- John Goodman
- Larry Kotlikoff
- Jane Shaw Stroup
- Thomas Saving
- Devon Herrick
- Linda Gorman
- Pete Du Pont
- All Posts

Who Are the Real Authoritarians?
If the Trump presidency meant anything, it meant less government. Specifically, lower taxes, less regulation, and fewer (potentially war-causing) foreign entanglements. Typical Trump supporters are also anti-government – even more than Trump is. More

A Republican Alternative to Medicare for All
It’s been 15 years since John McCain ran for president with a plan to completely revamp our healthcare system. In the interim, Republicans have attempted a nip here or a tuck there, but nothing really big. Fortunately, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) and his colleagues have come to the rescue with a reform plan that is a pro-patient, pro-family, pro-free enterprise alternative. It is based on three fundamental values. More

Against Medicaid Expansion
Expanding Medicaid to the relatively healthy might make sense if it improved general health. But there is little evidence it does. In Oregon, for example, a first-of-its-kind controlled trial tracked individuals who applied for Medicaid through a lottery. After two years, there was no discernible difference in the physical health of the winners and losers. More

Liberating the Doctors
For the past half century, virtually every major attempt to reform the health care system has involved people who don’t practice medicine telling the doctors who do practice medicine how to manage their affairs. Yet none of these solutions appears to work. Costs keep rising. Quality of care is not measurably improving. And, access to care (as measured, say, by per-capita doctor visits or the length of time needed to see a doctor) seems to be getting worse. So why not try something different? Why not allow the folks who practice medicine and who are in the best position to eliminate waste, improve quality and expand access to care to solve the very problems no one else seems able to solve? More

It’s Time to Retire the Labor Law
The emergence of Uber and similar ride services and the pandemic-induced phenomenon of working from home are radically changing the nature of work. The idea of “an hour of work” for a single employer is increasingly a meaningless concept. But without that metric, you can’t make sense of “minimum hourly pay” or “overtime” and other features of 85-year-old labor law. Moreover, millions of people no longer want to be traditional “employees.” To facilitate that desire, we need to let independent contractors have all the tax advantages employees have with respect to health insurance, retirement pensions and other benefits. More.

Medicare’s Future
In just eight years, nearly 78 million Medicare beneficiaries will face an automatic 11 percent payment cut in their hospital insurance benefits, and these cuts could come even sooner and strike even deeper if America is hit by a recession. More

Charity Without the Welfare State
We can have a safety net that meets the needs of people who experience misfortune without creating a permanent class of nonworking dependents who behave in socially undesirable ways.

What to Know About Pete Sessions’ Health Reform Bill
With the help of scholars at the Goodman institute and Americans for Prosperity, Congressman Pete Sessions and his colleagues have introduced the Health Care Fairness for All Act. Among its other features, the bill would do the following: 1. For the first time in the...

Obamacare’s Dirty Little Secret
When Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act of 2010, President Obama and lawmakers made the same claim over and over: The act would make good, affordable health insurance available to people with pre-existing conditions. The actual result has been the opposite. Obamacare makes health insurance as good as possible for the healthy and as bad as possible for the sick.
From John Goodman’s editorial in the Wall Street Journal (Paid gateway)

Can the Left and Right Agree on Health Reform?
A new book calls for universal health insurance coverage, but with no increase in government spending. It’s getting a lot of attention in progressive circles. Yet a bill that would go a long way toward implementing Finkelstein’s proposal has been introduced in Congress by a conservative Republican. More

ObamaCare Turns Out to Be Affordable Only for the Healthy
It was supposed to help those with pre-existing conditions, but they pay dearly for bad options.

Social Security’s Massive Malfeasance
Social Security has committed and continues to commit huge fraud against 13,000 plus widow(er)s who collectively have been swindled out of $130 million. Those are the figures of Social Security’s own Inspector General. More

America’s Fiscal Gap
That’s the difference between the federal government’s spending commitments and its income – looking indefinitely into the future. Closing the gap through time requires an immediate and permanent 41.3 percent increase in all federal taxes or an immediate and permanent 35.3 percent cut in all non interest federal spending. More

Social Security Benefits: Heads They Win, Tails You Lose
One disabled lady was clawed back for over $300,000 for a mistake that Social Security admitted in writing was theirs! If she doesn’t repay, Social Security will almost always stop sending people like her a single penny until they pay “what they owe.” This can take years or decades. More

