According to Mayor Giuliani, “we gotta solve our healthcare problems with American principles, not with principles of socialism.” (Basing policy on empirical data doesn’t seem to be an option.) In his speech, he then gives this rather bizarre evidence for the superiority of the American system: Europeans have asked him to get them into American hospitals, but no one has asked him to get them into a European hospital. His favorite example for the superiority of outcomes in the U.S. is a prostate-cancer comparison with the U.K., but he is simply wrong about the numbers. Nevertheless, it turns out that Americans are going abroad for healthcare. The term for this phenomenon is “medical tourism,” which connotes the rich and famous convalescing on the Riviera. But, it is actually a result of desperation for those who can’t afford treatment in the United States. And, although Mayor Giuliani likes to knock Sicko by including Cuba in his lists, many of these American "tourists" are going to third-world countries.

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If you ever wondered just how profitable credit card lending can be, take a look at what a savvy business will pay for the chance to lend money to people already in financial trouble.

According to Nilson Reports, HSBC just sold its subprime credit card operations (338,000 accounts) in the UK to SAV Credit for $796,000,000. SAV paid an average of $2,355 per account.

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The good news from Capitol Hill is that the Ackerman-Boustany letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has 135 signers so far. This is a big deal. The letter supports the upcoming Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, urging more vigorous U.S. diplomacy to promote its success and calling for more U.S. aid to the Palestinians.

In the past, far too many letters and resolutions circulated on Capitol Hill originated with conservative pro-Israel lobbying organizations and were essentially exercises in Palestinian-bashing.

Significantly, Ackerman-Boustany is supported by a very different array of organizations: Israel Policy Forum, the American Task Force on Palestine, Americans for Peace Now, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, the Arab American Institute, the Union of Reform Judaism (which represents 1.5 million Reform Jews, the largest Jewish denomination), the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation and Churches for Middle East Peace (representing 21 Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox denominations and tens of millions of congregants).

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Earlier this week, the North Carolina Commissioner of Banks released a report about the reaction of low and middle-income families to last year's shutdown of payday lenders.  The result?  Well, let's just say payday lenders shouldn't expect any Christmas cards from their former customers.

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We began the week with a discussion of the Colorado experiment; my suggestion was that versions of that experiment are being conducted, every day, on the Internet. I want to end with a discussion of a more indirectly relevant experiment, involving jury behavior. That experiment, conducted by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, David Schkade and me, can be found here and in shorter form in Cass R. Sunstein et al., Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide (University of Chicago Press, 2003). The suggestion is that the experiment has implications for certain uses of the Internet, above all because it helps explain the dynamics of outrage.

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With another Democratic candidate debate on tap in Nevada later today, you can bet Barack Obama is going to get questions about his proposal for modifying the cap on income subject to Social Security payroll taxes. But it's important to understand why this is such a big deal for a lot of progressive Democrats. His proposal isn't the controversial thing (though it certainly would be in a general election campaign, where it would be hammered by Republicans as a tax increase); it's his decision to raise the subject at all, and particularly his use of the word "crisis" to describe the status of the Social Security system.

The immediate reason for this reaction is obvious enough; by the well-earned end of Bush's 2005 drive to divert payroll tax funds to create private retirement accounts, Democratic critics of his plan were devoting just as much time denying there was a Social Security solvency problem as they were attacking the plan's baleful consequences. So ironically, a proposal by Obama that's "Left" in terms of its specifics (avoiding any benefit changes while making the payroll tax burden more progressive) is drawing fire from the Left itself as a heretical concession to the rationale for Bush's proposal, and to those much-derided "Centrist" media types who like to talk about entitlement reform. And for that reason, the reaction among left-bent Democrats to Obama's Social Security rap provides a microcosm of the exquisite ambivalence they are experiencing over the Obama candidacy in its entirety.

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Here’s a graph at which we should all take a close look. It’s just a few data points bouncing around a chart, but it explains a lot, I think, about why so many people are unsettled by developments in the current economy.

The data are the inflation-adjusted, average weekly earnings of a representative group of workers—those who are non-managers in the service sector and blue-collar workers in manufacturing. So we’re talking about the bottom 80% of workforce.

Adjusting for the growth of prices and looking back of the past few years, their weekly earnings rose significantly in just two months: September and October of last year. Before and since, earnings have been flat (these data leave out fringe benefits, which have also been falling for most workers).

