As price theory illustrates, it is always interesting to see how economics shifts buying patterns, or is it vice-versa?
In this case, instead of having surgery done locally, a client is flying over to a new hospital in New Delhi to have his operation done. Even after the flight is taken into consideration, both he and his company will save over $10,000.
And India is hardly a bastion of free-enterprise.
Rather it is simply that the costs of complying with government regulations of hospitals on this side of the Pacific have risen so dramatically that it is now cheaper to outsource health-care to such venues.
Oh and the little fact that the medical industry here is a highly regulated monopoly, with stiff barriers to entry also means that generally speaking, the established firms typically do not have to worry about competition, because where else are you going to go… India?
Thank you very much, come again.
Via LewRockwell.
In the past, I’ve mentioned clubs solely organized around superficial themes such as being “really attractive.”
Continuing down this vanity trail, The Village Voice recently interviewed founders of high-IQ societies.
Talk about a group of anti-social, pompous individuals whose existential meanderings amount to little more than self-loathing… “oh why don’t people understand me?”
Their rhetorical questioning and seemingly nihilistic world-view makes you wonder if they really are as smart as they claim to be. Consequently, they do not sound much different than some of the posters at SuicideGirls.
In fact, the author noted that IQ tests generally fail to “really define what intelligence is” due to their inability to differentiate between knowledge and ability — which is a sentiment that Arnold Kling noted this year as well.
In other words, IQ tests by-in-large fail to measure any amount of motivation or creativity of an individual, which means their results have little correlation and applicability to the real-world (i.e. it obviously does not take a genius to make a small fortune, and there are plenty of examples of Poindexter’s making very poor decisions).
Genius, however, seems to be something that is strongly influenced by several controllable, environmental factors — it is not simply chance. B.K. Marcus has more on that.
And lastly, while I try to refrain from using the moniker “Gifted and Talented” because of all the baggage it carries (i.e. does that mean non-GT kids are ungifted and untalented?), reader DJC has pointed to a recent Wall Street Journal article that discusses a new summer-camp trend that is arguably institutionalizing intellectual elitism at the earliest of ages.
See also, this image from Gary Larson’s The Farside.
