Superfreakonomics

Superfreakonomics is Stephen Leavitt and Stephen Dubner's 2009 sequel to the wildly interesting 2006 Freakonomics. They discuss the economics of prostitution, how tracking bank fraud can also help you track down terrorists, and how the number of automobile deaths went up up in the months after September 11th, not because people were afraid to fly, but (as you find if you look at the numbers more closely and notice that they were clumped in the northeast and showed a larger-than-usual number of alcohol-related accidents) because of post-traumatic stress.  Currently, they’ve followed up with Think Like a Freak, about the metaproblems of thinking outside the economics box, which is in the to-be-read pile.

The Dying Light

Based on a favorable review in The Economist I dug up The Dying Light, a 2009 thriller by British writer Henry Porter. Consider what happens when the British government starts gathering an unbounded set of information on everyone in the country on the grounds of protecting us all from terrorists. But that the data collection grows to the point where it's used to persecute everyone who shows any sign of protesting or being against the party in power. And that the head of the security services is forced out because he objects to the massive violation of civil liberties. Faked deaths, rigged coroner's inquests, loose organizations of protesters, small towns in England and Wales, people who care about rights and privacy. A call-to-action on our side of the Atlantic as well as to the British. Nicely done, and worth the read.

The Healing of America

Given the current policy debates, TR Reid's 2010 book The Healing of America (subtitled "a global quest for better, cheaper, and fairer health care") is worth revisiting.  It's a book comparing how medical care is delivered and paid for in several countries across the world. He argues that deciding to provide health care as universal coverage is fundamentally a moral decision, and then proceeds to show how delivering coverage works in places like Japan and France and Germany and England and Canada. Note that two of those countries --- France and Germany --- achieve universal coverage completely with private insurance plans. All of them tightly control costs by dictating what is covered by a standard medical insurance plan and the prices charged for services. France goes further and gives everyone an encrypted smart card with all their medical information so that your doctor can look at all your records immediately. Such a card also cuts the time for a bill to be paid down to less than a week. The next effect is that France, which is seen as profligate by its EU neighbors in its expenditure on health care spends half what the US does on healthcare (as a fraction of GDP) and a tenth what the US spends on administrative overhead.

     Net take-away for me: Anyone who calls European healthcare "socialist medicine" is lying. Anyone who says that cost control won't work is a shill for the insurance industry.