Along the same lines, he could inoculate himself from the "pretty boy" charge by proclaiming his bisexuality.

The problem with that line of reasoning, ogged, is that it would take at least a full minute to articulate.

He should also get a cheetah, and the purchase the corpse of a dead celebrity at great expense. Eva Peron, maybe.

Not really, Ben: "Class warfare? Have you seen my house?"

I wonder if Edwards really has the fire in the belly that's needed. If he really wanted to win, he'd have invited MTV Cribs to see the place.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

The line would be that he wants to prevent other Americans from succeeded the way he has, by pulling the ladder up after him. This is what they say on Free Republic about Warren Buffett when Buffett says that it's unfair that his taxes are so low.

I think that's the best way to spin it.

Also, did you see that Edwards is setting up shop in Second Life?

LB, you're a genius.

I don't think so, really. In fact, I think it hurts for the same reasons you described. "He says he's for the poor but he lives in a mansion, therefore he's a hypocrite" is a fallacy that obviously resonates to a lot of people, even liberals. "He lives in a mansion and he's a hypocrite" quickly lends itself to "he wants to send ordinary Americans to toil in the Siberian salt mines" and voila, class warfare against that snooty rich Edwards.

Not that I know anything about Second Life. Just thought it was interesting, although I don't know if it will be effective. Does look like he's not completely abandoning the internet though (although I think working with bloggers would be better use of resources).

Just yanking your chain.

Obama: all the boys want to be him, and all the girls want to fuck him.

Edwards: has a really nice crib.

It could work.

11: Huh?

Nevermind.

Oh neat. "Vote Edwards! Just as crass as the rest of us, but purtier!"

Oh well, whatever.

Damn you, DaveL, for messing up my bad joke.

That's what America loves. By which I mean me too -- while exactly what it takes to be just as crass as me is probably a little off the statistical norm, I'd vote for someone who was in a heartbeat.

Bet you think you're crasser than me, dontcha?

19: Mostly true, but there's some tension between loving the guy who validates who we are and loving the guy who convinces us we can be better than we are. Edwards has seemed like he was going for (1) rather than (2), but maybe he has to cede (2) to Obama and try the regular guy thing after all (see JM's 13).

1: Apo, I don't think that's "inoculation" -- sounds like "ownership" to me.

This is where it would be helpful for him to point out how progressive taxes and government programs, and not Reganesque-low taxes, that helped get him from celebrating his wedding at Wendy's to owning a mansion.

21: Shit, this time I did say it backwards. Edwards has seemed to be going for (2) rather than (1), but...

23: If by "progressive taxes and government programs" you mean "claiming to channel the spirit of a dead little girl during a closing argument in order to convince the jury to award his clients a large sum of money, among other personal injury lawyer techniques," then yes, he should do that.

The above should not be constituted as a declaration of animosity against John Edwards. I sincerely plan to vote for him in the Democratic primary here in NC, assuming he's still in the race.

In other words, I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'.

I think Ogged just wants Edwards' house.

Evidently the new chez Edwards is near my family. Every so often I get an excited call about how they've bumped into The Hair at Kroger.

This is delusional. Seeming like Richie Rich is never the way to be.

Charming as always. Yep, if we know anything about the average American, it's that they hate and fear the rich.

Charming as always. Yep, if we know anything about the average American, it's that they hate and fear the rich.

I don't think baa implied hate or fear. But seriously, if one of our candidates gets tagged as "Richie Rich" by the media, and use of than nickname becomes widespread, are you really going to be psyched? I fear that ogged's love of black BMWs and garish gold watches has led him astray.

Seeming like Richie Rich is never the way to be.

Says the Bush voter.

26 - Ogged wouldn't want this house. He doesn't believe in having a cleaning service. He'd spend all of his life scrubbing toilets.

Of the potential 2008 candidates, in both parties, where does Edwards' net worth rank?

If "Richie Rich" is how you're tagged initially, that's bad, but having some Richie Rich in you when you're an advocate for the poor can be a good thing.

These are areas where a deft touch is needed. How that touch gets deployed will depend on the circs. I wouldn't push the house or wealth forward, but I wouldn't run from it, either. But I wouldn't make it a plank I was running on. It's ancillary; keep it ancillary.

But seriously, if one of our candidates gets tagged as "Richie Rich" by the media, and use of than nickname becomes widespread, are you really going to be psyched?

Is this likely, though? What are the odds that Edwards would be facing an opponent with considerably less wealth in the general election?

The hypocrisy argument strikes me as the greater concern, even though it makes no sense. (John Edwards claims to care about the poor, but he really has a big house.)

I suspect, with no real proof to offer, that Ogged and LB are right.

I think this is the reverse of the interracial marriage thing (where people know they're supposed to tell pollsters that they support it, but if you actually ask them who they want their children to marry...). In this case, I think people will mouth the "rich liberals are hypocrites" but deep down, a number of them won't care, because they'll be preoccupied with thinking "I'm gonna be that rich someday."

What are the odds that Edwards would be facing an opponent with considerably less wealth in the general election?

It's not wealth, it's the perception of wealth. Look at the '04 election, and the difference between the guy with actual military experience and the guy who dressed up in a flight suit. Tim is right, a deft touch is needed. But I think it's possible to achieve.

Maybe Americans are more like the Irish than we thought.

There are better and worse ways to carry wealth, no doubt. And it is a benefit to someone singing some version of the social gospel not to look like they generally are against, consumption, fun, and liquor. And almost any deficit in politics (like announcing your spearation on TV before informing your wife, for example) can be overcome by skillfull positioning and a deft touch. What I really don't think is terribly debatable is that being perceived as 'mansion-level' rich is not a plus. When I enter politics, my robot maid is just a cross I am going to have to bear.

And seriously, was it uncharming? I thought "this is delusional" was in the realm of bloggy politeness...

What I really don't think is terribly debatable is that being perceived as 'mansion-level' rich is not a plus.

Oh, 'delusional' wasn't rhetorically out of line, it just seemed unjustified considering our long history of successful and popular 'mansion-level' rich candidates. Every presidential candidate since god knows has been quite well off, and the really rich ones who are successful are also pretty common. Bush, for one, preceded by Bush (and while Kerry lost, it was in a squeaker -- marrying a billionaire isn't what lost it for him); Kennedy, Roosevelt... being crazy-rich just isn't that much of a detriment in American politics.

Being perceived as "mansion-level" rich is a prima facie negative: it screams out of touch, and is a weird thing to try to spin as a plus for a populist candidate. We've had plenty of wealthy candidates and presidents, but the winners have managed not to look like rich brats. Edwards can probably do this, and he can probably do this by saying something like how he wants every American to have the opportunity to achieve the American dream, but I think that just makes his wealth neutral, not a plus.

"Richie Rich" "rich brats"

You know, I think inherited wealth could be a problem along those lines -- that's what Baa seemed to be alluding to with 'Richie Rich', and you with 'brat'. Is the 'Poor boy makes good, and boy does he ever make good!' narrative damaging in the same way? (Separate from hostility to lawyers, that is.)

Well, I had a whole comment ready to, but LB made it for me on preview. The idea that Edwards' wealth is going to hurt him just seems crazy to me. Especially given that he wasn't born into it, was the first in his family to go to college, went to the agriculture/engineering state school to get a degree in textiles, etc.

As I say, being rich can be worn well -- as by Kennedy -- but there's little doubt that the perception of being rich doesn't help. That's why GWB is always clearing scrub or whatever the hell make-work it is he does to demonstrate what a a regular son of the soil he is.

