I remember reading Galbraith's Affluent Society back in college, and that was when he still had some relevance. Professor Brad DeLong reviews a new biography and offers up his reflection on why Galbraith, who he feels should "rank as the twentieth century's most influential American economist" has withered to where his "influence on economics is small, and his influence on U.S. politics is receding by the year."

Let's just say that the faster this happens the better. I can think of several economists, Hayek, Friedman, and Samuelson who have far more impact and influence than Galbraith. But the reason why Galbraith has so little influence is in professor DeLong's own words:

What has survived throughout is the American myth of rugged individualism, and it is this that Parker's political story neglects. The power of this myth has meant that the United States is not, and never will be, a European-style social democracy. People may come together for barn raisings, but America is still the land of upward mobility and opportunity, where the most common questions are, I've done it, so why haven't you? and Doesn't this social solidarity stuff mean that I've got to pull more than my share of the weight? In spirit, it is still a nation of upwardly mobile immigrants blessed with an abundance of resources (free land) and an absence of government constraints (free labor).

Where does Galbraith still hold sway? In the upper echelons of the left, those elitists who seethe with contempt at the middle and entrepeneurial classes. Would not the multi-millionaire funders of MoveOn.org be typical of this crowd? I found Galbraith to be condescending at best, the type who would see himself (as he did during the war) as the one who should control the economy. His distrust of and contempt for the ability of people to govern their own lives was obvious.

We see the results of his ideas in Europe. Centralized planning, massive welfare benefits, socialized medicine, generous retirement, paid vacations and family leave and a host of government mandated programs to produce the perfect soceity have left Europe in decline. It would have happened much sooner had not the US subsidized this largesse for fifty years with massive military spending that allowed Europe to continue the charade.

Maybe that is why the new growth markets in Asia and Eastern Europe have turned to the free market and not the government. Perhaps that is why we got "the end of welfare as we know it" in the 1990's while this decade marks the end of the third rail of politics. Social security reform is still a few years away, but it is no longer poltiical suicide.

This is why we get soliloquies such as:

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it has become clear who John Kenneth Galbraith really is: Sisyphus, constantly pushing the boulder of social-democratic enlightenment up the hill. But the hill, it turns out, is too steep, and Galbraith not mighty enough.

Which in reality is just a fancy way of saying we're too stupid to know better. Galbriath and his ilk never fully grapsed what made this country so great that it was the person who came to America, who would leave everything behind and cross an ocean in the hope of success. He simply had a fundamentally flawed understanding of America. He saw poverty and thought it due to systemic, not individual failure. He saw success and believed it due to privilege, not discipline. And for this we should pay homage?

Galbraith believed he could remake the modern society through enlightened thought and social engineering. Make any excuse you want, but the fact remains the reason why Galbraith has little influence anymore is simply that he was wrong. And for that, he can at least write op-eds for the New York Times.

Sometimes it is so frustrating. The governator makes what is an honest and realistic statement and immediately has to backtrack. Former Colorado governor Richard Lamm, a college professor, democrat and former civil rights attorney, discovers the thought police. But he makes great sense:

Let me offer you, metaphorically, two magic wands that have sweeping powers to change society. With one wand you could wipe out all racism and discrimination from the hearts and minds of white America. The other wand you could wave across the ghettoes and barrios of America and infuse the inhabitants with Japanese or Jewish values, respect for learning, and ambition. But, alas, you can t wave both wands. Only one.

Which would you choose? I understand that many would love to wave both wands; no one can easily refuse the chance to erase racism and discrimination. But I suggest that the best wand for the society and for those who live in the ghettoes and barrios would be the second wand.
...
Most discussion of minority failure blames racism and discrimination. I m an old civil rights lawyer and such racism and discrimination clearly still exists. But the problem is, I fear, deeper than the current dialogue. We need to think honestly about these problems with new sophistication. One of these new areas is to recognize that increasingly scholars are saying culture matters.

