luck, externalities, and fraud. And fire.
RWL #416
Greetings from The University of New Hampshire! It is that time of year when we close the windows and light the fire. There is something peaceful about the warmth of the fire and the tock-tick-click of the expanding and contracting of the wood stove when the outside is pitch black at dinner time now. We’ve been leveling down in terms of heat - highs this week in the 50’s for the most part, though we haven’t had a frost yet. I brought in our plants from their summer home on the porch tonight in anticipation that we may get a frost this week. Fall is truly here and the trees will be bare in a few weeks.
This Friday I will be hosting my 8th annual Shaping the Future: Leadership and Public Policy in Healthcare conference. We have a hundred people attending. I love this conference because it is a great opportunity for the students to meet many healthcare leaders from around northern New England, but I have to confess I am really looking forward to the day after. Or the evening after, snug by the fire with a whisky, neat, for the fire inside to match the fire outside.
As usual, willing good for all of you!
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Read
What: The Guardian, The big idea: should we be thinking about luck differently?
Why: Short essay on luck, specifically “constitutive luck”, which is not a phrase I am familiar with. From the article:
But perhaps the most important is “constitutive luck”, which covers all the fortunate or unfortunate circumstances of your very existence; the period of history in which you were born, your parents, background, genes and character traits.
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Watch
What: Marginal Revolution University, What Are Positive Externalities? (5 min)
Why: Tyler Cowen is a brilliant economics explainer, amongst many other things he is brilliant at. I have agreed to write a book chapter on health economics for an introductory text book on the US Healthcare System. One of the fundamental concepts of economics is the idea of externalities. Externalities are regularly called out to explain health policy decisions. Don’t know what an externality is? Check out this short video. He uses the example of the immunizations to explain it, which is likely one of the examples I will use as well. But he does it so nicely. I can only try. It’s a pleasure to listen to a master.
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Listen
What: The Journal, The Money Laundering Behind TD Bank’s $3 Billion Fine (21 min)
Why: I’m often skeptical of judgments of this scale - my sense is they are often disproportionate. But listening to the scale of what was carried out - deposits of hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash… repeatedly - how did that not throw up red flags? And these are not proceeds of victimless crimes - the money funds violence. (We can go around about how drug prohibition is the cause of violence, but let’s just accept that this money helped fund violence.) I’m not sure $3B is the right number, but the sheer greed that was behind this willful ignorance… you have to listen.