Bush senior was emphatically not helped by being perceived as rich against Clinton. The supermarket scanner urban legend derived largely from Bush's image as an out-of-touch rich guy.

Yeah, but was the problem there 'rich' or 'out of touch'? I don't think Edwards comes off as out of touch with the economic concerns of us proles at all.

I know the traditional story is that being rich is bad, but when your big problem is concern that you're hostile to the rich, being rich can be good. Context, peeps.

LB, the poor-boy-makes-good narrative is harder to sell if you're simultaneously trying to play down the sleazy-ambulance-chaser narrative. And yes, context means it's not an overall negative, but just that it's neutral. (If he were just upper-middle class, rather than mansion-level wealthy, I think he'd be in a better political position.)

sleazy-ambulance-chaser narrative

I think this narrative has almost no traction outside some small, mostly Republican, circles.

I think apostropher in 45 and Cala in 49 mostly get it right. Were it not for the slick ambulance chaser thing, the house is not really much of a problem against most of his opponents because (putting the ambulance chasing to one side) he earned the money through work, and most people admire that. I do not know Senator Obama's bio well enough to say if he has a poor kid makes good thing going too. If so, Edwards is vulnerable there.

If he were just upper-middle class, rather than mansion-level wealthy, I think he'd be in a better political position

See, I don't think so. I think it helps that the mansion makes it seem like he has a real weakness for the gaudy--he's a real man of the people.

I think this narrative has almost no traction outside some small, mostly Republican, circles.

Obviously, I am in that circle, so I am not completely objective, but I am pretty sure you underestimate its effect.

Nuh uh.

Nuh uh.

Oh. Well, in that case . . . .

Comity!

ogged, I suspect there's a perception that trial lawyerin' is a morally bankrupt profession that makes lawyers rich at the expense of common sense (millions of dollars because the coffee was hot!!) It's probably no worse than any other highly lucrative profession, but I think it has a larger image problem that you think it does. And that makes it harder to play up his work ethic.

I've already addressed that argument, Cala.

With your decisive "Nuh uh"?

Uh huh.

I think it helps that the mansion makes it seem like he has a real weakness for the gaudy--he's a real man of the people.

This. I really don't think there's any significant negative valence to being rich by itself -- all of the negativity is attached to being a snooty upperclass elitist, not to just having a lot of money. And spending his hardearned money on a big tacky mansion makes Edwards less, not more, of a snooty upperclass elitist: if he were doing something tasteful with it, he'd be in more trouble.

The reason you have not yet been hired by a campaign for your rhetorical gifts escapes me.

Seriously, someone with a better memory or actual polling results will have to settle this, but as I recall, the Republicans were licking their chops over the trial-lawyer thing in '04 and it turned out that no one gave a damn; and when it came up, Edwards was all "Yeah, I helped a little girl get money from a big corporation that ruined her life, you have a problem with that?"

Mmm. The whole 'decent Americans hate trial lawyers' routine appears to me to be more astroturf than grassroots -- whatever's wrong with the tort system, it doesn't directly affect the 99.9 of the population who aren't in a position to be sued, and I don't think they've emotionally bought into the 'trial-lawyer' hating.

See, I don't think so. I think it helps that the mansion makes it seem like he has a real weakness for the gaudy--he's a real man of the people.

I honestly can't tell if you're slurring the common man or admitting to your own tackiness. You saw the same kind of speculation about Clinton and his weakness for well-proportioned women (or such was the claim): he's just like the common man.

I do not think that people work the way you seem to think they work.

65: Haven't you noticed that Clinton is, in fact, a popular guy?

And similar politics, on a stiff, proper, paragon of moral rectitude like Gore? Less popular.

And spending his hardearned money on a big tacky mansion makes Edwards less, not more, of a snooty upperclass elitist: if he were doing something tasteful with it, he'd be in more trouble.

I think SCMT is right in 65. Tackiness is rarely found in the lexicon of words used to describe inspirational leaders.

Yeah, but it's not b/c he goes around saying, "I've like women with meat on them." It's, in part, because he's really, really skillful about anticipating an argument and deflecting it quickly ("people like me should pay more taxes") so that no one really talks about it.

68: Tacky as the opposite of snooty? I think that makes it look pretty appealing.

63: They didn't try it in the '04 campaign because the Helms machine tried it when he ran for Senate and Edwards handed their asses to them.

Something I read in 2004 or so backs up LB's narrow point here: a ranking of prestige placed being rich-with-common-man-tastes first, rich-with-elite-tastes second, common with common tastes third, and common with elite tastes (i.e., all junior faculty) last.

But I don't think that house plays as what-the-common-man-would-do-with-his-millions; it's big, but it looks like other southern gentry mansions to me.

67: I sometimes wonder how much Gore lost points for still being crazy in love with his wife. . .since everything I read made it seem rather obvious. . .or if, in fact, that was not part of his popular image at all, and they would have done better to publicize it more.

25: I was thinking more in terms of the school loans and tax credits that helped him to embark on such a career to begin with; who funded that state agricultural college?

Tacky as the opposite of snooty? I think that makes it look pretty appealing.

The opposite of snooty is not tacky, it is approachable and sympathetic. What people liked about Clinton (and GW Bush) was the notion that they understood "regular" people and did not look down on them or think that they were "better" than them. That is the opposite of snooty.

[please, let's not have an argument about whether this perception is true with respect to GWB]

I don't think that house plays as what-the-common-man-would-do-with-his-millions

It does in the South.

let's not have an argument about whether this perception is true with respect to GWB

Okay, can we have one about whether this perception ever actually existed?

69: He doesn't say that. But actions speaking louder than words, etc. And tackiness is very relative; in a world that's pretty close to one-man-one-vote it pays to go for if not the lowest common denominator, at least a pretty low one.

68: Tacky as the opposite of snooty? I think that makes it look pretty appealing.

The problem is bringing up this pairing to begin with. I don't think anyone would have called GWB either; that's why he was appealing as a "common man." Further, appealing "tacky" is a grace note--the rich guy who sneaks off to McDonald's b/c he can't get enough McRib Sandwiches. Not appealing "tacky" is big tacky--like Donald Trump. And no matter what the ratings say, nobody likes Donald Trump, and nobody would vote for him for President.

I don't really think this is going to be a problem for Edwards; he seems pretty good at this stuff.

Nah, I think it's fair to say that it did exist on some level -- that Gore and then Kerry were snooty elitists, and Bush was jes' a reglar good ol' boy who you could have a beer with. (Consider the indignant argument that this was utter crap alluded to rather than made.) I just think that being a little tacky doesn't hurt in creating that impression.

(Of course, the fact that the word I went for is 'tacky' means that I'm a snooty elitist. But no one would vote for me anyway.)

Yeah, didn't Bush brag about serving his guests with paper plates at his ranch? When he could totally afford, you know, plates and a dish washer.

the fact that the word I went for is 'tacky' means that I'm a snooty elitist.

OK. As long as we have beaten this admission out of you, we have comity.

Oh wait, I had the Bushes reversed.

Makes much more sense now. Sorry.

beaten this admission out of you

Hey, no beating of the bloggers! We're delicate.

didn't Bush brag about serving his guests with paper plates at his ranch?

If we actually had a liberal media in the country, that boast would be accompanied by a photograph of trash cans full of nasty used paper plates.

