Marginal Revolution

The best sentence I read today

So there is a possibility that what has looked like peak oil to some observers (something I believe is coming), was actually GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries investing by not extracting oil.

Here is more.  In these models, once oil prices start falling, they can fall very fast indeed.

Progress on Dual Tracking?

One hundred leading European officials in health regulation, the pharmaceutical industry, and the health media will gather in Stockholm March 27 to discuss a new proposal that would enable patients to gain faster access to life-saving drugs not yet approved by regulators.

One track of this new proposal, known as "Dual Tracking," provides that patients and their doctors try to minimize risk by using only approved drugs as they do now. On the other track, patients and doctors can choose not-yet-approved drugs that have passed safety trials. Patients would be able to balance their own preferences for risk with substantial new opportunities for health improvement. (Quoted here.)

See Bart Madden's More Choices, Better Health (pdf) for a very good explanation and defense of the dual tracking proposal.

Assorted links

1. Crisis vs. recession.  Via Felix Salmon, here is a wise account from India, it is still likely to be true.

2. Are tips discriminatory against African-Americans?

3. Money does make you happy -- if you give it away (via Jacqueline Passey)

4. The economics of Gawker bloggers

The Other Ex-Ante Moral Hazard in Health: You are too Healthy

If you catch a disease or condition, and therefore you make the number of sufferers from that condition more numerous, the chance they will find a cure or partial solution is much greater.  That benefits many other people, not just yourself.  In other words, you will overinvest in being healthy.  There is much more here.

The permanent tax revolt

...the fractional assessment of homes was easily the largest single government housing subsidy in the postwar era, and it was among the largest categories of social expenditure of any kind, direct or indirect.  Fractional assessment of residential property provided a subsidy that was forty times greater than federal spending for public housing.  It was ten times greater than the home mortgage interest deduction.  It was five times as costly as more controversial "welfare" programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children.  Although fractional assessment did not show up on official government budgets, on the eve of the tax revolt it was providing more benefits than any other social policy in America except for the twin blockbusters of the federal budget, Social Security and Medicare.

That is from the new book The Permanent Tax Revolt: How the Property Tax Transformed American Politics, by Isaac Martin.  The main thesis of this book is overstated, namely that the professionalization of property tax assessments is the root cause of American exceptionalism on tax politics; nonetheless I found this a very informative and stimulating read.