Economists, Doctors' Cartels, and Uber

...What is striking is that the enthusiasm for the virtues of competition seems to disappear when we switch the topic from the taxi cartel to the doctors' cartel. Doctors actually have been far more effective than taxi companies in limiting competition. Doctors largely get to set standards of care, which not surprisingly requires twice as high a percentage of highly paid specialists as in other wealthy countries. They also restrict the number of doctors with a wonderfully protectionist rule that prohibits doctors from practicing in the United States unless they have completed a U.S. residency program. This means that even well-established doctors in places like Germany, France, and Canada would face arrest if they attempted to practice medicine in the United States.
As a result of this cartel, doctors in the U.S. earn on average more than $250,000 a year, putting the average doctor not far below the one percent threshold, even assuming no other family income. This is roughly twice the pay as the average doctor earns in other wealthy countries.
It is striking that the doctors' cartel gets so much less attention from economists than the taxi cartel. After all, we spend close to $250 billion a year on doctors compared to $6 billion a year on taxis. I could suggest that the lack of interest is due to the fact that many economists have parents, siblings and/or children who are doctors, but I wouldn't be that rude...

If Donald Trump Targets Journalists, Thank Obama

An important note, and not just sour grapes. We all need to do better at keeping the president's feet the fire on free speech, no matter their party:

Mr. Trump made his animus toward the news media clear during the presidential campaign, often expressing his disgust with coverage through Twitter or in diatribes at rallies. So if his campaign is any guide, Mr. Trump seems likely to enthusiastically embrace the aggressive crackdown on journalists and whistle-blowers that is an important yet little understood component of Mr. Obama’s presidential legacy.
Criticism of Mr. Obama’s stance on press freedom, government transparency and secrecy is hotly disputed by the White House, but many journalism groups say the record is clear. Over the past eight years, the administration has prosecuted nine cases involving whistle-blowers and leakers, compared with only three by all previous administrations combined. It has repeatedly used the Espionage Act, a relic of World War I-era red-baiting, not to prosecute spies but to go after government officials who talked to journalists.
Under Mr. Obama, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. have spied on reporters by monitoring their phone records, labeled one journalist an unindicted co-conspirator in a criminal case for simply doing reporting and issued subpoenas to other reporters to try to force them to reveal their sources and testify in criminal cases.

Postal Service business is up, deficit is all politics

For starters, the Postal Service actually is operating in the black. USPS revenue exceeded operating expenses by $610 million in Fiscal Year 2016, bringing its total operating profit the past three years to $3.2 billion. Bear in mind that this is all earned revenue; by law USPS gets no tax dollars.
This impressive performance stems from two ongoing structural factors: As the economy gradually improves from the worst recession in 80 years, letter revenue is stabilizing. And as the Internet drives online shopping among Bay area residents and beyond, package revenue is rising sharply (up 16 percent in 2016), auguring well for the future.
There is red ink but it has nothing to do with the mail and everything to do with congressional politics. In 2006, a lame-duck Congress mandated that the Postal Service pre-fund future retiree health benefits.
No other public agency or private company has to do this even one year in advance; USPS must pre-fund these benefits decades into the future. That $5.8 billion annual charge not only accounts for the ‘red ink’, it disguises the actual profits postal operations have been generating for years.

Are We Becoming More Moral Faster Than We're Becoming More Dangerous?

In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker convincingly makes the point that by pretty much every measure you can think of, violence has declined on our planet over the long term. More generally, "the world continues to improve in just about every way." He's right, but there are two important caveats.
One, he is talking about the long term. The trend lines are uniformly positive across the centuries and mostly positive across the decades, but go up and down year to year...
The second caveat is both more subtle and more important. In 2013, I wrote about how technology empowers attackers. By this measure, the world is getting more dangerous:...
Pinker's trends are based both on increased societal morality and better technology, and both are based on averages: the average person with the average technology. My increased attack capability trend is based on those two trends as well, but on the outliers: the most extreme person with the most extreme technology. Pinker's trends are noisy, but over the long term they're strongly linear. Mine seem to be exponential.
When Pinker expresses optimism that the overall trends he identifies will continue into the future, he's making a bet. He's betting that his trend lines and my trend lines won't cross. That is, that our society's gradual improvement in overall morality will continue to outpace the potentially exponentially increasing ability of the extreme few to destroy everything...