House Republicans – Raise the Debt Limit, But Stick to Your Fiscal Guns. Our Country Is Dead Broke!
Our country’s fiscal gap is 7.7 percent of GDP. This means we need to collect 7.7 percent more in taxes, every year starting now, to cover all the future spending the CBO projects. Alternatively, we need to immediately and permanently lower the path of federal spending by 7.7 percent of each future year’s GDP. Or we can do neither of these things and dig an even deeper hole for our kids. More

Social Security’s Massive Malfeasance
The Social Security administration has committed and continues to commit huge fraud against 13,000 plus widow(er)s who collectively have been swindled out of $130 million. These figures are those of Social Security’s own Inspector General. More

Should You Now Wait Till 75 To Take Your IRA?
The Secure 2.0 Act, which Wall Street loves, gives retirees the ability to defer taxable withdrawals from their IRA accounts from the current age 72 to 73 in 2023, if you reach 72 in that year or later, and to 75 starting in 2033. That may not be a good financial decision, however. More

Are US retirees foregoing large sums of Social Security benefits?
90% of Americans are likely to benefit if they wait until age 70 to claim their Social Security benefits. Yet only 6% do so. If you add up the loss of benefits from these decisions over the remainder of a retiree’s lifetime, the typical retiree is leaving $182,370 (in present-value terms) on the table by claiming benefits too soon. More

Social Security COLA Still Fails To Keep Up With Inflation
The COLA is supposed to keep our (I’m also a recipient) benefits even with inflation. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. The COLA is calculated based on the rise in the Consumer Price Index between September 30th and October 1st of the previous year. Hence, we’re getting compensated for past annual inflation, with a three-month lag to boot! This leaves us perpetually behind the eight ball. More

Social Security Sues invalid for Money He Received 21 Years Ago, At Age 11
Roy Farmer of Grand Rapids Michigan has Cerebral Palsy. He’s 32. In 2019, out of the blue, he received a claw back letter from Social Security demanding he repay $4,902 that his (now deceased) mother received back when he was 11. Roy has spent over three years appealing this judgement. He’s been denied twice. More from Kotlikoff Forbes editorial.

Our Fiscal System Needs Reform
Over half of working-age Americans face lifetime marginal tax rates (including direct taxes and loss of entitlement benefits) above 43 percent. One in ten in the bottom fifth face tax rates above 70 percent, effectively locking them into poverty. For some would-be-workers, the tax rates exceed 100 percent.
Extremely high LMTRs reflect the complete loss of family benefits, in the current and future years, from programs such as Medicaid – which ends benefits abruptly if one’s income or assets exceed specific thresholds by even one dollar. More.

What the Debt Deal Ignored
A month ago, Social Security’s Trustees published their annual report. Table VIF1, buried deep in the Appendix, where no one looks, is the statement that Social Security’s unfunded liability is $66 trillion. This measure of Social Security’s red ink is not just gargantuan on its own. It’s $13 trillion larger than it was just three years ago. More

Can There Be Too Many Trees?
Drought-resistant trees are replacing grasslands around the world, and, specifically in the western United States. This is a problem? More.

Economic Freedom IS good for the environment
Yes, data from the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy and the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World Index send a resounding message: Economic freedom brings about environmental protection. Why? Because economic freedom leads to prosperity and only prosperous countries can truly protect their environment. Are you skeptical? More.

Why California Needs Higher Prices for Water
California’s extreme drought will force rationing of water or higher prices, say John McKenzie and Richard McKenzie. Raising water prices has a great advantage: “Higher water prices can increase the state’s available water supply—without additional rainfall or...

Should We Even Try to Recycle Plastics?
Pressuring plastic producers to recycle their products has gone on for decades. But two writers at the Atlantic have now concluded, “Plastic recycling does not work and will never work.” In the U.S. in 2021 only 5 percent of all post-consumer plastic was recycled. Furthermore, they say that the plastic producers deny this and those denials are “reminiscent of” the tobacco companies in making false claims. (For years, many tobacco firms rejected the idea that cigarettes caused cancer.)

What’s Wrong with Planting More Trees?
Planting trees to sequester carbon and prevent carbon dioxide emissions has become very popular (whether it is accomplishing much or not). Now the New York Times reports that the effort to save the world is causing local ecological harm by bringing in non-native species.