(Of course, the fact that the word I went for is 'tacky' means that I'm a snooty elitist. But no one would vote for me anyway.)

Right. The nice thing about Clinton is that he really does have the common touch. He likes people. Somersby made the point while reviewing parts of Clinton's biography. He noted that in a passage Clinton had about some whackjob religious types who were anti-abortion and sort of separatists, Clinton talked about all sorts of good things you could see about them: that they made sure every child had clothes and love, that they were kind and generous, that there was an unbelievable sense of community, etc. He just flat out liked them, despite the fact that he disagreed with them about a lot.

As always, we should remember that the Republican slime machine will throw lots of slime at whichever Democrat is nominated. No matter who it is, and no matter whether it makes any real sense. No candidate is fireproof, and the party shouldn't run away from a c candidate on the basis of silly stuff like this.

On the other hand, being able to stay on offense and push back hard whenever necessary is the most important thing. Edwards has lost a little bit on that count in the last couple weeks.

And also, in many cases the Republican case is just "The Democrats are just as bad as us". They're just trying to neutralize or reduce a disadvantage, they don't plan to actually win. 1% here and 2% there adds up to victory.

It turns out McCain is loaded. His wife's money, I think.

On a completely different topic, what is the impression here of general tastefulness of John Edward's legal career? Physicians I know despise him, largely on the basis of the case NCprosceutor mentions above. On the other hand, that swimming pool drain case seems like exactly the reason we have a tort system. Whats' the consensus?

Sorry, busted link. For fun, check out "top assets."

That story Apo linked in above has an anecdote I've seen before about Edwards hiring a team of doctors to comb through his past cases for anything that looked frivolous, and not coming up with anything. I haven't seen criticism of specific cases of his, although I don't know that there's nothing embarrassing -- still, a bunch of campaigns means you'd think we'd have heard about it by now if there was. My guess is that the hot tub case is pretty representative.

89: I don't know a whole lot about John Edwards' particular career, but I have a moderately strong aversion to plaintiffs' lawyers. They perform a necessary function, but the level of sanctimony about how they're serving the common man while getting rich by retaining a largish chunk of his recovery is a turnoff. OTOH part of it's probably just tribal enmity and it's not something I can't get past.

I know what you mean about the tribal enmity. In principle, I have nothing at all against them, and they serve a noble purpose. In practice, the ones I've litigated against are a smarmy bunch of fucks, and I kinda hate them. But not ever having litigated against Edwards, I'm not bothered about him.

Frankly, as someone who has suffered at the wrong end of the medical system a few times, I don't have much sympathy when doctors blindly deride Edwards. Some doctors need to be sued.

There's a case in Four Trials that totally spooked my mother b/c the circumstances of the birth were very like mine. But instead of an educated, well-off, uppity woman who was already a mom and was the daughter of a doctor, the mother in this case was very young, not very educated, and very poor. My mom questioned and prodded and growled and got her c-section and her healthy baby; this woman trusted and agreed and demurred and got a vaginal delivery and a very injured baby. Yay my mom for being bully-proof, but you shouldn't have to be bully-proof in the labor-room, so yay Edwards for kicking some ass. It might not have done so much for the baby, but maybe it made some doctors be a little less careless.

/end grumbling.

If plaintiffs lawyers didn't exist, we'd have to invent them - frivolous lawsuits aside, they serve a purpose; someone needs to represent those who were really damaged by the acts/omissions of another. And however large contingency fees seem to be, remember that no win = no pay.

I'm not up on current UK law, but when I was, plaintiffs in civil cases had to pay-as-they-went, which meant that fewer people could afford to pursue remedies for a tort . The practice of holding barristers accountable for the cases they accepted held down the level of idiotic suits. I do wish we had something similar here, but the trial lawyers lobby will never let that come to pass.

Don't you think contingency fees have that effect to some degree -- that plaintiffs lawyers have a pretty strong incentive to find the meritorious cases, because that's how they get paid? It's not perfect, but it's not terrible.

91

It is my understanding that Edwards won some big awards in cerebral palsy cases by alleging OB mistakes during delivery whereas it is the current medical consensus that cerebral palsy is already present in the fetus before delivery.

95, 96: I think the really pernicious stuff with contingent fees happens lower in the market in relatively simple cases that settle quickly, and, on the flip side, strong but not slam-dunk cases that don't have enough damages to be worth the time they'd take to try or settle and so never get brought at all. At Edwards' level, I think there's a fair bit of truth to your point, but also a case to be made for more judicial and bar oversight of fee reasonableness in the real "jackpot" cases.

It is a complicated area, with no perfect solutions. 92, 93 and 98 sum it up for me.

96

The problem is that legally meritorious and objectively meritorious are quite different. If plaintiff is sympathetic and has severe injuries they are likely to obtain a big judgment even when objectively the defendant had no responsibility.

The practice of holding barristers accountable for the cases they accepted held down the level of idiotic suits.

But also good, losing suits, I would guess.

95

Regarding the necessity of plaintiff lawyers, liberals are always claiming health care in places like France is more rationally organized but as far as I know none of these places have anything like our medical malpractice legal environment.

64

Where do you get only .1% of the population is in a position to be sued? Should I drop my auto insurance?

97: I don't think the medical consensus is that clear -- it's my understanding that CP is still poorly understood, and so long as Edwards was operating under what what thought to be good science at the time, it's hard to hold that against him.

102: Want to expand on that a little? My sense is that it makes no sense, but it's so compressed I can't really tell what you mean.

101: the people who sued Dan Brown for supposedly stealing the plot to The DaVinci Code ended up having to pay half a million pounds in legal fees or some such.

102: It may well be correct that if we moved to something more similar to the French health insurance or health care system, malpractice law should also be restructured. This of course tells you nothing about how malpractice should be structured in the absence of such a move.

97: But the pertinent question is not what current medical concensus is; the pertinent question is what contemporary medical consensus was when these trials occurred, and what the specific doctors knew and did. My understanding is that CP can be caused before and during delivery. In the Four Trials case I looked at (and this was three years ago), it wasn't just any old case of CP, but really aggregious damage, the main plaintiff witness was the delivery nurse; and there were plenty of specific circumstances indicating carelessness on the part of the physician.

103: "Trial lawyer", in the sense we're using it, means big-ticket plaintiffs' attorney, suing corporations or wealthy businesspeople. Unless you've got a whole lot of money, John Edwards isn't coming after you. (I cop to 99.99% being shameless hyperbole -- I have no idea what the relevant figures are with any exactitude.)

Anyone who thinks that your average voter is going to put this level of analysis into voting for (or not voting for) John Edwards is crazy. He didn't do anything obviously sleazy--he's home free.

If plaintiff is sympathetic and has severe injuries they are likely to obtain a big judgment even when objectively the defendant had no responsibility.

You wouldn't happen to have evidence for this, would you?

104: Surely there's a spectrum of different ways to deal with bad medical outcomes, ranging from "gee, that sucks, we're sorry" to "you get made whole, plus some punitive damages are awarded against the doctor so he doesn't do it again." I'd expect most countries with heavily state influenced health care systems to be more to the former end.

107: "what did they think then" is a pertinent question, but it's not the pertinent question.

Regarding the original post I think it is not completely convincing. Similarly one could say Giuliani's history inoculates him against charges that Republicans are all prudes who hate sex. But it doesn't really because the Republicans are the antisex party just like the Democrats are the antiwealth party. So the opposition is still not going to vote for you because you are in the wrong party. And you may have problems with your side particularly in primaries.

