Simon Johnson, professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and co-founder of BaselineScenario.com, argues that the G20 this week offers unique and valuable opportunities to bring about significant financial reform on a global scale, but that the proposals currently on the table will not change much of anything.

Simon Johnson, professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and co-founder of BaselineScenario.com, weighs in on the debate over whether Congress should renew the tax credit for first-time home buyers, warning that special interests may spawn yet another inefficient and costly government program that will be very hard to get rid of.

Check out the latest on TNRtv:

Not many Ph.D. students expect their research to generate outrage among Washington pundits decades later, but, as it turns out, that's exactly what happened to Stephen Schneider. Back in 1971, Schneider was studying plasma physics at Columbia and moonlighting as a research assistant at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. There, he co-authored an article for Science arguing that the warming effect caused by rising amounts of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere would be swamped by the cooling effect caused by aerosol pollution like dust and smoke.

Bernard Avishai, the author of two excellent, but sometimes misunderstood, books on Israel and on Zionism,  is a professor of business at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and on top of the transformation of the older industrial into a new cyber-industrial economy. Avishai has written a very important

Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.

Be sure to check out Daniel Pauly, a professor of fisheries at the University of British Columbia, on NPR's Fresh Air today. He'll be discussing a piece he recently wrote for TNR, "Aquacalypse Now: The End of Fish," about the global fishing industry's threat to the fish population.

In "Is The A Middle Way?" in the latest issue of TNR, Stephen Biddle argues that half-measures in Afghanistan will ultimately fail.  Today, two experts in the field, The New America Foundation's Michael A. Cohen and Boston University professor Andrew J. Bacevich, respond.

Click here to read Stephen Biddle's original piece on the need for a full counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.

It's some 400 miles from Harvard Square to Capitol Hill, but when Rory Stewart made the trip last month, he chose an unlikely mode of transport: He took a plane. Stewart is an inveterate, epic walker. He spent part of this past summer strolling the 150 miles from Crieff to Penrith in his native Scotland. More impressively, in 2002, not long after he quit his job with the British Foreign Office, he walked across Afghanistan, a 600-mile jaunt that served as the basis for his best-selling book The Places In Between. Indeed, his Afghan adventure was only one leg of a 6,000-mile journey by foot through six Asian countries that took nearly two years to complete.

On Wednesday, Dan Tarullo, a governor of the Federal Reserve and distinguished law school professor, dismissed breaking up big banks as “more a provocative idea than a proposal” and instead put almost all his eggs in the “creation by Congress of a special resolution procedure for systemically important financial firms.” He stressed: “We are hopeful that Congress will, in its legislative response to the crisis, include a resolution mechanism and an extension of regulation to all systemically important financial institutions” (full speech).

This put him strikingly at odds with Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, who said Tuesday night, quite bluntly,

 “There are those who claim that such proposals [involving breaking up the largest banks] are impractical. It is hard to see why. Existing prudential regulation makes distinctions between different types of banking activities when determining capital requirements. What does seem impractical, however, are the current arrangements. Anyone who proposed giving government guarantees to retail depositors and other creditors, and then suggested that such funding could be used to finance highly risky and speculative activities, would be thought rather unworldly. But that is where we now are.”

Tarullo’s speech actually framed today’s problem just right: “I would suggest … that the reform process cannot be judged a success unless it substantially reduces systemic risk generally and, in particular, the too-big-to-fail problem.” This is consistent with the tone of King’s remarks (even if less pointed than what Neal Barofsky said).

President Obama faces an enormous political challenge in figuring out how to respond to General Stanley McChrystal's request for more soldiers in Afghanistan. One the one hand, resisting troop requests from the military during a time of war is difficult for any chief executive--particularly for Democratic presidents. On the other hand, Americans are showing little stomach to once again commit more troops to a distant, war-torn region: No recent survey has found majority support for the idea.

