Timothy Taylor writes that “the U.S. spends more than 50% more per person on health care than the next highest countries…and more than double per person what many other countries spend.” Yet the reasons for high spending without a corresponding increase in life expectancy aren’t what most people would assume:

• While America does have an obesity crisis it also has a younger population with low rates of smoking. So it is not the case that Americans are less healthier than others.
• The US also does not have more doctors or hospital beds per person than other rich, developed countries.
• While the US does buy brand-name drugs instead of generic drugs, the amount that could be saved from the move to generic drugs would only be about 2-3% of total healthcare costs.

So what does explain the high spending? High prices for hospital stays and high administrative costs. To read more about why these costs are so high, as well as other factors do and don’t contribute to the problem of high healthcare spending, and some scattered analysis of how American healthcare compares to that of other countries, click here.

Source: Conversable Economist

Katy June Friesen had the opportunity to interview Jeffrey M. Pilcher, an expert on Mexican food. In this interview they discussed the origins of the taco and some highlights include:

• One theory suggests that the word ‘taco’ has its origins in the dynamite (paper covered gunpowder) used in Mexican silver mines.
• Tacos are a relatively modern invention that can be traced back to the 1700s.
• Tacos were first mentioned in the United States in 1905, at a time when Mexicans began to migrate to the United States.
• They were seen as lower class food until the children of the original Mexican migrants began to advance economically.
• What is widely considered a standard taco today is really an amalgam of American and Mexican cuisine. Hamburger meat, cheddar cheese, iceberg lettuce and tomatoes are all signs of American influences.
• Hard shell tacos did not become mainstream until around the 1940s.

To read more about Lebanese-Mexican tacos, why tacos are like doughnuts, why Taco Bell has been unsuccessful in Mexico, the role that sexualization has played in the adoption of the taco, and why eating a taco was described as “biting a serpent” read the full interview here.

Source: Smithsonian

Via: Kottke

Nick Berry who formerly worked in Microsoft’s Casual Game division (the people behind the Xbox) used mathematics to come up with a strategy that can increase your likelihood of victory in the board game, Battleship. Highlights of Aisha Harris’s report on Berry’s strategies include:

• If you pick random squares on the board to target your opponent’s ships then on average it will take you 66 moves to sink your opponent’s battleship.
• You can reduce this to 65 by using a Hunt mode. In this mode you keep in mind that any ship has to occupy at least two squares. Therefore you should only target half the squares to find the ship.
• The real secret though allows you to drop it to 44 moves. This method requires an understanding of probability distributions and while you need a sophisticated computer to calculate all of the probabilities perfectly you can engage in a little bit of it yourself. If, for example, you’re looking for the aircraft carrier – the largest ship on the board – you know that it can’t exist on any stretches of ocean with less than five squares. Therefore you should target areas with the greatest probability of hiding a five slot ship.

To read more about Harris’s attempt to utilize these differing strategies, how Berry came up with these strategies, and the random nature of the game, click here.

Source: Slate

James Melik reviewed some of the history behind Switzerland’s most iconic product. Highlights include:

• The Swiss Army Knife was first patented over a hundred years ago in 1897.
• The company behind the knife makes 35,000 each day.
• In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks pocket knives were banned from airplanes. This caused sales of Swiss Army Knives to plummet by 30%.
• To deal with this the company released a ‘flight version’ of their product – it features no blades but has all the other functions.
• More recent innovations include an army knife with a USB stick.

To read more about the countries that the company currently supplies, how they feel about the Chinese market, how the company, Victorinox, got its name, and why they have never made a worker redundant for financial reasons, click here.

Source: BBC

If the product you’re using is free, the old adage goes, then you are the product. The BBC reports that Facebook has set its share price at $38 per share. Why would investors be willing to pay so much for it? Because it is by far the largest social network – there are 901 million users which make Facebook a high value product. CNN reports that if all of Facebook’s employees and executives exercise their share options then there will be about 2.8 billion shares of Facebook. At $38 each this means that Facebook will have a total worth of 106,400,000,000 – One hundred six billion and four hundred million.

