Last week, it was West Side Story. This week, the incomparable Tiri Te Kanawa sings O mio babbino caro.
Over the past couple of years, Bill King has done a great job (and see generally here) of explaining how Houstonís unfunded public pension obligation represents a horrific burden on the city governmentís financial condition.
Given that such obligations are clearly unsustainable, why does the city government continue to provide them?
Edward L. Glaeser provides the following particularly lucid explanation of the dynamic that leads to such profligacy:
On Friday, The New York Times ran a front-page article about pensions that took note of a 44-year-old retired police officer who receives an annual pension of $101,333 despite never having earned more than $74,000 a year in base pay. The article reported that in Yonkers alone ìmore than 100 retired police officers and firefighters are collecting pensions greater than their pay when they were workingî and that ìabout 3,700 retired public workers in New York are now getting pensions of more than $100,000 a year, exempt from state and local taxes.î
The emotional response of many people is to vilify the retirees, but thatís a mistake. The individual police officers and firefighters were following the rules. They have jobs that require them to risk their lives in service of their communities, and large pensions are one payoff for accepting those risks and accepting relatively lower wages up front. Iím sure many of them are no less impatient than the rest of us and would have preferred to get more money in their 20s and less in their 50s.
The fault lies in the political process that makes their negotiating partners ó state and local governments ó more impatient than their employees. State and local governments donít want to face the short-term consequences of paying higher wages, so they structure compensation in ways that defer the costs of each new deal for years.
Politics doesnít just favor delayed compensation; it also favors forms of compensation that are particularly hard for people to evaluate. Governments almost always love obfuscation. The appeal of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was that they could subsidize homeownership without appearing to cost the taxpayers anything. Of course, they ended costing us plenty, just like hard-to-evaluate pension promises.
The rest of Glaeserís post is here.
Louis Menandís New Yorker article earlier this year that reviewed a couple of new books on psychiatry in the context of the confusing state of psychiatric literature posed the compelling question that is the title of this post:
You go see a doctor. The doctor hears your story and prescribes an antidepressant. Do you take it?
However you go about making this decision, do not read the psychiatric literature. Everything in it, from the science (do the meds really work?) to the metaphysics (is depression really a disease?), will confuse you. There is little agreement about what causes depression and no consensus about what cures it. Virtually no scientist subscribes to the man-in-the-waiting-room theory, which is that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin, but many people report that they feel better when they take drugs that affect serotonin and other brain chemicals. [. . .]
. . . As a branch of medicine, depression seems to be a mess. Business, however, is extremely good. Between 1988, the year after Prozac was approved by the F.D.A., and 2000, adult use of antidepressants almost tripled. By 2005, one out of every ten Americans had a prescription for an antidepressant. IMS Health, a company that gathers data on health care, reports that in the United States in 2008 a hundred and sixty-four million prescriptions were written for antidepressants, and sales totalled $9.6 billion.
As a depressed person might ask, What does it all mean?
Following on that provocative article, Russ Roberts’ essential EconTalk series this week presents this fascinating interview of Menand on the state of psychiatric knowledge and the scientific basis for making conclusions about current therapeutic approaches of battling it.
Although hard and fast conclusions are few, Menand is asking the right questions about a subject that desperately needs better societal understanding. His article and interview are valuable contributions to improving that understanding.
Kiri Te Kanawa does Leonard Bernstein’s classic from West Side Story.
Another Paul Potts? Self-developed talent is truly inspiring.