10/21/10 7:50 PMThe Final Question I Asked in Today's Econ 1 Lecture - Grasping Reality with Both Hands

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Grasping Reality with Both HandsThe Semi-Daily Journal of Economist J. Bradford DeLong: Fair, Balanced, Reality-Based, and Even-HandedDepartment of Economics, U.C. Berkeley #3880, Berkeley, CA 94720-3880; 925 708 0467; delong@econ.berkeley.edu.

Economics 210aWeblog ArchivesDeLong Hot on GoogleDeLong Hot on Google BlogsearchSeptember 22, 2010

The Final Question I Asked in Today's Econ 1 Lecture

What is the most likely outcome for the U.S. budget come 2060? 1. We will have raised taxes to pay for government healthspending. 2. We will have cut doctors' wages and enslaved them by drafting them into a socialist national health service. 3. Wewill have abandoned our commitment to providing state-of-the-art health care to the sick and not just the wealthy. 4. Thehealth care fairy will have figured out a way for us all to have all the medically-appropriate care we need for a surprisingly lowprivate and public budgetary cost. 5. The federal government as we know it will have collapsed, and those of us still alive will bestarring involuntarily in a remake of “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome”.

Brad DeLong on September 22, 2010 at 01:28 PM in Economics, Economics: Fiscal Policy, Politics | Permalink

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dilbert dogbert said...I vote for “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome”Your readers would be entertained by the actual responses of the students.

Reply September 22, 2010 at 02:00 PMKen Houghton said...Can I pick a combination of (1) and (2)? An old buddy who worked for Heritage one summer notes that U.S. GPs make abouttwice what doctors in any other country do. When the conservatives have identified that as an issue now, certainly they willaddress it over the next 50 years.

[Aside: (3) is, of course, not possible since that commitment _per se_ does not exist. Denying that we ration health care byprice would be disingenuous of your students, though they might be justified in noting that expanding that rationing throughdeliberate policy (not just through growing income inequality) would be possible.]

Reply September 22, 2010 at 02:31 PMNeal said...I suggest that you download "Where There Is No Doctor", a medical guide I used during my years in the Peace Corps.

http://www.hesperian.org/publications_download_wtnd.php

By 2025 this will be your primary health resource. Regular health insurance and predictable, quality health care will be theexclusive right of plutocrats and their politicians.

Reply September 22, 2010 at 02:43 PMJohn said...Bring on the Thunderdome!

Reply September 22, 2010 at 02:48 PMLeft Outside said...2. socialist healthcare, it is the end of history after all.

Or alternatively, option 5 by way of number 3.

Reply September 22, 2010 at 03:30 PMMichael said...

Dashboard Blog Stats Edit Post

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Option 3B -- maybe there's no committment now, but there will be even less of one by 2060. The non-wealthy sick will be citedas examples of parasitic behavior.

Reply September 22, 2010 at 04:04 PMLee A. Arnold said...The correct answer is number 4. Everything is going to be fine. We finally have the correct mix of tools for medicine, and theprice is going to come down. Medicine has been haphazard for millennia, but not any longer. Now we are combining biotech,nanotech, computation and genomics. Of course, we shall soon have to revisit the extended patent protections in this brew ,because continued innovation is going to be held back by the undeserved rents to the patent holders. But clearly the rate ofdiscovery and innovation in medicine has begun to accelerate at the rate of Moore's Law, i.e. doubling around once every 18months. If you have followed any science news at all for the past few years, you already know this. And from all other industrieswe also know that, where the technology is apt, the prices of goods and services come down. Medicine will continue to be agrowth industry and employ lots more people for three or four more decades, but the service and price will be more like fastfood. By 2060 you are going to live forever, and you won't want to retire. You will have the body of a 20-year old. You will evenlike hip hop! You will start to build spaceships.

Reply September 22, 2010 at 04:34 PMMayson Lancaster said...We will be somewhere in Bruce Sterling country. Whether it will be Heavy Weather, Holy Fire, Distraction, or The Caryatids, orsome mixture of the lot, I have no idea, but I'm pretty sure that strong elements of some of those futures will be with us, and itwon't be pretty. (Of course assuming no nuclear holocaust, gray goo, or Vingian singularity[or at least none with any visible-to-the-masses effects].) But it should be interesting.

Reply September 22, 2010 at 05:18 PMThe Pale Scot said...Sliding toward Mad Max by 2025. water will become painfully scarce before oil does, and stuff like copper, phosphates etc soonafter. Once the Arctic Sea becomes ice free during the summer climate change will really accelerate. Because of the oil pricesrising a large part of the global population will be unable to run the water pumps and the field tractors to feed themselves. Whathappens when the Jordan river dries up or is diverted? Desalinization requires a lot of energy. Since the USA still has a smallsupply of oil we'll last a little longer, but I think hard times will lead to fanatical politicians of a religious bent getting control ofthe USA, Israel, India and Pakistan.

