Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. How to Prevent 14,000 Heart Attacks

Statins are one of the world’s most exhaustively studied and widely prescribed medicines. There is no debate about their ability to reduce the likelihood of strokes and heart attacks. On his blog Pharmacopoeia, Alex Kesin argues statins should be available over-the-counter. Doing so would “save more American lives than a decade of health campaigns”:

Say only one percent of the 130 million U.S. adults aged 40-75 grab an OTC statin. That is 1.3 million new users. Apply the CTT risk curve to a conservative 10-year ASCVD baseline of 5 percent and you avert ~14,000 heart attacks and strokes. Value each event at a (ludicrously low) 4 QALYs and you are buying 56,000 quality-adjusted life-years for pocket change1. The cost-per-QALY plunges below the price of a fast-food combo meal.

He has charts and good data to prove his point.

2. Coming Soon: The End of Internet Advertising

Web-based search – and Google’s business model – may be dying. Writing in Stratechery, Ben Thompson outlines the case:

Why go through the hassle of typing a search term and choosing the best link — particularly as search results are polluted by an increasingly overwhelming amount of SEO spam, now augmented by generative AI — when ChatGPT (or Google itself) will simply give you the answer you are looking for? In short, every leg of the stool that supported the open web is at best wobbly: users are less likely to go to ad-supported content-based websites, even as the long tail of advertisers might soon lose their conduit to place ads on those websites, leaving said websites even less viable than they are today — and they’re barely hanging on as it is!

3. Heirloom New York Apartments

Gothamist ran a story about a NYC family that, for four generations, has enjoyed an astonishingly cheap rent-controlled apartment. Alex Tabarrok reposted the story and explainsthe broken economic and social policy behind it:

New York has outdone itself with a rent control system so dysfunctional it manages to achieve the worst of all worlds. Not only does it suffer from the usual problems of reducing the supply of housing and dulling incentives for maintenance, but it has transformed over time from a safety net into a hereditary entitlement. Thanks to succession rights, what was meant to help the poor now functions as a kind of family heirloom — a subsidized apartment passed down like grandma’s china set.

4. Underground Strategy

 Hayden Clarkin and Aaron Shavel contend that the New York City subway is a marvel of urban transportation. The problem is that the stations have been decaying for years and look terrible. It’s a straightforward fix that just needs a budget and timetable:

The iconic mosaics that spell out station names, the signature white tiles don’t need a redesign. They need a refresh...Most stations could benefit from better lighting and cosmetic repair. We do not need to reinvent the wheel. The bones of the subway system are beautiful. The goal should be to repaint, repair facades, and clean up without layering on unnecessary features like tile-clad platforms. Paint is good enough for the green rail entrances that define the system. There is no need to replace them with expensive modern designs that erase the subway’s iconic character.

5. “Incredibly Bad Art”

Robbie Williams, the former British boyband star from the 1990s, has reemerged as a conceptual artist. His one-man show in London is reviewed without mercy by The Guardian. A masterpiece of takedown criticism:

The big printed canvases of computerised line drawings on the walls are filled with therapy speak, greeting card banter and patronising, meaningless affirmations. An aeroplane flying across a blue sky pulls a banner that reads: “Yes you are self centred, but what a marvellous self to be centred on.” And my stomach starts turning…On a basic, artistic level, the work looks bad and expresses incredibly superficial ideas very poorly. It’s a “live, laugh, love” sign slowly strangling you with its self-importance. It’s an Instagram self-help quote attacking your brain and eyes. It is incredibly bad art: so earnest, so superficial, it’s barely even funny.

6. Reverse Commute

The city of Tulsa has figured out how to exploitthe still-potent force of remote work: lure workers to relocate with cash incentives rather than persuading large companies to open local offices. Tulsa pays selected workers $10,000 to move to the city and stay at least a year. The results beat out most other urban economic development schemes:

“Tulsa Remote” attracts workers who would not have moved there otherwise: 58 to 70 percent wouldn’t have come without the incentive. That’s a high success rate compared to other economic development tools, such as business tax incentives. A business tax incentive of the same cost per job as Tulsa Remote would only entice 6 percent of businesses to build or expand in Tulsa that wouldn’t have done so otherwise. 

Websites Worth Reading

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