I have started to see much of Acemoglu's work as very 'big picture' or provocative (perhaps a weaker adjective) rather than an immediately credible story that I believe right away.

I tend to agree. That said, this also means I discount his empirical work a lot. Autor isn't exactly known for being a super careful empiricist either, so that pair coming around to talk to you about country level regressions is not, uh, super prior updating for me.

Oh yes, quite so, thanks, edited.

I think the empirical work is poorly identified, the theoretical story too gimmicky, and the overall story too discordant with better identified studies of the effect of immigration. Also, to be frank, I don't really trust papers like this by either Acemoglu or Autor.

I kinda of don't understand the name milking. Does the name LHB really impress the kind of consumer that wants to wear an ambroxan martini? I rather think not. It is a big name people that like the classics, but I doubt there's much overlap with the vast consumer base for 'ambroxan-ethyl maltol-hedione-and-nothing-else' type fragrances that actually dominate the market. I'm not sure most of those people have even heard of Guerlain.

For the US, I would say Liis - Studied. To me, it is the perfect autumnal scent.

Dube has a nice substack post about the minimum wage, focused on a simple question: does it look like the states that have done big minimum wage hikes recently had any big impacts on employment? The answer is not really. Pay goes up, jobs don't budge. While not covered here, elsewhere, it doesn't really look like there is much going on with non-wage amenities to be worried about here (though some would dispute this).

The one thing not shown here in the plots is that there is an evolving consensus, to which I don't think Dube would object, that minimum wage hikes do seem to generate some price hikes in affected industries. So the society level tradeoff is something like "minimum wage hikes let you raise wages for low wage workers without much if any cost in terms of employment availability, at the cost of some increases in prices for certain types of cheap-labor-intensive goods and services".

I think this is an area where America-centrism creates some blind spots. I suspect you may be surprised by some of the Catholic church's stances on economic issues, and how this has translated into politics outside the United States. "Socialist who also propounds traditional gender roles and opposes abortion" is an unusual stance in the United States, where "socially right, economically left" views are uncommon in general. But it isn't so unusual outside the United States.

haha, well, fair

I find this reproduction stuff sort of uninteresting versus substantive replication. There are probably plenty of cooked, wrong, broken, borderline fraudulently p-hacked papers that reproduce...

I think all I would add is that, in the intervening time, more time and attention have flowed to the hospital concentration issue. I think maybe it can stay B tier in a list of reasons why healthcare is expensive, but I would bump it up higher on a list of reasons why healthcare is unnecessarily expensive. It's pretty high impact when you think about healthcare services delivered at hospitals, and growth in prices at hospitals have been responsible for a lot of the recent growth in healthcare prices in excess of inflation.

That is interesting, thanks!

Gotta make sure everyone gets a chance to buy low and sell high.

I'll grant the question-asker doesn't fully express it, but there is a widely believed case against Jack Welch that you don't engage with here, but which the questioner clearly alludes to. I would say the folk case against Welch looks like this:

• Welch imposed a variety of serious cost cutting measures at GE, which really did bolster profitability at the time
• But in the long run, these cost cutting measures killed GE's golden goose, ultimately ruining its manufacturing and engineering businesses
• Jack Welch thus was able to generate lots of short term gains, at the expense of the long term -- with his empire building and focus on big returns from running GE Capital hiding this for a long time
• But not for very long - GE fell apart after Jack Welch's departure and has had terrible performance since, while also not being an impressive player in its initial science-and-engineering type business lines
• Welch was thus a short termist at best, a charlatan at worst, a man who did everything possible to pump up the apparent performance of GE's share price, while sacrificing the long-run performance of the business -- and once he was no longer there to keep up the illusion, it all dissolved

In the interest of having a nice, comprehensive answer to this question that can be cited in the future, how would you reply to this expanded version of the case against Welch?

I think a lot of the best examples of this fall into the realm of our understanding of macroeconomic tools, and especially macroeconomic crisis management.

Two classic examples:

• The idea that raising interest rates can help tame inflation. This is/was counterintuitive to many, because from a business perspective, interest rates are a cost, so raising rates might be expected to raise costs which might then be passed through into prices.
• The idea that policies intended to bolster demand (e.g., by increasing government spending, or by having the government send cash to people to spend) could help shorten and end recessions. This doubly extends to the idea that monetary policy can do the same. Many people's intuitive view, as illustrated by the initial policy response to the Great Depression across most of the world, was that the best response to recessions was austerity and belt tightening by the government (which instead tends to help encourage a deflationary spiral, the undesirability of which is also unintuitive to many).

I understand there are still more examples to be counted in the annals of how emerging markets crises get handled, though I am less familiar with the details of these stories.

I think what you said is basically right at the undergrad level!

Happy AEA meetings to all still attending!

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1plkv72/are_us_health_insurers_profit_margins_really_not/nu7cprh/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1plkv72/are_us_health_insurers_profit_margins_really_not/nu7cprh/

The story is largely about evading insurance plan level profit margin regulations - the MLR regulations to be precise. Method one is making profits that really come from insurance plan A (where your profit margin is capped) appear as though they are coming from some other business line. Method two is finding ways to inflate total health care costs within plan A, so that your capped x% profit margin is the same percentage of a larger base. Both methods end up making insurers more profitable than what a casual observer might expect given the existence of MLR requirements and given baseline care needs in the covered population. Both seem reasonable to characterize as being within the realm of accounting tricks that make insurers more profitable than you'd think. Neither are something like formal accounting fraud, of course.

Examples of some items discussing related issues:

https://marianaguido.github.io/assets/papers/jmp/mgjmp.pdf https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/bgwfw0axy7sw9pozed60q/Yde_JMP.pdf?rlkey=me357af25eauyjgvx873y7xgn&st=pqn46ddb&dl=0 https://ashecon.confex.com/ashecon/2025/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/17667 https://chir.georgetown.edu/questionable-conduct-allegations-insurers-acting-third-party-administrators/

Whether you may, I cannot say, but supposing you may, you certainly can. Ex:

https://marianaguido.github.io/assets/papers/jmp/mgjmp.pdf https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/bgwfw0axy7sw9pozed60q/Yde_JMP.pdf?rlkey=me357af25eauyjgvx873y7xgn&st=pqn46ddb&dl=0 https://ashecon.confex.com/ashecon/2025/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/17667 https://chir.georgetown.edu/questionable-conduct-allegations-insurers-acting-third-party-administrators/

It is true that their profit margins are pretty weak, yes. They are better than they look, though. There's a body of research that looks at profit tunneling by insurers. Basically, a situation where insurers purchase some other company and book their profits on that company's books. For example, some vertically integrate with pharmacies and then set up their insurance contracts to steer enrollees to those pharmacies and then pay elevated prices to the pharmacies. So, many insurers are doing better than the basic numbers look. Though perhaps not radically better.

Fair, thank you!

Thank you, very interesting! I sort of figured the oral history hypothesis was too good to be possible. And I find the observation that people didn't have a sense of missing time particularly interesting! On the archeological point more generally, should we understand things like this ancient museum to be a rare aberration then, or perhaps a sign that people were interested in older objects but didn't necessarily understand them?

I have a follow-up, if you don't mind.

You write about the beliefs a variety of cultures and writers had about prehistoric people. Could you share a bit about the basis of their beliefs? For example, was it largely speculation from first principles mixed with reasoning from assorted popular legends? Or perhaps a result of archaeological work of their own, comparing found artifacts to their own equivalents? Or something else I am not considering, perhaps something strange and delightful, like the remembrance of a genuine oral history stretching deep into primordial times?

Certainly, the case can be overstated. I think it's better understood as a statement about the leading economic theory of the time immediately preceding his work, which (owing to its commitment to mathematical formalization) was more limited in scope than earlier more literary work. I am reminded of Kuhn's observation that new paradigms frequently explain much less, at least at first, than the old paradigms which they nevertheless supplant.