I m impressed, for instance, that minorities that have been discriminated against earn the highest family incomes in America. Japanese Americans, Jews, Chinese Americans, and Korean Americans all out-earn white Americans by substantial margins and all have faced discrimination and racism. We put Japanese Americans in camps 60 years ago and confiscated much of their property. Yet today they out-earn all other demographic groups. Discrimination and racism are social cancers and can never be justified but it is enlightening that, for these groups, they were a hurdle, not a barrier to success.
...
I suggest that those groups whose culture and values stress delayed gratification, education, hard work, success and ambition are those groups that succeed in America regardless of discrimination. I further suggest that, even if discrimination was removed, other groups would still have massive problems until they develop the traits that lead to success. Asian and Jewish children do twice as much homework as Black and Hispanic students, and get twice as good grades. Why should we be surprised?

Last week William Raspberry, African Amerrican and liberal columnist for the WaPo offers that the best solution is to Show Blacks how to fill their Glasses.

"The gains of the last 40 years," he said, "have created a new, larger, stronger black middle class. But many have been left behind. Still, one out of every four black Americans lives in poverty, and almost half of those who live in poverty live in extreme poverty. So you've got, if you will, a paradox."

You've got, if you will, something a good deal more interesting than a paradox. If racism (and racial neglect) is the major source of the gaps the Urban League would so like to narrow, then how can it be that three-fourths of black Americans have escaped poverty and that there is a "larger, stronger black middle class"?

Instead of spending the bulk of our attention on what white people have done (or failed to do), wouldn't it be interesting to examine what the members of that growing black middle class have done and are doing?

Coming on the heels of Bill Cosby's speech at the NAACP, we're seeing progress and it looks like there is hope. We won't see dramatic change overnight, nor should we hope to. It will take time. But it is becoming clearer to many that the race industry is just that, a group of hucksters and charlatans who seek personal fame and fortune at the cost of prolonging the misery of their "constituency".

Racism and bigotry will never end, but it does not hold people back any more. What holds people back is the actions they take and the decisions they make. It is too easy to simply victimize and demonize. Thinking that blaming others was ever going to solve any problems was a fool's errand. It is becoming possible to address income and other inequalities from a rational viewpoint without resorting to the worn out bromides.

Rome hasn't been conquered, but the Rubicon has been crossed.

Professos Bainbridge skewers Sullivan over his anti-papal tirades. I have written about this several times.

Back when John Paul passed away, I wrote of his critics:

His critics, who are really critics of all people of faith, will find plenty to criticize. They will disparage church practice and practices from those that exposed millions to AIDS to gender inequality in church and society. They will however, over time appear to be shrill and spiteful nihilists. More and more people will over time see that the pope's words against relativism and narcicism were prescient indeed.

"Shrill and spiteful nihilists". Mr. Sullivan certainly lives up to that doesn't he? On JPII's legacy, I wrote that

Andrew Sullivan has a personal grievance with the pope and the Catholic church. It is his right, as is theirs, to disagree. Church practice is theirs to set, his to dispute or follow. It is analogous to the 23 year old college graduate who returns home to live and feels that his parents' rules are unreasonable now that he's an adult. However, it's their house and their rules. Demanding the church change is no better than demanding that the parents change. In either case, the door is always there.

That certainly sounds like what his complaints over Cardinal Ratzinger are. Even back in October, I observed this:

Poor poor Andrew Sullivan. So obsessed with his own personal issue, he has lost perspective. His anger at the president over a constitutional amendment has clouded his judgment.

Andrew Sullivan has been obsessed with his single solitary issue for quite some time, and it really has affected his writing and his obseravtions. He wrote a while ago regarding a study that showed marriage is beneficial to mean's health, which he tries to stretch to include gay men should they have the chance at marriage. I wrote that that's
not exactly the case. In addition to the substantial health risks, both physical and mental, that are assocaited with gay men, for Sullivan, and many others promting same-sex marriage:

the arguments without exception are still selfish. It's all death benefits, property transferral, hospital visitation rights, etc. It's all me me me. I want this, I want that. Marriage isn't about me, it's about we, and now, it's completely about they, the children.

Perhaps Prof. Bainbridge sums it up best:

It's always about sex with Andrew, isn't it?

And that sums it up absolutely perfectly.

Looks like Andrew Sullivan is back on the bandwagon with It’s not the end in Iraq but it is the end of the beginning.

Saddam is gone and finished. So is Saddamism. We forget now the appalling squalor and brutality he inflicted on his country.

