HeyJaredThe Cranky Corner: Putting Complexity Back in Policy
My attempt to simplify, but never over-simplify, the economics behind policy debates.
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Blame it on the mathematics of queues... (opens the original)
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While working on paper on workloads among healthcare providers, we kept hitting a wall with readers because they just could not understand how we were finding such low workloads (unused capacity in primary care is running upwards of 80% in many LMIC) when their experience suggested long queues. Part of the reason is because of huge skews in workloads, which means that even if the average provider has unused capacity, the average *patient* sees a busy provider. But part of the reason is also the
How overworked are healthcare workers in low-income countries? (opens the original)
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Written with Ben Daniels, Roberta Gatti and Andres Yi Chang. I will be participating in a panel on clinical workloads at the annual ODI Global Public Finance Conference on September 30 in Nairobi (I will be virtual). You can register to join online here.This blog first appeared in the CGD Blog Series; it is reproduced here under Creative Commons Attribution-Non
Mental Health and Economics: Reflections by Veena Das (opens the original)
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In the previous post, I suggested that the household may mediate between social conditions and individual mental health. But economists generally observe households as units: a roster, a consumption aggregate, perhaps measures of bargaining or allocation. I asked Veena Das how an ethnographer thinks about the household as a relational formation whose history cannot be recovered by adding up its individual members. What follows is her reflection.(Veena Das, former net ball champion (in India) and
Mental Health and Economics: What next (opens the original)
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To recap, for economists, the idea of mental health-poverty trap is important because it provides a rationale both for why there may be huge benefits to improving mental health and people do not undertake these investments themselves. Yet, my attempts to find evidence for such a trap have not been successful--eventually, we do show that a mental health-poverty gradient emerges when populations are subject to a large shock (a devastating earthquake in our study), but even in these populations, th
Mental Health and the Great Pakistan Earthquake of 2005 (opens the original)
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(An edited, shorter version of this post appears in VoxDev: https://voxdev.org/topic/health/when-poverty-linked-mental-health)On the morning of October 8th, 2005, just as children reached school at 8:50 in the morning, a powerful earthquake struck the Himalayan region. Measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale it left more than 80,000 people dead and virtually all physical infrastructure in the affected regions destroyed. Winter came shortly afterwards, and although relief providers and the government
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