. . . and asks "what happened in 1980?" If I had to guess, I'd say "some sort of data discontinuity", but other than that, I don't know.
I do, however, have a plausible candidate for what happened in 1986, when the thing starts rising briskly over a period of years: the Reagan tax simplification. It got rid of a lot of the ability to expense lifestyle enhancements for workers, but left an important one intact: the deduction for health care.
You can argue that the employee health care deduction basically explains the entire cost differential between American systems and the others. Take a look at this graph (you'll have seen some variant of it many times during the health care debate, but I got this particular one from a presentation by Scott Atlas at Hoover last month):
The blue lines show per capita spending; the purple, spending as a percentage of GDP. Now look at that same image, hamfistedly altered by yours truly to show what the graph would look like if the approximately 35% tax subsidy we give to employer health care benefits were withdrawn:
Suddenly, the US isn't really an outlier. We'd still be spending more--but we're richer, and in general, rich countries spend more of their GDP on health care.
Is this dispositive? Hardly. But it's suggestive. And there's some literature to back up effects that are huge, if not quite 35%, like Jonathan Gruber's recent paper.
Naturally, this puts me in mind of Ezra Klein's recent post:
The problem is that Medicare can't control costs too much better than private insurers or, as you see from the article above, doctors will simply abandon Medicare. In a world where there's only Medicare and Medicare decides to control costs, doctors can either take the pay cut or stop being doctors. And as we see from other countries, lots of people want to be doctors, even if being a doctor doesn't make you particularly wealthy. But in a world where Medicare is just one of many payers and Medicare decides to control costs, doctors can simply stop taking Medicare patients and a lot of legislators will lose their jobs.
Given how hard it's proven to tackle the tax subsidy for employer-sponsored insurance, I'm not seeing much of a change any time soon. In fact, a recent post by Austin Frakt suggests that we're expanding it:
Are you getting this? Let me make it clear. The PPACA may make it possible for workers to get the same tax break for purchasing health insurance on the individual market (via an exchange or otherwise) as they would if they bought their employer-sponsored plan (if they're offered one). If this is the case, it removes one huge incentive for maintaining employer-sponsored coverage. With respect to taxation, it levels the playing field between the group and non-group (individual) markets.
There are some economic efficiency arguments for doing this, but it's not going to help us control costs. Perhaps quite the opposite.
Even as longevity increases across the rich world, uneducated white Americans are living sicker and dying earlier. Two economists speculate on the reasons why.
Since 1998, people all over the world have been living healthier and living longer. But middle-aged, white non-Hispanics in the United States have been getting sicker and dying in greater numbers. The trend is being driven primarily by people with a high-school degree or less.
That's the sobering takeaway from a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published this week.
Mortality Rate for 45-to-54-Year-Olds, By Country
The study authors sum it up:
Between 1978 to 1998, the mortality rate for U.S. whites aged 45 to 54 fell by 2 percent per year on average, which matched the average rate of decline in the six countries shown, and the average over all other industrialized countries. After 1998, other rich countries’ mortality rates continued to decline by 2 percent a year. In contrast, U.S. white non-Hispanic mortality rose by half a percent a year. No other rich country saw a similar turnaround.
I have never changed my mind about anything as quickly or completely as I changed my mind about adult coloring books. I found the trend mostly baffling and maybe a little dumb. But I saw some in a bookstore the other day and I immediately said to my friend, “Well, I'm not leaving here without one of these.”
And indeed, reader, I did not.
Let me clarify: When I say “adult coloring book,” I’m referring to a specific subset thereof. I don’t mean the Benedict-Cumberbatch-is-your-boyfriend coloring books or novelty coloring books based on beloved TV shows. These are silly and whimsical, and—while I am all for silly and whimsical, let’s just be clear about that—they don’t seem like they would actually be that fun to color? I mean, even if you make Barnabus Crumplecake into an alien and color his skin with polka dots or whatever, you’re still just filling in a big human head over and over. (I’m sorry, Benny, I like you and your big head. Really.)
Want to understand why Putin does what he does? Look at a map.
Vladimir Putin says he is a religious man, a great supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church. If so, he may well go to bed each night, say his prayers, and ask God: “Why didn’t you put mountains in eastern Ukraine?”
If God had built mountains in eastern Ukraine, then the great expanse of flatland that is the European Plain would not have been such inviting territory for the invaders who have attacked Russia from there repeatedly through history. As things stand, Putin, like Russian leaders before him, likely feels he has no choice but to at least try to control the flatlands to Russia’s west. So it is with landscapes around the world—their physical features imprison political leaders, constraining their choices and room for maneuver. These rules of geography are especially clear in Russia, where power is hard to defend, and where for centuries leaders have compensated by pushing outward.
Tuesday’s elections, which hinged on social issues such as gay rights and pot, call into question Democrats’ insistence that Republicans are out of step with the times.
In Tuesday’s elections, voters rejected recreational marijuana, transgender rights, and illegal-immigrant sanctuaries; they reacted equivocally to gun-control arguments; and they handed a surprise victory to a Republican gubernatorial candidate who emphasized his opposition to gay marriage.
