It’s getting cold on this island:

— Meet the folks who think killing cap and trade will lead to climate reductions through wishful thinking.

— Nothing vague about the homoerotic elements in Moby Dick.

— Shaq says he’s okay with the NBA’s new twitter policy.

— I’ve been enjoying my fast Swedish internet.

— Not enjoying Sweden’s obsession with making you take a number to wait for service.

Song of the day is from Koop, a band I hadn’t heard of before coming to Sweden: “Koop Island Blues”.

I thought I might add that not only do I not believe that gerrymandering is responsible for political polarization, I don’t even think gerrymandering has played a large role in making House seats uncompetitive. For any given district and any given incumbent, there’s some set of ideological properties in a challenger that should be winnable. To think of it in a stripped-down way, any district, no matter how gerrymandered, has a median voter and a sufficiently motivated challenger can make a good shot at finding him.

The real issue, I think, is the relative scarcity of campaign funds. If every major party nominee in every House district in America were guaranteed a reasonable sum of public funds with which to conduct his campaign then I think you’d suddenly see all sorts of interesting candidates popping up in “uncompetitive” districts. This, of course, is precisely why incumbent legislators would be loathe to vote for such a public financing scheme. But that’s the real issue.

Points for blood-letting, Hans von Gersdorff (surgeon), Field book of wound medicine, 1517

This morning I went to the Stockholm Stadsmuseum where they had, among other things, an unremarkable little diorama showing pre-modern health care as practiced in Sweden. Lot pre-modern health care elsewhere in Europe it involved a lot of bloodletting and other bogus practices based on a completely wrongheaded understanding of how disease works.

This is all pretty well-known as a matter of history and science. But it occurred to me that it’s perhaps something worth thinking about in the context of modern health care debates. After all what typically happens when the technology for doing something doesn’t exist is that it just doesn’t get done. People started buying radios when people learned to build radios that worked. Why were all these people buying health care services that didn’t improve health? And what would a health reform debate in 1500 look like? On the one hand, I guess you’d have liberals saying it was really unfair that poor people couldn’t get health care and advocated for taxes and a regulated list of covered services to which everyone was entitled. And on the other hand you’d have free market economists saying that this interference in the market was a terrible idea, was going to lead to rationing, would stifle innovation, etc. Somewhere you’d have a 16th century Shannon Brownlee protesting that actually the doctors were just killing people with their leeches, but nobody would listen to her.

Now obviously modern medicine’s not the same as that. But whatever elements of human psychology—some combination of wishful thinking plus Robin Hanson’s point that we spend on health care for relatives not only because we care but also to show we care—created a viable market in non-cures are still with us. And that’s got to be an important factor in why it’s hard to design satisfactory health care systems. It’s noteworthy when you compare what different countries do that there’s enormous diversity in policy while the diversity in actual outcomes is hard to find and hard to measure.

Spencer Ackerman recommended this post on lithium from CNAS’ “natural security” blog. I enjoyed parts of it, but this leapt out at me as a red flag:

But going forward, the center of lithium influence is likely to shift to Bolivia, since vast reserves lie beneath its Salar de Uyuni salt flats. For the United States, this could be a problem: the Morales government remains hostile to U.S. concerns, and there is potential for instability given serious rifts in Bolivian politics.

This mostly strikes me as an example of how the American foreign policy establishment’s ability to gin up “threats” to our national security is really impressive, and paranoia will be a renewal resource in our political discourse for the foreseeable future. Tom Lee informs me that this account is wrong in several technical aspects but even if it is this kind of “war for lithium” thinking is misguided.

Probably the best case for why it’s misguided is to just remind everyone about the Hugo Chavez experience. Venezuela controls lots of oil. Oil is a valuable resource. Not only does America use a lot of oil, but we really use a uniquely large amount of oil. And Chavez is hostile to US concerns. In the current parlance, he’s “anti-American.” And he’s got us over the barrel!

Except . . . he doesn’t. What happens is that at the margin Americans have lots of money and want more oil whereas Venezuela has lots of oil and wants more money so in exchange for money we get oil from Venezuela. It’ll be just the same with Evo Morales and his lithium. If US firms and consumers want lithium, they’ll have to pay money to the people who own it. But if the world’s largest lithium reserves were in Italy or Iceland or Ireland or Illinois it would still be the same—people who want access to lithium ore will need to pay money to the people who control it. Ownership of natural resources is useful insofar as it helps you get money. But developing countries whose economies depend on exporting natural resources need their customers more than we need them (if Iran stopped exporting oil it’d be a disaster for the US but a much bigger disaster for Iran) and it’s in everyone’s interests to keep the commerce flowing.