Really, 50% of the American population expects the rapture to come by 2050, what better way to speed it up than by launchingsome nukes? India is a stable land mass surrounded by harsh, heavily populated territory on three sides. religious nuts havemuch higher birthrates than the sane in Israel and Pakistan. China will see Siberia as an empty territory with a moderatingclimate at the same time the Euro-Russia is in a permanent drought.

So the best bet is someplace in the southern hemisphere to avoid the bulk of the fallout.

Future so bright..I gotta wear shades..

Reply September 22, 2010 at 05:44 PMLee A. Arnold said...If there is a sudden acceleration of global warming to make the methane burp out of the melted tundra, then agriculture world-wide will STOP DEAD for two or three years, with an enormous human die-off.

The clown denialists had better get with the program pretty soon, or else the rest of us will have to gather them into a spaceship,and launch it to Mars. Which ain't no kind of place to raise your kid.

The only recalcitrant problems I see are: the proliferation of low-cost, high-tech killing, and the disappearance of wildlifeecosystems by habitat fragmentation, with that disappearance now accelerated by climate change.

It remains to be seen whether intelligence extension will make people more or less evil, more or less greedy, find ways to makethings better, even quicker.

Only two ways it can go: Either smart technologies solve this emotional disease of fear of self, and its need for power overothers, or else our need to guard against it will become the predominating social question, with policies ranging from changes inthe redistribution of income to technological security firewalls. Because the increasing ability of individuals, and small groups,to wreak nearly unfathomable havoc is going to force the formation of a global police state.

Reply September 22, 2010 at 06:04 PMChacoKevy said...Neal!I hear that! I still have my copy of "Donde no Hay Doctor". I'm curious, when did you serve. I was '03-'05

Reply September 22, 2010 at 06:19 PMOmega Centauri said...Brad, I hope you were pulling our legs. It might be a great question for a philosophical debating class, but for beginning econ.Boy, would the answers be hard to grade fairly.

Although the mad max world as depicted in the movie is impossible, "everything has collaspsed, but they seem to have infinitefuel, and no visible means of food production" collapse is one distinct possibility.

Reply September 22, 2010 at 07:29 PMGreg said...The correct answer is both 1 and 3. People in 2060 will be paying more, in all sorts of direct and indirect ways, to support asystem that benefits fewer and fewer.

This is because of rent-seeking by everyone in the health system. But Brad's students haven't been exposed to that concept yet --those are the breaks when you do macro before micro.

Reply September 22, 2010 at 08:03 PMnopretensehere@gmail.com said...The Cretins will have their opportunity at some point over the next 30 years to establish a one party system of conservativesdefended by a largely southern evangelist Christian military:

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"Wartime recruits come more from rural areas, particularly from the South. However, many states outside of the South, such asAlaska and Montana [my comment - RED STATES OF COURSE], continue to have strong proportional representation. Areasclassified as entirely urban are strongly underrepresented compared to areas with increased rural concentrations, all of whichwere overrepresented." (Heritage Foundation - 2006 Who are the Troops)

They will gain office as a backlash against change and US shrinking economic clout but will narrowly loose a major election asthe middle class continues to shrink and the ignorant old who make up the Cretinous tea party dimwits die off. Instead ofceding they will come up with some outlandish lie to invalidate the election and will simply stay in office with the backing pf themilitary. There will be an oppressive crackdown on personal liberties and a level of monitoring that George Orwell could NEVERhave imagined will be directed at the population.

Health care will be for the wealthy, politically connected and "valuable" of society. Military service should be required.

Reply September 22, 2010 at 08:21 PMGene O'Grady said...Isn't the answer to the question that no one knows? I mean, we're supposed to change a lot faster nowadays, and imagine anAthenian in 463 BC asking that question about 413.

I'm not sure I quite buy the comment on the military, and suspect that (a) the Heritage Foundation is a little self-indulgent inwhat they claim, and (b) things have changed. Rural Oregon also supplies a lot of troops, and a lot of casualties, for Bush's littlewar, and the returned soldiers I've met don't sound a bit like the previous poster's dystopia would require. Plus, the backbone ofthe career military, not the dim bulbs that Cheney promoted, is a lot smarter than people think, and their experiences and thechanges those experiences produce, also point in a different direction.

Reply September 22, 2010 at 08:30 PMnopretensehere@gmail.com said in reply to Gene O'Grady...I hear you on the Heritage foundation but I could not find any icy government stats on regional and religion composition of themilitary. I suspect though that it's largely conservative and southern. If "The Military" were a state I think it would be fairly red.Can anyone answer that with authority?

