J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 1093
January 12, 2015
First-World Problems: Live from Evans Hall
Can someone please tell me why my computer keeps trying to join ATTWiFi rather than AirBears?
Live from the Lafayette Reservoir: Missing Men Edition
65F, bright and sunny, 11:00 AM as of a Sunday morning...
During our 2.7 miles around the Lafayette Reservoir we met :
185 men and boys;
323 women and girls;
23 babies in strollers, backpacks, and snugglies; plus
74 dogs
525 people is a very substantial proportion of the 25,000 population of Lafayette, CA.
But where were the missing men?
138 of them.
They were not at work. They were not preparing brunch. They were not even watching tv sports. So what were they doing?
Noted for Your Afternoon Procrastination for January 12, 2015
Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog
Simon Wren-Lewis: On the Monetary Offset Argument
James Pethokoukis vs. "Big Solar"
Slides for a Talk: Thoughts on Making a Better Economics
Still Relevant: Sisyphus as Social Democrat: A Review of Richard Parker's 'John Kenneth Galbraith'
Kevin Drum: Non-Chart of the Day: Where's the Austerity?
Plus:
Things to Read on the Afternoon of January 12, 2015
Must- and Shall-Reads:
Neil Irwin:
The Depression’s Unheeded Lessons: A Review of Barry Eichengreen's Hall of Mirrors
Max Roser:
World Income Distribution: 1820, 1970, 2000
Simon Wren-Lewis:
On the Monetary Offset Argument
James Pethokoukis:
Should Republicans Ignore Income Inequality?
Kevin Drum:
Non-Chart of the Day: Where's the Austerity?
And Over Here:
Re-Reading My Weblog: May 2005
The Recent Thing Closest to a High-Quality DeLong Smackdown I Can Find: Legacy Journalism Skills Edition
Liveblogging World War II: January 12, 1945: Vistula–Oder Offensive
Slides for a Talk: Thoughts on Making a Better Economics
On the U.S. Health Care System as Boss Hogg in "The Dukes of Hazzard": Douglas Coupland in the Financial Times
We Are Watching the Golden Globes Tonight: Live from Hollywood
Liveblogging World War II: January 11, 1945: Situation Map
Hoisted from Other People's Archives from 97 Years Ago: The Already-Written Fidel Castro Obituary--(Rosa Luxemburg, "The Russian Revolution" Chapter 6)
Simon Wren-Lewis:
On the Monetary Offset Argument:
"A number of us are highly critical of moving to austerity so early in the recovery from the Great Recession. Market Monetarists... argue... the ZLB is not a problem.... I want to make a couple of observations. First, MM often [wrongly] imagine that they invented this offset argument.... Second, if you... want to take the MM argument seriously, you have to believe that monetary policy is [as] capable of offsetting the impact of austerity as much now as later... [and] that this is actually what monetary policy makers will do. If you believe the first, but are not sure about the second, then fiscal consolidation now is a mistake.... [This] exposes how weak the MM argument is at the ZLB.... Central banks at the moment are inflation targeting, and are likely to continue to do so, so enacting fiscal contraction in the hope that they might change is highly irresponsible. So the MM argument that the ZLB does not matter has to rely on Quantitative Easing (QE). But here there is a basic problem that MM has never to my knowledge answered. Just how much QE do you do to offset any fiscal contraction? We have no real idea, because we have so little experience..."
James Pethokoukis:
Should Republicans Ignore Income Inequality? | National Review Online:
"Inequality has increased across advanced economies. Macro factors such as globalization and technology deserve most — but maybe not all — of the ‘blame.’ Big Government loves to pick winners and losers in the private sector. Some lucky ducks owe their place in the 1 percent or 0.1 percent or 0.01 percent to federal favoritism. Conservatives shouldn’t mind at all when value-creating innovators and entrepreneurs strike it rich while crony capitalists do not. The precious tax breaks and subsidies that go to rent seekers, such as those in the agriculture and alternative-energy sectors, should get the ax. Sorry, Big Sugar and Big Solar..."
