Month: June 2018

Capital In The 21th Century

Contrary to the popular consensus today, the American Dream was very real for most of America’s history. This was less due to American ideals and institutions, and more the fact that America (as a new country) had less time to accumulate a rentier class, which takes a couple generations for the fortunes to really multiply. And as a country with a very high population growth rate (remember the average colonial New England family had like 10 kids), any wealth that did get accumulated was quickly diluted over a bunch of children instead of inherited as a chunk. This was at least true in the North and frontier – the South, which inherited a lot of the worst parts of the 1600s English upper-class, got a society along the lines of the European aristocratic model with rentier plantation owners. Traditional models of labor-capital split generally fail to capture this because much Southern wealth was in the form of slaves, ie labor turned into a form of capital, which confuses the models. But as for the rest of the country, Piketty approvingly quotes Tocqueville’s description of America as “a land without capital”.

Bronx Night Market

In the mood for some delicious food, artisanal products, and live music? Head on up to the Bronx’s first-ever Night Market, at Fordham Plaza this Saturday from 16-21. Following the lead of the Queens International Night Market, which opened in 2014, the Bronx Night Market will feature more than 40 food vendors, as well as a variety of art and merchandise vendors.

Grimm

After 5 years of wandering from host to host, peddling its award-winning and very beloved beers, local beer brand Grimm Artisanal Ales opens a brewery and taproom in East Williamsburg. In this new brewery at 990 Metropolitan Ave., between Morgan Avenue and Catherine Street, owners Lauren and Joe Grimm will serve more than 10 drafts, bottle-conditioned and oak-aged sour beers, and some local wine, cider, and soda. Alongside the popular beers will be Middle Eastern food from nearby Samesa, with dishes such as a chicken shawarma melt and pumpernickel pita with dip made with Grimm beer.

Swedish Biohackers

1000s of people in Sweden have inserted microchips, which can function as contactless credit cards, key cards and even railcards, into their bodies. Once the chip is underneath your skin, there is no longer any need to worry about misplacing a card or carrying a heavy wallet. This phenomenon reflects Sweden’s unique biohacking scene. If you look underneath the surface, Sweden’s love affair with all things digital goes much deeper than these microchips.

High altitude connectivity

Part of that investment has been in developing next-generation connectivity technologies like Aquila, a high altitude platform station (HAPS) system. This has involved a lot of trial and error. When we started the Aquila program back in 2014, very few companies were involved in this area — and they were all working independently of one other. In addition, the only spectrum available for these platforms wasn’t suitable for broadband due to technical and geographical limitations.

Moroccan Pancakes

Moroccan pancakes, or beghrir, aren’t your everyday flapjacks. The semolina batter is yeasted and cooked on only one side, allowing the other to develop the countless tiny “eyes” that give the dish its nickname, 1000-hole pancake. In the new Smile to Go canteen at the Freehand Hotel in Gramercy, Marden cooks them in batches and reheats them in the oven, then tops them with seasonal-fruit compote, house made ricotta, and pistachio honey.

Medicine Cost Disease

Cheap-O Psychiatry wouldn’t have an office, because offices cost money. You would Skype, from your house to mine. It wouldn’t have a receptionist, because receptionists cost money. You would book a slot in my Google Calendar. It wouldn’t have a billing department, because billing departments cost money. You would PayPal me the cost of the appointment afterwards. How little could Cheap-O charge? Suppose I wanted to earn an average psychiatrist salary of about $200K – the whole point of cost disease is that we should be able to lower prices without anyone having to take a pay cut. And suppose I work a 40 hour week, 50 weeks a year, each appointment takes 15 minutes, and 75% of my workday is patient appointments. That’s 6000 appointments per year. So to make my $200K I would need to charge about $35 per appointment. There would be a few added costs – malpractice insurance would probably run about $10K per year – but this is the best-case scenario.

$35 per appointment isn’t bad. Most existing cash-only psychiatry practices charge at least $150 per (30 minute) appointment, so we would be less than a quarter of the going rate. I think a lot of insurances charge a $40 copay per psychiatrist visit, so even uninsured Cheap-O patients would be paying less cash than insured patients anywhere else. Create Cheap-O style psychiatry offices, primary care offices, etc, all around the country, and maybe (aside from catastrophe insurance, which should be cheap) having health insurance would no longer be such a big deal.