Marginal Revolution

Make dentistry cheaper

Can you see what is coming?:

But to the Alaska Dental Society and the American Dental Association, the clinic is a place where the rules of dentistry are flouted daily. The dental groups object not because of any evidence that the clinic provides substandard care, but because it is run by Aurora Johnson, who is not a dentist. After two years of training in a program unique to Alaska, Ms. Johnson performs basic dental work like drilling and filling cavities.

Here is much more.  Get this:

The number of dentists in the United States has been roughly flat since 1990 and is forecast to decline over the next decade. A study last year from the Centers for Disease Control showed that Americans’ dental health was worsening for the first time since statistics began to be kept.

In Alaska, the A.D.A. and the state’s dental society had filed a lawsuit to block the program that trained people like Ms. Johnson, who are called dental therapists. The groups dropped the suit last summer after a state court judge issued a ruling critical of the dentists. But the A.D.A. continues to oppose allowing therapists to operate anywhere in the lower 49 states. Currently, therapists are allowed to practice only in Alaska, and only on Alaska Natives.

The opposition to therapists follows decades of efforts by state dental boards, which are dominated by dentists, to block hygienists from providing care without being supervised by dentists.

The dental associations say they simply want to be sure that patients do not receive substandard care. But some dentists in public health programs contend that dentists in private practice consider therapists low-cost competition. In Alaska, the federally financed program that supplies care to Alaska Natives pays therapists about $60,000 a year, one-half to one-third of what dentists typically earn.

The Alaska program is small, with fewer than a dozen therapists practicing so far. But the early results are promising, according to dental health experts who are studying the program.

As someone who has spent a lot of time at the dentist, I very much like the assistants and I think of the dentist himself as a kind of middle-level manager and salesman.

I thank Greg Rehmke for the pointer.

Eminent Domain and Civil Rights

“[t]he burden of eminent domain has and will continue to fall disproportionately upon racial and ethnic minorities, the elderly, and economically disadvantaged.” Unfettered eminent domain authority, the NAACP concluded, is a “license for government to coerce individuals on behalf of society’s strongest interests.”

That is the NAACP quoted in an op-ed by David Beito and GMU law prof Ilya Somin. 

Hat tip to The Beacon.

In case you weren't paying attention...

James Joyce, Ulysses, Kindle edition, $3.19.  Free shipping, too. 

Is the book market going the way of the music market, where there is a systematic redistribution of the surplus toward suppliers of the hardware rather than suppliers of the content?

Exporting Electrons

Everyone knows that Caterpillar is an exporter.  But last week Google reported record profits and Google stock rose nearly twenty percent.  Why were profits up?  Google's foreign revenues shot head of its U.S. revenues because of a weaker dollar.  Google is an exporter.  Who knew?  And what does Google export?  Patterns of electrons.

Thanks to David Levy for discussion.

How to behave when you're old

Bryan Caplan presents us with his dilemma:

When I'm old, I want to be the octogenarian that the Young Turks come to with their crazy new ideas. I don't want to be the senior professor that the whippersnapper assistant profs avoid. Above all else, I never want to be a lunch tax - I like lunch too much.

Unfortunately, by the time I'm 80 I'll probably be too befuddled to figure out how to do any of this. So I want to figure it out now, tape it on my office wall, and refer to it when the time is ripe.

...Not mentioning any names, what are the biggest social mistakes elderly faculty make? What are some simple strategies for them to ingratiate themselves to the next generation? If you've got some good advice, I'll thank you when I'm 80. If I remember!

I remain a fan of Richard Posner's book on old age, one of his best.  I ask Bryan: would he still take the advice that his 12-year-old self might have taped to a door?  Neurological changes aside, the elderly simply have less incentive to be deferential and to court their younger colleagues; Aristotle knew this too.

Bryan's best lunchtime bet is that, when he is eighty, I am still around at ninety.

An alternative strategy is to find -- today -- the eighty-year olds who are still fascinating and run your new ideas by them.  Most of them will gladly receive you.  I used to fly out to Ann Arbor occasionally to meet with the great Marvin Becker, but in general I haven't done much of this in my life.  Call that my failing but it's another reason why so many eighty-year-olds don't bother to appeal to Young Turks as a constituency.

Overall I am struck by how little beneficial trade there is between the generations.  I find this one of the most striking stylized facts of the social sciences; one simple model is that people don't want to leave groups that produce fun and high relative status for them, and that is what switching across the generations usually entails.

Do you all have any other advice for Bryan?