Kevin Drum:
Non-Chart of the Day: Where's the Austerity? | Mother Jones:
"Tyler Cowen... [and] Angus.... 'Either austerity means nominal cuts and we never had any of it, or austerity means cuts relative to trend and we are still savagely in its grasp.' Oh come on.... Let's take a look at this chart done right... real per capita government expenditures.... This is what austerity looks like: a drop in government expenditures. For a little while, in 2009 and 2010, stimulus spending partially offset... but by the third quarter of 2010 the stimulus had run its course.... If you run this chart back for 50 years you'll never see anything like it.... Finally, in 2014, the spending decline stops. Austerity is over, and we even start to see a small uptick. At the same time, the economy starts to pick up. This is not bulletproof evidence that austerity is bad for the economy, or that government spending helps it. But it's certainly consistent with the hypothesis, and it's really not hard to see."
Should Be Aware of:
John Mondragon:
Household credit and employment in the Great Recession
Chirag Mehta:
Tip of My Tongue
Matthew Yglesias:
I read the French far-right party's platform, and it gets one big thing absolutely right:
"At some point, European leaders have to face up to the fact that it's not all nuttiness and racism. Voters are turning to extreme parties because the mainstream parties have blundered into a years-long economic fiasco and they have no plan to end it.... The party's founder — Marine Le Pen's still-living father — was a fascist street-brawler as a youth, managed Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour's Vichyite presidential campaign in 1965, and traffics in not-at-all-disguised racism. In its current incarnation, the Front advances a genuinely extreme view on immigration (a 95 percent reduction in legal immigration levels), promotes anti-Muslim politics under the guise of secularism, and clearly practices dog whistle politics intended to appeal to a racist constituency (hardly a unique tactic).... In other respects, though, the party is not so extreme... hike military spending... build more prisons, discourage abortion, ban same-sex marriages, and ban affirmative action — fairly standard conservative ideas in the US. On finance, Le Pen sounds like Elizabeth Warren, calling for a separation of investment and commercial banking (Glass-Steagall rules, in US terms) and a financial transactions tax. They bemoan the privatization of public services. On the welfare state, they chart a third way. The (dubious) central premise seems to be that once you massively curtail legal and illegal immigration alike, affordability questions go out the window. Mothers of three or more children will secure earlier access to full social security benefits, family allowances will be raised, and more preschool funding provided. They claim (again, dubiously) that protectionist tariff policy will promote the re-industrialization of France.... But beyond this ideological grab-bag is a thoroughgoing and persuasive critique of European monetary arrangements... cite Milton Friedman as an authority on the idea that the Eurozone is not an optimal currency area... rightly say that the inability of Eurozone member states to conduct independent monetary policy 'condemns the people to austerity plans that do nothing but exacerbate the crisis'... call for the Bank of France to print money to cover French budget deficits. That's a step that could be dangerous in many scenarios, but given that France is currently experience negative inflation it seems well worth trying. There's much to dislike in the National Front's policy gestalt.... But the Europe stuff deserves an answer.... The Eurozone is fundamentally a political project rather than an economic one, but to succeed politically it needs to work economically. Right now it isn't, and Le Pen's brand of populist nationalism is a logical alternative..."
Re-Reading My Weblog: May 2005
There is not that much worth noting that I wrote in May 2005. I was storming through my American Economic History course here at Berkeley:
Economics 113: The Omnibus Great-Depression-and-After Lecture Notes File
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/05/economics_113_t.html
2005-05-10
I was trying--unsuccessfully--to write a good paper on threshold effects, nonlinearities, increasing returns, and economic growth:
Limitations of the Marshallian Toolkit
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/05/limitations_of_.html
2005-05-11
And I was testifying before the DPC as the Bush Administration Social Security Clown Show continued:
Statement on Social Security Reform
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/05/statement_on_so.html
2005-05-12
I expressed substantial skepticism with respect to Bernanke's "Global Savings Glut" argument:
The Global Savings Glut Argument
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/05/the_global_savi.html
2005-05-22
And I had some interesting musings on economic growth, class, inequality, social networks, happiness, and George Orwell:
Alameida of "Unfogged" Is Puzzled by Investment Banker Compensation Levels
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/05/alamedia_of_unf.html
2005-05-16
Class, Status, Prada
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/05/class_status_pr.html
2005-05-15
The feel-good thing to read is my Social Security Reform statement:
Statement on Social Security Reform
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/05/statement_on_so.html
2005-05-12
The feel-bad thing to read is on social networks and investment banker compensation levels:
Alameida of "Unfogged" Is Puzzled by Investment Banker Compensation Levels
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/05/alamedia_of_unf.html
2005-05-16
Over at Equitable Growth: Slides for a Talk: Thoughts on Making a Better Economics: Daily Focus
Economic Methodology, Economic History, and Economic Thinking##
Creating and supporting intellectual spaces in which insightful thoughts about how the economies of the present and the future work can be thought. As I see it, this requires combining a broad catholic range of empirical and theoretical inputs with effective quality control. But how? READ MOAR
Four Gaps:
Between what economists should say and what they do say
Between what economists do say among themselves and what they are heard to say outside the community
Between what economists are heard to say and what the public sphere concludes
Between what the public sphere concludes and what policies are actually implemented
Concentrate for now on the first two
What Went Wrong?:
In the development of economic theory
In the application of theory to policy before 2008
In the application of theory to policy since 2008
What economics was relevant?
