I read Francis Fukayama's The End of History a couple of years ago, and wrote at least a few very lengthy posts on it. I don't know if anyone read them, but the book itself IS worth reading. It's one of the most provocative and ambitious theories ever put forward about human development.

Whether you agree with it or not, once you've read it every argument or prediction you make on the subject must thereafter be in reference to it.

Very, very broadly, Fukayama argues that liberal democracy is the end point of human political development. Democracy, and everything that goes with it - free markets, globalization, a general lack of full-scale warfare between states. As we stand on the threshold of widespread, near-universal adoption of democratic forms of government, we are coming, in some sense, to the end of history.

Fukayama wrote his original essay (which he later expanded into a book) in 1989. By 2002, as the US became earnest about its War on Terror in the Middle East, Fukayama was often considered widely discredited. After all, here we are, a democracy, fighting a war. So history goes on, yes?

Via Marginal Revolution, this guy says 'not so fast':

[What is t]he best prediction of the past 20 years?

Before answering this question, let’s first examine what has happened over the past 20 years.

1. The world has gotten much more peaceful. I recall reading that the last couple years were the most peaceful in all of human history (and pre-history for that matter.) Perhaps someone can find the article.

2. The world has gotten much more democratic. The number of democratic countries has soared at the fastest rate in history, by far.

3. The world has gotten much more market-oriented. There has been a huge wave of privatization and deregulation of prices and market access. And this trend extends far beyond the formerly communist countries.

So the obvious choice for most successful prediction is Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 claim that “history was ending,” that the great ideological battle between democratic capitalism and other isms was essentially over, and that henceforth the world would become gradually more democratic, peaceful, and market-oriented.

So you would think that intellectuals would treat Fukuyama as a hero, that he would be figuratively hoisted on our shoulders and paraded around as the prophet of the new age. Just the reverse. I must have seen his name mentioned dozens of times in intellectual outlets like the New York Review of Books. And every single time, without exception, the reference has been derisive, mocking, a sort of rolling of the eyes in wonder than anyone could have believed anything so foolish. So what gives?

Scott Summer has some interesting theories on why intellectuals disdain Fukayama, and takes a broad look at the various 'exceptions to the rule' that still plague our world. Also, China. Worth reading.

So I'm sure you've heard about Disney buying Marvel. There's been a lot of discussion in the Geekosphere - is this the final twilight of civilization before it burns to the ground and its ashes are scattered to the four winds? Or is it just really bad with some upsides?

Meh.

Marvel was already a huge corporate entity. Stan Lee is a multi-millionaire, people! Anyway, I part ways with most people on the whole 'corporations are inherently evil' thing. Corporations are made up of people. And people can be kind of stupid and greedy, yes, but that's the risk you run anywhere.

In the short run, I don't see that the merger will have that much impact on Marvel, unless it's positive. Disney is supposedly not firing everyone and replacing them with Mouseketeers. And Marvel now has access to the infinite resources of the vast Disney media empire.

I'm not as savvy as Wired is that Pixar is going to start churning out Marvel films, though. I mean, technically if they wanted to do that there was nothing stopping them already. There is this thing called 'licensing', you know.

Meanwhile, Penny Arcade has ( other concerns... )

Via Freakonomics - a strong argument against 'Peak Oil' fears.

Part of this argument can generally be extrapolated to most resource scarcity panics. An expert estimates that the Earth has "X" resources that are economically viable. Someone does the math and sees that we're using up "Y" per year, where Y is a sizable fraction of X. They go to the press, panicky headlines ensue, government programs are put in place, everyone braces for the end and then... we never run out.

These panics virtually always overlook or discount the twin forces of technology and economics. Technology gives people the means and free markets give them the wills to find better, cheaper and more efficient ways to exploit resources. The oil we're extracting today is oil that was unreachable 100 years ago. Smart money says that tomorrow we'll be cheaply pulling out oil that is far too expensive to get at today. The same is true for just about anything else that humans invest serious money, time and effort into.

