetic coma because of bad habits; this also applies to people who can pay. How many diabetics do you know who have been thin all their life?

A. Zarkov wrote, "And finally I want to know what Kerry expects from the people who are going to get this new coverage for free."

Uh huh. And what does the government expect from "landowners"---people granted monopolies on parcels on land by the government, with rights backed up by the government's monopoly on violence?

http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/tma68/geo-faq.htm

A. Zarkov wrote, "But overall, checkups for everyone won’t improve public health nearly as much as getting people to stop smoking, lose weight, exercise, and change their diets. If you really want to help people as opposed to winning elections, concentrate on these lifestyle changes first. Then you won’t have to spend as much later on because fewer people will get sick in the first place."

Completely true. But that also falls under the aegis of public health.

"A lot of people who 'can’t pay' end up in a diabetic coma because of bad habits; this also applies to people who can pay. How many diabetics do you know who have been thin all their life?" Right. So why did the Bush administration oppose WHO efforts to discourage consumption of junk food?

A Zarkov asks: "How many diabetics do you know who have been thin all their life?"

Answer: My father, who has diabetes and high blood pressure, which is an unfortunate family trait not entirely due to "bad habits"

You might wanna watch your sweeping assuptions.

There is a ton of literature of the cost-effectiveness of preventive care. I'd like to see if Zarkov can refer us to any reviews that would support his claims. Mass screening of apparently healthy people is only one approach. Preventive care in doctors' and nurse-practitioners' offices can be cost effective. For example, you can include information on family history.

Zarkov's proposal that we have ultra early preventive care programs for smoking cessation, weight gain, exercise. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of these programs is very low. Smoking -geeze- if you get a success rate of 20% for a course or treatment that is just huge (refs available upon request)

So office based programs to screen people at risk can be very cost-effective. There are many walking potential disasters waiting to happen -the hypertensive smoker with high cholesterol who doesn't exercise. You want to change one of those risk factors before the smoker has a heart attack. The smoker will probably live, since smokers have heart attacks at a much earlier age. So then you have a heart attack survivor who has a very highly elevated risk of congestive heart failure, which can turn into a real bottomless money sink.

And so, what if it is due to their own habits? Can any market fanatics out there tell us how insurance companies in an unregulated market would feasibly screen for these people when they first buy their insurance policies? Many will be buying their policies in their twenties and thirties before the effects of their habits bcome observable. So, if these folks get in your risk pool, they are costing you, and it makes sense to take care of them.

Professor DeLong: isn't it time to subliminate our frustrations into action instead of banging our heads on the wall? Shouldn't we start thinking about establishing MA and PhD programs in Economic Journalism. Maybe, this would also create an opportunity to define a "new" school of journalism that it less concerned with meta-news and more focused on "external" reality and service to the electorate. I know such programs exist at a handful of schools but there is obviously a need for more. We need to raise a new generation of journalists with a tad more concern for genuine professionalism and political ethics.

"...isn't it time to subliminate our frustrations into action instead of banging our heads on the wall? Shouldn't we start thinking about establishing MA and PhD programs in Economic Journalism. Maybe, this would also create an opportunity to define a 'new' school of journalism ..."

Columbia University is engaged in a controversial effort to reshape its School of Journalism so that its graduates will know more about what they are writing about, rather than be generalist scriveners. Conflict has prevented anything concrete from happening (last I looked) but the general idea is to add a year to the course in which students study an actual real-world subject such as economics, medicine, public schools, military affairs, etc.

It sounds like a credible idea at first, but on second thought a lot of problems come to mind. An extra year of school is very expensive for the students, and their first job out of school is probably going to be covering high-school sports anyhow. When you are a 23-year old student how the heck are you supposed to know what you will really want to cover when you are 30 or 45 or 55? Or even 25? And how much can one really learn in one year of journalism school about economics or business or military affairs or science anyhow ... probably only about one-year's worth of an undergrad college major. That just doesn't get you there. And of course, the j-schools would need to provide specialist education on *everything*, not just econ.

And in any event, who in journalism goes to j-school? Almost nobody.
http://slate.msn.com/?id=2071993
So it wouldn't have any influence anyhow.

The only real solution is for the media to recruit people who already are professionals or experts in various fields who want to do journalism (and give them re-write people or ghost writers if necessary).