111: I think it's the pertinent question to deciding whether or not Edwards was being sleazy. Did he, in good faith, query the medical establishment, and did they, in good faith, mostly say, "a non neglectful doctor would not have done such a thing"? That's the issue being litigated, and he's being portrayed as someone who didn't honestly approach it that way. If 10 or 15 years later it turns out that someone was *accidentally* doing the *superior* medical technique and just *coincidentally* getting bad results, it does not reflect on Edwards badly.

But 109 is probably right.

Has anyone read TooMuchCoffeMan's graphical rendition of the McDonald's Hot Coffee case?

109: Agreed. I spent a LOT of time thinking about this issue (especially the "channeling" case) last election cycle, and I'm still a big fan.

104

I understood it was being claimed that plaintiff's lawyers were needed to keep doctors in line. However countries like France have a medical system that liberals seem to prefer to ours without our medical malpractice system. So I doubt that plaintiff's lawyers are actually all that essential.

It hasn't occurred to you that the issue of how to pay for medical care and the issue of how to both care for people injured by malpractice and give doctors appropriate incentives to avoid injuring patients are, in fact, separate issues? Liberals are fond of single payer systems because of how they manage the first of those two issues.

I don't know much of anything about the French malpractice system, and because of that neither prefer it nor think it inferior to ours.

113

It shouldn't really matter how many neglectful, stupid or totally deranged things the doctor did if they did not cause the plaintiff's injuries.

I don't believe there was any medical consensus at the time that the negligent acts alleged were the most likely cause of cerebral palsy. However you just need one doctor on your side and a sympathetic jury.

I'm sure we all bow to your expertise as to the state of medical knowledge about cerebral palsy.

There's a thread of thought that holds, essentially, that medical malpractice cases are what we have in the US instead of universal health coverage. I can't remember where I read about this, or the details of the reasoning, but it was argued pretty well, well enough for the conclusion to stick with me.

116: I don't think that they're completely separate. Or rather, the way you compensate people injured by malpractice (and define malpractice) affects strongly how much you pay, which affects the possibilities for the way you pay. Especially with regards to determining the cost-effectiveness of treatments and whether or not to pay for them.

119: So if we'd just stop holding the medical profession accountable through the legal system, we'd get universal health care? I guess it would be universal, but I'm not sure how healthy it would be.

Sure, they're connected, but liberals aren't out there cooing over single-payer systems because they solve our malpractice problem. W/d gets it right in 106 -- changing to a single-payer system would probably necessitate a change in malpractice, but that doesn't tell you much about how things should or do work under our current system.

116

I don't think they are separate issues at all. The issue is how society should deliver medical care. You want to deliver high quality care as cheaply as possible. It is often claimed that the French system is both better and cheaper than ours. The American malpractice system is very expensive, if it is not giving significant gains in quality it is hard to see the rational for keeping it.

Or to put it another way perhaps the French system is better because it has no plaintiff's lawyers rather than because is single payer. This may not be very plausible but it is not legitimate to attribute all the advantages of the French system in quality vrs cost solely to the differences you find congenial without some further analysis.

The American malpractice system is very expensive, if it is not giving significant gains in quality it is hard to see the rational for keeping it.

IIRC, it's unclear why it's expensive. I seem to recall Drum linking to a series of studies purporting to show that malpractice premiums did not correlate with either malpractice suits or malpractice awards.

116: They're not unrelated. One of the reasons cited for rising health care costs is skyrocketing malpractice insurance, which supposedly leads to higher overall costs as well as a greater tendency for doctors to order unnecessary tests (to be able to cover their asses in case they get sued.) They're not two problems with the same solution, true, but if we get universal health care coverage, I can't see it happening without some kind of malpractice reform.

Are you talking about any actual facts you have knowledge of: what percentage of health care costs is accounted for by malpractice verdicts; how France handles medical injuries; whether France has plaintiffs' lawyers... anything? Or are you simply babbling?

I started to make fun of 115, but it kinda felt like this, so I didn't.

Ack, sorry for the pile-on; didn't refresh.

So if we'd just stop holding the medical profession accountable through the legal system, we'd get universal health care?

Um, no. Not at all. But we don't have universal health care, and therefore the current malpractice system has risen to fill the gaps in the patchwork system we do have. That's the argument, anyway. I don't remember the details well enough to say if I find it persuasive.

One of the reasons cited for rising health care costs is skyrocketing malpractice insurance, which supposedly leads to higher overall costs as well as a greater tendency for doctors to order unnecessary tests (to be able to cover their asses in case they get sued.)

This is mostly bullshit. Tim's right about the studies.

Medical malpractice is used as a stalking horse to justify sweeping 'tort reform' against all personal injury defendants, because doctors are sympathetic, and you can protect corporations who make dangerous products by pretending that 'tort reform' is all about shielding innocent doctors. The expense and irrationality of med-mal verdicts is vastly exaggerated.

I think one of the unstated assumptions behind what Shearer's saying is that liberals don't like the current American healthcare system, but do like the current American malpractice system, so when they look at a country which has better healthcare without either, they're inclined to attribute the results to the differences in healthcare systems rather than malpractice systems. He's saying they shouldn't, because it might be the malpractice systems that make the difference (though he concedes that this is implausible). This seems like a strawman argument to me.

122: Yes. I don't recommend only changing our malpractice system to be like that of some other country. But I think that it would have to be part of broad moves toward a more public health care system, and was only trying to offer an interpretation of JBS's comment.

124: My gut feel (completely unsupported by factual evidence, but hey, this is the internet) is that a good way to spend a ridiculous amount of money on health care is to insist on the latest and greatest rather than going for something that will work pretty well in almost all cases but leave some people screwed. If the decision to order additional test X is not based on expected societal value but on some doctor being worried about getting sued if he didn't do all that he reasonably could, things can clearly get expensive in a hurry.

That looks about right. A major flaw in the assumption is the idea that liberals 'like the malpractice system' in the sense of actively thinking it's a spectacularly wonderful thing, rather than liking it in the sense that thinking that proposed reforms would probably make it worse.

The expense and irrationality of med-mal verdicts is vastly exaggerated.

But Cala's talking about malpractice premiums, which, as per 124, don't correlate well with malpractice verdicts. Perhaps the insurance companies are to blame.

133: Yeah, that's the strawman part.

133 to 131.

To 132: There's certainly widespread speculation that fear of liability drives a lot of unnecessary health care -- my sense is that there isn't much good data supporting this. Not that there's good data disproving it, but it's an issue that's hard to nail down.

Perhaps the insurance companies are to blame.

DING!

Here is a NYT article on Edwards and cerebral palsy.

Some quotes:

An examination of Mr. Edwards's legal career also opens a window onto the world of personal injury litigation. In building his career, Mr. Edwards underbid other lawyers to win promising clients, sifted through several dozen expert witnesses to find one who would attest to his claims, and opposed state legislation that would have helped all families with brain-damaged children and not just those few who win big malpractice awards.

and:

In 1985 he handled his first cerebral palsy case, for Jennifer Campbell, the girl whose voice he recreated at trial. In his book "Four Trials," Mr. Edwards described the case as an uphill battle. The doctor was esteemed and worked at a prestigious teaching hospital. Mr. Edwards's associate interviewed 41 obstetricians before finding one local doctor who would make a good witness.

