Category: Economics

Your Candidate Sucks: Democracy Troubles

Now that we basically have our two major candidates, let’s do a retrospective look at some of the political candidates our system was able to produce, reject, or approve over this election cycle.  Let’s start with Republicans.

In early 2015, the prevailing wisdom was that Hillary Clinton was going to be the Democratic nominee.  She looked like a strong candidate but one with a low ceiling; she had great name recognition and experience, but also was (and is) tied to the Obama administration, especially its foreign policy. I’d argue she’s appeared even weaker over the course of the primaries than she did in 2015 as big swaths of Democrats have shown hesitation to embrace her candidacy. Given this situation, Republicans should have been able to come up with candidates that played well against Hillary; what they got is someone who (as of May 2016), isn’t very competitive. If only there had been someone else to pick from!

Wikipedia counts 17 Republican candidates. We won’t spend lots of time on all of them, but it’s worth seeing some of the candidates that were rejected. Continue reading Your Candidate Sucks: Democracy Troubles

Should Tesla charge more for their cars?

Tesla Motors announced their newest car, the Model 3, is now available for pre-order.  It’s always been Tesla’s stated purpose to bring down the cost of electric vehicle dramatically, by first charging people for high end cars, and using those profits to innovate the cost of cars down to affordable levels for the general public. It’s an admirable goal that combines the best intentions with good incentives, using idealism to drive profits.

Tesla has, confusingly, sold 3 models of cars prior to the Model 3: the early Tesla Roadster (all over $109k price), the ultra-luxury sedan Model S (starting price at $76k, but most sell at over $100k), and the newer Model X SUV (about $5000 more than the Model S).  Few Model X’s have been shipped, and only about 2500 Tesla Roadsters were ever built. The vast majority of Tesla’s automobiles have been Model S’s between 2012-2016. In that 4 year span, roughly 107,000 cars have been sold worldwide, with about 63,000 in the United States.

In the past couple weeks, Tesla has received 325,000 almost 400,000 Model 3 pre-orders.

Making matters worse, Tesla has said they expect to start shipping at the end of 2017. Some analysts say that Tesla will ship about 12,000 cars in 2017 and another 60,000 in 2018.  But this might be optimistic, since Tesla was supposed to start building the Model X last year, but only got a couple hundred out the factory before January.

Tesla will get better at manufacturing, but they are not ready to switch from the high end market to the mass market (or as mass market as a $35,000 base model). The Tesla “master plan” is not ready to attack this level of the market yet, but that’s not to say it isn’t successful in other ways; as Ben Thompson wrote: “The real payoff of Musk’s ‘Master Plan’ is the fact that Tesla means something.”  In fact it means so much that the demand for a $35k Tesla in 2017 is something like 10x predicted supply! Tesla should take advantage of this.

The obvious economic answer to quantity demanded outstripping quantity supplied is to raise the price.  Scaling Tesla’s manufacturing output to new heights is not going to be easy, but it will be easier with additional resources. And Tesla could use some additional resources (they lost about $300 million in 2014). Right now, people will be waiting around for their cars for years. Why not take some more from people who want a car sooner, so that more innovation can be done to help the people on the back-end?  That’s Tesla’s whole plan anyway.  Creating an affordable family car that you can only make 50,000 of every year doesn’t help many families!

Now, of course, it’s true that some of the appeal of Tesla is that they are trying to transform the auto industry, and if they charge more for the Model 3, one could argue they aren’t as transformational as they claim.  But I’d counter with Thompson’s comparison to Apple, in that the Tesla brand itself is drenched in cool. Tesla’s brand is quite valuable, and the best way to help humanity with that brand is to push harder for innovation.

An awesome, widely available $35,000 electric car will come, but for now, Tesla has the opportunity to marshal more resources to build a better future; it would be silly to not take advantage of that.

Photo Credit: “Candy Red Tesla Model 3”, is a derivative of this photo by Steve Jurvetson, used under CC BY 2.0. “Candy” is licensed under CC BY 2.0 by Mariordo.

Follow-up: Not that wrong about Obamacare

Anytime we see something that challenges our worldview, it’s important to acknowledge it, and investigate whether our model of the world is incorrect, or at least to acknowledge our mistake. Otherwise, we cease to be engaging in discussion and building on knowledge. About a year ago, Josh, one of the former authors on this blog, wrote an excellent piece about how his predictions of massive failure for Obamacare did not seem to be coming true:

I Was Wrong About Obamacare

But now, a year further along, it seems the healthcare system isn’t doing so hot. The Wall Street Journal wrote in October:

Among this population of the uninsured, HHS reports that half are between the ages of 18 and 34 and nearly two-thirds are in excellent or very good health. The exchanges won’t survive actuarially unless they attract this prime demographic: ObamaCare’s individual mandate penalty and social-justice redistribution are supposed to force these low-cost consumers to buy overpriced policies to cross-subsidize everybody else. No wonder HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell said meeting even the downgraded target is “probably pretty challenging.”

Late in December, Reason reported:

United announced during an investor briefing Thursday that it was expecting a whopping $425 million hit on its earnings this year, primarily due to mounting losses on its Obamacare exchange business. “We cannot sustain these losses,” United CEO Stephen Hensley declared.

And also in January:

Aetna, for example, has already dropped out of the exchange market in two states. A dozen of the 23 non-profit co-op plans backed by the law have already closed up shop, causing about 600,000 people to lose health plans, and a Politico analysis indicates that most of the remaining co-op plans are in trouble. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas and North Carolina both lost a sizable chunk of money on its exchange business during the program’s first year. The financial outlook for a number of insurers participating in Obamacare, in other words, doesn’t look good. And there are few signs that it is set to improve in the near future.

February:

Yet, the mandates aren’t working as planned. My colleague Brian Blase recently summed up the difference between the projected numbers of people who were expected to enroll in the ACA during this third open enrollment and the people who actually did. He notes a high estimate of 12.7 million people signing up for an exchange plan. But Blase actually thinks there will only be an average of 11 million enrollees this year. That’s 16 million fewer than the Rand Corporation predicted, 11.8 million fewer than the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services predicted, 12.1 million fewer than the Urban Institute predicted and 10 million fewer than the Congressional Budget Office projected.

It seems more likely than not that there will need to be some sort of change to the health system. Perhaps Josh’s predictions were too dire, but overall, I would retitle his post “I was still mostly right about Obamacare”.

 

Legalize Organ Markets

In 1996, Hurricane Fran hit Raleigh, knocking out power and trees. Duke Political Science Professor Michael Munger describes the response of several citizens from a neighboring town who decided to exploit the situation.  These budding opportunist entrepreneurs rented some refrigerated trucks, filled them with ice and drove to Raleigh, where they sold the bags of ice for about $8 each.  Raleigh police eventually arrived, arrested them for price gouging, and allowed the ice to melt with virtually none distributed to the locals.

Continue reading Legalize Organ Markets