Links 7/4/11

I am still interested in that title about Kansas outlawing the practice of evolution. Is there a link?

Paul, it was a satire article from theonion.com

Mike: The article about Dean Baker was clearly wrong. I'm quoting his responses to that misleading article below:
Kirk,
Iâm really not sure what youâre taking issue with in my comment. You said:
âSo for a time between the mid 80â²s and 2009, the AMA did endorse halting expansion of medical education.â
That time is 25 years. And in fact the number of medical students remained roughly unchanged from the early 80s until just the last couple of years, even though the population increased by almost 40 percent and the elderly population increased by almost 60 percent.
According to you, the AMA supported effort to keep the number of doctors constant over a quarter century in which the demand likely increased by close to 50 percent. And, youâre upset at me for saying that AMA restricted the supply of doctors?

Kirk,
I am not playing games with the semantics of present tense and past tense. I donât have access to the AMAâs internal discussions. However, the AMA had publicly taken positions that both restricted Med school enrollment and the number of foreign medical residents allowed to come to the U.S..
I have no idea if they got this advice from economists. If they did, it should have been pretty apparent that it was bad advice. It really doesnât take a genius to figure out that a rising population and a rapidly rising elderly population are going to require more doctors. And, the information on demographics was available from literally hundreds of publicly available sources. I canât believe that the AMA had economists who told them the opposite and they listened to them. (The economists may have told them that restricting the supply was the best way to maximize their incomes â and they were right.)
Again, there was a very long period in which Medical school enrollments did not change [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/29/education/29iht-riedmedus.html]. In the last few years they have grown. We wonât see any gains from this increase for a few years yet (due to the long training process), but it is certainly a step in the right direction.
Nonetheless, it will take a long time to make up for the long period in which enrollments did not increase and we still have not increased enrollments anywhere near in step with the growth of the population and certainly not the elderly population. So this means that right now, as we are having this exchange, the AMAâs efforts to restrict med school enrollment and the entrance of foreign medical residents are having an enormous effect on the wages of physicians.
So,I am absolutely right in saying that the AMAâs efforts to restrict the supply of doctors IS a major factor in keeping up their wages. The extent to which AMA will continue to restrict supply remains to be seen. (By the way, restricting supply does not mean zero growth â most monopolists allow for growing supply, even as they restrict it to well below the competitive market level.)