It's not that things never run out, or that resources are infinite. By times change. Technology changes. Economics change. There's a strong likelihood that by the time we reach true 'peak oil' we simply won't need oil anymore.

There are a lot of good reasons to argue against our continued dependency on oil. But invoking an immanent cataclysm that never seems to come to pass is not one of them.

I've written before about how I'm not very impressed with Charles Stross as an author. I don't think he's an idiot, though. After diving into his latest novel, Halting State, I just wonder if he isn't in the wrong profession.

What should we do with him instead? Make him an economist, maybe? Give him a law degree and put him in charge of sorting out the intellectual property mess? Or possibly just make him a consultant for architecting Web 4.0?

I think he'd shine in any of these positions. And then we'd be spared sentences like this:

TI is an angel specializiing in high-tech start-ups, your typical Web 3.1415 outfits, and TI contracted DBA - in the person of Chris Morgan, full partner (and Director of Risk Management) - to produce full pre-IPO investment reports on their clients.

If you feel like you just accidentally read the prospectus for a Silicon Valley startup instead of a line from a novel, well, wait until you try the whole thing. And that second person singular thing is not an accident - throughout the entire book, all three different characters are referred to as you.

Which, believe it or not, doesn't help to make the long-chain molecules of jargon porn less hard on the ear. It's like being whacked over the head with a baseball bat made of old Wired articles. Stross is clearly trying to emulate old-time cyberpunk heroes like Gibson, but he comes off sounding like a copywriter for Microsoft on cocaine.

The plot doesn't make a lot of sense. Or maybe it does, but the author never slows down long enough to explain the soup of acronyms and buzzwords he's spewing at you, so whether they resolve themselves into something coherent at some level is anybody's guess. And remember, I write this as a member of the target demographic. What someone would make of this who is over 35 doesn't eat, drink and breathe the internet for a living I shudder to think.

So no, there's no character and no plot and the sentence structure will burn your eyes, yet I'm going to go ahead and recommend this as a book possibly worth reading.

Halting State takes place about twenty minutes into the future, and even as he does violence to the very concept of a novel, Stross has a lot of interesting and intriguing things to say about What's Next. Peer-to-peer networks, cellular phones, network security, quantum computing, ARGs, risk management and the economics of MMOs all get some attention here and it's fascinating stuff. I would rate his vision of the future as one of the least implausible ones I've read recently. If you're interested in that kind of stuff, this really is your ticket to ride.

The cliff notes of Stross's vision is a world where information is not getting any more centralized or any more secure. As distribution spins out of control, international powers have to find new ways of spying on each other and keeping their own stuff secure and where the spheres of corporate gamesmanship, international NGOs, government policymaking and the dabbling of private citizens bleed into each other. The resulting vision is somewhat compelling.

If you're not quite ready to wade into Stross's prose to dig these gems out, however, you can go straight to the horse's mouth. I don't know who got a leading New York Times economist and a science-fiction writer together for a panel, but somebody did and the resulting transcript is worth reading.

So, looks like the best-selling economics book of all time is getting a sequel:

( It's super sized... )

Mental_Floss has a nice comparative overview of the American health-care system versus other systems around the world. I think it's generally fair although I might take issue with the statement that we have "the best and also the worst" health care. I think generally our health care is very good; unless they are simply referring to the fact that some people don't have any health care at all. But Americans don't even understand the concept of a waiting list, and that says something.

But of course we have a lot of people who simply cannot afford health care and with the economic crisis that number is growing, not shrinking. And those that can are paying more and more every year.  There is definitely a problem here that needs a solution.

There is a lot of debate about this solution. I'm sure the readers of this blog come down on virtually every side of the issue.

