Economists specialize in pointing out unpleasant trade-offs - a skill that is on full display in the health care debate. We want patients to receive the best care available. We also want consumers to pay less. And we don't want to bankrupt the government or private insurers. Something must give.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the difficult trade-offs in the healthcare debate between quality care, affordability, and financial sustainability.
Sendhil Mullainathan emphasizes the complex trade-offs in healthcare, illustrating the challenges of providing high-quality care while keeping costs manageable for consumers and avoiding financial strain on government and private insurers. This quote invites critical thinking about the competing interests in economic policies and the inevitable compromises that must be made.
In practice
During a seminar on health policy, this quote could be used to illustrate the challenges decision-makers face.
Faced with a time shortage, we squeeze tasks into the nooks and crannies of our calendar, leaving less and less time to switch between them. As a result, we become less and less productive exactly when we need to be most productive.
The problem with data is that it says a lot, but it also says nothing. 'Big data' is terrific, but it's usually thin. To understand why something is happening, we have to engage in both forensics and guess work.
There's a popular image of people who don't save for the future as lacking in self-control. But the reason saving is so hard has less to do with self-control and more to do with a scarcity of attention.
January is always a good month for behavioral economics: Few things illustrate self-control as vividly as New Year's resolutions. February is even better, though, because it lets us study why so many of those resolutions are broken.
Busy people all make the same mistake: they assume they are short on time, which of course, they are. But time is not their only scarce resource. They are also short on bandwidth. By bandwidth I mean basic cognitive resources - psychologists call them working memory and executive control - that we use in nearly every activity.
Income inequality is troubling because, among other things, it means that many people in our society don't have the opportunities to advance themselves.
During the next four years...unless drastic steps are taken by Congress, the U.S. will have nearly 8,000,000 unemployed and will stand on the brink of a deep depression.
Economists argue about the relative impact of immigrants versus robots on wage stagnation - voters don't care much. They blame immigrants. It's easier to get mad at a person from Macedonia or Mexico, taking your job than it is to get mad at a piece of technology from Silicon Valley.
History does not provide any example of capital accumulation brought about by a government. As far as governments invested in the construction of roads, railroads, and other useful public works, the capital needed was provided by the savings of individual citizens and borrowed by the government.
The merchants will manage [commerce] the better, the more they are left free to manage for themselves.
Capitalism and market forces are very powerful in producing wealth and innovation. But we need to ensure that these forces act in the common interest.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.