Reply September 22, 2010 at 08:36 PMAnon said...Mad Max here we come, climate change is going to make life worse in a way that crazy demagogues will take advantage of.

Reply September 22, 2010 at 08:48 PMcharles said...3, because for the most part healthcare is not an insurable interest

Reply September 22, 2010 at 09:24 PMCaitlinO said...I really did have it figured out, but the dog ate my answer.

Reply September 22, 2010 at 11:30 PMalbrt said...Definitely Mad Max. With Michelle Obama's head in a jar starring as Aunty Entity.

But only after the current Obama administration succeeds in installing a thirty year Wall Street oligarchy, under which we areconsistently told year after year that we will receive health care coverage in the fifth year of a five year plan.

Reply September 23, 2010 at 12:38 AMVacslav said...The "commitment to providing state-of-the-art health care to the sick and not just the wealthy" will clash with the reality offinite resources: provided infinite resources we already can extend one's life way beyond what was considered "natural" just oneor two generations ago. Those demanding "state of the art health care at somebody else's expense" will have to make hard moralchoices - or abandon the concept altogether.

Reply September 23, 2010 at 01:13 AMNeal said...ChacoKevy

British Honduras/Belize, 1979-1982, right when they were pushed into independence by the British. It was one of the fewinstances where there were riots AGAINST independence.

This was well before the development of the current tourist economy. George Price, the then Prime Minister, fulminated manytimes against becoming a "nation of maids and waiters". I was stationed in Belmopan, but I remember going out to AmbergrisCaye, staying in a hotel on the beach for $3 per night.

I worked as an engineer, designing and inspecting projects such as schools, hurricane shelters, bridges, community centers.

Reply September 23, 2010 at 05:16 AMcervantes said...2. We will have cut doctors' wages and enslaved them by drafting them into a socialist national health service.

This is a rather tendentious formulation, don't you think? British doctors do not consider themselves to be "enslaved," not inthe least. And yes, we do need to cut the pay of many specialists because their high pay simply cannot be justified. Primary caredocs can make a little more and the total amount of physician salaries will be less -- which indeed it should be.

Btw, the same economic ends could be achieved with a single payer system, without making docs employees of a "socialist"NHS. You left that one out.

I'm surprised you know so little about health care policy.

All that said, I doubt it will happen.

Reply September 23, 2010 at 05:50 AMSARose said...Too bad there is no choice #6, "Nothing will change , although the country will have accumulated tens of trillions of new debtand the Fed will have burned up three Crays attempting to transfer enough money to banks to keep up with inflation in the

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health care sector."

Easy A.

Reply September 23, 2010 at 08:11 AMEorr said...This is obviously a trick question akin to asking what is more likely to destroy the earth a comet, astroid, or supernova nearby.If someone asked that question in 1950 it would involve flying cars and else else that is anywhere close to the truth.Development is an exponential process and to figure out what the world will look like on my death bead is fantasy and notscience fiction.

Reply September 23, 2010 at 11:04 AMGazbo said...I work as a civilian on a military base, and while there are plenty of "red state" G.I.s, there are lots of blue state folks around too; I just checked out two guys from the Hamptons e.g.What has been impressive to me is the really intense commitment to civilian control in the jr officer corps. Question the nextcorporal or lieutenant you meet on this subject, and you may be surprised at the passion you'll hear; it's clearly part of thetraining.Very reassuring, and the same from righties and lefties - and there's plenty of both on this base (navy and marine).I really doubtthat a military coup could get much traction in the US.As to the larger question, I expect that the death panels will make the issue moot.

Reply September 23, 2010 at 04:28 PMMaynard Handley said...2010 to 2060...Well 1910 to 1960 gave us 2 world wars, plus the cold war, and atomic weapons. Personally I think history like that (another world war, plus, for good measure, a new super-weapon, most likely engineeredtargeted biological weapons) is the most likely outcome. Too many people, not enough oil and other resources to go round, andour political institutions have made it remarkably clear that, just like in 1910, their allegiance is to the plutocracy and nothingelse.

So of the choices that are available, I'd go for 5.

But I do like the measured neutral tone in which you described option 2.

Reply September 24, 2010 at 07:45 PMNathanael said...I vote for (5). Though really Mad Max is hopelessly unrealistic; something like a combination of Hitler's Germany and modernSomalia, perhaps. Or maybe a nice rerun of World War One. Or maybe it will be On the Beach.

We have problems far beyond health care, and global climate change is going to blow the status quo out of the water; while thecorrupt plutocracy will largely waste its time trying to fight against the proletariat rather than trying to deal with the problems.

So yeah, the post-apocalyptic is by *far* the most likely.

What did the students vote for?

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