57th Annual Management Conference 2009 on “The Future of Markets”, held at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, May 29, 2009. Of particular interest is the 2 hour, 7 minute long keynote panel webcast featuring the following six University of Chicago faculty panelists:
Gary Becker, University Professor of Economics and of Sociology and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economics
Kevin Murphy, George J. Stigler Distinguished Service Professor of Economics
Raghuram Rajan, Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance
Steven Kaplan, Neubauer Family Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance
Marianne Bertrand, Fred G. Steingraber/A. T. Kearney Professor of Economics
Anil Kashyap, Edward Eagle Brown Professor of Economics and Finance
A Strategy to Save Obamacare, But at What Cost, by Charles Krauthammer Washington Post: “Obamacare Version 1.0 is dead. The 1,000-page monstrosity that emerged in various editions from Congress was done in by widespread national revulsion not just at its expense and intrusiveness but also at the mendacity with which it is being sold. You don’t need a PhD to see that the promise to expand coverage and reduce costs is a crude deception, or that cutting $500 billion from Medicare without affecting care is a fiction.”
Some Roman Catholic Bishops Assail Health Plan, by David Kirkpatrick New York Times: “Despite the church’s push on the issue, some are raising concerns over abortion and alarms about ‘rationing.’”
Fixing Health Care Is Good for Business, by Gary Locke Wall Street Journal: “How many aspiring entrepreneurs are stuck in dead-end jobs because of health concerns?”President Obama’s Secretary of Commerce asks a very pertinent question here. However, as I have previously noted, the question of whether the health care system should be reformed is not particularly controversial; what is controversial is the manner in which health care reform ought to be structured and implemented.
Miscellaneous
How Facebook Ruins Friendships, by Elizabeth Bernstein
This essay from today’s Wall StreetJournal ought to be required reading for all Facebook users!
Religion
The Benefits of Religion Freakonomics: “A new study by Angus Deaton uses an expansive dataset to analyze the determinants and benefits of religiosity around the world.”