But there is no reason to assume that it is the (alleged) lack of medical malpractice in France that seprates their system from ours. It is theoretically possible absent any other knowledge--i.e. we have two systems with two sets of characteristics and two sets of outcomes. Considering that medical malpractice accounts for a small percentage of expenses in this system, there is no particular reason to randomly guess that it is THE great advantage of the French system.

legitimate to attribute all the advantages of the French system in quality vrs cost solely to the differences you find congenial without some further analysis.

To be fair LB didn't do that--you're the one who brought up the French system--but when I have heard the French system brought up by other people more versed in the subject, it is in contexts and by thinkers who seem competent and likely enough to look at the total picture, not just the congenial bits. Since you brought it up, it seems you should bring the relevant data to the table.

138: I sense that you mean us to understand those quotes as damaging. Can you elucidate?

139: Yep. Exactly.

136: It is hard to nail down. And of course pinning it all on fear of liability is unfair; I think that consumerism in health care has a lot to do with it. HMOs were wildly unpopular, but I don't think that they produce any worse health outcomes than friendlier plans.

In building his career, Mr. Edwards underbid other lawyers to win promising

Shocking. But I guess we all know the Republicans aren't too hot on competitive bidding these days.

theoretically possible absent any other knowledge

This seems to be the distinguishing characteristic of most of Shearer's arguments, actually.

pwned by one and all.

138:
1) Underbidding seems like putting the free market to work.
2) Witness sifting could mean anything. He could have just been trying to find the most articulate one as well.
3) That's interesting, and I'll look into that. Thanks.
4) You don't see any relation between the first sentence and the second? That maybe people might not want to ruffle the feathers of one of their own??

3) If you look further into the article, the referenced litigation would have capped malpractice awards and created a fund for brain-injured children. Whether this would have been a good law depends on where the cap was, and how big the fund was, points on which the article remained mute.

re: 137 and preceeding:

What you seem to be arguing is that the obvious and only economically reasonable answer: insurance premiums rise and fall based on the risk and expected size of payout is a filthy lie, and that the real reason is a conspiracy by Republicans, manufacturers of dangerous products and insurance companies. Of course, for your conspiracy to work, every insurance company would have to be a member, lest a renegade capture all of the medical malpractice insurance work by charging a lower premium that reflected the real risk (oh, and you would have to keep all new entrants out of the market, too, lest they break the rules of this massive price fixing conspiracy).

I am not sure which studies you are referring to, but if the wording you are using reflects the studies, one huge flaw is immediately apparent. An insurance company worries about its risk of paying. Verdicts are a tiny portion of what they pay--most things settle. Logically, fear of large verdicts leads to larger settlements and fewer cases with potentially huge verdicts going to trial. This should result in verdicts not being huge, because more of the cases which are not settled would be the ones the insurance companies think they can win.

That's the economic model. Hating on insurance companies and other evil corporations provides a less rigorous (although perhaps more satisfying) theory.

146: Yep. Oligopoly is a myth, there's no such thing as market power, and there certainly aren't any barriers to entry in the insurance market.

I'll just go back to foaming at the mouth about my conspiratorial fantasies now.

138 140

I intended the quotes to support my claim in 117 that you just need one doctor on your side.

Oligopoly is a myth, there's no such thing as market power, and there certainly aren't any barriers to entry in the insurance market.

Are you claiming that there is no competition in the insurance market? Seen a GEICO ad lately?

I am not sure which studies you are referring to, but if the wording you are using reflects the studies, one huge flaw is immediately apparent.

Hence the reference to malpractice suits.

People who talk about administration costs of government programs almost never recognize the enormous administration costs of our public-private medical system. The private insurance companies are a tremendous drain on everyone.

Perhaps the insurance companies are to blame.

Perhaps. Either way, premiums are going up; that's not bullshit, no matter what Kevin Drum says. Whether the problem is runaway torts or runaway insurance companies (my guess is that the torts give the insurance companies a pretext), that's going to be something that has to change if we move to single-payer.

And are you claiming that the existence of any competition in a market renders collusion impossible? Because that would be silly if you were.

In any case, you may have missed the CBO document that Saheli linked in; noting that according to the Congressional Budget Office, total malpractice costs account for less than 2% of health care spending.

Are you claiming that there is no competition in the insurance market? Seen a GEICO ad lately?

It's a heavily regulated industry. At one point, I was exposed (but may not have understood) to a lot of economic information about healthcare costs, and I don't think I remember any compelling claims that they were related to malpractice. The big drivers that I remember being compelling were a bad incentive structure (not primarily about suits) and, sadly, technology.

149: A fully competitive market in auto insurance--which is not at all proven by ads, no matter how cute geckos are--does not prove a competitive market in medical malpractice insurance.

The fact that the US has more expensive care than anywhere else, without getting better results, should have been mentioned by now.

As far as I'm concerned, andyone who accuses someone else of being a conspiracy theorist automatically loses the argument unless they have a darn good case. So let's put Idealist on probabtion for 24 hours, in the hope that he'll see the error of his ways.

124

As I recall what those studies purport to show is that sudden big increases in malpractice permiums (which upset doctors) are generally caused by insurance market dynamics and not sudden big increases in legal risk which is at least somewhat plausible. This does not mean premiums are entirely unrelated to risk. For example I don't think it is disputed that premium variations by speciality or over long periods of time are driven by differences in risk.

Let's not. The remedy for saying something intemperate is having people say intemperate things back to you, not getting all weird with double-secret probation.

157, see 153, 2d paragraph.

you may have missed the CBO document that Saheli linked

This from the report to which you linked seems to contradict your claims that there is little or no relationship between malpractice csuits and liability insurance premiums pretty thoroughly:

Premiums for malpractice insurance are set so that over time, insurers' income from those premiums equals their total costs (including the cost of providing a competitive return to their investors) minus their income from investing any funds they hold in reserve. In the short term, however, premiums may be above or below that equilibrium level, with profits fluctuating or reserves rising or falling as a result.

A full analysis of the reasons for the recent rise in premiums is beyond the scope of this brief. But the available evidence suggests that higher costs for insurers (particularly from increases in the size of malpractice awards), lower investment income, and short-term factors such as cyclical patterns in the insurance market have all played major roles.

Payments of claims are the most significant costs that malpractice insurers face, accounting for about two-thirds of their total costs. The average payment for a malpractice claim has risen fairly steadily since 1986, from about $95,000 in that year to $320,000 in 2002 (see Figure 2). That increase represents an annual growth rate of nearly 8 percent--more than twice the general rate of inflation.

let's put Idealist on probabtion for 24 hours

Fine. I've got many hours of work to do before I can go home tonight anyway.

160: What claims do you think you've just refuted?

(including the cost of providing a competitive return to their investors)

Am I crazy or is that just a fancy desription for profits? Doesn't that make that first sentence a tautology of accounting?

154

The malpractice environment helps drive adoption of dubious technology. When a company comes up with an expensive new item of medical technology it profits from doctors who use it because they are afraid of being sued if they don't use it and something bad happens. Even if there is no objective evidence that the new item does any good you just need one enthusiastic advocate (common with new technology) to sway a jury. See for example the doubts in the NYT article I linked that expensive fetal heart monitors actually do any good on balance.

162

Presumedly the claims in 124 that premiums are unrelated to risks which is what I though we were discussing.

Even if there is no objective evidence that the new item does any good

Right, because the FDA is famous for the eagerness with which is approves the use of new medical devices or drugs that have no objective evidence to them at all.