This is the second installment of our new feature: Curbside Consult. For the uninitiated, curbside consults are a venerable medical tradition, whereby a doctor seeks informal advice from an experienced colleague in treating a patient with a complex condition. In covering or understanding complex health and social policies, we need sometimes help too.

Today’s interview is with Katherine Swartz, PhD. She is Professor of Health Economics and Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health. Author of Reinsuring Health: Why More Middle-Class People Are Uninsured and What Government Can Do, she has researched state efforts to cover the uninsured and to help people with costly conditions who fare poorly in the private health insurance market.

Swartz is a particular expert in the economics of high-risk pools (HRPs--sorry for the acronym) and reinsurance. If you follow health reform, you’ve probably heard these terms thrown around without a lot of discussion of what these terms actually mean.

To put it simply, HRPs are special insurance plans for people who couldn't get coverage on their own, because of costly pre-existing medical conditions. Reinsurance is probably best explained as "insurance for the insurers." It's a special fund that reimburses insurers for the super-high claims of catastrophic medical expenses. The idea is that this spreads the burden of those expenses as widely as possible, while removing (at least partly) the incentive insurers have to avoid risky beneficiaries.

Both parties propose HRPs and reinsurance to address the immediate and long-term challenges in financing care for people with costly conditions. President Obama mentioned HRPs in his address before Congress to offer quick help to people facing the dual challenges of uninsurance and serious illness. Such provisions are contained in the Baucus bill and in recently-proposed Republican amendments. The Bush administration made modest investments in HRPs. Senator McCain’s 2008 health plan made heavy use of them, as do current Republican proposals presented in the House.

Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.

Imagine that you walk outside your home one rainy morning to get your morning paper. You slip and fall on your slippery front steps, breaking your back and suffering irreparable spinal cord damage. Even if you have perfect medical insurance, you would quickly discover that you would need a lot of help. You might need a home health care aid. You might need ramps and equipment for your house, a handicap-accessible van. You might easily deplete your assets buying these goods and services. You might have to, if you end up in an institution or on Medicaid.

If falls and related mishaps such as car crashes don’t scare you, move the film forward a few decades. You are now caring for a spouse experiencing increasing cognitive difficulties, and everything that entails. You are trying to make this work without going crazy or going broke, without depleting the assets of a lifetime you hope to leave for your kids.

Films Worth Seeing

Araya. Made in 1959, acclaimed at Cannes but skimpily released, this exceptional documentary is very deservedly brought forth again. Shot in stunning black and white, this account of salt workers on the coast of Venezuela tells the truth about their lives in quasi-poetic style. (Reviewed 11/4/09)

You may be a bit tired of Ahmadinejad's classes. But here's what one might call his summation lecture. Or maybe it's his introductory lecture. It is clear, it makes fine distinctions. Oh, what a relief:  "Some governments and their people always hated the Jews because of  the bad conduct of some of them."  That "some of them" is a really meaningful subtlety. It shows you how honest Dr. A'jad is.

In our last issue, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig made the provocative case outlining the perils of what he called the “naked transparency movement,” which seeks to make massive amounts of data about the government readily available for public consumption. In a TNR debate last week, six writers weighed in on his essay. Check them out:

Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.

Alec MacGillis had a nice Washington Post piece on the Mayo Clinic’s low provision of care to Medicaid patients and the even more dicey policies of Mayo’s Glendale, Arizona site to stop accepting Medicare primary care patients. If Arizonans want Mayo primary care, they will have to pay an annual $250 fee, plus a pretty stiff $175 to $400 per visit. Mayo will still provide these patients more complex--and lucrative--procedures.

As MacGillis details, 5 percent of Mayo’s Rochester Minnesota patients are on Medicaid. The Medicaid caseload is 29 percent at the other local hospital. Mayo will no longer accept Nebraska or Montana Medicaid patients, though it is arranging for some currently receiving care.

