I had three reactions to yesterday's cap-and-trade vote, two of which came from The New York Times article that I read this morning and one of which came from Stan's very smart post.  Here they are:

1. From the article, "Only eight Republicans voted for the bill, which runs to more than 1,300 pages."
2. From the article, "The bill would grant a majority of the permits free in the early years of the program, to keep costs low."
3. From Stan, "But the bigger story is that the White House once again has demonstrated an excellent ability to get Congress to go along with the things it wants."

And now let me take each one in turn.

David Skeel takes on the conventional wisdom regarding the bailout of Bear Stearns, with the benefit of 15 months of hindsight, and questions the wisdom of now institutionalizing "bailout in lieu of bankruptcy:"

An interesting video from the development office at Dartmouth:

Noam Cohen, who has been covering internet issues for The New York Times for the past few years, assesses the role Twitter has played in the old and new media coverage of the election and protests in Iran.  Worth a read this morning.

Any country can have problems with its elections.  Only in a few do the incumbents kill the citizens over them.

Writing at the Health Affairs blog, my colleague Amitabh Chandra answers the criticisms of using the Dartmouth Atlas studies of health care spending variation as a basis for policy reform (see this post from last week and a related post from earlier this week).  He is particularly concerned about some spotty reasoning that appeared in this Wall Street Journal editorial.  He ends with five recommendations for what to do politically based on the evidence on regional variation in health care spending:

1. Do not cut reimbursements.
2. Focus on cost growth.
3. Be realistic about the gains from bundled payments.
4. Think accountable organizations
5. Worry about spillovers.

Read the whole thing.

Writing at Economix, my colleague Jonathan Skinner answers the criticisms of using the Dartmouth Atlas studies of health care spending variation as a basis for policy reform (see this post from last week).  From his fourth point, on what to do about regional variation:

The critics are also right to be worried that simply cutting reimbursement rates won’t turn an expensive and fragmented health-care system (like Miami’s, with 2006 Medicare costs of $16,351 per person), into an efficient, integrated system of care (like that of Grand Junction, Colo., with costs of $5,873). How then can regional systems of care be transformed? One proposal is to establish accountable care organizations, or A.C.O.’s. These are physician-hospital networks designed to encourage providers to coordinate care, improve quality, and share some of the resulting savings. Elliott Fisher of Dartmouth and Mark McClellan of the Brookings Institution have argued that this is the key building block for any health-care reform.

You can also see Jon discussing these ideas as part of this Rockefeller Center panel (his talk starts about an hour into the program).

Today I heard one of the very best valedictory addresses in fifteen years on the Dartmouth faculty.  From Geoffrey Kirsch, who was one of two students who graduated with a perfect 4.0:

And so it is easy enough to lament that such comfort and convenience have come at a price; that the wilderness is gone and with it the adventurous spirit of “old Dartmouth”; that the College is already built on the Hill, the voice in the desert already heard, the books already read; that we stand here today, “magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life,” crying out for nothing more than a job in this miserable economy.

I do not believe this. As long as economy and environment alike are ruined by myopia and greed, as long as hunger and disease plague the world, we languish in a winter as dark and iron and oppressive as the early months of 1771. Wherever we set our learning against ignorance and ideology, we as Dartmouth graduates stand on the edge of a wilderness every bit as tangled and trackless as that which Eleazar Wheelock traveled in 1770.

Read the whole thing.

I read this statement by Senator Kerry in a New York Times article on regional disparities in Medicare spending earlier this week and predictably went crazy:

“There is too much uncertainty about the Dartmouth study to use it as a basis for public policy,” said Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts. “Researchers can’t explain why some areas of the country spend more on health care than others. There are many reasons spending could vary: higher costs of living, sicker people or more teaching hospitals.”

“States like Massachusetts are concentrated centers of medical innovation where cutting-edge treatments are tested and some of the nation’s finest doctors are trained,” Mr. Kerry added. “This work might cost a little more, but it benefits the entire country.”

May I also add that sticking your head in the sand (a euphemism) and ignoring statistically significant differences in average spending per capita is no basis for public policy?

Courtesy of the Associated Press, in its coverage of President Obama's latest proposals for limiting top executive compensation at firms receiving government assistance, we discover Representative Barney Frank's left hand not knowing what his right hand is doing:

To Rep. Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Geithner's plan doesn't go far enough.

"It is not the government's business to discourage risk taking," said Frank, D-Mass. "But neither should we allow systems which have existed up until now whereby decision-makers are handsomely rewarded if they take big risks that pay off, but suffer no penalty whatsoever if those risks result in losses to the company."

An interesting new working paper by Jonathan Meer and Harvey Rosen:

A substantial experimental literature suggests that a personal solicitation is an effective way to induce people to make charitable donations. We examine whether this result generalizes to a non-experimental setting. Specifically, we estimate the effect of a marginal personal solicitation using observational data on alumni giving at an anonymous research university, which we refer to as Anon U. At Anon U, volunteers use lists provided by the Development Office to telephone classmates and solicit them for donations. The names on these lists are always in alphabetical order. The volunteers who do the soliciting often run out of time before they reach the end of their lists. These observations suggest a simple strategy for testing whether personal solicitation matters, viz., examine whether alumni with names toward the end of the alphabet are less likely to give than alumni with names toward the beginning, ceteris paribus. If so, then a marginal personal solicitation matters.