Jane Mayer at the New Yorker has a profile of Robert Mercer, the reclusive Billionaire who probably invested more money in getting Trump elected than any other American (and we don’t know how much Putin spent). He not only directly…
Yearly Archives: 2017
Eradicating diseases through individual efforts only works when there is no poverty
There are many diseases that have been basically eradicated from rich countries because they are easy to cure with modern medicine, but they persist in poor nations for the lack of money for basic treatments. For example, I’ll be taking…
Posted in Development, Health
Will individuals or their employers own their genetic code?
A property right is the right to exclude others’ access to something. It is the right to infringe on others’ freedom. These rights are socially determined and vary greatly across different societies. For example, do you think you should own…
Posted in Health, Public Finance
Money can’t buy you love, but can it buy you life?
Raj Chetty et al. published a study of the correlation of class and life expectancy that got a lot of press, but I hadn’t actually looked at the original publication until this week. Here is the correlation between life expectancy…
The US is more interested in median income than anywhere else in the world
Interest in median income is much bigger in the US compared with the rest of the world according to Google Search Trends. Perhaps the US is more interested in median income because, as Brian Nolan, Max Roser, and Stefan Thewissen…
Posted in Medianism
Median income per capita
One of the big problems with our official median income statistics is that the government only estimates the median income of households and we care about the welfare of people, not households. Household size has dropped which has tended to…
Posted in Medianism
The fracking belt?
Last December, the Census Bureau released official maps showing median income growth by county since the Great Recession began in 2007. Too bad we don’t have data for 2016 yet. It might be interesting to use it to analyze voting…
Medianism 