Daniel Lubetzky

A study recently found that children on Medicaid are given antipsychotic drugs at a rate 4 times higher than those on private health insurance.

The implications for health and justice are deep. Antipsychotic drugs are severely overprescribed – and their long-term damage to society has not yet been registered.

The article posits this trend among the poor may be related to short- sighted measures to "efficiently" control problem children.

A more serious and systemic problem is the abuse by the pharmaceutical industry of government programs – and their undue influence over certain segments of the medical community.

These are scary developments that seem to get scarier with time. A serious and systemic response is necessary.

Interesting article about an investment scandal in Lebanon that has tarnished Hezbollah’s reputation.

This article provides some proof that, Putin’s KGBesque bravado aside, Russia’s economy is a house of cards waiting to fall.

[Read more →]

David Brooks wrote an interesting column on the working values America desperately needs to regain in order to forestall a national economic decline amidst hedonistic indulgence and overspending beyond its peoples’ and its government’s means. 

Immigrants with nothing to fall back on tend to work hard and build themselves.  Children of rich and successful people are less likely to have that same work ethic.  At a macro level, the same challenge befalls nations as a whole.  How do we regain the work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit tied to long-term value creation rather than short-term debt escalation?

[Read more →]

From Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs:

You have to, in your own life, get people to want to work with you and want to help you. The organizational chart, in my opinion, means very little. I need my bosses’ goodwill, but I need the goodwill of my subordinates even more. Because they can make it easy for me to get information. They’ll come to me and say: “Look at this. Do this.” Or they can give it to me begrudgingly, if they’re hostile.

Now why would they be hostile? Why would they be negative? Why would they be slow to give me information? Because they thought I wasn’t good for them. They thought I’d be bad for them.

Life is always about contracts that you make with people. Very few of them are written. Most of them are implicit, and most of them evolve out of a course of dealing and understanding. And if you are good for your people, they’ll be good to you, and help you and help propel you up in your career.

By the way, being good to them doesn’t mean you pay them more or you’re more liberal, or you let them get away with things. Most people, what they want is to be better. They want to work for a great organization. They want to feel good about themselves. They want to not so much get promoted, as be promotable. They want to evolve. And if you’re the kind of person that they think will help them do that, they’ll give you a loyalty that’s the most sincere kind of loyalty.

from NYTimes interview: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/business/13corner.html?sq=lessons%20learned%20at%20goldman&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=print

In three paragraphs, Peter Goodman [http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/business/economy/13excerpt.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=big%20spenders&st=cse] plainly describes how an administrator ended in a homeless shelter:

Big Spenders? They Wish

By PETER S. GOODMAN

Millions of Americans have lost homes, jobs and savings to the financial crisis and recession. While greed and extravagance played roles, many lived beyond their means because their paychecks shrank. This article is adapted from “Past Due: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy,” by Peter S. Goodman, a reporter for The New York Times. The book, to be published Tuesday by Times Books, explores the origins of the crisis and suggests ways to reinvigorate the economy.

ONE afternoon in November 2006, a policeman spotted an expired license plate on Dorothy Thomas’s 10-year-old Toyota Corolla as she drove through San Jose, Calif. He ordered her to pull over.

Struggling under the weight of thousands of dollars in credit card bills, Ms. Thomas was perpetually short of cash. She had not bought a $10 auto registration sticker. The officer checked his database and recognized that she had already been ticketed once before for the same thing. He arranged to have her car towed away.

“I got down on my knees and begged that officer,” Ms. Thomas recalled.

As she watched her car being hauled off, she sensed that this was the beginning of a descent into a crisis from which she might not easily escape. Without money to pay the towing and storage fees, she could not extract her car from the lot, and the tab soon grew to $1,600. Without a car, she could not reach the hospital where she worked in the administrative offices, so she lost her $16-an-hour job. Without a paycheck, she could no longer pay the rent on her modest home. She moved to Oakland, where a friend lived in a beaten-down, rented house on a street they called Crack Avenue. By year’s end, Ms. Thomas, then 49, was occupying a bunk at a homeless shelter, searching in vain for a job in an economy plagued by unemployment.

Time Magazine wrote a very compelling piece about "The High Price of Cheap Food." It should be required reading, as should the movie Food Inc. and Michael Pollan’s books, which presumably inspired this article.

[Read more →]

Shaikh Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, Crown Prince of Bahrain, wrote a refreshing column in the Washington Post, telling Israelis and Arabs some truths they need to hear about the imperative of moving towards conflict resolution.  Unfortunately earnest non-partisan nuanced talk doesn’t get as much coverage as biased one-sided positions.  But it is worth reading.

[Read more →]

I have been hearing many cliches about how the New York City Real Estate market at the end of the day will not adjust as much as the rest of the real estate market because of scarcity.  But the economist in me doesn’t buy it.  Yes, as supply is somewhat limited, real estate in NYC should reasonably appreciate more solidly than in the expanses of San Antonio, TX, where land is plenty.  But the crazy run-up in prices over the last decade+ cannot be reconciled solely by scarcity, and as bubbles burst in all other asset categories, so to they will (and have started to) in Manhattan real estate.

It is surprising that so few resources are available online to track historical trends in real estate – per square foot and/or per median and average home prices, for NYC and otherwise.

It almost seems as if real estate brokers want to focus prospects purely on 5-year timelines, and that is all they publish and share.

So here are the few sites I found useful, in case others find them handy:

• Free By 50 has some great posts and analysis:

• Explains why Average Home Appreciation across the US has averaged about 5.9% per annum nationally over the last 40 years (and 6% in NYS), but why this number may be inflated by recent exorbitant re appreciation, and why thus the more accurate/conservative annual estimate is 4%

My friend Justin Fox appeared on the Daily Show and provided some compelling insights about why markets and people behave irrationally…