Mayo receives much praise for its high-quality care. Some effusive praise has come from the President of the United States. That praise is well-deserved. So the above paragraphs should give one special pause. Mayo and other flagship institutions provide excellent, sometimes surprisingly cost-effective care. Yet how should we think about these institutions in light of the reality that many choose in varying degrees to channel their services towards a relatively privileged slice of the American population?

New statistics show that U.S. students are struggling to learn basic math. The 2009 results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in math, a test given every two years to fourth- and eighth-graders nationwide, were released this week. Although average overall scores have doubled since the NAEP was introduced in 1990, results have completely flat-lined among fourth-graders, and the achievement gap between white and black students isn't narrowing.

 The New York Times notes that such trends could be linked to the enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002:

They [the test results] show that scores grew faster during the seven years before the federal law’s enactment. During those years, average fourth-grade math scores grew by 11 points, to 235 in 2003 from 224 in 1996, and eighth-grade scores grew by eight points, to 278 in 2003 from 270 in 1996. In the six years since the law took effect, fourth-grade scores have risen by five points, to 240 from 235. Eighth-grade scores have risen by an equal amount, to 283 from 278. (emphasis added)

Editors's Note: Timothy Jost is a professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law. He posts regularly on the Politico health reform arena and on Georgetown University’s Legal Issues in Health Reform blog.

Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.

I’m piling on the AHIP party. As three Jonathans have already pointed out today, PricewaterhouseCoopers’s analysis done for AHIP is depressingly one-sided.

That’s too bad for several reasons.

First, PricewaterhouseCoopers is right to note: “Insurance market reforms and consumer protections … would raise health insurance premiums for individuals and families if the reforms are not coupled with an effective coverage requirement.” This is a genuine concern. The Senate Finance Committee bill provides insufficient subsidies to make insurance affordable. It doesn’t fix things to let people out of the requirement.

The firm is also right to note that a large proportion of the taxes on “Cadillac” health plans will fall on the affected consumers. I personally prefer even stiffer taxes on health benefits, with one caveat: that the tax be levied only on benefits provided to high-income workers who can afford to pay. Blue-collar unionized workers who make less than six-figure incomes deserve greater protection.

Then we hit the dicey parts. PricewaterhouseCoopers assumes that 100% of these costs will be shifted onto consumers. This extreme assumption is dicey, given consumers’ obvious incentive to shift coverage to cheaper plans and insurers’ obvious incentives to trim their offerings to minimize the tax hit. The memo also presents extreme trend projections that imply Congress will sit idly by and allow these tax provisions to reach a huge proportion of the insurance market. This is, to be kind, counter-intuitive.

Two especially tendentious matters deserve mention. PricewaterhouseCoopers assumes that any reduction in Medicare or Medicaid payments to medical providers will result in “full cost shifting” onto private payers. During the 1980s, eons ago in health policy years, this was plausible. It isn’t remotely plausible now.

Disgrace

Paladin

The Other Man

Image Entertainment

J.M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace has been made into a film that, in good measure, is faithful to it. Along with the admiration that obviously drew them to the book, the film-makers had to deal with some heavy data. Coetzee is a Nobel laureate; Disgrace won a lofty British award called the Booker Prize; an English newspaper poll lately named Disgrace as the best novel of the last twenty-five years. Aesthetically dubious though such tags are, nonetheless the book has been a favorite of many good readers over many years.

The wittiest scene in Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2001 film The Man Who Wasn’t There is one in which a fast-talking defense attorney, Freddy Riedenschneider (marvelously played by Tony Shalhoub), invokes Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle as grounds for a not-guilty verdict in a murder case:

We can’t know what really happened.… Because the more you look, the less you know. But the beauty of it is, we don't gotta know! We just gotta show that, goddamnit, they don't know. Reasonable doubt. Science. The atom. You explain it to me. Go ahead, try.