What do I think? Well, I think that health care is super complex. Having lived with a doctor for a while and discussed this at length with him, I feel pretty comfortable saying that there's no magic bullet. But here are some things that are worth thinking about in any health care discussion:

1. There is no limit to the amount of money we can justify spending on health care.  No one wants to put a price tag on human life.  With the march of technology, it's always possible to spend a few millions to extend someone's life one more week, or even one more day.  It is always possible to provide more preventative care to catch problems before they get out of control.  Even with increased administrative efficiency, it is still possible for health care costs to balloon exponentially and approach 100% of our GNP if people are continually increasing their expectations of medical care.
2. We can't save everyone.  This relates back to point one.  As much as our modern society wants to think that everything can be controlled, everyone can be healthy, and every outcome can be optimized; they can't.  We wouldn't have the money or the manpower, even if we were a nation of millionaire doctors.  Which we very much are not. 
3. Someone is always going to have to make hard decisions.  In the US, these decisions tend to be made by insurance companies and financial considerations.  In other countries they are made by the government.  But given that cost-versus-benefit decisions will always have to be made in health care, someone somewhere will have to be given the responsibility of deciding who is allowed to get treatment.  This is frightening, but inevitable.  Families are most likely not capable of making these decisions.

There is no perfect system.  Unfortunately, in a world of resource scarcity human life DOES have a price.  Any health care program, whether it's a brand new one or a radical overhaul of the existing one, will have to make trade-offs.  Universal health care brings long waiting lists and high taxes.  Fast and efficient health care brings less coverage.  And in either case, a third party decides who gets treatment.  It really comes down to what trade-offs that we as a society are willing to make. 

One trade-off that we will apparently not make is LESS health care.  This is the third option: we could tough it out, accept less health care in general and realize that old people die and we're all getting older.  If we were ancient Vikings, sticking our elders in longboats and pushing them out to sea, we might be considered inhumane but we would also be a lot more likely to have cheap-but-efficient health care.  Making the decision to voluntarily limit our own access would bring the costs down and make universal coverage much more feasible. 

It's ironic: we could have inexpensive universal health care so long as everybody didn't use it.

Of course, this would require the biggest change of all - not a political or economic change, but a cultural change.  And thus it's the least likely to happen.  Our society sues because tables have sharp corners and coffee is too hot.  Safety and security are high priorities for us, if our behavior is any guide.  Well, if that's what we want, okay.  

But we're going to have to be prepared to pay for it.

Just read a really fascinating Slate article entitled Why No More 9/11s? It lays out eight prevailing theories on why terrorists have not made a successful attack on US soil since 2001, starting with the comforting ("Terrorists are dumb.") and moving towards the disconcerting ("It's only a matter of time."). It's long, but you won't be bored.

That's right The Office fans, here's the Freakonomics take on Michael Scott's new paper company. Key quote:

My guess is they were charging too low a price because most companies that I’ve worked with closely — when you run the numbers — are charging too low a price.

Hmm. As a consumer, that's never the answer you want to hear...

Apparently the boys at Penny Arcade share my dislike of political cartoons.

I've never understood the point of political cartoons. They're not clever or subtle, covered as they are with labels. They're not revealing metaphors, since they usually resort to cheap shots and gross generalizations. What exactly do they add to the conversation?

Anyway, political cartoons are in trouble, which is not exactly surprising since the entire newspaper industry is in deep, deep doo-doo. The credit crisis is exacerbating the slow decline of newspapers to the point where most may not even EXIST in a few years. You really ought to go and read this fantastically interesting blog post called Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.

It cogently summarizes the reasons for newspaper journalism's imminent demise. Basically, newspapers had a business model that was based on the expense of running a printing press. Printing presses were big, expensive, complicated pieces of equipment. Everyone couldn't just set one up in their dining room. You needed a big company with the money to run it. Around this idea was built the newspaper.

Except that, circa the twenty-first century, everyone DOES have a printing press in their dining room. It's called a computer with an internet connection. And it serves the exact same function of distributing information, but much MUCH more affordably. The collapse has been a long time coming, but the stark truth of the matter is that there isn't and never was any way that newspapers make sense in a society of ubiquitous, instantly accessible information.

At any rate, the author of the above piece says all this and more better than I could in a few paragraphs, so go read it.