See for example the doubts in the NYT article I linked that expensive fetal heart monitors actually do any good on balance.

I mean, there is a big difference between evolving doubts about the full effect on balance and no objective evidence.

Am I crazy or is that just a fancy desription for profits? Doesn't that make that first sentence a tautology of accounting?

Pretty much, yeah.

163

No it means the normal rate of profit which can be taken as the average rate over all industries. Actual profits can be less or more. Economics 101 says if an industry is earning excessive (above average) profits it will attract more competition driving profits down towards the normal (average) rate. On the other hand if profits are deficient (below average) some participants will look for greener pastures reducing competition and driving profits up towards the normal rate. So in the Econ 101 perfect competition world over time all industries will average the normal rate of profit (but particular companies may do better or worse in particular years).

The remedy for saying something intemperate is having people say intemperate things back to you, not getting all weird with double-secret probation.

And before long, everybody's angry. It's win-win.

Economics 101 says

Oh no you didn't!

Aaaaarrrgh. The Econ 101! It burns!

For christs sakes, can we please stop applying 101 to industries that we know behave nothing like "perfect competition world".

Also, Drum's done a couple good posts in this area.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_05/008913.php

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_02/008311.php

Ah health care! My three cents:

1. I have had managers of hospitals that self-insure tell me that they have had to increase their protection because of rising malpratice claims. This is anecdotal, of course, but it tends to support the simple, in concordance with the basic laws of economics argument that increasing the average payout of an insurance policy will increase the price of the premium.
2. If 'conspiracy theorist' is out, what do we call someone who asserts an industry-wide cartel to fix prices without evidence and without industry dynamics (such as substantial barriers to entry) that tend to support oligopoly behavior? I vote for 'cartel theorist.' By the way, did you know GE has a lightbulb that lasts forever which they refuse to sell? Totally true.
3. That said, I sincerely doubt (although I can in no way prove) that malpractice is the major difference between French health care costs and US health care costs. There is probably some defensive medicine effect, but other factors loom larger. We pay doctors more, for one. We do far more non-diagnostic procedures, for two. And of course, we pay full freight for pharmaceuticals and use more of them. These are all spiffy thigns to do, I should add.

John, you win. The teaching of Econ 101 has caused more misery than Hitler and the avian flu combined.

171 172

Good grief, I was just trying to explain the terminology and why it is not a tautology. I carefully labelled it Econ 101 thinking so as not to personally vouch for it. Your quarrel would appear to be with the CBO document that somebody else linked. The quoted passage is straight Econ 101 as I attempted to explain.

This is an interesting article about how fetal heart monitors increased the legal risks to OBs even though it is not completely consistent with what I have been arguing.

Can someone explain to me why "econ 101" is held in such high distain? The reason it's econ 101 is because it has immense theoretical and empirical support. You can think a price floor (e.g., the minimum wage) is worth the costs. You can think a price ceiling (e.g., rent control) is worth the costs. But there are costs, right? Do people here think setting a price floor for good X at 40% above the market clearing price really has no negative effect on demand?

Do people here think setting a price floor for good X at 40% above the market clearing price really has no negative effect on demand?

Well that is certainly very strongly in keeping with what several of the more active voices on this thread have been arguing....

166

Ok I should have said something like even if there is no convincing case that the device does any good on balance. Here is an example of a medical device the FDA approved on ambigious evidence.

Can someone explain to me why "econ 101" is held in such high distain?

Gah. It's not. It's the application of 101 to situations where we already know 101 to be inadequate.

Because Econ 101 is an all too common cry from people who haven't taken Econ 321, or looked at any empirical data. (Which, to be fair, doesn't really apply to what Shearer was saying at all -- people just reacted to the phrase as a joke.) The fourth or fifth time you have some nitwit trying to browbeat you with Econ 101 in a situation where, say, there isn't perfect competition, and all things aren't equal, you get pretty sick of it.

Yes, sorry, I was being flippant, referencing complaints here in the past over the "Duh, it's supply and demand! simple Econ 101!" tactic.

And what about ec 321 tells you that price floors don't decrease demand? This sounds like a great D^2 slogan that doesn't actaully have much practical bite.

And what about ec 321 tells you that price floors don't decrease demand?

Nothing, but it tells you that in some cases the econometric data show that other effects predominate.

Econ 101 is the part of econ that in fact does _not_ have immense empirical support (immense theoretical support is tautologous). For example, econ 101 predicts the "law of one price". It's hard to find a real-world example where the law of one price does hold. (Currency markets and commodity markets are probably the only examples.)

Teo, that's absolutely correct. But it doesn't mean the price floor doesn't have the effects it has. Or that econ 101 of the crudest sort (supply and demand, downward sloping demand/price curves) doesn't almost universally apply. I could have sworn that people on this thread were arguing that increasing the average payout on an insurance policy wasn't effecting premiums, but instead it was collusion. This seems to me just shy of magical thinking.

Walt, no doubt there are implications of perfect market theory that do not have empirical support because most markets are not perfect. I have simply never heard anyone claim that the law of one price applies in most markets. Not even at conclaves of libertarian economists. Everyone thinks the corner store will charge more for a can of coke than costco.

But this cannot explain the opprobrium directed towards 'econ 101." Do you believe a price floor on good X set at 40% above the market clearing price will have no impact on demand? (and we will assume X is not insulin). Do you believe that increasing the average payout of an insurance policy 40% will have no effect on premiums? If yes, whyever?

As has been said above, Econ 101 is frequently used to clinch political arguments in cases where it doesn't apply, often by people who haven't even taken Econ 102. Econ is a beautiful formal system which confirms many prejudices, and people tend to love it so much that they aren't very interested in its limitations.

To me it sometimes seems that Econ is different than other sciences, in that the advanced classes end up telling you that the basic principles you learned at the beginning are formalisms with a fairly limited application in practice.

To me it sometimes seems that Econ is different than other sciences, in that the advanced classes end up telling you that the basic principles you learned at the beginning are formalisms with a fairly limited application in practice.

That actually sounds pretty similar to other sciences, from what I understand. I'm no scientist, though.

You mean there aren't frictionless surfaces in real life?

Hey hey hey -- I like to bash Econ 101 as much as anybody, but the important thing about what Shearer is saying in 169 doesn't depend on "perfect competition" in the insurance market or any other very unrealistic assumptions. Going past Econ 101 isn't going to change it.

Quick summary of insurance pricing: Insurance is different from most other products because costs are determined after, not before, pricing. In order to price a medical malpractice policy, you need to estimate the following:

1) The expected amount of insurance claims on the policy
2) The amount of insurance company administrative expenses (salaries, etc.) allocated to the policy
3) The amount of investment income the insurance company will collect from the policy (because premiums are paid upfront while claims are paid many years in the future)
4) The amount of profit the insurance company can "expect" (on average) the policy to generate

Now comments 163 and 168 say that #4 is simply an accounting tautology, because obviously the difference between revenues and costs (adjusted for the time value of money) will be the profit. But this is missing the point, because obviously not every level of profit is acceptable to the insurance company. As an extreme case, negative profit would not be acceptable -- why would anyone want to own a company that only bled money?

So what is the "right" amount of profit? This depends on the amount of "capital" -- surplus cash -- an insurance company needs to be in business. In order to attract and retain capital, an insurance company needs to provide a "reasonable" return to investors -- if the return is not good enough, capital will get shifted to other uses with higher returns. Note that this argument depends much more on the competitiveness of the capital markets than on the competitiveness of the insurance market (which I would argue is somewhat higher than many people are suggesting here).

