Whose Hand Controls the Global Thermostat?

A good report here, from the Economist, on a recent geoengineering summit in Asilomar, Calif. (which, unsurprisingly, had its detractors before it was ever held). The article's final paragraph gets at something we've touched on before, in SuperFreakonomics and on this blog: that if global warming gets bad enough to require a geoengineering intervention, the actual science may well not be the hardest part:
Producing plausible policies and ways for the public to have a say on them will be hard

Giving Doctors an Incentive

While partisan rancor over health care continues in the U.S., Australia is forging its own health care path. Its government, hoping to encourage doctors to treat diabetics outside the hospital, announced that doctors will be given a cash payment for every diabetic they treat, and an additional payment for patients whose health improves.

Technology and Trade

John van Reenen of the London School of Economics gave a very neat paper recently.

A huge literature has demonstrated the growth in inequality in the U.S. and Europe in the past two decades, with most papers pointing to skill-biased technical change, and others pointing to the growth in international trade. This new study combines the two, showing how the expansion of imports from low-wage countries, particularly China, has induced European and American firms to switch to higher-technology products, to innovate more and to reallocate workers to plants that use more up-to-date technologies.

These changes in the nature of production, which have been strongest in those industries and those times where/when imports from China have grown most, may have contributed substantially to the decreasing relative earnings of the less-skilled. So it is not only trade, not only technological change that has altered Western labor markets; it

Farewell, George Johnson

One of my best friends in the profession, George Johnson, passed away this week at age 70.

Quotes Uncovered: The Curious Cat

Photo: Sukanto Debnath
Each week, I

Tighter Government, One Nudge at a Time

The federal government may have a reputation for being a bit slow and bloated, but a new concept, the President's SAVE award, hopes to change some of that. Begun in 2009 by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), it's "a contest for federal employees to come up with the best idea to save taxpayer dollars and make the government perform more effectively and efficiently." (Where was this program when John Szilagyi needed it?) During the first submission window, the OMB received nearly 40,000 ideas within three weeks; the best ideas were passed to the appropriate government agencies. One idea is already bound for implementation: the Department of Homeland Security "announced that it is changing the default setting for its payroll statements from paper to electronic ... By making e-statements the default option, while giving employees the option to opt out in favor of the paper statement, we hope to increase the percentage of federal employees who use this approach while saving the taxpayers

Bad (and Worse) Corruption

Ray Fisman, writing in Foreign Policy, explains that some types of corruption are better than others: "In an orderly, predictable -- yet corrupt -- system, businesses can at least calculate expected returns and plan accordingly.