One thing that I would add to this though is that I feel the same way about newspapers that Penny Arcade feels about political cartoonists. I just don't have a lot of sympathy for them. I've never admired the bizarre combination of self-righteous 'fourth estate' posturing, blatant disregard for individual privacy, and basic incompetence when it came to getting the facts straight.

We can imagine a scenario where people come together to save the newspaper as a bastion of free speech and fearless reporting, but in the real world I think these guys squandered whatever public goodwill they once had long ago. I don't think anyone who has ever seen themselves 'quoted' in a newspaper without accuracy or context would disagree with this. That's to say nothing of the unlucky people who have had jobs and marriages ruined by scandal-hunting reporters.

Now I definitely think that freedom of the press is one of the most important freedoms we have, and that it's a safeguard against tyranny. But I don't think that that freedom is synonymous with The Newspaper. From the article:

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.

Exactly.

My one major concern right now is that there are a few genuinely talented writers working in the newspaper industry - the James Lileks of the world, and so-forth. Just today I was reading Lore Sjoberg's blog about how he is 'underemployed' as Wired has cut way back on the stuff they are asking him to write. However I think that most of these people have been foresighted enough to get ahead of the curve and establish themselves as strong online presences. I feel optimistic that, in the long-run, they will survive and thrive.

So, how do you feel about newspapers. Time for a change, or are they worth saving?

Hah! From The Undercover Economist:

Dear Economist,
My young son came home from school and asked me: “Mummy, what’s a credit crunch?” How can I explain this to a five-year-old?
Ms LG, London

Dear Ms LG,

Once upon a time, there was a blameless girl called Consumerella, who didn’t have enough money to buy all the lovely things she wanted. She went to her Fairy Godmother, who called a man called Rumpelstiltskin who lived on Wall Street and claimed to be able to spin straw into gold. Rumpelstiltskin sent the Fairy Godmother the recipe for this magic spell. It was written in tiny, tiny writing, so she did not read it but hoped the Sorcerers’ Exchange Commission had checked it.

The Fairy Godmother carried away armfuls of glistening straw-derivative at a bargain price. Emboldened by the deal, she lent Consumerella – who had a big party to go to – 125 per cent of the money she needed. Consumerella bought a bling-bedizened gown, a palace and a Mercedes – and spent the rest on champagne. The first payment was due at midnight.

At midnight, Consumerella missed the first payment on her loan. (The result of overindulgence, although some blamed the pronouncements of the Toastmaster, a man called Peston.) Consumerella’s credit rating turned into a pumpkin and Rumpelstiltskin’s spell was broken. He and the Fairy Godmother discovered that their vaults were not full of gold, but ordinary straw.

All seemed lost until Santa Claus and his helpers, men with implausible fairy-tale names such as Darling and Bernanke, began handing out presents. It was only in January that Consumerella’s credit card statement arrived and she discovered that Santa Claus had paid for the gifts by taking out a loan in her name. They all lived miserably ever after. The End.

Man, good thing it's just a silly story, right?

How do you shop online? Do you pay attention to reviews? If so, how do you decide if a given review is an accurate reflection of the product at hand?

In the gentle digital anarchy of the internet, everyone becomes a product reviewer. As empowering as this sounds, it comes with the usual caveat - that means there's a lot of noise out there. Useless reviews, or worse, misleading and inaccurate reviews. Often intentionally so.

For every new book released there's someone with an axe to grind against the author. For every new piece of software released there are corporate shills masquerading as Joe Reviewer. Not to mention the relatively innocent folks who are just a little baffled about how they got here but are going to post something anyway.

How do you tell the good reviews from the bad ones?

A negative review is fine if it warns you away from a project you wouldn't appreciate. A glowing review is wonderful if it turns you onto something you'll love. But equally, a negative review can be used to drive you away from something that is in fact perfectly good, and a positive review can sell you on a piece of crap. What the consumer wants, then, is not negative or positive reviews, but USEFUL reviews.