Larry Summers and Martin Wolf at Bretton Woods
Bagehot, Minsky, Kindleberger
(Eichengreen, Akerlof, Woodford)
What Is Good and Bad Theory?:
Good theory is and can be nothing other than crystalized history
Microfoundations from first principles?
Paul Dirac's relativistic electron's magnetic moment: 1, 1.00118, 1.00115965221±4
Does this help us with protein folding and pharmaceutical molecule design?
Isaac Newton: "I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men"
Lost £20000
True then, true now
Bad Theory:
Assuming infinitely-lived rational-expections representative agents
Waving your hands
Hoping that all heterogeneity and frictions will cancel out
Almost as bad theory
Assuming ILRERA
Adding one friction
Hoping that all other heterogeneity and frictions will cancel out
Robert Solow:
"Attaching a realistic or behavioral deviation to the Ramsey model does not confer microfoundational legitimacy on the combination"
"Quite the contrary: a story loses legitimacy and credibility when it is spliced to a simple, extreme, and... irrelevant special case"
Two Branches:
Creating space to build better economic theory * Better communicating economic theory
Second branch easier
Second Branch: Better Communicating Economic Theory:
What does history teach us?
Keynes: The End of Laissez-Faire
J.R. McCulloch's parrot
Triumph of the popularizers
Marketeers: markets are efficient, governments are incompetent or corrupt
In Keynes's day there were planners: governments harness collective purpose to technocratic plans, markets are wasteful
Need a grammar of forms of organization--market, hierarchy, plan, collective, yardstick competition, regulated monopoly, etc.--and when they work and when they do not
Consider that, historically, education, health, pensions, infrastructure, technology, security not amenable to market provision--and that those are growing
First Branch: Space to Build Better Economic Theory:
Knowledge of history the sine qua non
Catholic approach to modeling strategies--broadening the tool set
Somehow, exercising effective quality control
The Recent Thing Closest to a High-Quality DeLong Smackdown I Can Find: Legacy Journalism Skills Edition
Apropos of:
Zumb:
I've been thinking about what...:
The legacy skills of reporting have lost their value..."
and my:
Legacy vs. Internet Media Once More: Just what are these 'legacy skills of reporting'...
that have lost their value?...
As best as I can see... the 'skills' of having a big Rolodex containing a lot of people who are confident that if they talk to you the story will show them or their cause in a better light. This is a valuable skill in the pre-internet age. Trading pieces of beat-sweetening for information (cf. what Matthew Yglesias described as "Richard Stevenson's love poem to Karl Rove") is unethical but efficient. With it, you can write a story in a day in a world in which actually finding, assembling, digesting, and processing the paper trail to write the story would take a week or more.
But it means that you are not a trusted information intermediary. You are, rather, something else--but it does get a job if not the job done...
Robert Waldmann responds by writing:
Robert Waldmann:
Comment on "Legacy vs. Internet Media Once More": "[Although] the exact same question came to my mind...
...Your description of the legacy skills is harsh....
My guess was... that 'internet skills' means 'higher googling,'--that is what used to be called (with a sneer) Lexis-Nexis journalism--and that 'legacy skills' were the ability to find sources and get them to talk....
I am not so sure either that legacy skills are unethical or that they are obsolete....
There is a legitimate highly ethical critically important role for reporters who know who whistle blowers are (and know they really do have access to the inside information) and who don't name them. The occasional real whistle blower is surrounded by hundreds or thousands of spin meisters. But similar skills are required to interview each of them.
Consider Seymour Hersh. Are you saying that reporters like him are no longer needed? His skills must be old--he used them in the 60s.