Don’t Worry about Greenland’s Melting Ice
Greenland ‘s ice mass is melting—but more slowly than it did a decade ago, and its level right now is about the same as in the 1930s. But little of this information reaches the media or even the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)…

Laws, Sausages, and Land-Grants
The agricultural and technical university, which often has “state” in its name, is typically a land-grant university formed under the auspices of the Morrill Act of 1862. It was meant to be a practical, down-to-earth “people’s university,” and even today it is less prestigious than the state’s traditional university, usually founded much earlier. But the emphasis on technology has made some of the land-grant universities research powerhouses and often bigger than their in-state rivals.

The Case for Retirement Communities
A retirement home has some resemblance to a college dorm. But that’s a good thing. Unlike a typical apartment complex, where one rarely knows one’s neighbors, a retirement home allows meeting many people—at meals, exercise classes, lectures and clubs.

Economic Growth Theories Fall into the Dustbin of History (And That’s Okay)
Economists like Samuelson failed to understand economic growth in developing countries. Unbeknownst to them, cost-reducing innovations in transportation and communication led to increased trade and lifted people out of poverty. The Industrial Revolution benefited only a small portion of the world. Trade spurred prosperity and development on its own.

Conservation Leases?
This guest post by Shawn Regan is a substantive analysis of the recent proposal by the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management to allow leasing of public land for conservation purposes. Regan is vice president of research at the Property and Environment...

The “Madness of Crowds”?
Can history help us understand today’s panic over global warming? While the Earth is warming and human activity is probably contributing to it, the overheated efforts to make people fear the long-term future suggest that this is more of a crusade than a rationally considered enterprise. Extreme fear of global warming is negatively affecting politics, the economy, the media, international relations, and education.

Goodman and Saving: Budget Deal’s Trillion Dollar Surprise
The most significant federal entitlement reform in our lifetime was a little noticed provision that Democrats included in the Affordable Care Act. The provision was a cap on Medicare spending, similar to the cap Republicans proposed for Medicaid last summer.

Saving on CNBC: FED is holding 20% of federal debt
The Federal Reserve System is holding 20% of the federal government’s publicly held debt. It also is holding a lot of bank reserves. For every dollar of required reserves, banks have deposited $12 at the FED.

Gramm and Saving in the Wall Street Journal: Fed Task is Precarious
The Fed balance sheet contains 20% of all publicly held federal debt and 34% of the value of all outstanding government-guaranteed mortgage-backed securities. As the economy returns to normal growth, getting rid of those assets risks runaway inflation or a crippled recovery or both.

Saving: Are Republicans Too Stingy with Medicaid?
Before the Senate voted on a “skinny” alternative to Obamacare, it was considering the House version of repeal and replace – called the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA).

The Federal Reserve’s Accountability Deficit
The Federal Reserve enjoys extraordinary independence from the elected branches of government, based on the well-founded fear that politicians cannot be trusted with the power to print money and manipulate interest rates.

Tom Saving has a new book
Tom Saving has a new book called A Century of Federal Reserve Monetary Policy: Issues and Implications for the Future.

Saving and Gramm in the Wall Street Journal: The Fed’s Obama-Era Hangover
The Federal Reserve System is paying banks not to lend money under an Obama era policy.

Gramm and Saving in the WSJ: The Fed has lost its ability to control interest rates
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, former Sen. Phil Gramm and Goodman institute Senior Fellow Thomas Saving write “Never in the Fed’s 105-year history has it had less control over market interest rates than it has today…. To expect the Fed to hold interest rates above or below the market rate under these circumstances is not only naive but dangerous.”

Health Reform: There Is Something for Everyone to Love… and Hate
Why is it controversial to expand the physician supply, creating more competition? Doctors oppose it, just like they oppose expanding the scope of practice for nurse practitioners. Doctors don’t want me to be able to see a nurse practitioner or physician assistant for a wart on my toe unless that NP/PA works for them.
How did doctors get so powerful? In the first half of the 20th Century, the American Medical Association (AMA) waged a largely successful battle to close medical schools that trained competing physicians. …. More than half of American and Canadian medical schools were closed…. Thus, the job of a physician was yanked out of reach of all but the smartest, most disciplined, wealthy elites.

The 60 Percent Solution to Reforming Healthcare
Can we transform the entire health care system by empowering the roughly 60 percent of patients who are in private health plans? That’s the premise of a new book I just read by Todd Furniss (@TFurniss on Twitter). The author ofThe 60% Solution: Rethinking Healthcare, believes there are five major reforms necessary to empower patients and help them get better care at better prices. These include: (1) change governance, (2) modify health savings accounts (HSAs), (3) clear prices, (4) standardize accounting and information technology in the medical industry and (5) emphasize primary care.