So what was so special about those two months?

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Sometimes a small incident can teach volumes. Nigeria, a failing state with a rising number of Muslim extremists, recently completed the construction of a nuclear plant fueled by weapons-grade uranium (WGU). It has been able to do so without violating the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). And it is hardly alone.

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I received a video this morning from the Obama campaign. A former student interviewed me about my research on the link between bankruptcy and health care, and part of the interview appears in the clip. What struck me about the video is its vision. Obama lays out the case that we need universal health care because it is right. Hard-working Americans should not be struck down financially by a broken health care system. Drugs, health insurance coverage, and cancer treatments may save lives, but cost families their financial security.

Obama is not alone in advocating for universal health care coverage, but this video reminded me how far the debate has come. While Democrats debate who will provide the best plan, most Republicans look away. Obama makes it clear in this video that health care is one middle class promise that he will tie himself to: he is willing to be judged by the quality of what he can deliver. A tough, middle class economic issue has become one of the signature pieces that defines this presidential season.

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Thus far we've been exploring some risks associated with certain uses of the Internet. Let's turn to another, happier side. The central ideas come from Friedrich Hayek, the great twentieth century critic of socialism and defender of market arrangements. Hayek's ideas bear directly on open source software, wikis, prediction markets, and perhaps much more.

Hayek’s most important contribution to social thought is captured in his short 1945 paper, “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” Hayek claims that the real advantage of prices is that they aggregate both the information and the tastes of numerous people, incorporating far more material than could possibly be assembled by any central planner or board, however expert and well-motivated. Hayek emphasizes above all the unshared nature of information -- the “dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”

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Since the Musharraf regime's suspension of the constitution in Pakistan, there has been a lot of talk about the dangers of Islamabad's nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists should his regime be overthrown. These fears are greatly exaggerated, as Bill Arkin notes in an article entitled "Don't Let Nukes Become Musharraf's Excuse" that appears on his excellent "Early Warning" blog on the Washington Post web site.

He notes that "Pakistan doesn't have 'bombs' that could be just picked up and carted off by Al Qaeda. By all indications, Pakistan's nuclear materials are stored separately from its warheads, not assembled as ready-to-use weapons." Furthermore, the components are stored in two or more secret, heavily guarded locations.

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Remember that great NPR piece about the new data showing a 3 percentage point drop in homeownership rates for African Americans? No one else is likely to remember it either, because NPR didn’t run it. As the subprime crisis continues, with foreclosure rates approaching record level, there has still been little attention given to one of the factors that led to this crisis: the ideology of homeownership.

For years many conservatives, and even some liberals, touted the virtues of homeownership as an end in itself. They argued that this was the way for the poor, and especially minorities, to gain economic security and enter the middle class. This was really bad advice to give people in the middle of a housing bubble.

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Last night, PBS aired a superb Nova documentary about the Dover, Pennsylvania “intelligent design” case. My 11-year twins were as riveted as I was as the story unfolded from the suspicious burning of a student’s mural depicting man’s evolution from apes, to a school committee member’s questioning of how the high school’s science teachers approach evolution, to raucous board meetings, through the trial. Throughout, both Darwin’s theory and the arguments made on behalf of intelligent design were presented carefully, engagingly, and clearly enough so my kids (and even I) could fully understand them.

Ultimately, of course, Judge John Jones ruled that intelligent design is grounded in theology rather than science, and thereby would be unconstitutional to teach in public schools. He was subsequently subjected to death threats. After the town’s voters ousted the school committee members who had tried to introduce intelligent design, Pat Robertson issued a warning: "I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected him from your city."

In watching the documentary, I was struck by the parallels between the Dover story and movement conservatism generally. The selling of “intelligent design,” and the idea itself, has much in common with Social Security privatization, supply-side economics, the invasion of Iraq, school vouchers, and other half-baked causes that the right has relentlessly been pushing in recent decades.

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Over a decade ago, Nicholas Negroponte discussed the possible emergence of the Daily Me -- a fully personalized newspaper. Such a newspaper would allow you to include those topics and ideas that interest you, or that you like, and to screen out those topics and ideas that bore you, or that you dislike. Many people are now using the Internet to create something like a Daily Me. And many people are now celebrating the rise of countless niches, of long tails, and of collaborative filtering, all of which promote personalization.