My approach is to sort of take the temperature of the reviews overall. What's the trend? Is it mostly good with a few angry blowhards, or mostly bad with a dash of hype from unrepentant fan-boys? Even more helpful than this, though, is to look at the good AND bad reviews and see what they have in common. For instance, one person may mention a feature in a very positive light while another may see it as a negative. This doesn't mean that one of them is lying. But it does mean that there's a feature in the product that, depending on taste, I may really enjoy or really dislike. And that is very useful information.

I bring all this up because of Kanye West. I was reading the excellent Slate.com article that patrick___ linked to yesterday on TR-808 drum machines. I was intrigued by the references to Kanye West's new album, so I flipped over to the Amazon review page.

Whoa.

The last time I saw such a polarizing product on Amazon was, well, I really can't think of it. Talk about a love-it-or-hate-it proposition. Amazon.com now offers a helpful breakdown of how many people gave how many stars on a given product. As of this writing, 808's and Heartbreak stands at 56 five-star reviews, 42 one-star reviews and only eight three starrers!

Wars have been fought over less heated feelings than these.

As for me, color me intrigued. I'm always fascinated when an artist takes their music in a radical new direction. It's my experience that heated negative reactions to this is usually an indication that they've done something really interesting, and worth checking out. I don't 'hip' the 'hop' very much, but on the occasions that I have I've really enjoyed the offerings of Mr. West. Perhaps I need to check this album out.

I've got all of the money I'll ever need... as long as I die by noon tomorrow.

Somebody quotes this line from a song in this very interesting Freakonomics Quorum and I love it. But yeah, the question they've posed to various writers and industry leaders is a fascinating one - what would you do if you lost everything?

The responses are quite interesting. Most of the responders, with the exception of one who seems bent on becoming a wandering poet, are convinced that their situation would be temporary at best. Given their level of education, their networks of friends and family, and various support organization they feel confident that they could pull themselves up out of poverty before too long.

But if these experts are so salient about their outlook, why don't the millions of Americans living in poverty just take their advice? Do they have disadvantages that these guys don't have? Or are the respondents overlooking some critical factors?

What's your take? And for bonus credit: what's your plan for if it all goes south?

It's a little bit jarring, actually, but 'Mercury', the second track and first single from the new Bloc Party album, distinctly sounds like it's at least partly about the economic crisis. Given that the real downturn isn't even two months old yet, it's rather eerie to hear a song about it already.

BP is either very prescient, very lucky, or they had a very abbreviated path from studio to record store shelves.

Maybe I'm reading something into the song that's not really there, but you can read the lyrics and decide for yourself. While a sample of Kele's voice chanting "My mercury's in retograde" repeats in the background, he sings the following lines:

This is not the time to start a new love
This is not the time to sign a lease
Try not to worry about what's forgotten
Try not to worry about what's been missed.

What do you think? Remember, this is also being promoted as the first single.

Via lolfed:

Call it guerilla marketing, call it open source billboards, heck, even call it old-fashioned 'vandalism'... but this recent 'improvement' of a Wachovia billboard by the Billboard Liberation Front is kinda brilliant:

( Read more... )

My favorite part of the altered billboard is the bottom right corner.

You can see more of the BLF's efforts on their blog.

This actually has nothing to do with ruthette but I was amused that the person involved is named Ruth. Imagining her as the author of this letter just makes the ensuing discussion that much better.

While I really don't have trouble getting out of bed most mornings, I appreciate the wisdom contained herein. I have often tried to coerce myself into doing (or not doing) something I really wanted too (often involving sugar). Bargaining is definitely one of the stages in this process. Denial and acceptance are others.

From Dear Economist -

I struggle to wake up in the morning although I sleep, on average, seven and a half hours. As I do have a flexible timetable, I arrive at work at 10am. I would like to start at 9am, but my laziness makes it impossible.