Now the key recent examples of journalists with legacy skills (as I and the Polk and Pulitzer committees define them) are Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Ewen MacAskill (Polk only) and Barton Gelman. The latest legacy media awards are split between the legacy and Omidyar media, but the skills are the old skills (including, most definitely, having given Snowden reason to believe that his information would be presented in a way which encouraged intepretations which would please him)....
The problem is that it is a rewarded skill to convince powerful people to supply one with official leaks--off the record communications which would be made on the record if that were necessary. The socially undesirable skill is the ability to convince extremely powerful people who have plenty of ways to communicate their views that you are on their side....
The bad legacy skills also include getting on the record quotes from people who are so powerful that their opinions are news, even if they are false opinions about matters of fact (or actually lies). The key bad legacy reporters would be Chris Matthews, the late Tim Russert--not Bob Woodward....
There can be a problem... the view that it is too hard and pointless to learn the facts (because, fairly or not, in politics perception is reality) so one should just cover the debate, and powerful fools and knaves are as good as, and easier to find than, genuine experts. But your definition didn't include the 'powerful', 'plenty of ways to get the message out', or important enough that it doesn't matter that their claims are false clauses.
I think that this is a fine DeLong Smackdown, even though Robert claims not to think so:
OK this is a minor and very verbose extension of your post, not a DeLong smackdown. Sorry. I'm trying to protect you from [having to read] Graeber, but you aren't helping--give me a break--write something dumb for a change.
MOAR like this, please, internet...
Liveblogging World War II: January 12, 1945: Vistula–Oder Offensive
Wikipedia:
[Vistula–Oder Offensive(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vistula–...
German intelligence had estimated that the Soviet forces had a 3:1 numerical superiority to the German forces; there was in fact a 5:1 superiority. In the large Baranow/Sandomierz bridgehead, the Fourth Panzer Army was required to defend from 'strongpoints' in some areas, as it lacked the infantry to man a continuous front line.... The offensive commenced in the Baranow bridgehead at 04:35 on 12 January with an intense bombardment by the guns of the 1st Ukrainian Front against the positions of the 4th Panzer Army. Concentrated against the divisions of XLVIII Panzer Corps, which had been deployed across the face of the bridgehead, the bombardment effectively destroyed their capacity to respond; a battalion commander in the 68th Infantry Division stated that 'I began the operation with an understrength battalion [...] after the smoke of the Soviet preparation cleared [...] I had only a platoon of combat effective soldiers left'.
The initial barrage was followed by probing attacks and a further heavy bombardment at 10:00. By the time the main armored exploitation force of the 3rd Guards and 4th Tank Armies moved forward four hours later, the Fourth Panzer Army had already lost up to ⅔ of its artillery and ¼ of its troops. The Soviet units made rapid progress, moving to cut off the defenders at Kielce. The armored reserves of the 4th Panzer Army's central corps, the XXIV Panzer Corps, were committed, but had suffered serious damage by the time they reached Kielce, and were already being outflanked. The XLVIII Panzer Corps, on the Fourth Panzer Army's southern flank, had by this time been completely destroyed, along with much of Recknagel's LXII Corps in the north. By 14 January, the 1st Ukrainian Front had forced crossings of the Nida river....
The only major German response came on 15 January, when Hitler (against the advice of Guderian) ordered the Grossdeutschland Division of Dietrich von Saucken from East Prussia to cover the breach made in the sector of the 4th Panzer Army, but the advance of Zhukov's forces forced it to detrain at Łódź without even reaching its objective. After covering the 9th Army's retreat, it was forced to withdraw southwest toward the Warthe.
On 17 January, Konev was given new objectives: to advance towards Breslau using his mechanised forces, and to use the combined-arms forces of the 60th and 59th Armies to open an attack on the southern flank towards the industrial heartland of Upper Silesia through Kraków. Kraków was secured undamaged on 19 January after an encirclement by the 59th and 60th Armies, in conjunction with the 4th Guards Tank Corps, forced the German defenders to withdraw hurriedly....
On 25 January, Schulz requested that he be allowed to withdraw his 100,000 troops from the developing salient around Katowice/Kattowitz. This was refused, and he repeated the request on 26 January. Schoerner eventually permitted Schulz to pull his forces back on the night of 27 January, while Konev – who had allowed just enough room for the 17th Army to withdraw without putting up serious resistance – secured the area undamaged. On Konev's northern flank, the 4th Tank Army had spearheaded an advance to the Oder, where it secured a major bridgehead at Steinau. Troops of the 5th Guards Army established a second bridgehead upstream at Ohlau.