Hey, tell that to the anti-war protestors. You were always consistent regarding Saddam, but as your faith wavered, perhps it was because you forgot.

his former apparatchiks continue to intimidate and murder. But they appear to be weakening under steady assault from coalition forces and better intelligence from local Iraqis now convinced they have a democratic future. Attacks on allied forces are at new lows; and the hideous and often incompetent murders of Iraqi civilians — close to 30 dead in a couple of days last week — are becoming more insights into the nihilism of the insurgency than their brandishing of potential victory.

Why? Because the elections worked.

And your boy, the senator from Massachusettes would have pushed for elections?

In insurgencies narrative is key. Captain Aaron Kalloch put it beautifully to Mark Danner, a liberal reporter, in The New York Review of Books. “The simple fact is that how things are perceived here is almost as important as how things actually are,” Kalloch told Danner. “And here IO is everything. Insurgency is relatively easy for the enemy because he’s got his own personal international IO platform . . . the US media.”

I called this several months ago. Based in the results of the Iraqi war, each future operation will have two enemies: one military, one political. And if we don't account for the latter, then we'll surely lose the former.

Above all we have not seen civil war, despite many, many attempts to ignite one.

I called this one too. Should they provoke a civil war, a remote possibility, the odds are decidely against them. They know they can't win. The Kurds are armed, the peshmerga a fierce fighting force. The Shia will certainly field a force more than willing to exact revenge. That Sunni would start a war they cannot hope to win, and worse, one they know will crush them, is highly unlikely. The few jihadis who harbor their own jihadist gotterdammerung are going to find few happy warriors among the mostly educated populous. They know that all options go from bad to worse. And go that way in a hurry. Civil wars happen when there is hope for success AND substantial support among to local population. In Iraq, there were neither.

But in one fundamental sense President George W Bush didn’t screw up. His simple conviction was that there would be no real solution to the threat of Islamist terror unless we grasped the nettle of Arab autocracy, unless we created a space for freedom in that part of the world.

Uh-huh. And wouldn't that be the most important area, that of overall strategy? As opposed to "wrong war, wrong time" Kerry, "war cooked up in Crawford" Kennedy, and all the other nonsense that spewed from the democrats.

A fairy tale of easy liberation became a short story of war and then a rambling novel of endless conflict but diminishing violence. I’ve stopped hoping for a happy ending but I see no reason to expect a tragic one either. Just a long, hard, qualified and still not inevitable success.

You never read a history book? War, and its aftermath, are not some tidy little operation that can be put on a schedule. We were never told that it would go quickly, that democracy would bloom in the fertile crescent immediately. The president said clearly, and often, that the struggle we are engaged in will be along and difficult one. It will take many fronts and involve many battles and many years.

He has been resolute in his leadership in the face of mounting opposition and difficulties, and you begrudgingly give him credit for that. Well, better late than never.

You really have to wonder who writes Krugman's articles. His latest article, The Medical Money Pit, appears to have been writeen by an undergrad looking to score some bonus points by pleasing his professor.

The countries that have something to teach us are the nations that don't pinch pennies to the same extent - like France, Germany or Canada - but still spend far less than we do. (Yes, Canada also has waiting lists, but they're much shorter than Britain's - and Canadians overwhelmingly prefer their system to ours. France and Germany don't have a waiting list problem.)

Let me rattle off some numbers.

In 2002, the latest year for which comparable data are available, the United States spent $5,267 on health care for each man, woman and child in the population. Of this, $2,364, or 45 percent, was government spending, mainly on Medicare and Medicaid. Canada spent $2,931 per person, of which $2,048 came from the government. France spent $2,736 per person, of which $2,080 was government spending.

Amazing, isn't it? U.S. health care is so expensive that our government spends more on health care than the governments of other advanced countries, even though the private sector pays a far higher share of the bills than anywhere else.

What do we get for all that money? Not much.

Most Americans probably don't know that we have substantially lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality figures than other advanced countries. It would be wrong to jump to the conclusion that this poor performance is entirely the result of a defective health care system; social factors, notably America's high poverty rate, surely play a role. Still, it seems puzzling that we spend so much, with so little return.

A 2003 study published in Health Affairs (one of whose authors is my Princeton colleague Uwe Reinhardt) tried to resolve that puzzle by comparing a number of measures of health services across the advanced world. What the authors found was that the United States scores high on high-tech services - we have lots of M.R.I.'s - but on more prosaic measures, like the number of doctors' visits and number of days spent in hospitals, America is only average, or even below average. There's also direct evidence that identical procedures cost far more in the U.S. than in other advanced countries.