Do you have any advice?
Ruth

Dear Ruth,

Your guide here must be the Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling. Schelling’s expertise as a game theorist was honed by his experiences as a cold war strategist – he advised John F. Kennedy during the Berlin crisis.

Schelling realised that the same bargaining and bluffing techniques that worked against Nikita Khrushchev might also work in an individual’s struggle with herself, to quit smoking, diet or get out of bed in the morning. He called the idea “egonomics”.

Your predicament is a contest between two competitors, Evening Ruth and Morning Ruth. Evening Ruth has fine ideas about an early start, but her late nights impose costs on Morning Ruth, who then stays in bed.

One option is to tie Morning Ruth’s hands, just as Odysseus ordered his sailors to tie him to the mast. Evening Ruth might buy one of those motorised alarm clocks that falls off the dresser and scuttles under the bed, beeping loudly.

An alternative is to recruit a third player. The British government handed over control of interest rates to the Bank of England. Similarly, ask an early-bird friend to call every morning.

Odder still, Evening Ruth could enlist Bad Cop Ruth to punish Morning Ruth for lie-ins by, say, denying her(self) television privileges. Bizarre as it may seem to turn one person’s decision into a three-way inner struggle, Schelling avers that this technique works.

One final point. Your letter was evidently composed by Evening Ruth. Are you sure that Morning Ruth’s preferences are so mistaken?

Penny Arcade is worth hitting up this week. The boys are out of town and a series of guest bloggers from the gaming industry are pontificating on the weighty topic of Digital Rights Management. Here are parts uno and dos.

For those of you who aren't huge nerds, DRM is the reason why you can't copy music you bought on iTunes to your friends' computer and why you have to enter those really long CD keys every time you install Windows software. Basically, DRM is what prevents the PC universe from descending into an orgy of illegal copying and file sharing. Or so the theory goes.

Others aren't so savvy on the idea, and feel that DRM restricts users from using what is rightfully theirs.

Here's what I want to see: I don't want to buy an MP3 file, or a five installs of a program, or whatever. I want to buy the right to that song, to that movie, that game, to download or watch or listen to on whatever computer I currently own, or may own, forever and ever, amen.

I'm confused as to why iTunes is still asking me to backup my purchases. They ARE backed up, Apple - on your servers! You know which ones I've bought and paid for. I should be able to re-download them at any point and for no extra cost. The same goes for games on Steam such as Portal, and in fact anything that has been digitally streamed directly to my computer. Which, in the future, will be everything.

I believe that this will be law someday, when copyright law catches up a little bit with the information age. As physical media goes the way of the dodo, exactly what we are buying with our money will have to be more specifically and concretely defined.

I don't think 'everything free' is a viable model, really. Sorry, libertarian anarcho-capitalists. I accept that there will probably always be the tug of war between publisher and consumer about 'making copies' and 'sharing'.

But the question about whether or not I can use software that I legitimately paid for and downloaded on a computer or device that I own should not even enter into the discussion.

Those of you who a) are following the unfolding financial crisis closely and b) are big fans of the internet phenomenon known as LOLcats need to make haste to the following URL. Ladies and germs, I give you -

LOLFed.

( epic luls ftw )

The great thing about LOLFed is that in addition to stock photos with double-post-ironic captions they also bring actual snarky commentary to the bizarre financial news making the rounds the last couple of weeks. Looks like an excellent way to keep tabs on some of the more ridiculous maneuvers that the Fed and the big investment firms are pulling. And teh funneh fotos just serve to emphasize the point.

I tell you what, if I ever headed back to school I would definitely pick up an Economics major. Followed by a History major, a Poli-Sci major and possibly a Journalism major. But definitely Econ first.

There's all this crazy news in the financial markets recently, but I just don't feel that I (or most people) have the necessary information to really understand what's going on. A free market is a wonderously strange and complex beast at the best of times. And this is not the best of times.

Blogs like Marginal Revolution help somewhat. The posts and the surprisingly insightful commenters there shed some light on aspects my non-economist brain was oblivious too. But a lot of it is still over my head or too complex for me to have a clear idea of what they're talking about.