At the time, this routine seemed little more than an offhanded parody of the Michael Frayn play Copenhagen, in which Heisenberg and Nils Bohr discourse windily about the inscrutability of their past actions and intents. But the idea recurs more centrally in the Coen brothers’ new film, A Serious Man, when a beleaguered physics professor named Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) explains to his students that the uncertainty principle “proves that we can’t ever know what’s going on.” In this case, it is far less clear whether the assertion is intended as satire or corroboration of Frayn’s metaphor. Indeed, the movie itself is similarly difficult to pin down: part tragedy, part epistemological inquiry, part Jewish comedy of manners.

Liberal pundits, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and National Security Advisor James Jones are in agreement: General Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was wrong to give public voice to his views about the best way forward in that beleaguered country. Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman accused McChrystal of “a plain violation of the principle of civilian control.” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson put it most bluntly: "The men with the stars on their shoulders … need to shut up and salute." Some are even drawing parallels between McChrystal and Douglas MacArthur. All these critics are wrong.

The Thing Around Your Neck

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

(Knopf, 218 pp., $24.95)

In “Jumping Monkey Hill,” the most wicked story in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new collection, a group of young writers selected from all over Africa have gathered for a workshop at a fancy resort outside Cape Town--”the kind of place,” thinks Ujunwa, the representative Nigerian, “where . . . affluent foreign tourists would dart around taking pictures of lizards and then return home still mostly unaware that there were more black people than red-capped lizards in South Africa.” The workshop is run by a white couple of a familiar type: liberal expats who proclaim their attachment to their new home a bit too loudly. (“White people who liked Africa too much and those who liked Africa too little were the same--condescending,” Adichie writes in another story.) The wife compliments Ujunwa’s bone structure and asks if she is descended from royalty: “The first thing that came to Ujunwa’s mind was to ask if Isabel ever needed royal blood to explain the good looks of friends back in London.” The smarmy husband makes lewd remarks to the women and speaks pompously of his own authority on Africa.

Maurice Bowra: A Life

By Leslie Mitchell

(Oxford University Press, 385 pp., $50)

As warden of Wadham College in Oxford, president of the British Academy, the author of well-known books on ancient Greek literature, and a conversationalist of legendary brilliance, Maurice Bowra seemed, in the middle of the last century, the very embodiment of Oxford life. Enjoying a huge international reputation as a scholar, a wit, and an administrator, he was duly elected into prestigious academies and awarded honorary degrees in both Europe and America. George VI knighted him in 1951. Yet few who were not alive at that time know his name today. For those of the younger generation who are aware of him at all, his career conjures up the Oxford of Brideshead Revisited, and it has been said that he was the model for Mr. Samgrass. A few of his bright remarks linger on among the chattering classes: "Buggers can’t be choosers," or "Where there’s death there’s hope," or "He is a man who has no public virtues and no private parts." But for the most part Bowra has sunk into oblivion, to emerge from time to time in an obituary or in the voluminous correspondence of Isaiah Berlin.

Ryan Lizza has some fascinating biographical details in his must-read profile of Summers in the forthcoming New Yorker. First, he solves a mystery I'd chewed over but never figured out when profiling Summers myself: 

M.I.T. hired him as a professor in 1979, then Harvard offered him tenure in 1982, when he was just twenty-seven. He was one of the youngest people to receive tenure in the university’s history. According to a friend of Summers’s, Harvard had wanted him earlier that year, but the university’s rules required him to have a Ph.D., and although he had finished his graduate work in 1979, he hadn’t yet turned in his doctorate, something that mystified his colleagues. “They had to get him to turn the thing in pronto, and have his committee pass him, so that they could move forward on the process,” the friend said. “This is a guy who published like a fiend, especially in those days. So why three years to get his Ph.D.? Well, his uncle Paul’s dissertation got Paul the Nobel Prize. And his uncle Kenneth’s dissertation got Kenneth the Nobel Prize. If you’re Larry, it’s pretty hard to turn in that dissertation.”

You rarely hear about the ways Summers's eminent family members loomed over him, even though it would have been impossible for them not to. This helpfully sheds some light on that, I think.

Also, Ryan has some great backstory on how Summers ended up in his current position: