rayiner

The article touts that it’s a “homeownership measure [that] puts people first,” which seems like it’s trying to at least be politically relevant.

Correct. You can argue this is money that you’d otherwise get if it wasn’t going to healthcare, and that’s a fair point. But then you have to count that in the top line income.

Which ones are in the cooler parts of the country

There are very few “cooler parts of the country.” Europe’s “no AC” culture was because, until the 2000s, almost everywhere had less than 15 days a year over 30C (85F). There’s only a handful of cities like that in the U.S., such as San Francisco and Seattle. Even in the northern latitudes the U.S. gets really hot. Cedar Rapids, Iowa, averaged about 50 85F+ days a year in the 1970s. Boston and Minneapolis were in the 30-60 range during that decade.

To put that into context, Germany over the last decade is seeing 15-20 30C+ days a year. It hit 30-31 only in two years recently, 2018 and 2019. Those years had 7,000-8,000 deaths each year. Germany’s epic heatwaves killing thousands of people was a mild summer in Cedar Rapids or Boston or Minneapolis even in 1970.

The U.S. is just a very hot country, even in the northeast and upper midwest. AC is a huge, lifesaving standard of living improvement almost everywhere in the country. And we shouldn’t take for granted the developments that enabled 88% of the country to have access to that technology.

Average temperatures were also lower in 1970

Yes, but not enough to change whether you want AC or not: https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/washington-dc/yea.... In DC in 1970 you had 98 days above 85 degrees. The year before was 80 and the year after was 71. Last year was 72 and the year before was 93. There are more warm days, but you wanted an AC in the DC area back in the 1970s too.

and we didn't put as many of the jobs in places where you absolutely needed an AC

I don’t think that’s true. The south and mid atlantic was always a huge share of the population. And the midwest was a bigger share than today, while the temperate west coast was a smaller share. You need AC in Chicago too: https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/cities/chicago/yearly-da.... Even in the 1970s in Chicago you had 30-60 days over 85 every year.

My point is that you’re projecting forward into the future where providers need to raise prices, but overlooking the demand that will arise when the rest of the economy starts using AI.

It’s true there’s a spin in that direction. But I think there’s also a tendency to take things for granted in the other direction because they have become so cheap. Food and clothing used to make up significant line items for ordinary people. I remember in the 1990s seeing ads for discount cereal (“it comes in a bag on the bottom shelf but it’s just as good as the branded stuff!”). When was the last time you saw a commercial like that?

A lot of the durable goods that became very cheap were a huge quality of life improvement that we simply take for granted. In 1970, which was when boomers were about the same age as Gen Z is today, only a third of americans had air conditioning. Today it’s almost 90%—basically only the people in very temperate climates don’t have it.

Manufactured goods, food, and clothing. Note that we tend to think of these things as not being a big deal, but that’s colored by the fact they’re so cheap. In 1970, a wall mount AC was about $400, when the median family income was under $10,000. Lots of people simply could not afford one. Today, a wall mount AC is still $400, while the median family income is over $80,000. People dismiss the fact that an AC unit has gotten 90% cheaper in real terms. But you wouldn’t do that if everyone in your family was huddled around a single AC unit in one room during a southern summer, as was very common in the 1970s.

Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives.

BLS says housing, transportation, and food are the top 3. Insurance/pensions is #4, but that also includes car and homeowners insurance and retirement contributions.

Over the past 50 years, both transportation and food got cheaper. Moreover, clothing actually used to be one of the top categories, but that’s fallen off completely.

This isn’t “putting people first,” it’s baking in the cultural assumption that adults live separately from kin. Consider the examples:

Housing unit 1. A couple owns their home. The woman’s parents live with them.

Housing unit 2. A couple owns their home. Their son, a recent college graduate, lives with them.

Housing unit 3. A man owns his home. A friend lives with him.

Housing unit 4. A couple owns their home. Their two young children live with them.

Housing unit 5. Three roommates rent their home. The owner lives elsewhere.

As illustrated in Figure 1, these five housing units are home to 14 adults. Because four of these five housing units have their respective owners as residents, the owner-occupancy rate—the measure traditionally viewed as the homeownership rate—on the cul-de-sac is 80 percent. However, because only seven of the 14 adults are actually owners of the homes they live in, the HPOP is much lower, at 50 percent.

I think 1, 2, and 4 should all count as “owning their home.” The new measure is also a recipe for confounding attempts to compare the metrics over time, as demographic change brings in cultures that embrace multi-generational living. So what seems to be a drop in homeownership rate could instead reflect a growing and aging sub-population where the cultural preference is for parents to live with adult children instead of separately.

The compute demand is not fake. Non-coding industries have barely begun to deploy this technology. In the legal sector, I’ve been a tech pessimist my entire career, because it was uniformly quite bad. I’ve spent the last few months demoing legal tools backed by frontier models, and we’re definitely going to buy one of them. They’re real and they work and they address a bunch of needs.

I’m not making a point about UK wait times; we’re talking about LLMs as a research tool. I’m using a link I found through Google search as an example to show why LLMs are useful for such questions. As I said in my post, the problem with looking at articles to find an answer is that I don’t know if the data is cherry picked to push a narrative.

Your Gemini query actually proves my point. Average wait times for mental health care in the UK NHS are shorter than you’d think if you Google and search for articles. Because most articles are trying to peddle a narrative.

