Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law
30 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in health economics Tags: Ebola
People in developed countries seek treatment when they feel ill and submit to quarantine if diagnosed with a contagious disease.
HT: reason.com
30 Jul 2014 1 Comment
in applied price theory, economics of education, health economics Tags: offsetting behaviour, school breakfast programmes
When children arrive at school without breakfast, being the dismal economist I am, the question I ask is not why they didn’t have breakfast – I ask whether their parents had breakfast.
If these children are getting a free breakfast because their parents are too poor to buy them breakfast food, why aren’t their parents invited to school to have a free breakfast as well. How do these parents eat at all? Any good parent would give up their breakfast for their children.
Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Mary Zaki in their just released Expanding the School Breakfast Program: Impacts on Children’s Consumption, Nutrition and Health look at the school lunch program is nearly universally available in U.S. public schools.
They use experimental data collected by the US Department of Agriculture to measure the impact of two policy innovations aimed at increasing access to the school breakfast program.
The first, universal free school breakfast, provides a hot breakfast before school (typically served in the school’s cafeteria) to all students regardless of their income eligibility for free or reduced-price meals.
The second is the Breakfast in the Classroom program that provides free school breakfast to all children to be eaten in the classroom during the first few minutes of the school day.
The study grouped schools into treated groups (school decided between breakfast in class and cafeteria-based) and control (had normal meal tested before school breakfast which serves free or reduced-price (maximum price of 30 cents) breakfast to those that are income-eligible and can be purchased at full price for those ineligible for a meal subsidy).
The study showed that breakfast in the classroom substantially increased participation in the school breakfast program and the likelihood a child eats a high-quality breakfast. However, there was no evidence for positive impacts on other outcomes, including: overall dietary quality, health, attendance rates, and test scores.
Both policies increase the take-up rate of school breakfast, though much of this reflects shifting breakfast consumption from home to school or the consumption of multiple breakfasts and relatively little of the increase is from students gaining access to breakfast.
Eating in breakfast at home when I was kid was a good chance to talk to my mum and dad and brothers and sisters, but I wasn’t much of a morning person, so I might be understating the benefits of having breakfast at home. I was always running late, so I would always say to mum on the way out to the car to go to school
Feed the cat
.
25 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in health economics, technological progress Tags: medical progress, The Great Escape
HT: cato.org
07 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in health and safety, health economics, labour economics, labour supply, welfare reform Tags: disability benefits, moral hazard
In the past three decades, the number of people who are on disability benefit has skyrocketed.
There is no compelling evidence that the incidence of disabling health conditions among the working age population is rising. Autor (2006) found that disability rolls in the USA expanded because:
Autor found that the aging of the baby boom generation has contributed little to the growth of disability benefit numbers to date.
David Autor and Mark Duggan (2003) found that low-skills and a poor education is predictor of disability: in the USA in 2004, nearly one in five male high school dropouts between ages 55 and 64 were in the disability program; that was more than double that of high school graduates of the same age and more than five times higher than the 3.7 % of college graduates of that age who collect disability. Unemployment is another driver of disability.
The proportion of working-age people receiving a Sickness Benefit, an Invalid’s Benefit or Accident Compensation weekly compensation in New Zealand rose from around 1% in the 1970s to 5% in June 2002.
Figure 1 The Number of People Receiving Benefit as a Primary Recipient, All Age Groups, 1975–2005
Source: DSW Annual Reports or Statistical Information Reports and MSD SWIFFT data from Dwyer and McLeod (2006).
Most other OECD countries also experienced a rise in the proportion of the working-age population claiming incapacity benefits over this period. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was common for around 4–6.5% of the working-age population to receive such benefits. Some European countries have up to 10% of their working age population on disability or sickness benefit!
When the UK undertook reassessments of those on its disability and sickness benefit, fewer than one in 10 people assessed for the new sickness benefit has been deemed too ill to carry out any work.
More than a third of the 1.3million people who applied for Employment and Support Allowance were found to be fully capable of working; a similar proportion abandoned their claims while they were still being processed. Moral hazard seems to be the main explanation of the rise in disability roles.
Before 15 July 1980, a victim of a workplace accident in the state of Kentucky received a payment proportional to his or her wage with an upper limit of $131 per week. On 15 July 1980, the limit was raised to $217 per week. This increase made a considerable difference to the best-paid workers: their periods of convalescence grew 20% longer (Cahuc and Zylberberg 2006).
06 Jul 2014 Leave a comment
in economics of regulation, environmental economics, health economics, technological progress, Thomas Schelling, transport economics Tags: Thomas Schelling, value of life
Thomas Schelling’s crucial contribution in 1968 at RAND was the notion of statistical lives—mortality risks—in contrast to valuing the lives of specific, identified individuals. His insight was that economists could evade the moral thicket of valuing life and instead focus on people’s willingness to trade-off money for small reductions in the risks they face.
18 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in health economics Tags: health and safety, Kip Viscusi, smoking
When I was a kid, we used to call cigarettes cancer sticks. Some people with a straight face claim that people still don’t know smoking is risky. The message has got through. Smoking is been in a long-term decline since the mid-1960s.
Along with my brothers and sisters, I remember pestering my mother to give up smoking. When she did, no one noticed at 11 weeks until she drew our attention to it. Children have short attention spans.
My father gave up smoking because, as a doctor, he could not be recommending to his patients to give up smoking while having a working ashtray at his desk. He used to suck on lollies to get rid of the craving. He first brought home a bag of lollies, but when his kids started asking for a lolly, he had to buy two bags of lollies before he came home.
Most of the evidence in perception risks by smokers show that they actually greatly overstate the risk of smoking rather than don’t know that it is dangerous as it is as Kip Viscusi found:
…smokers are not isolated from the considerable public information about the hazards of cigarettes.
They are very much aware of the risks. Indeed, they overestimate the smoking-related risks of lung cancer, life expectancy loss, and total mortality loss. Perception of these hazards affects the decision to ever smoke, to be a current smoker, and to become a former smoker in the expected manner.
Moreover, there is evidence of consistent risk-taking behaviour, as people who use seatbelts or exercise care in their diets make risk-reducing choices in the smoking domain as well. People who forego health insurance and place their well-being substantially at risk by doing so are especially likely to smoke and not to quit once they have begun.
Cigarette smoking is a large risk that is highly correlated with other risk-taking activities among the current smoking population
In the 1950s,cigarette companies would market particular cigarettes as having lower tar and other factors that made them less likely to cause health problems.
I think smoking is a dirty and disgusting habit, but people do plenty of things that are dirty and disgusting or risky or unhealthy. Perhaps we should ban the sports and holiday activities of the fit and healthy: ban mountain climbing, bushwalking, skiing and tourism to dangerous and unhealthy places in the Third World.
Smokers smoke for the same reason people engage in other risky activities. They really like smoking and are willing to take their chances. Smoking is hard to give up because most people find it hard to give up anything they really like to do. Few people are addicted to things they don’t like to do.
16 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in health economics Tags: anti-vaccination. The Great Escape, vaccination
HT: The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe
12 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in economics of regulation, health economics Tags: nanny state, The fatal conceit, unintended consequences
12 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in environmental economics, environmentalism, health economics Tags: Bjørn Lomborg, pollution, The Club of Rome, The Great Escape, The Great Fact, The Limits of Growth
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