i think his edge was the more 70’s looking sideburns and the stubble.

I’m afraid you won’t find much in the way of get-rich-quick ideas in the Black Swan. You will however find an amazing essay that touches on many aspects of life, including the philosophy of science, history, and prediction.

I don’t know if I would call it pessimistic, although you could read it that way–that basically you have little ability to predict the major events that will shape your life and the world. I found it to be rather uplifting actually–if much of your life is based on luck, then it takes some of the pressure off. Anyway, you should definitely read it. It’s the book I tell everyone about when they ask me what I’ve been reading lately.

Besides, it’s hard not to love a writer who cites Bastiat, Popper, and Hayek as (a few of ) his intellectual precursors.

Thanks for commenting.

A few things come to mind. First is that many of the problems you describe are caused by government involvement in the first place. These include problems with regulation, which force insurance prices up, and the cartelization of doctors, which creates a shortage.

In other words, health care has not behaved like a free market, precisely because it is not a free market. Since you admit that many of the problems that plague health care are created by the government, I wonder why you have so much faith in the ability of further government involvement to solve the problems.

You say “health care is a different sort of commodity.” What about health care makes it unique so that the laws of economics don’t apply?

As for doctors not healing people on purpose…Well if doctors had a cure for AIDS I think they would be prescribing it. I don’t know about you but if I had AIDS and there was a cure, I would want the cure and I would find a doctor that would give it to me. I haven’t seen any evidence that indicates that doctors purposely give patients sub-optimal treatment in order to keep them around as customers, although I understand there is an incentive there.

There are, however, other incentives at play and doctors will also be motivated for reputation reasons and moral reasons. Reputation incentives figure into the bottom line in the long run, but not nearly as much as they would in a completely free market. Again, this is a problem of too much government involvement as opposed to too little.

The government gets most of its money by fiat- by simply printing it. Also, it’s a matter of allocation. We could have less war and more health care. Also, you say that prices are used to ration care. Well, in the current system the prices are determined in a complex way by the health insurance companies. There’s no free market creating a price point. It’s rationing, just by insurance companies.

Although doctors don’t actually give people diseases (at least I don’t think they do- from a strictly profit motive angle, it would be in their interest) , they don’t necessarily have an incentive to heal them either. If you have a customer, you want him to come back. Once a doctor has healed a patient, that patient doesn’t come back. If you look at our current health system, it’s based on getting people to take a drug for the rest of their lives. Look at AIDS, for example. No cure, but if you take the expensive meds for the rest of your life, you can live with it.

Also, in a real market economy there is competition to keep prices down. In health care, there’s not much competition. There’s a lot more grocery stores selling lots more different brands of apples than there are hospitals offering neurosurgery. Plenty of of places have just one hospital. There’s not much overlap even in big cities.

The government already has to be in health care in a big way just to regulate it and keep it safe. You can’t get surgery at CostCo.

In Trinidad, there is private health insurance and there are private doctors for those that want to pay for that.

I don’t think profit is immoral. I’m a capitalist. However, I’m a realist as well. Get real. Health care is a different sort of commodity. Even the big capitalists realize that we’re not competitive as a country anymore because too much of the price of a product goes into paying for private health care for the workers.