4 ms·
A response to my least charitable critics (2020)
- zahlman 2y agoThe title doesn't make it at all obvious what or who this is about. It appears to be a followup to https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-on-health-care-is-wrong-a-primer/ https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-conventional-wisdom-o... , recently posted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41870858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41870858 (and also several other times since the original publication, but this is the first time it got traction on HN). The thing that isn't clear to me in the author's model is why it should make sense to see this kind of power-law result (it obviously cannot extend indefinitely, since at some level of income, health care spending would be predicted to exceed 100% of income). This should be at least as much of a problem as the "poor countries are predicted to have negative health care expenditure" problem that the author points out with linear models. (If we're concerned with out-of-sample data in judging the soundness of a model, then presumably we should also be concerned with these sorts of hypotheticals. The author does seem to note the concern, but IMO dismisses it too readily.) A more intuitive model, IMO, would be a fixed percentage of income in excess of some threshold - but this is also problematic in that our "threshold" for covering basic needs is apparently highly variable (given how poor some countries are compared to the US).