We’ll Soon See Trump’s True Trade Agenda

...This raises the question of the agenda that Donald Trump wants to pursue in trade deals. If his goal is first and foremost to regain manufacturing jobs by reducing the size of the trade deficit, then the top priority should be lowering the value of the dollar against the currencies of China and other trading partners. 
A lower valued dollar will make U.S. exports cheaper for people living in other countries leading them to buy more of our exports. It will also make imports more expensive for people in the United States. That will cause U.S. consumers to substitute domestically produced items for imports. The net effect would be a smaller trade deficit and more jobs in manufacturing. 
While it is not possible to get back the five million manufacturing jobs we have lost in the last two decades, plausible reductions in the trade deficit could bring back 1-2 million manufacturing jobs. This would have a noticeable impact on the labor market for workers without college degrees. 
However it is not clear that Trump plans to pursue a trade policy focused on getting back manufacturing jobs. While he railed about currency “manipulation” in the election campaign, he also complained that other countries didn’t grant our companies adequate market access or respect the patents and copyrights of U.S. companies.
These are conflicting agendas and it remains to be seen whether Trump pursues a trade agenda that will increase manufacturing jobs or one that will further enrich corporate America. With the top two economic posts in the Trump administration going to Goldman Sachs alums, the smart money is betting on the corporate agenda...

The Power of Concentration

Mindfulness and meditation are the most important skills for a good (fulfilling, rich, peaceful, and peaceable) adult life, in my opinion. I hope one day we make them a routine part of our school curriculum. Until then, they're a good New Years Resolution (hint, hint).

Though the concept originates in ancient Buddhist, Hindu and Chinese traditions, when it comes to experimental psychology, mindfulness is less about spirituality and more about concentration: the ability to quiet your mind, focus your attention on the present, and dismiss any distractions that come your way. The formulation dates from the work of the psychologist Ellen Langer, who demonstrated in the 1970s that mindful thought could lead to improvements on measures of cognitive function and even vital functions in older adults.
Now we’re learning that the benefits may reach further still, and be more attainable, than Professor Langer could have then imagined. Even in small doses, mindfulness can effect impressive changes in how we feel and think — and it does so at a basic neural level.
In 2011, researchers from the University of Wisconsin demonstrated that daily meditation-like thought could shift frontal brain activity toward a pattern that is associated with what cognitive scientists call positive, approach-oriented emotional states — states that make us more likely to engage the world rather than to withdraw from it.
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But mindfulness goes beyond improving emotion regulation. An exercise in mindfulness can also help with that plague of modern existence: multitasking. Of course, we would like to believe that our attention is infinite, but it isn’t. Multitasking is a persistent myth. What we really do is shift our attention rapidly from task to task. Two bad things happen as a result. We don’t devote as much attention to any one thing, and we sacrifice the quality of our attention. When we are mindful, some of that attentional flightiness disappears as if of its own accord.
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Mindfulness training has even been shown to affect the brain’s default network — the network of connections that remains active when we are in a so-called resting state — with regular meditators exhibiting increased resting-state functional connectivity and increased connectivity generally. After a dose of mindfulness, the default network has greater consistent access to information about our internal states and an enhanced ability to monitor the surrounding environment.
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Until recently, our 20s were considered the point when our brain’s wiring was basically complete. But new evidence suggests that not only can we learn into old age, but the structure of our brains can continue to change and develop. In 2006, a team of psychologists demonstrated that the neural activation patterns of older adults (specifically, activation in the prefrontal cortex), began to resemble those of much younger subjects after just five one-hour training sessions on a task of attentional control. Their brains became more efficient at coordinating multiple tasks — and the benefit transferred to untrained activities, suggesting that it was symptomatic of general improvement.
Similar changes have been observed in the default network (the brain’s resting-state activity). In 2012, researchers from Ohio State University demonstrated that older adults who scored higher on mindfulness scales had increased connectivity in their default networks, specifically in two of the brain’s major information processing hubs. And while we already know that this kind of increased connectivity is a very good thing, there’s more to these particular results. The precise areas that show increased connectivity with mindfulness are also known to be pathophysiological sites of Alzheimer’s disease.

Six Confirmation Hearings, Trump News Conference Scheduled on One Day

In Washington, Republican lawmakers have scheduled confirmation hearings for Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees next week—with at least six candidates set to testify to senators on the same day. It’s a move that critics say is a clear effort to prevent public scrutiny of Trump’s controversial Cabinet picks... The crush of hearings comes on the same day that Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has scheduled a rapid-fire series of budget items dubbed a "vote-o-rama" that will include votes related to repealing the Affordable Care Act. And topping it off, President-elect Donald Trump has scheduled his first news conference for January 11...

Yes Folks, Trade Really Did Cost Manufacturing Jobs

Actually, automation is not new. It's called "productivity growth" and has been going on for centuries, often much faster than it is today. As we can see, manufacturing employment remained roughly even, with cyclical ups and downs, from 1970 to 2000. It then plunged as the trade deficit exploded to almost 6.0 percent of GDP in 2005 and 2006 ($1.1 trillion in today's economy).
The basic story is that manufacturing employment was declining as a share of total employment through this whole period and undoubtedly would have continued to do so regardless of what happened with trade. However, the sharp plunge in employment that we saw in the years 2000 to 2007 (pre-crash) was due to the trade deficit.