The fact that 50% of mental health issues go untreated in the U.S. is also interesting. Let’s do a similar query for the U.K.: https://share.gemini.google/69TASFO2sA3S

“Based on the most recent data from the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey (APMS) for 2023/2024, approximately 52.3% of adults in England with a common mental health condition go untreated.”

So it looks like 50% of mental health issues go untreated in the UK as well. Doesn’t that show the value of using LLMs to pull out facts, instead of reading articles that wraps the facts up in spin?

Source? In my experience, LLMs are especially valuable in that setting. Human generated content tries to put a spin on facts. But with LLMs, you can pull the facts out of such content while making your assumptions explicit.

For example, I could point you to this article talking about 12 month+ waiting lists for UK mental health treatment: https://www.rethink.org/news-and-stories/news-and-views/2025.... What is the organization’s spin? Am I cherry picking this article in comparison to others? I don’t know!

It seems like there’s a big advantage to an LLM synthesizing a result from a large corpus of articles that contain facts embedded within spin and narrative.

Because LLMs are pretty good at summarizing facts from publicly available sources.

No, economics is just how we describe resource limits and tradeoffs in a methodical way.

Bad things happen all the time even when it’s not the fault of any person or system.

Yes, facts are more important than framing.

Look how many people in this thread are thinking about avoiding health insurance based on the premise that you’ll be financially wiped out by a catastrophic event even if you have insurance. That’s what happens when you put framing over facts. It’s important for people to understand the facts so they can make good decisions.

It sounds like this guy needed around-the-clock, in-patient care. That's inherently expensive. While those facilities exist in countries with publicly funded healthcare, there's a huge shortage of in-patient beds, so there is some mechanism to funnel patients to outpatient care.

Show me a country where that's the goal. Every other developed country has a goal that's something like: "provide the best outcomes for the population as a whole, at a cost the public is willing to pay."

A bad result is not evidence that a system failed or did anything wrong. To show a problem with the system, you need to show, for example, that other systems do things differently in a way that would have avoided what happened here.

The article doesn't just tell a story about one person, it makes a general point about the healthcare industry. The title is: "My husband’s suicide shows there’s something very wrong with the U.S. insurance industry."

How else are you supposed to evaluate the author's conclusion, other than to compare it to how other healthcare industries handle similar situations?

To understand how doctor's recommendations for in-patient care are treated in the health system of another developed country?

This is definitely a case where the insurance company holds the majority of the blame.

What facts are the basis of your conclusion? There is no health system in the developed world where a doctor's recommendation will guarantee expensive inpatient treatment without a layer of bureaucratic review.

A major use of AI that would save the economy hundreds of billions of dollars, if not a trillion plus, would be to streamline routine medical malpractice and personal injury cases by taking them out of the court system. I suspect there would be a lot less unnecessary treatment if a doctor's conduct could be measured against a specially trained AI, instead of allowing these cases to go to trial with hand-picked experts telling the jury how the doctor could've avoided the problem with more tests.

You're correct that China today is not fully capitalist, but you're using the term "5 year plan" in a way that overstates the difference with the U.S. The term "5-year plan" means different things pre- and post-Deng Xiaoping. Classic central planning was a disaster in China. In 1990, after 78 years of communist rule, China's per-capita income was comparable to India and Bangladesh. In the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping undertook market reforms which, over the next decades, turned China into an authoritarian state-capitalist country. It was widely known at the time the classic model had failed and that China was trying something different. Here's Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew talking about it early on: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jw8wI9risfI

The modern Chinese system embraces Econ 101 "capitalism" in the sense that it relies on markets for price discovery. Today, the "5 year plans" are more like what we would call "industrial policy" in the west. That's different than pure capitalism, but so is the American system. Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln both advocated strong federal intervention in the economy in service of industrial policy: https://emergingamerica.org/blog/alexander-hamilton-founder-... ("Hamilton’s plan involved the following aspects: 1) the creation of a Federally backed source of credit, the First Bank of the United States; 2) a system of tariffs, bounties, and other financial incentives or penalties to support the “essential” sectors of the U.S. economy; and 3) Federal support for developing manufactures by helping fund physical infrastructure ( transportation, in particular), regulating quality standards, and creating an institution to promote 'the prosecution and introduction of useful discoveries, inventions and improvements.'").

Gotcha. I was talking about American "people" generally; I don't know enough about the financial world to know if assets are appropriately priced or not. If you're talking about investment into China versus the U.S., I assume it reflects expropriation risk.

I think that’s correct. One way to look at it: when the Greek world expanded geographically, the new people tried to connect themselves with the Homeric stories (as did the Romans). Whose stories serve that function today? Disney.

It’s obviously Twain.

From what I can tell, China has a capitalism problem, not an industrial wealth problem - they could house every one of their citizens in a decent apartment and give them gadgets and a car to drive

This is wildly incorrect.

Most of them. Semiconductor fabrication is a big one. Metallurgy in general, with specific application to jet turbines. Aerospace broadly. The Chinese can’t build anything like a 787. Radars and most weapons systems.

Exactly. China is a real tech power now, just like Japan and Taiwan. The U.S. is ahead in a lot of areas of technology, but China has home grown talent that is taking the lead in other areas. And unlike Japan and Taiwan, China has a much bigger pool to draw from.