What is wrong with countless editions of the Daily Me? One problem is an absence of shared experiences: diverse nations need some social glue, and shared experiences can provide that glue, because they give people a sense that they are involved in a common enterprise. National holidays are important partly for that reason. Shared communications experiences, as opposed to information cocoons, have a similar function. (Think of a presidential debate.)

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My kids are both hip hop aficionados and have been since they were small kids (they are both adults now) so maybe that explains how badly I feel about the death of Kanye West's mother. Kanye is one of the real good guys in the rap world, managing to become one of the top two or three rap artists in the world without indulging in paeans to violence, guns, and too much emphasis on bling.

To me, he always seems like a sweet kid playing the role of tough guy, and not that convincingly.

A subtext to the Kanye West story has always been his relationship with his mom, Dr. Donda West, who died at 58 the other day after minor surgery. She was a professor who gave up her career to manage her son's. At the time of her passing, she was involved in pretty much every aspect of his life and career. Of course, prior to Kanye's rise, she was a single mom balancing family and job and successful at both.

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 The New York Times has an interesting piece discussing improvements in employee health coverage by Wal-Mart -- the company notorious for its workers showing up on state Medicaid rolls.  It notes that 100,000 more employees are now covered than were three years ago and that less barriers exist to covering employees' spouses and children.  I found two themes in the article particularly interesting.  First is that Wal-Mart's action in this area is largely a response to the pressure put on the company and that unions, namely SEIU and UFCW, were amongst the first groups to really go after Wal-Mart in this regard (click on the "Timeline" pop-out in the article).  Second is the potentially dramatic effect that Wal-Mart, if it pursues driving down the price of health care with the same vigor that it pursues cutting other business expenses, could have in making health care more affordable.  For instance, the article notes that the company has already been able to leverage its power to offer over 2,400 generic drugs to its employees for $4/month, and plans to offer the same deal to customers in the near future.  It is exciting to think about what could happen if Wal-Mart seriously continues to pursue such an agenda.  As one health economist states, “If you really turned Wal-Mart loose and had Wal-Mart against the health care providers [...] it would be a fair fight.”

At last, a website for predatory lenders!  A place to get together to swap ideas about how to maximize profits, tips on racial profiling, and ways to get around the new laws insulating military families from payday lenders.  There is a handy fee calculator, so a novice predatory lender can make sure it is getting the most out of its predatory loans.  There's even a blacklist.

Most of all, this is a place to combat the public's misunderstanding that predatory lending is bad.

Check it out.  The site is wicked.

Thanks much to all for the excellent comments. For those who'd like to see the formal write-up of the Colorado experiment, see this link; the final version appeared in the California Law Review. The paper is by David Schkade, Reid Hastie, and me; the first two, unlike the third, are terrific social scientists who know how to conduct experiments of this kind.

One more set of data before a little analysis: Federal judges sit on three-member panels. Assignment is random. Panels consist of the following possible combinations: three Republican appointees; three Democratic appointees; two D appointees and one R appointee; and two R appointees and one D appointee. We now know that in ideologically contested areas (eg sex discrimination, disability discrimination, environmental protection, labor relations), R appointees show VERY conservative voting patterns on RRR panels -- and D appointees show VERY liberal voting patterns on DDD panels. There's far more moderation on mixed panels. (The details can be found in Cass R.Sunstein et al., Are Judges Political? (Brookings 2006). The statistical analysis was done by David Schkade, the second author,who is a specialist on that sort of thing.)

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With all the focus on the Dem takeover of the Virginia Senate last week, there's been far less attention to the danger that the GOP will pick up a chamber in post-Katrina Louisiana in next Saturday's runoffs. Now, even a lot of Lousiana Dems are pretty conservative, but there's at least one race that the netroots types should be watching, right in the heart of New Orleans itself.

Community activist Deborah Langhoff (D) faces off against one-session incumbent Nick Lorusso (R). Lorusso was elected in a March 2007 special election runoff, after winning only 89 more votes than Langhoff in the hastily-called special primary. I actually met Deborah when I spoke at a grassroots Louisiana conference last Spring and she was everything you'd want in a progressive candidate.

