I'm hoping for some serious jailtime

... for everybody involved:

Don't believe everything you read on the internet is a good rule to follow, but it turns out that you can't even believe a 'peer reviewed scientific journal' as details emerge that drug manufacturer Merck created a phony, but real sounding, peer-review journal titled the 'Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine' to publish data favorable to its products. 'What's sad is that I'm sure many a primary care physician was given literature from Merck that said, "As published in Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, Fosamax outperforms all other medications...."' writes Summer Johnson in a post on the website of the American Journal of Bioethics. One Australian rheumatologist named Peter Brooks who served as an 'honorary advisory board' to the journal didn't receive a single paper for peer-review in his entire time on the board, but it didn't bother him because he apparently knew the journal did not receive original submissions of research. All this is probably not too surprising in light of Merck's difficulties with Vioxx, the once $2.5 billion a year drug that was pulled from the market in September 2004, after a study showed it doubled the risk of heart attack and stroke in long-term users resulting in payments by Merck of $4.85 billion to settle personal injury claims from former users, but it bears repeating that 'if physicians would not lend their names or pens to these efforts, and publishers would not offer their presses, these publications could not exist.

Source:

If true, I would also hope for fine that would pay for healthcare in Africa for a few years.

Not so helpful protection

I recently started a new job. It's pretty time intensive - 60 hours a week is a norm, on average. More when necessary. The work is interesting, well (or even extremely well paid, depending on your criteria), colleagues are smart and the whole atmosphere is friendly (so far, as far as I can tell). So the hours seem acceptable.
Sometimes, there is just too much work and the workload increases to unreasonable levels. In the US, the firm asks you to measure true hours working. You report truthfully (there is really not reason not to - if there is not enough work, you are expected to be home, "on the beach". And if you get to insane levels, somebody will come and help you (seriously, man).
The great socialist left (and right) in Europe, probably at the end of the industrial revolution, decided that working about 50 hours a week a year should be illegal. Why the rule might make sense if you work in a factory for minimum wage, it does not make much sense for highly qualified jobs, when you actually want to work more, but should not. Nobody can tell how much you actually work, of course, but you have to report the hours and such reports have to be archived.
This idea of protection is actually harmful. Instead of truthful reports, you have to lie, otherwise your employer (and thus also you) would have a problem. It may be ok to lie to the government (it is not for me, but so what), but it is really stupid that you have to lie to the company that wants to know, but legally cannot (should not) for its own protection.
If I may ask, I don't want any more protection like this. Thank you.

Happy days

I'm happy to inform you that this information came by mail

Your plans to leave the U.S. on the [July 16] have been approved...

Great! So I'm actually allowed to go home. I should not forget to apply for permission to breathe when I get there.

What's wrong with these people?

There is an interesting story going on here (in NY, to be precise), where a long-time fighter against prostitution was proved (and he eventually admitted) to have a sex with a prostitute. (See summary and a nice comment here.) Of course, this starts the (usual) debate whether the prostitution should be illegal (it is in the USA) and whether it is a private matter of a politician who fights against it (not). What is much more fascinating to me is the need to use a prostitute in the first place. He has a wife, he is not eighteen (or twenty something), he could probably get a date or something, so why does he need to pay couple of thousand dollars for a girl, several times? I could understand him watching porn (that's legal anyway), or have an extra-marital affair. But I don't understand getting a prostitute - the gap between these things seems so huge to me.

Richard Thaler on Libertarian Paternalism

Richard Thaler introduced at UCSD his new book on Libertarian Paternalism. This seems to be a strange title for a Chicago guy (and he gets some heat from his colleagues) and maybe even an oxymoron (which it's not). The talk was, in short, fascinating. The basic idea is that people are not perfectly rational in every single decision they make (which may sound suspicious to economists, but seems trivial for people), and thus they make mistakes. They even make mistakes in a predictable way. They regret these mistakes. The most frequently used example is 401(k) plan: usually, these are opt-in plans - you get in, save money, your employer gives some more money and life is beautiful. Except that people don't opt-in for some reason. Presumably, they face tough choice (easily 80 different hedge funds), they don't have time to thing and decide etc.They end up not only losing possible returns on their own savings, but also employer's contribution. But if they have the opt-out choice, they stay in and save. The designer (government, employer) who has interest of such people in mind might find useful to use opt-out instead of opt-in system. Everybody is free to go (libertarian), if they want to, but if they don't do anything, they are in (paternalism).
The idea of a design of a system that does something for you if you choose not to do anything, but allows you to leave whenever you go will hopefully get more attention in the future. It does not restrict your freedom (costs of saying "no" are negligible), yet it makes the choice for many people easier and they end up satisfied with this decision.
The idea is not limited to 401(k) plans. Among other fascinating examples, I like the one that saves lives and not money. It's the organ donation status. In some countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Luxemburg, Norway, Singapore, Slovenia, and Spain), everybody is presumed to be willing to donate his/her organs in case of death - opt out is easy. In other countries (USA), one has to opt-in to be considered a donor.So what?

The result is that in “presumed consent” nations over
90 percent of people make their organs available for donation, whereas in the United
States, the corresponding number is below 20 percent.

( (Cass R. Sunstein and Richard H. Thaler)
Simple policy, simple decision and huge impact.

Example like allow me to hope that libertarian paternalism is a future of applied economics. Previously, government simply regulated (enforced, restricted, forbid or taxed) a behavior. We are at the point in which we understand subtler errors of human behavior. And we can use this knowledge to design existing (or even new) regulations better for everybody, especially if some choice about the design needs to be done. The nice libertarian touch is that nobody is forced to do anything, as long as costs of saying "no" are trivial, which they should.

Anyway, if you have an hour to spare, you can listen to Richard Thaler himself at a very similar talk at EconTalk.org