Herrick: OBAMACARE RATIONS CARE FOR THE SICK AND OVERCHARGES THE HEALTHY
The health care reform debate that lead to Obamacare was initially about covering the uninsured, but in order to gain the support of ordinary people who already had coverage, proponents had to figure out a way to sway public opinion.

Herrick: States Should Ban These Lab Scams
There is a new health care scam spreading across rural America that could cost you plenty. Large commercial labs like Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp do not have locations in every small town. As a result, many rural hospitals perform lab work for both their inpatients and outpatients in the local community.

Herrick: Future Pandemics Require Better Access to Primary Care
When Americans become ill or have a health complaint, they often schedule an appointment with a primary care provider (PCP). PCPs are often the first line of defense in the battle against the onset of seasonal outbreaks of colds, flu or more serious problems like COVID-19.

Herrick: Could Free-Market Medicine Respond Better to Pandemics?
Many people have come to believe that the only way to protect Americans against future pandemics is to turn over control of our health care system to the government. The folly of this view was apparent when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) utterly failed as the monopoly supplier of COVID-19 diagnostic testing kits. When the first cases appeared, about half of the test kits failed and replacements were slow in coming.

How Obamacare Made Things Worse for Patients With Preexisting Conditions
One of the strange features of the national health care conversation is how it has evolved. What is often referred to as Obamacare began as an attempt to insure the uninsured. In fact, the initial Congressional Budget Office estimates predicted the Affordable Care Act would be largely successful in doing just that. Yet it was the Senate’s Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, who identified the political problem with that goal early on. About 95% of those who vote already have insurance, Schumer noted. So Obamacare was promising to spend a great deal of money on people who don’t vote.

Response to Coronavirus Reflects Trump’s Plan to Radically Reform Health Care
Critics of President Trump’s response to the coronavirus crisis characterize it as knee-jerk, spur-of-the-moment, and grasping at any straw within reach. In fact, many of the executive actions we have seen in the past few days reflect a new approach to health policy that has been underway almost since the day Donald Trump was sworn into office.

What’s Behind the Vaccine Slowdown?
What’s behind the slowdown in vaccinations? The consensus among experts is those not yet vaccinated either 1) don’t want the vaccine 2) harbor some doubts about vaccine safety or efficacy, or 3) simply lack the motivation to find vaccine providers and make an appointment. Vaccine hesitancy accounts for about one-third of adults. For example, the Kaiser Family Foundation ran a survey in April that found 15 percent of respondents who had not received the vaccine plan to “wait and see.” Another 6 percent will get vaccinated “only if required,” and 13 percent refuse to get the vaccine.

Correcting Misconceptions of Health Care Reform
One reader posed the question, how does the tax break for employee health insurance harm our health care system? Short answer: over time the practice reduced competition, which weakened cost-control and resulted in health care inflation three times that of consumer inflation. Consider this: once covered by generous health plans, workers cared less about what medical care cost because their health plans paid most of the tab. Employers didn’t care what things cost because they were passing on the costs to workers (indirectly) in lieu of higher cash wages. Third party administrators (TPAs), who manage the benefits for employers, didn’t much care what things cost because they were passing on the costs to employers with a mark-up. The more money spent, the more TPAs earn.

How a Questionable Drug Turned into a Goldmine at Taxpayers’ Expense
On June 7th the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a new drug to treat early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. Is this good news for patients suffering with Alzheimer’s disease? Probably not and certainly not for taxpayers. The clinical trial data found little evidence the drug works. One Phase 3 clinical trial showed a slight slowing in cognitive decline, while the second clinical trial failed to show any improvement.

If The Court Strikes Down Obamacare, How Bad Would That Be?
This article was coauthored by Linda Gorman, director of health care at the Independence Institute in Denver, Colorado.

Gorman in The Hill: Trump’s Drug Plan Wrong Rx
The Trump administration wants to use an average of the drug prices paid by other countries to limit what Medicare Part B pays for some drugs. This is a bad idea.

Linda Gorman Study: Obamacare Dollars Wasted
The percent of the population with private health insurance actually declined during the eight years of the Obama presidency, according to a study by health economist Linda Gorman.