The authors concluded that Americans spend far more on health care than their counterparts abroad - but they don't actually receive more care. The title of their article? "It's the Prices, Stupid."

Why is the price of U.S. health care so high? One answer is doctors' salaries: although average wages in France and the United States are similar, American doctors are paid much more than their French counterparts. Another answer is that America's health care system drives a poor bargain with the pharmaceutical industry.

Above all, a large part of America's health care spending goes into paperwork. A 2003 study in The New England Journal of Medicine estimated that administrative costs took 31 cents out of every dollar the United States spent on health care, compared with only 17 cents in Canada.

Just as in prior article, the good news was that we'd have to raise taxes. This time, the problem is that doctors make too much money. How much does Krugman earn? I'll bet it's too much? I mean, all he does is write a couple of columns per week, make a few stats, hurl a few accusations, and rely on every rhetorical trick to persuade the reader that he's not full of crap. Oh yeah, I forgot, he also advises (advised?) Enron.

That the professor could rant about high health care costs and not address liability lawuits shows he's either clueless or disingenuous. You take your pick. Didn't Doctors protest malpractice insurance in West Virginia and in Las Vegas OBGYN's ar turning away new patients. I think this goes under the category of "they're to stupid to know" that liberals use to decieve the public.

Again, he gets paid for this?

You have to wonder really who's writing Paul Krugman's columns. And you have to wonder how somebody actually gets paid for it?

Ailing Health Care

Rising health care spending isn't primarily the result of medical price inflation. It's primarily a response to innovation: the range of things that medicine can do keeps increasing. For example, Medicare recently started paying for implanted cardiac devices in many patients with heart trouble, now that research has shown them to be highly effective. This is good news, not bad.

So what's the problem? Why not welcome medical progress, and consider its costs money well spent? There are three answers.

First, America's traditional private health insurance system, in which workers get coverage through their employers, is unraveling. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that in 2004 there were at least five million fewer jobs providing health insurance than in 2001. And health care costs have become a major burden on those businesses that continue to provide insurance coverage: General Motors now spends about $1,500 on health care for every car it produces.

Second, rising Medicare spending may be a sign of progress, but it still must be paid for - and right now few politicians are willing to talk about the tax increases that will be needed if the program is to make medical advances available to all older Americans.

Finally, the U.S. health care system is wildly inefficient. Americans tend to believe that we have the best health care system in the world. (I've encountered members of the journalistic elite who flatly refuse to believe that France ranks much better on most measures of health care quality than the United States.) But it isn't true. We spend far more per person on health care than any other country - 75 percent more than Canada or France - yet rank near the bottom among industrial countries in indicators from life expectancy to infant mortality.

This last point is, in a way, good news. In the long run, medical progress may force us to make a harsh choice: if we don't want to become a society in which the rich get life-saving medical treatment and the rest of us don't, we'll have to pay much higher taxes. The vast waste in our current system means, however, that effective reform could both improve quality and cut costs, postponing the day of reckoning.

To get effective reform, however, we'll need to shed some preconceptions - in particular, the ideologically driven belief that government is always the problem and market competition is always the solution.

The fact is that in health care, the private sector is often bloated and bureaucratic, while some government agencies - notably the Veterans Administration system - are lean and efficient. In health care, competition and personal choice can and do lead to higher costs and lower quality. The United States has the most privatized, competitive health system in the advanced world; it also has by far the highest costs, and close to the worst results.

So, the good news is that the increase in health care costs is due to innovation. And how does the professor think all that innovation happens?

The health care system is inefficent? Maybe if we didn't have to account for all the lawsuits and paperwork...

The good news out of all this? "We'll have to pay much higher taxes." They used to be good at hiding their real agenda. Not any longer.

The claim that the private health care system is bloated and the government system lean is prepostersous. Medicare and Medical are ripe with fraud. Public hospitals all over are going bankrupt, forcing local governments to either cut funding or close facilities.

We might have the most privatetized and competitive health care system in the world, but it's far from a competitive market. In addition, health care providers are required by law to cover an increasing array of services directly the result of our innovation. This innovation comes at a tremendous cost. We expect machines and medicines to save us from everything. If this R&D isn't recoverable, than it will cease. The other nations that pay far less don't have this expediture.

And he gets paid for this?