Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• All-payer rate setting: America’s back-door to single-payer?

  Single-payer health care has long been the political pipe dream of the left, but there's a nearly identical system that could actually happen.

  All-payer rate setting, as the system is known, shares the same goals of single-payer: it aims to increase efficiency and reduce insurer overhead in the health care system. Single payer does this by eliminating private plans for one government plan. All-payer rate setting gets there by setting one price that every health insurer pays for any given medical procedure.

• Ray Dalio's Capitalism for Cowards

  I believe that, as a principle, if there is a very big gap in the economic conditions of people who share a budget and there is an economic downturn, there is a high risk of bad conflict. Disparity in wealth, especially when accompanied by disparity in values, leads to increasing conflict and, in the government, that manifests itself in the form of populism of the left and populism of the right and often in revolutions of one sort or another. For that reason, I am worried what the next economic downturn will be like, especially as central banks have limited ability to reverse it and we have so much political polarity and populism.

  The problem is that capitalists typically don't know how to divide the pie well and socialists typically don't know how to grow it well. While one might hope that when such economic polarity and poor conditions exist, leaders would pull together to reform the system to both divide the economic pie and make it grow better (which is certainly doable and the best path), they typically become progressively more extreme and fight more than cooperate.

  More details at Why and How Capitalism Needs to Be Reformed (Parts 1 & 2).

• The IRS Tried to Take on the Ultrawealthy. It Didn't Go Well.

  Ten years ago, the tax agency formed a special team to unravel the complex tax-lowering strategies of the nation's wealthiest people. But with big money - and Congress - arrayed against the team, it never had a chance.

  The IRS' new approach to taking on the superwealthy has been stymied. The wealthy's lobbyists immediately pushed to defang the new team. And soon after the group was formed, Republicans in Congress began slashing the agency's budget. As a result, the team didn't receive the resources it was promised. Thousands of IRS employees left from every corner of the agency, especially ones with expertise in complex audits, the kinds of specialists the agency hoped would staff the new elite unit. The agency had planned to assign 242 examiners to the group by 2012, according to a report by the IRS' inspector general. But by 2014, it had only 96 auditors. By last year, the number had fallen to 58.

• How a new financing model could fix America's broken student loan system

  Fortunately, some innovative colleges, in partnership with private investors and a small number of philanthropies, are experimenting with a new financing model called "income share agreements" or "ISAs" which address these two core issues. With an ISA, instead of assuming a fixed debt obligation, students simply agree to pay an affordable percentage of their future income over a set time period, subject to an overall cap. High earners will have larger payments than low earners, but all will have an affordable payment, based on what they will actually be making. Importantly, when the college is providing some or all of the funding for the ISA, its return will be aligned with its students' post-college earnings, giving it economic incentives to make sure its students both graduate and find jobs.

• It's time for Ilhan Omar's critics to stand with her against Trump's attacks

  A Jewish critic of Omar's Israel comments on why it's vital to defend her against Islamophobia.

  Ilhan Omar didn't shoot up a synagogue in Pittsburgh; a far-right ideologue did that. Ilhan Omar hasn't been behind a relentless campaign blaming wealthy Jews for mass Latino migration, the ideas that the Pittsburgh shooter said inspired him; President Trump and his allies did that. Ilhan Omar didn't threaten to attack my wedding, which happened on the same day as the Pittsburgh attack; alt-right anti-Semites did that.

• Hello world: Shining a light onto the culture of computer programmers

  Clive Thompson new book, Coders.

  Coders might have different backgrounds and political opinions, but nearly every one I've ever met found deep, almost soulful pleasure in taking something inefficient - even just a little bit slow - and tightening it up a notch. Removing the friction from a system is an aesthetic joy; coders' eyes blaze when they talk about making something run faster or how they eliminated some bothersome human effort from a process.

• Denniz Pop: The man who created the sound of modern pop

  By tailoring their music to a global audience, Swedish songwriters inspired by Pop and Martin have achieved far more than they ever could have by instead focusing inwards. When music is specifically designed to appeal to the maximum amount of people, no other type of pop music could ever be more `popular' than that.