In the northern sector of the offensive, Zhukov's 1st Belorussian Front also made rapid progress, as 9th Army was no longer able to offer coherent resistance. Its XXXVI Panzer Corps, which was positioned behind Warsaw, was pushed over the Vistula into the neighbouring Second Army sector. Warsaw was taken on 17 January, as Army Group A's headquarters issued orders for the city to be abandoned; units of the 2nd Guards and 3rd Shock Armies entering the city were profoundly affected by the devastation wrought by German forces after the Warsaw Uprising.... The 2nd Guards Tank Army pressed forward to the Oder, while to the south the 8th Guards Army reached Łódź by 18 January, and took it by 19 January. The 1st Guards Tank Army moved to encircle Poznań by 25 January, and the 8th Guards Army began to fight its way into the city on the following day, though there was protracted and intense fighting in the Siege of Poznań before the city would finally be taken.... The military historian Earl Ziemke described the advance thus:
On the 25th, Zhukov's main force passed Poznań heading due west towards Kuestrin, on the Oder forty miles east of Berlin. The path of the Soviet advance looked like the work of a gigantic snowplough, its point aimed on a line from Warsaw to Poznań, to Berlin. All of Army Group A was being caught up by the point and the left blade and thrown across the Oder. On the right the German had nothing except a skeleton army group that Hitler had created some days earlier and named Army Group Vistula....
The 2nd Guards Tank and 5th Shock Armies reached the Oder almost unopposed; a unit of the 5th Shock Army crossed the river ice and took the town of Kienitz as early as 31 January. Stavka declared the operation complete on 2 February. Zhukov had initially hoped to advance directly on Berlin, as the German defences had largely collapsed. However the exposed northern flank of 1st Belorussian Front in Pomerania, along with a German counter-attack (Operation Solstice) against its spearheads, convinced the Soviet command that it was essential to clear German forces from Pomerania in the East Pomeranian Offensive before the Berlin offensive could proceed.
By mid January, the SS and Nazi-controlled police units had begun forcing thousands of camp prisoners from Poland, East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania to walk westward away from the advancing Russian offensives. The death marches, which took place over hundreds of kilometers in sub-zero conditions, resulted in large numbers of concentration camp prisoners and allied POWs dying on route. On 27 January, troops from Konev's First Ukrainian Front (322nd Rifle Division, 60th Army) liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp....
The Vistula–Oder Offensive was a major success.... Within a matter of days the forces involved had advanced hundreds of kilometers, taking much of Poland and striking deep within the borders of the Reich. The offensive broke Army Group A, and much of Germany's remaining capacity for military resistance. However the stubborn resistance of German forces in Silesia and Pomerania, as well as continuing fighting in East Prussia, meant that the final offensive towards Berlin was delayed by two months, by which time the Wehrmacht had once again built up a substantial force on this axis.
On 31 January, the Soviet offensive was voluntarily halted, though Berlin was undefended and only approximately 70 km (43 mi) away from the Soviet bridgeheads across the Oder river. After the war a debate raged, mainly between Vasily Chuikov and Georgy Zhukov whether it was wise to stop the offensive. Chuikov argued Berlin should have been taken then, while Zhukov defended the decision to stop. The controversy is fueled by the fact that the Battle of the Seelow Heights (16–19 April) and the battle in the city of Berlin (April until early May) were costly to the Soviets.
The German losses were 295,000 soldiers killed and 147,000 captured, as well as 2,995 tanks, 552 planes, 34,000 vehicles, 15,000 artillery pieces and 26,000 machine guns...
January 11, 2015
We Are Watching the Golden Globes Tonight: Live from Hollywood
& hoping my first cousin Phil Lord gets one...
http://www.goldenglobes.com/2015_72nd_Golden_Globes_Nominees
On the U.S. Health Care System as Boss Hogg in "The Dukes of Hazzard": Douglas Coupland in the Financial Times
Hey! All of y'all who are not subscribing to the Financial Times, you really should be.
Weekend reading:
Douglas Coupland:
Oxy!: "I was in Atlanta...
...I checked into the hotel, a nice place, but my room, upon entering, was a dank meat locker. I looked around for the thermostat but I couldn’t find one, and I went to open the windows and they were sealed shut. So I asked the front desk how to make the room slightly less frozen and was told: ‘We keep all rooms at a consistent temperature. Guests seem to prefer it this way.’ I figured, what can possibly go wrong sleeping a few nights in a room like this?
