“When many remedies are proposed for a disease, that means the disease is incurable.”
-Anton Chekhov
I came across an interesting quote in the New Yorker recently, reflecting on the US banking system. It reads: The power and the growth of power of our financial oligarchs comes from wielding the savings and credit capital of others. The fetters which bind the people are forged from the people’s own gold. Pretty timely thoughts,…
In a wonderful New Yorker article titled “The Hangover,” Nick Paumgarten writes about the strange mix of private and government forces that led to the Spanish fiscal crisis. In a wonderful sentence, he evokes one such force, the almost invisibility of debt: It is often hard to perceive an economic crisis. Debt doesn’t look like…
When New Jersey decided to hike its minimum wage by some 20 percent in 1991, David Card and Alan Krueger recognized a tremendous opportunity to test how the minimum wage affects employment.
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I recently heard Dan Sulmasy give an ethics talk at a conference. Like me, Dan is a general internist. In his talk, he quoted a former President of the Society of General Internal Medicine and I thought I’d pass the quote along. That former President was Nicole Lurie, who now works for the federal government…
One of the great pleasures of blogging is reaching new audiences and, better yet, interacting with new people. On the other hand, blogging also puts us bloggers into contact with unpleasant commenters. This unpleasantness has compelled me to establish some guidelines for my own on-line behavior. First, I strive always to blog, and to comment…
Most of us have at least one cranky old relative who not only has stronger opinions than the rest of us, but is also convinced that those opinions are superior to ours. Not just content to believe that, say, voter ID laws are a good idea, this relative is also derisive of anyone with a…