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For the past year, progressives have begun to talk about health care reform as if it is inevitable. After all, the polls show that the majority of taxpayers, employers and even most doctors want to see a major change. What’s stopping us?

I’m no longer as optimistic as I was six months ago. Recently, I spoke at a Massachusetts Medical Society Forum where what I heard about the Massachusetts plan made my heart sink. While everyone in Massachusetts wants health care reform, no one wants to pay for it. Those who are receiving state subsidies to buy insurance are enthusiastic. But uninsured citizens earning more than 300% of the poverty level are expected to purchase their own insurance. The state hoped that 228,000 of its uninsured citizens would sign up; as of last month, just 15,000 had enrolled. Many have decided that they would rather pay the penalty than buy health insurance.

At the forum, Robert Blendon, professor of health policy and political analysis at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, talked about what Massachusetts’ experience might mean for the national health care debate: “Massachusetts is the canary in the coal mine,” Blendon, who is also a professor at Harvard’s School of Public Health, declared bluntly. “If it’s not breathing in 2009, people won’t go in that mine.” If the Massachusetts plan unravels, he suggested, Washington’s politicians will say “If they can’t do it in a liberal state like Massachusetts, how can we do it here?"

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Iowa is going to be all it’s supposed to be in American election mythology: the place where some campaigns run out of gas, some crack up on the road to the nomination and two emerge as the leaders going into New Hampshire. That’s what my wife and I saw this Saturday in Des Moines.

We saw Obama at the Farmers’ Union early in the day and from 7 to nearly midnight the whole line-up, plus the local stars, at the Jefferson-Jackson dinner. Our son works as a field organizer for Obama in Kossuth County, several hours’ drive north toward Minnesota, so we also fortified ourselves for the evening talkathon at the wine & cheese party for Democrats of that region held in the party room of a condominium tower.

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What are the effects of the Internet on democracy? The answer depends, of course, on how people use the Internet. But let's begin with a possible clue, coming from a small experiment in democracy, held in Colorado in 2005.

About sixty American citizens were brought together and assembled into ten
groups, each consisting of five or six people. Members of each group were
asked to deliberate on three of the most controversial issues of the day: Should
the United States sign an international treaty to combat global warming? Should
states allow same-sex couples to enter into civil unions? Should employers
engage in affirmative action by giving a preference to members of traditionally
disadvantaged groups?

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Welcome to Table for One, the guest-blogging section at TPMCafe.

This week we are joined by Professor Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago and the recent author of Republic.com 2.0, an update of his earlier book Republic.com. Together the two books examine how widespread use of the Internet as a news-gathering and communication tool has contributed to polarization and radicalism in American politics.

See earlier Table for One guest-blogs:
Jacob Soboroff, Sam Quinones, Jeffrey Toobin, Ben Naimark-Rowse, Charlie Savage, Congressman Steve Kagen, Congressman Earl Blumenauer, Scott Winship, Robert Hormats, Bill McKibben, Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Sen. John Edwards, the ACLU's Anthony Romero, Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Andrew Rasiej, Gov. Tom Vilsack,Gen. Wesley Clark, Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), and Sen. Russ Feingold.

They won the game a couple of times, but bad coaching once again left them undone and made the hapless Eagles victorious. The defensive, offensive and head coaches -- all three -- repeatedly demonstrated foolish play calling, bad clock management, inability to get even the right number of players on the field, failure to manage time outs correctly, such disorganization that 11 penalties were called, and a total lack of trust in the demonstrated capability of QB Campbell's arm.

Worst of all was Coach Gibbs' repeat performance of his brainlock against the Giants: here, as then, he ran the ball over and over from inside the five, and so telegraphed his intention that a brick wall of defense was constructed and proved impregnable. This with an offensive line depleted by injury. As a result, he lost the game for his myrmidons. Soon they will want to quit on him, since his creativity has quit on them.

Consistent with the Washington sports media's parallel with the Village coverage of political matters, the coaching will go largely uncriticized, the few reporters who do criticize will be ostracized, and Coach Gibbs' insistence on operating according to the mores of the 80's (while the rest of league plays with spread formations) and under-utilizing the players' best skills will simply continue.

The coach was great in the 80's. It's a different game now. This sport, like world affairs, has moved on, but the Washington establishment in each case lives in the past.

If only the coaches, like Congress, had to be elected every two years.

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