By my third morning I have a cough: hack-hack. The next morning, my last at the hotel, the hack-hack has turned into a deep cough-cough. As the week progressed elsewhere in Georgia, the cough turned into bronchitis, and I could feel foamy bubbles percolating in my lungs when I lay down to sleep. Yes, there’s nothing sexier than wheezing, a bodily function seemingly designed to remind us all that death lurks around every corner. Finally, I dragged myself to a local medical clinic, and this is when things got really American.
‘Sounds like you’ve got bronchitis there.’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘If you’d left it another day, it’d have turned into pneumonia.’
‘Well, I’m glad we’re dealing with it now.’
‘OK. Let me see what I can do.’
My doctor vanished for a few minutes and I looked around. The clinic was pleasant enough, as were both the staff and my doctor, who returned a few minutes later with some filled-out prescription forms. ‘I’m going to give you a course of antibiotics. Take one a day in the morning with food. Just one.’
‘OK.’
‘And here’s a prescription for oxycodone. Take two a day.’
‘Oxycodone?’ It felt weirdly glamorous to be getting some oxy for the first time.
‘Yes. It’s a terrific cough suppressant.’
‘OK.’ In my head I was thinking, ‘Oxy — woohoo!’ . . . but in my body I was thinking, ‘But I also really would like to stop coughing up jelly-like deep-sea creatures into my dinner napkins.’ So I walked three minutes to the pharmacist and picked up my antibiotics, and then my oxy. My pharmacist looked at me gravely: ‘You know, you’re very lucky your doctor gave me this discount coupon on your oxycodone prescription.’
‘Oh — why’s that?’
‘This drug [use drug name; get sued] is $900 a pop.’
‘What?!’
‘Yes, but for you, with a coupon this first time, it’s $90.’
‘For a cough suppressant?’
‘Not just any cough suppressant. This is oxycodone.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘And there’s a bit of decongestant added to it as well.’
‘Hard to argue with that.’
So I started taking the antibiotics and . . . nothing happened. The bronchitis remained and, if anything, got a bit worse. With the oxy, though, it was different: let it be said here that life is truly great when you’re taking oxycodone. It really is. Annoying people stop being annoying. Repetitive tasks become engrossing. Writing and creative work become euphoric.
And then it turns on you.
It turned on me around Day Six. I woke up and the back of my skull felt like it had a skeleton hand with long, pointy fingernails clasping on to it. Of course, the only way to unclasp it was . . . more oxy. You can see where this is going. Let it be said here that I have an addictive personality and oxycodone is, as hillbilly populations will attest, extremely addictive.
By Day Nine the bronchitis was morphing into pneumonia, and pretty much 50 per cent of my cognitive output was based around analysing my bodily sensations and trying to figure out if they were real or psychosomatic but, either way, the only way to unclasp The Hand at the back of my skull was to take another pill, except by then it wasn’t fun any more. Every moment of the day felt like I was about to step into a too-hot bathtub and, concomitantly, much of my cognitive function was by then being deployed to monitor my outward behaviour so as to not look like I was hiding The Hand on the back of my skull.
So I stopped. And I returned to Canada, where my doctor looked at my prescriptions, puzzled. First, my antibiotic: ‘Your Florida doctor prescribed you this? [Name drug; get lawsuit.] We used to give this to two-year-olds and, even then, for your body weight, this ought to have been at least three times a day at quadruple strength.’
‘OK, but what about oxycodone? You have to admit, it did stop me from coughing.’
‘Yes, but you also almost became addicted to a $900-a-pop drug.’
‘True.’
‘And just to be clear, you were deliberately underprescribed antibiotics to keep you from getting well so as to ensure that you’d keep going back for more visits and repeat oxy prescriptions. And your doctor was obviously in on some kind of racket with the pharmacist — all that coupon nonsense.’
‘All true.’
Within 48 hours, my pneumonia essentially vanished thanks to two azithromycin tablets. But it took almost a week for The Hand to permanently unclasp itself from my skull. Now that the experience is over, I feel as if I’d driven through a speed trap in a small Ozark town and had been at the mercy of the local Boss Hogg. All of this because of bronchitis. What if I’d had something bigger than mere bronchitis? What bigger and scarier speed traps would await me or you or anyone else down the US medical road?
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