• How Does Very-Long-Baseline Interferometry Allow Us To Image A Black Hole?

  The Event Horizon Telescope has imaged the event horizon of a black hole directly.

  While there are many contributions and contributors that are well-deserving of being highlighted, there's a fundamental physics technique that it all depended on: Very-Long-Baseline Interferometry, or VLBI

• Freeman Dyson Interview

  I kept quiet for thirty years, maybe it's time to speak.

  Yes. I mean we don't understand climate. The most extreme examples of climate change were the ice ages and they were really a catastrophe for life in many parts of the world. And we don't understand them. We just don't know why they started or why they come and go in a more or less periodic fashion. It's all a big mystery. And if we don't understand ice ages we don't understand climate.
  ...
  In fact, we could grow enough trees to take care of the carbon in the atmosphere. And that's still true. If you planted all the wasteland over the globe with trees, it would be just about enough to absorb the carbon from the atmosphere.

• Nicholas Humphrey - the problem of consciousness

  After 40 years of studying the problem of consciousness, Nicholas Humphrey believes it was natural selection that gave us souls. God, he insists, had nothing to do with it

  Consciousness, in this theory, is a knowledge of what is going on in our own minds, and we have it so that we can better understand what is going on in the minds of those around us, so that we can manipulate them and avoid being manipulated in our turn. This fits human consciousness into a normal biological framework: it offers the possessor of bigger and better brains the kind of advantage that natural selection can see and work on.

• Unknowability: How Do We Know What Cannot Be Known?

  The New School Center For Public Scholarship 38th Social Research Conference April 4-5, 2019.

  This conference will look at the many ways in which the unknowable figures in multiple areas of inquiry and scholarship. Experts from across a range of academic disciplines will discuss the criteria used to determine what appear to be unanswerable questions in their field and jointly reflect on how and why these criteria may differ across disciplines.

Some recent items related to U.S. politics that I found interesting.

• RepresentUs: End corruption. Defend the Republic.

  They seem to me like a worthwhile organization that IMO is getting to the heart of our political mess and should be getting more attention Am I missing something or is the problem that the media is more interested in attracting viewers and listeners with the latest crazy tweet or proposal to give something to people for free than in actually discussing the more boring topic of what is wrong and how to fix it?
  Here's one politician working in that direction: Andrew Gillum on why O’Rourke is running for president and he’s not
  

• Us v Them: the birth of populism

  It's not about left or right: populism is a style of politics that pits 'the people' against 'the establishment'. Its rise is a warning sign that the status quo is failing.

  Leftwing populists champion the people against an elite or an establishment. Theirs is a vertical politics of the bottom and middle, arrayed against the top. Rightwing populists champion the people against an elite that they accuse of favouring a third group, which can consist, for instance, of immigrants, Islamists, or African American militants. Rightwing populism is triadic: it looks upward, but also down upon an out group.

• Anti-Trump conservatives want to reverse the GOP's destruction.

  The Never Trumpers - that dwindling band of conservative intellectuals, journalists, campaign hands and elected officials who've opposed Donald Trump since the 2016 race - have earned the right to name names. They assail the president's values and impulses, and they pillory his Republican enablers for discarding their long-held, or at least long-proclaimed, conservative principles. Though they worry about Trump's impact on democratic norms and the rule of law, the Never Trumpers are especially concerned about the fate of their party and movement. Their book titles give it away: "The Corrosion of Conservatism" by Max Boot. "Everything Trump Touches Dies" by Rick Wilson. "How the Right Lost Its Mind" by Charles J. Sykes. "Conscience of a Conservative" by Jeff Flake.

• Pete Buttigieg

  Of all those vying to be the Democratic nominee for president, he is the one that impresses me the most. A long shot but see the 538 case at How Pete Buttigieg Could Win The 2020 Democratic Nomination.

  But for some negative commentary on him from a Bernie Sanders supporter see, All About Pete.
  And for how he differs from other Democrats on Israel, Pete Buttigieg is pro-Israel when Democrats are increasingly critical.