Gorman: Obamacare has been extremely wasteful
The federal government spent $341 billion from 2014 through 2016 on subsidizing individual coverage so that people would buy it (Not counting the money spent on state and federal exchanges).

Gorman in The Hill: Doctor Incentives Rx is Failing
The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has voted to recommend scrapping the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System because it “cannot succeed.”

Gorman in Forbes: Will Tax Reform Kill People?
You know you are in the silly season when the charges against sensible tax reform become more and more outrageous. The silliest and most outrageous is based on this causal reasoning: The Republican tax measure repeals the Obamacare mandate, requiring people to purchase health insurance; without the mandate, fewer people will insure; and without insurance, more people will die.

Gorman in The Hill: States are bilking Uncle Sam with Medicaid scams
Congress has decided to stop forcing federal taxpayers to subsidize people who live under state governments intent on levying excessive income taxes. Now, how about ending federal subsidies rewarding states that tax the heck out of health care?

Congress Could Improve Health Care by Reforming the False Claims Act
In a new Independence Institute working paper on the use and misuse of the False Claims Act (FCA), attorneys Mark W. Pearlstein and Laura McLane explain how an 1863 statute written to expose and punish Civil War contractors who billed for gunpowder and supplied kegs full of sawdust raises costs and threatens access to medical care.

The $3.5T Spending Mistake
Congressional Democrats are proposing to spend an enormous amount of taxpayer dollars on what the New York Times calls a “cradle to the grave” addition to U.S. social welfare. When budgeting shenanigans are ignored, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that the full cost is not the $3.5 trillion that has been widely advertised, but at least $5.0 trillion and possibly as much as $5.5 trillion.

Gorman: US Hospitals are Safer
A frequent criticism of US hospitals is the charge of excessive adverse medical events, sometimes leading to avoidable deaths. How do our hospitals compare to hospitals in national health care systems? Quite well. The percent of patients who experience an adverse event is twice as high in Canada, three times as high in Britain and four times as high in New Zealand.

Hidden Traps in the IRA Bill’s Drug Provisions
In the near future, the elderly and the disabled will face a double whammy: higher premiums for Part D drug insurance and higher prices at the pharmacy. This is on top of negotiated prices (and the consequent drop in new drug production) which will kick in later in the decade.
John Goodman and Linda Gorman explain why this will happen in The Hill.

Our Gravest Peril
ObamaCare? Stagnant economy? Crushing debt? Foreign policy fecklessness may trump them all. Commentary by Pete du Pont January 21, 2014 Source: Wall Street Journal America's most worrisome problem may not be the failed takeover of our healthcare system. It may not be...

The Great Destroyer
ObamaCare wreaks havoc on health care, the economy, American freedom and Obama's presidency. Commentary by Pete du Pont November 25, 2013 Source:The Wall Street Journal Polls show an increasing majority of Americans dislike President Obama's healthcare law and...

Hillary Will Run
How could she not? Commentary by Pete du Pont October 29, 2013 Source: Wall Street Journal Hillary Clinton is going to run for president in 2016. Granted, she is exhibiting even more coyness than most presidential prospects, and yes, the media are filled with those...

The Beltway Stalemate
Democrats and Republicans have never had such a conflict of visions. Commentary by Pete du Pont September 26, 2013 Source: The Wall Street Journal The debate about military action in Syria seems over for now, and Washington is back in campaign mode. We have a...

Obama’s Foreign Failure
The world hasn't lived up to his Pollyannaish expectations. Commentary by Pete du Pont August 27, 2013 Source: The Wall Street Journal Barack Obama entered the White House with the promise of restoring our nation's standing in the world. Suffering from war fatigue and...

Second-Term Nightmare
ObamaCare's chickens come home to roost. Commentary by Pete du Pont July 27, 2013 Source: The Wall Street Journal Talk about being between a rock and a hard place. The Obama administration and its allies in Congress are faced with the challenge of trying to convince...

Obama’s Anti-Energy Agenda
He threatens to cut off the fuel the economy needs. Commentary by Pete du Pont July 01, 2013 Source: The Wall Street Journal Not surprisingly, President Obama and Speaker John Boehner have different views on energy policy, differences brought into stark contrast by...

Obama’s Scandalous Legacy
He has given Americans new reason to distrust the government. Commentary by Pete du Pont May 28, 2013 Source: The Wall Street Journal It's too early to tell if May will be remembered as marking the beginning of a failed second term for President Obama, but it is clear...