Insurance companies need capital because there is always a chance that premiums will not be sufficient to cover claims, even in the aggregate (think catastrophic claims, or exposures like asbestos that might not be known when the policy is written). Insurers are required by law to carry a certain amount of surplus, depending on the portfolios they are insuring. If an insurance company sits on a large pile of cash while not generating any profits, it doesn't take a particularly smart corporate raider to see an opportunity.

At any rate, when an insurance company prices any particular policy, they need to figure out how much of their capital should be allocated to the policy (not a trivial exercise, but you can make some simplifying assumptions that work out OK) and then they price in a "reasonable" profit to investors based on the allocated amount of capital.

Some things that might help you sleep better at night: insurance companies price policies before they can know what the costs are. In a world where people have strong short-term incentives to "bring in business" and grow market share, this creates institutional pressures to be optimistic if possible. Furthermore, insurers can suffer from the "winner's curse" -- even if they are striving to be objective, they are most likely to sell policies when they are being optimistic about the policyholder. This is not to say that cartel pricing in insurance is impossible or even unlikely, or that the market is perfectly competitive -- it's that there are more pressures working in the opposite direction than you might think.

192: Sure -- the reaction to 'Econ 101' wasn't so much disagreement with Shearer as to 'Econ 101' as a running gag.

187, 188: This discussion is breaking down because we aren't actually arguing anything terribly specific, so people are reacting to things that haven't been said. I haven't understood anyone to make the claim that volume of malpractice payouts has no effect on malpractice insurance premiums -- rather, that there are other large effects on insurance premiums, and that whatever the cost of malpractice insurance, malpractice costs aren't a large part of total healthcare costs. In short, anyone blaming a crisis in healthcare costs on our malpractice system is off-base.

Considering the gnomic and annoying way the intial allusions to such a malpractice crisis were made by Shearer, responses were offhanded and snappish, rather than carefully phrased rebuttals of a specific thesis. The conversation's been sloppy.

But the Econ 101 mockery is fair, generally. Anyone trying to apply Physics 101 to a real world problem like trying to figure out the gas mileage of your car ("It weighs X kilos, so going at 55 mph its kinetic energy is Y. So if I know how much gasoline contains that much energy, that tells me how much gas I need to accelerate the car, and then it doesn't need any more until I stop it and accelerate again.") would also get laughed at. People make Econ 101 arguments like that all the time.

I am in awe of you, LB.

Always glad to intimidate.

To clarify: the physics 101-gas mileage analogy is brilliant. I haven't read the rest of the thread, so I don't know whether it was actually a meaningful response to anything that's been said, but I'm stealing it for personal use.

I owe it all to you -- the argument about the treadmill snapped me back into 'teaching highschool physics' mode.

Oh please.

This claim: I haven't understood anyone to make the claim that volume of malpractice payouts has no effect on malpractice insurance premiums

Is inconsistent with the claims you and SCMT and others made above like:

I seem to recall Drum linking to a series of studies purporting to show that malpractice premiums did not correlate with either malpractice suits or malpractice awards

Tim's right about the studies.

But Cala's talking about malpractice premiums, which, as per 124, don't correlate well with malpractice verdicts. Perhaps the insurance companies are to blame.

Further, I think you have the point on Econ. 101 mostly wrong. To take your Physics 101 analogy, when someone starts claiming that magic beans will allow them to jump over a mountain, Physics 101 is a good place to start. You and other defended the positions I quoted above with lots of stuff--contempt, sarcasm and dismissiveness--but not with facts or economic theory. Econ 101 and some basic facts is actually a pretty good place to start in such a situation (at least until it becomes apparent that no one is engaging in good faith). If you do not want to hear about Econ 101, stop talking about magic beans.

Oh, go suck on a pickle. We were responding offhandedly to someone who was making vague bullshit claims about how liberal love for the French healthcare system demonstrated that we were hypocrites about malpractice, which is apparently the root of what's wrong with health care in America.

If you want a conversation to be conducted with rigor, make a claim about something and back it up, and see if anyone argues with you. If you want the conversation last night to have been more rigorous, go back in time, unplug Shearer's keyboard, and start it on a better footing.

190 is incorrect in general, to is true for a lot of specific instances. For example, physics 101 contains a lot of material that is used by engineers daily (albiet usually in a different form).

I've missed the thread, so don't read this as a commentary on the specifics people said here, I'm just reacting to teo's understanding of the relevance of 101 type course material.

I'm sticking to physics because the comparison is quite stark. The difference is something like this:

In intro physics you will be show material such as Newtons laws of motion. Things like these are very good approximations that work perfectly well in a large number of situations you run into in dailly life. Throw a ball and catch it. Balance something on a teeter-totter sort of arrangement. Figure out how a pulley works. It is when things get more complicated that they break down. Newtons theory of gravity breaks down at high speeds, etc. but it's perfectly fine for terrestrial bodies and a good approximation for many celestial ones. F=ma is a basis to build a lot of understanding of mechanics.

So with phys 101 the basics work. You can verify it yourself easily. You can, with a little further study, understand where it breaks down and how to generalize it and get quite a bit further.

The situation is very different with econ 101. In econ 101 you are presented basic principles that are also incorrect, just like phys 101. But they are incorrect in a different way. While the world is full of systems that empirically validate basic physics, there is no analogue in econ 101.

To revisit physics --- in fluid mechanics, a lot is understood about laminar flows but turbulence has been a headache for centuries. Turbulence is just hard, and while some progress has been made understanding it, it was very difficult and many early attempts are just wrong.

Economists are in some sense living in a world where all they have is turbulence, there is no (real world) simplified system to study; no analogue to laminar flows.

The real outgrowth from all this that some people find difficult to wrap their heads around is this. Absolutely nothing in economics is known in the same sense that classical mechanics, for an example, is known in physics. So when you are making arguments from econ 101, you are starting on shakier ground than from physics 101. That doesn't mean phys 101 type arguments can't be naive, or oversimplified, or just plain broken. It does mean it is at least possible to make some arguments of the type with a degree of certainty that is simply beyond the abilities of economics, 101 or otherwise.

There is nothing wrong with this.

200 me.

192: Sure -- the reaction to 'Econ 101' wasn't so much disagreement with Shearer as to 'Econ 101' as a running gag.

Really? I didn't read 172 as joke:

For christs sakes, can we please stop applying 101 to industries that we know behave nothing like "perfect competition world".

Running gag may not have been the right phrasing -- 'pre-established hot button'? Shearer's generally annoyingly obtuse, and 'Econ 101' is a hot button for the reasons described above. People saw the phrase and went off as a response to the phrase in isolation, particularly coming from someone who had been being irritating, rather than to the comment as a whole (which was actually perfectly reasonable).

If you want to say this was unfair, and that Shearer didn't deserve that sort of response to that particular comment, you're probably right. (Sorry, James.) Again, it was a non-rigorous conversation, because it got argumentative in response to some very vaguely stated claims that couldn't be directly refuted because there wasn't enough substance to them.

Further, I think you have the point on Econ. 101 mostly wrong. To take your Physics 101 analogy, when someone starts claiming that magic beans will allow them to jump over a mountain, Physics 101 is a good place to start.

This seems about right to me.

I mean, Shearer was displaying his typical obtuseness, but the Econ 101 rambling really has absolutely nothing to do with anything in this thread.

