All health care systems involve tradeoffs of some sort, and a recent video series from Canada’s health system highlights the tradeoffs a more nationalized system has to make. Canada has what’s called a National Health Insurance system, one of four main models that characterize health care globally. This type of model is know for creating […]

Students of the Philadelphia public school system returned to the classroom this week, even with lingering disagreements between the teachers union and the Pennsylvania Department of Education. After a summer of consolidation and layoffs, things are still in a state of flux.The state of Pennsylvania has overseen the Philadelphia school district since 2001.  Enrollment has dropped 23% […]

Quantifying happiness is a tricky business, but that doesn’t stop people from trying. The Wall Street Journal reports on a new poll that asked people across demographic groups to rate how happy they are, on a scale of one to ten. According to the poll’s results, the three happiest groups are the wealthy, Hispanics, and retirees: […]

The chief scientific advisor to Britain’s Department of Energy and Climate Change released a report Monday that shows fracking will not increase the country’s emissions. The report was released to help Cameron’s administration make the case for taking advantage of the UK’s 1,300+ trillion cubic feet of shale gas. Vehement green protests are stalling exploratory well […]

Americans awoke to the possibility this morning that the US has found a ‘solution’ to the Syria situation. The Times is reporting that the US and Russia have reached an agreement to remove or destroy Syria’s chemical weapons by mid-2014 (the official state department framework document on this agreement is here).If this deal goes through, […]

One of the thorniest problems in health care is that new medical technologies often raise costs. Other industries have been able to dramatically lower costs by adopting new technologies, but health care gets more expensive every year as hospitals adopt new treatments and surgical tools.Economist Jonathan Skinner thinks this “costly paradox of health-care technology” traces […]

America’s neglect of its young men, specifically its failure to address the gender gap in education, may be hurting its international competitiveness. That’s the implication of Christina Hoff Summers’ excellent new piece in the Atlantic.We’ve known for some time that more girls are going to college than boys, but the disparity actually begins much earlier in life. Primary […]

It’s official: the Bharatiya Janata Party has selected Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as its candidate for prime minister for the 2014 parliamentary elections in India. While his candidacy is not unexpected—he has been the rising star of the BJP—it has exposed divisions not just in Indian society, but within the BJP itself.Senior party members, […]

Being an economist is dangerous work in Argentina; too much honesty and integrity can lead to a midnight phone call from the government threatening incarceration. Orlando Ferreres, a respected economist in Buenos Aires, was the latest economist to dare tell the people that the country’s inflation index is a fat pack of lies. Naturally, reports […]

Rosanna Fay is a career-minded woman who chose not to have children, anticipating many years of freedom and professional success—and then her parents began to age. She found that caring for them limited her career just as much as children might have. In an enlightening and sad piece in The Atlantic, Fay hits on the some of […]