Democrats have become increasingly assertive in taking liberal social positions in recent years, believing that they enjoy majority support and even seeking to turn abortion and gay rights into electoral wedges against Republicans. But Tuesday’s results—and the broader trend of recent elections that have been generally disastrous for Democrats not named Barack Obama—call that view into question. Indeed, they suggest that the left has misread the electorate’s enthusiasm for social change, inviting a backlash from mainstream voters invested in the status quo.
On the Internet, search queries are used to target vulnerable consumers.
Google knows the questions that people wouldn’t dare ask aloud, and it silently offers reams of answers. But it is a mistake to think of a search engine as an oracle for anonymous queries. It isn’t. Not even close.
In some cases, the most intimate questions a person is asking—about health worries, relationship woes, financial hardship—are the ones that set off a chain reaction that can have troubling consequences both online and offline.
All this is because being online increasingly means being put into categories based on a socioeconomic portrait of you that’s built over time by advertisers and search engines collecting your data—a portrait that data brokers buy and sell, but that you cannot control or even see. (Not if you’re in the United States, anyway.)
The way people describe the condition makes it difficult, if not impossible, to define.
If I tell people that I have two autistic brothers, I often get asked some variation of the same question: “Where are they on the spectrum?” There are better and worse ways that people ask. “How bad are they?” is a worse way. So is any form of asking whether they’re “high-functioning or low-functioning.”
“How much support do they need?” is much better. But no matter how the question is asked, it is always really hard to answer. My brothers’ behaviors have changed drastically over time. I don’t feel like I know enough other autistic people to compare them on a line. And I don’t even know what that line would measure.
I understand why people ask. Many people are familiar with the idea that autism is a spectrum. It’s even in the name, “autism spectrum disorder.” And many people are familiar with the concept of a spectrum. In school, students learn about the visible light spectrum that goes from violet to red. There’s the political spectrum, with the right wing on one side and the left wing on another. Spectrums don’t, by definition, have ends. But in order for them to be useful to us, we plot things, like points of light and members of Congress, along those lines.
“Tilbakeblikk” is the name of a joint project between the Norwegian Forest and Landscape Institute and Norsk Folkemuseum. The project uses photographs taken of the same places separated by long periods of time to illustrate landscape changes in Norway.
"Tilbakeblikk" is the name of a joint project between the Norwegian Forest and Landscape Institute and Norsk Folkemuseum. Tilbakeblikk means “retrospect” or “looking back” in Norwegian, describing the project’s use of photographs taken of the same places separated by long periods of time to illustrate landscape changes in Norway. The images below (starting with photo number two) are interactive—click on each image to see the difference the decades can make.
Why do so many Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck despite earning a decent income?
There’s a growing segment of the American population that earns a decent salary but lives paycheck-to-paycheck: the income-rich and asset-poor.
Empty bank balances are often associated with those on the lowest rungs of the income ladder. But many members of America’s upper-middle class have almost no emergency cushion and are woefully unprepared for retirement. And years into the recovery, they are still struggling, leaving the entire economy vulnerable.
The median household income in America is about $55,000. To earn more than that is to do relatively well, particularly in low-cost areas. That’s what they bring in, but what do they really have? The figure below plots financial assets held by members of the upper-middle class aged 40 to 55. (Financial assets are any assets a household owns that isn’t a house, car, or business, which means it includes all retirement funds.)
132 years later, Barcelona’s fantastical Sagrada Família is approaching the last stage of its construction.
In August 1963, Merloyd Lawrence wrote a dispatch in The Atlantic from Barcelona, mentioning many of the city’s cultural landmarks: the merchants on Las Ramblas, the food, and the buildings designed by Antoni Gaudí, the “architect laureate of Catalonia.” After a disclaimer noting that many a “discriminating traveler has found his work hideous,” Lawrence describes the Iglesia de la Sagrada Família, Gaudí’s most famous building, as an “unfinished, uninhibited cathedral in which stone explodes into botanical fantasies or overflows like molten wax.”
52 years after Lawrence’s piece appeared in The Atlantic and 132 years after construction began in 1883, the magnificent Sagrada Família has reached its final stage of construction. According to the current chief architect, Jordi Fauli, six more towers will be added to the basilica by 2026, bringing the grand total to 18, each of which is dedicated to a different religious figure. The building’s completion is timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the architect’s death, although adding the final decorative elements could take another four to six years after the towers are erected. When it’s finished, the basilica will be the tallest religious building in Europe, standing at 564 feet.
As government agencies and tech companies develop more and more intrusive means of watching and influencing people, how can we live free lives?
I knew we’d bought walnuts at the store that week, and I wanted to add some to my oatmeal. I called to my wife and asked her where she’d put them. She was washing her face in the bathroom, running the faucet, and must not have heard me—she didn’t answer. I found the bag of nuts without her help and stirred a handful into my bowl. My phone was charging on the counter. Bored, I picked it up to check the app that wirelessly grabs data from the fitness band I’d started wearing a month earlier. I saw that I’d slept for almost eight hours the night before but had gotten a mere two hours of “deep sleep.” I saw that I’d reached exactly 30 percent of my day’s goal of 13,000 steps. And then I noticed a message in a small window reserved for miscellaneous health tips. “Walnuts,” it read. It told me to eat more walnuts.