The Left’s “Wars”
The Left’s “Wars” Commentary by Pete du Pont March 28, 2014 Source: The Wall Street Journal The midterm elections are just over seven months away and the left has unleashed its usual rhetoric about the Republican "war on women." It's baseless political pandering of...

Global Warming Heats Up
The public could use an honest debate. Commentary by Pete du Pont February 27, 2014 Source: The Wall Street Journal Global warming is back. Not actual global warming, as the decadelong trend of little to no increase in temperatures continues. But the topic of global...

The Real Inequality Problem
It isn’t that some people are wealthy but that others are struggling. Commentary by Pete du Pont April 28, 2014 Source: The Wall Street Journal Among the too numerous frustrations of the political process is that a lot of smart and talented people spend their time and...

Real Estate Agents After Fixed Commissions
Image Caption: Real estate agents arrive at a brokers tour. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) GETTY IMAGES Read the original article on Forbes.com Real estate agents have been slapped with a court ruling that their commission practices violate antitrust...

New Census Projections Show Tight U.S. Labor Market For Years
The U.S. Census Bureau issued new long-term population projections which are gloomy for employers. The growth of the working age population in the current decade, from 2020 to 2030, will be the lowest since the Civil War. These projections indicate even less labor force growth than the previous figures, which were released in 2018. Lower immigration than previously expected dominates the labor force issue. The Census Bureau believes immigration in future years will be about 17% lower than they previously projected—which itself was lower than 2014 projections.

ObamaCare Turns Out to Be Affordable Only for the Healthy
It was supposed to help those with pre-existing conditions, but they pay dearly for bad options.

Obamacare’s Dirty Little Secret
When Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act of 2010, President Obama and lawmakers made the same claim over and over: The act would make good, affordable health insurance available to people with pre-existing conditions. The actual result has been the opposite. Obamacare makes health insurance as good as possible for the healthy and as bad as possible for the sick.
From John Goodman’s editorial in the Wall Street Journal (Paid gateway)

Can the Left and Right Agree on Health Reform?
A new book calls for universal health insurance coverage, but with no increase in government spending. It’s getting a lot of attention in progressive circles. Yet a bill that would go a long way toward implementing Finkelstein’s proposal has been introduced in Congress by a conservative Republican. More

The “Madness of Crowds”?
Can history help us understand today’s panic over global warming? While the Earth is warming and human activity is probably contributing to it, the overheated efforts to make people fear the long-term future suggest that this is more of a crusade than a rationally considered enterprise. Extreme fear of global warming is negatively affecting politics, the economy, the media, international relations, and education.

Who Are the Real Authoritarians?
If the Trump presidency meant anything, it meant less government. Specifically, lower taxes, less regulation, and fewer (potentially war-causing) foreign entanglements. Typical Trump supporters are also anti-government – even more than Trump is. More

The Government’s New Tax Break for Retirees is Less Than Meets the Eye
QLACs — Qualified Longevity Annuity Contracts promise to be “A Retirement Tax Break That Ends the Fear of Outliving Your 401(k).” But while buying a QLAC lowers the person’s exposure to one major risk (living too long), it raises exposure to another risk: inflation. More

What Companies Using AI Need To Know About The Sam Altman Reshuffle
Turmoil is rocking the artificial intelligence industry. Business leaders developing an AI strategy should—in most but not all cases—continue as before the recent big news.
The board of OpenAI fired Sam Altman as CEO on November 17, and the company’s president, Greg Brockman, resigned soon after. Three days later, Microsoft announced, “Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft MSFT -1.2% to lead a new advanced AI research team.”

Tyler Cowen Searches For Economics GOAT In New Book
GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter? is an intriguing book by the well-known economist Tyler Cowen in which he tries to determine who is the greatest economist of all time. This book will be enjoyed not only by economists but also those interested in understanding the world of people and their interactions. Importantly, the book emphasizes the non-financial implications of economic analysis in areas such as friendship, community and aesthetics.

Julian Simon, Vindicated Again
Each year, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) has a dinner in Washington, D.C., honoring the economist Julian Simon, who died in 1998. Simon was a rare optimist in the fields of population and natural resources. He disagreed with most environmentalists of his day (especially in the 1980s through 1990s). They feared passionately that growing population would overwhelm agriculture and industry and that the world would run out of natural resources such as oil and minerals.