Divide that among the users and your Facebook profile is worth $118.09. Tragically, we’re told that our banal stories about our pets are still worth nothing.

Megan McArdle applied economic theory to kidnapping and came up with the following conclusions:

• Hostage negotiations are ‘bilateral monopoly price negotiations.’ There is just one seller (the kidnapper) and one buyer (the hostage’s loved ones.)
• In such a market two things determine price: willingness to accept failure and capacity to pay.
• The party that is more willing to accept failure – that is an inability to mutually agree upon the worth of the hostage – has more bargaining power.
• Those who are able to pay more have less bargaining power. This is likely why Filipinos are significantly cheaper to ransom than Europeans.
• What shouldn’t matter is the established ‘market-price’ for a hostage. In such a situation there is no established market – there is just a series of one-off transactions.

To read more about deviations from this model, what this has to say about economics as a whole, how this relates to Somali pirates, and the mistake that both Caesar and his kidnappers made, click here.

Source: The Atlantic

Today if you want to share photos you go to Facebook, and if you want to upload and store them you use Dropbox or SkyDrive writes Mat Honan. But it didn’t always used to be this way – at one point Flickr was the place to achieve all those tasks. Then Yahoo bought Flickr and “murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way.” Here’s how:

• When Yahoo purchased Flickr it focused on integrating it into Yahoo’s ecosystem rather than developing new products or features. This alienated the site’s prior fan base. At one point it required all Flickr users to abandon their old accounts and adopt Yahoo accounts.
• Moreover Yahoo spent too much time trying to monetize Flickr’s sophisticated image index.
• Yahoo had all the pieces in place to dominate social on the web – but it never put them together and now Facebook is a behemoth that Yahoo can’t compete with.
• Yahoo also missed the boat on mobile. It took a long time for Flickr apps to be released, and to this day the apps are slow, ineffectual, and lack basic features.
• Today Yahoo is trying to right past wrongs and is trying to take Flickr in the right direction. However the road ahead is difficult and Yahoo’s future itself is mired in uncertainty. The best outcome might be for Yahoo to spin Flickr off or sell it to somebody else.

To read more of what is an extensive analysis not only of Flickr but of Yahoo and the recent history of the web as a whole, and to find out how this all relates to cats with laser eyes, as well as some choice anecdotes and quotes, click here.

Source: Gizmodo

James R. Healey discussed numbers that suggest we might see a resurgence of manual cars:

• In the first quarter of 2012 manual cars were 6.5% of new cars sold. This is double what the rate has been in the past five years.
• This is all the more impressive because only 19% of the available cars had a manual gear shift as an option.
• The typical argument in favour of clutch pedal cars is that they save on fuel consumption. However that is no longer true – today’s embedded computers ensure that automatic cars are just as fuel efficient if not more so.
• Part of the appeal of manual cars is that they can be thousands of dollars cheaper.
• In certain types of cars it is easiest to get most power from a manual transmission.

To read other reasons for the rise in the sales of manual cars, including the role of habit and user-friendliness, as well as to find out what Ford’s Focus marketing manager has to say about the phenomenon, or to take a look at the expanded numbers click here.

Source: USA Today

Via: Salon

It appears that Mitt Romney’s Mormon roots and business credentials are going to be scrutinized closely in the 2012 elections. What’s the link between Mormonism and business? Schumpeter highlighted:

• Less than 2% of the United States’ population is Mormon, yet Mormons have created some of the most notable companies in the country. They include Romney’s own Bain Capital as well as JetBlue, Credit Suisse’s Investment arm and Marriott hotels.
• Their success is likely in part due to their clean living. Mormons do not consume alcohol or drugs which means that their judgment is rarely ever clouded.
• A history of persecution has also made Mormons more self-reliant.
• As the only global religion to have been created in the past 200 years, it is more oriented towards, and comfortable with, business than other religions.
• Even their conceptualization of God involves order and organization.
• The Mormon church itself is well run with estimates of its revenue running into the billions.

To read more about the organization structure of the Mormon church, other notable Mormons, the mission that all Mormons must undertake, and why Mormonism is one of the three “Ms” at Harvard business school, click here.

Source: The Economist