Still, I can tell you one thing: economics folks are deeply ambivalent about the recent bailouts of major financial institutions. If you think about it, a government bail-out essentially nationalizes the company in question. Right now economists are hoping that by bailing these companies out we've chosen the lesser of two evils, but it's by no means a sure thing.

As one commenter put it:

What am I doing in this basket? Why do I smell sulfur?

UPDATE: Freakonomics has posted a handy FAQ: everything you never wanted to know about the bail-outs.

Synergy! robkeeney posted some interesting thoughts on auto insurance inflating the price of simple car components just as I was thinking about the same thing from the medical side. I've been doing a lot of research into health insurance lately, and the more you know the more you realize how broken the system is.

I would like to have health insurance to keep from paying $180 a month out of pocket for a very common medication I am on. Legally, I can keep my current insurance coverage under COBRA. But the cost to me would be over $400 a month! Given that I'm a relatively healthy male in my twenties, that number is jaw-dropping.

Not only that, but there's no way my medication is really costing a pharmaceutical company $6 a pill to manufacture. I don't know drugs but I do know silicon. The industry that puts "Intel Inside" your computer manufactures mind-bogglingly complex processors with incredible cost-efficiency. An Intel 'Core 2' chip puts close to a billion transistors on silicon wafer that is roughly the size of your thumbnail. You can get one for less than $200.

800 million transistors or 30 purple pills*? Something doesn't add up.

Of course the purple pills are that expensive because they're not SUPPOSED to be purchased out-of-pocket, much like Big Macs are expensive because they're not supposed to be purchased stand-alone. McD's wants you to buy a Happy Meal, not just a sandwich, so they price to encourage this. Similarly, you're supposed to buy insurance and the insurance pays for your pills. And then it's reasonable - ten bucks, twenty bucks.

The pills are reasonable, at any rate. The cost of coverage is something else again.

The fact that continuing coverage would cost me over $400 a month tells me that my insurance company doesn't actually want to cover me. They're trying to price me out. The chance that $400/mo would turn out to be a SAVINGS for me is vanishingly small. Yeah, if I wind up needing a new kidney in the next year, I win. Otherwise, I'm the sucker.

I'm curious to know how the insurance industry got to the point where the one thing they really don't want to do is insure people. I know I'm not currently knowledgeable enough to answer it. But the reason my purple pills are so expensive seems like basic economics.

Requiring people to have insurance drives up the price of insurance. Requiring insurance to buy medication drives up the price of medication. Which will in turn drive up the price of insurance which will in turn... you get the idea. Vicious cycle, etc., etc.

Now I am personally opposed to socialized medicine. If you think about it, the same problems apply. Requiring that the government pay for medications will drive up the cost of those medications. Which will drive up the cost of socialized medicine. Which comes out of the taxpayer's pockets. I'm very fond of not giving the government half of every dime I make, which is what the Dutch do, for example.

It's hard to see a solution that doesn't involve some serious government intervention, however. How do you restructure an entire industry, but leave it private? I don't have an answer.

* I don't want to push this analogy too far. Obviously, people don't need CPUs to live. Yet.

I want to know the answer to this question too.

Man, a world where this kind of thing happened would have much more entertaining business headlines, don't you think? And nobody would sleep through corporate board meetings.

Instead of all this silly squabbling about corporate takeovers, Carl Icahn would just pay off CEO Jerry Yang's bodyguards to have an 'accident' happen to him on a fishing trip. Meanwhile, Steve Ballmer would walk into the next Yahoo board meeting and cheerfully gun down all the directors. Good times!

Seriously, though, why doesn't this happen? It's a more difficult question than you might think, especially when you realize that your primary response is, "That's silly! Because CEOs just... don't."

There's a theory that Democracies are less likely to fight wars of aggression because those with Napoleonic tendencies find outlets for them in the boardroom instead of on the battlefield. What do you think? True? Or are there other factors that keep the modern business world civilized?