It's true that the level of expertise of even the top writers at places like the NY Times has fallen appallingly low. E.g, I remember when the Times' military correspondent was Drew Middleton, a military man who knew what the heck he was talking about.

In contrast, even *I* recognized and was able to get the Times to publish a correction to a fat howler repeatedly made by its current military correspondent, Michael Gordon, in the leads of two of his page one stories.

Gordon wrote -- warning of the carnage to come if the US invaded Afghanistan -- that the Soviets suffered 15,000 dead and 450,000 combat wounded there. But those numbers give a ratio that is just *laughable* on its face -- they are as absurd as a sports writer reporting that Babe Ruth hit 7,000 home runs. Yet Gordon had no idea!

After several e-mail exchanges the Times finally printed a correction stating the actual numbers as closer to 13,000 killed and 37,000 wounded. There's never in history been a killed/wounded ratio anything like 1-30, the highest-ever ratio is more like 1-5, since a high relative number of wounded is a sign of superior medical care saving a large number of lives. 1-30 is an absurdity. Even a totally non-military dummy like me knew that -- but Gordon had no clue. Middleton must have been spinning.

"...that it less concerned with meta-news and more focused on 'external' reality and service to the electorate"

I don't know what you mean by "external" reality as opposed to real reality, but if are talking of service in terms of "public service" you are straying off base.

The entire press, the NY Times and the whole lot, are *for profit businesses*. There is nothing "public service" about them. Like other for-profit businesses their job is to make money by giving their respective audiences *what they want*. Which the Times and similarly successful ones do quite well.

Take Middleton/Gordon. Twenty years ago Drew used to write about what was actually happening in war, on the ground, and why. Gordon now writes about the politics, thinking in Washington, the sociology, the human interest factoids. I'll take that to be "meta news", the big systematic view. Knowledge like Middleton's of military affairs is unnecessary for that -- might even get in the way.

Both his page one news stories mentioning "450,000 Soviet wounded" were *warnings* that US voters might find a war in Afghanistan another Vietnam. Now that wasn't news, it was *opinion* about politics and sociology in the page one news columns. But ... that is what the Times' 'liberal urban' readership (as per Pinch) wants these days, so it is what the Times serves them with, successfully. And thus the Times is with all its reporting generally. One who wants actual literate-about-factual-reality-of-the-military (or whatever) reporting goes elsewhere in the free market of information.

The fault is not with our media, but with ourselves. As with any other business, make your preference known as a consumer. If they don't know wtf they are talking about, take your business elsewhere.

The idea that so many people here are just *now* discovering how soft the Times and CBS News and all are on *economic* reporting (as if that was the *only* thing!) is just laughable. And as to politics, the media's purpose is not to perform "public service" by accurately scrivening candidates' stated positions for public dissemination. Geeze. (If anything, the conservatives have a practical advantage here in that they learned this a long time ago, while so many liberals here are just shocked at the discovery.)

Note, though, that any media outlet performing a real public service is going to transmit the other side's ideas as fairly as yours, and not make people happy by catering to the huge demand for exercises in confirmation bias. So, predictably, most people will be frequently displeased with it and make their displeasure known by taking their business elsewhere. And that's why so few such outlets exist.

"Note, though, that any media outlet performing a real public service is going to transmit the other side's ideas as fairly as yours, and not make people happy by catering to the huge demand for exercises in confirmation bias."

Jim:
That may be what caused the right to develop the idea of rampant "Liberal bias" in the press. When the press reported on poverty, global warming, education, health care, etc. it just drove them nuts.

Maybe the press has neutralized these issues to suit the taste of these folks by making them appear to be subjective matters of opinion, and not stating anything of importance with authority.

Today's "exercises in confirmation bias" are so satisfying and tasty to the viewer/reader. Once you've become addicted, factual reporting that doesn't support your views is like a mouthful of vinegar. Blecccch!!! What is this crap! And who's responsible for it? BIAS! BIAS!

In a related vein, note tonight that the CNN top headline is:
"Officials: Pakistan arrest lead to orange alert."

whereas on the top of NYT web page we get:
"Reports That Led to Terror Alert Were Years Old, Officials Say"

Time for me to take my Zyprexa.