Or after previewing, exactly what you said.

Funny, I can't think of how the conversation would go, that would make anything from Physics 101 relevant. "Magic doesn't work" isn't a Physics 101 argument. It's a good argument, but it's not physics.

What about "I can build a perpetual motion machine"?

That one's Physics 101 -- conservation of energy. But 'magic beans' doesn't imply non-conserved energy, just an improbably large energy source.

Further, I think you have the point on Econ. 101 mostly wrong. To take your Physics 101 analogy, when someone starts claiming that magic beans will allow them to jump over a mountain, Physics 101 is a good place to start.

But in cases like the minimum wage argument, generally you have minimum wage supporters saying "It's guaranteed to give poor workers more money right now, and if people were concerned about the effect on unemployment, well, there's been a lot of studies and it really has almost no effect, presumably because regulated labor isn't as fungible as other commodities, and marginal wage changes aren't a huge part of most companies' expenditures, particularly these days when you compare actual wages to health care coverage." And then you have minimum wage opponents saying "LOL I can't believe you can be so stupid, do you hate the poor? When the price of something goes up, the demand goes down! The poor are already suffering enough by the existence of a minimum wage in the first place, according to the theoretical model that you should have learned in Econ 101."

In other words, it would be more like somebody saying "If I inject these drugs, I get stronger and faster. I don't know how it works, but that's what happens to me, and most other people as well." And then someone responds by saying "According to Nutrition 101, you need to eat fruits and vegetables and proteins and certain types of fats to get stronger and faster, not inject yourself with things. That's just completely implausible."

If we makes this the challenge of the battling strawmen, no doubt we can make either side seem more reasonable. If all minimum wage arguments were like Ned's (and perhaps, if all minimum wage increases were as small increases over the prevailing market wage as those studied in Card and Krueger) then pointing to Econ 101 would indeed be an inadequate first response. We should all be so lucky.

In point of fact, there was, in this very thread, an immediate move to suggest that rising insurance premiums were not linked to rising payouts, but were rather linked to a price-fixing cartel. It wasn't a strong claim, or a definitive claim. But it was, perhaps an instinctual claim. Econ 101 would help there, I think.

See my 199, with particular attention to the first sentence.

To be politer, I say again that the conversation last night was offhanded and snappish, in that it was mostly a response to vague bullshit. If you want to have a rigorous conversation about something, start one. If you want to complain that last night's conversation was ill-sourced, I would suggest that there are many, many ill-sourced conversations that you can find and complain about all over the Web.

there are many, many ill-sourced conversations that you can find and complain about all over the Web.

Someone should start a compiler.

The first thing I do when I hear about badly informed discourse on the internet is go write a computer program for an unrelated purpose.

I have so many such computer programs.

Well, I love pickles as much as the next guy. Speaking for myself (but maybe for Idealist too?), I would be less likely to pick nits did I not perceive that ec 101 mockery has become a convenient way for the proponents of non-market based policies (and not just on the left) to ignore the costs of their proposals. One of the best features of Ec 101 is that it discomfits (almost) everyone by emphasizes that policies have trade-offs. This isn't the whole of wisdom, but it's a great beginning.

re: 216. Baa speaks great wisdom.

And this: I can't think of how the conversation would go, that would make anything from Physics 101 relevant. "Magic doesn't work" isn't a Physics 101 argument. It's a good argument, but it's not physics.

You're right. We should have not been trying to use facts and a standard theoretical framework to address arguments that were based on neither. My bad.

And really, "go suck a pickle"? I know we taught you to be better at argument than that. What are they teaching you over there in big law these days?

Note that "ignoring the costs of their proposals" has no relevance whatsoever to the subject of the conversation in which you were picking nits. What proposal? Who made it?

Seriously, I pick nits sometimes -- in a focussed conversation, there's not a thing wrong with it. Looking at a mess like last night's comments, which were a response to nonsense like Shearer's 102 and 123, and picking nits there, is just timewasting. If it's not a conversation where you can clearly identify what points are being argued and what positions are committed to (and if you can do that with the conversation at issue, I'd be stunned), picking nits with what you have the general impression people are kind of saying probably is just being an asshole. While you can go ahead and do it if you like, I wouldn't plume myself on the potential for convincing anyone of anything that way.

216- Except that's not how it's commonly taught, unfortunately. It's commonly taught that liberal policies have trade-offs. Minimum wage, progressive income tax, environmental regulations? TRADE-OFFS. Free trade, tax cuts, school vouchers? EFFICIENCY.

You're right. We should have not been trying to use facts and a standard theoretical framework to address arguments that were based on neither. My bad.

I was making a real point -- there is nothing you learn in Physics 101 that tells you magic beans won't let you jump over a mountain. You come into the class knowing that, but someone with a firm grasp of the contents of Physics 101 doesn't have any advantage over someone who doesn't in terms of rejecting the 'magic beans' hypothesis.

The point of Econ 101 is that it leads to Econ 102, and I have the same kneejerk reaction to someone who dismisses an argument with, "Well, econ 101 says X" that I do to n00bs who start an ethics argument with "I took philosophy 101 once..."

It doth irk, because rarely is the person pointing out a serious, nay fundamental, mistake, but that both sides are talking out of their ass but one side remembers graphing something halfway relevant in Intro to Macro fifteen years previously.

re: 220

Physics might tell you what properties the magic beans ought to have, in order to enable mountain-jumping.

That they'd need to overcome a gravitational force of 9.81ms/s, that the height of the mountain was 200 metres, that the mass of the person jumping was 75kg, and so on. They'd help specify the explanatory hurdle the magic-bean advocate would have to overcome even if physics couldn't, and I agree, rule out (in advance and purely from physical first principles) the possibility.

[I'm nit-picking since I largely agree with you]

I was speaking generally about the advantages of ec 101 style thinking, not referencing a specific policy proposed in this thread. Although here are two positions that seem dismissive of trade-offs in ways that ec 101 thinking could help:

1. Increasing malpractice payouts will not increase premiums significantly because these effects are dominated by cartel pricing
2. Increases in the minimum wage do not reduce employment

These claims were at least touched on in the thread above, no? There is of course much more to be said about medical malpractice and the minimum wage.

On the larger point, the crux of the dispute seems to be whether ec 101 mockery is fair, generally, because ec 101 arguments are simplistic, or whether ec 101 arguments are usually a good place to start, from which on wants to justify divergence by evidence of special circumstance. Some proponents of non-market policies have started acting like ec 101 is just a silly place to start because of all the exceptions. That seems like a mistake.

216, 217: I'm just checking here, but the idea that getting things you want usually has costs, and that you should expect tradeoffs to be necessary to want to accomplish anything -- the two of you guys learned that in Econ 101? As in, it was a new idea to you then?

As in, it was a new idea to you then

This is a bit much from the person who has yet to explain the economic basis for her claim that studies showed that there was no relationship between malpractice insurance rates and payouts on those policies.

Some proponents of non-market policies have started acting like ec 101 is just a silly place to start because of all the exceptions. That seems like a mistake.

Why? As a general rule, if we want to make claims that certain principles have the status of scientific laws or are at least law-like then we don't, generally, want them hedged with ceteris paribus claims in order to get around the numerous exceptions.

That doesn't seem a bad place to start from if one were to look for an argument against one or more of the principles taught in 'economics 101'.

Backing up a bit, my vague recollection was that the insurance pricing studies cited above concluded that a "malpractice crisis" was not a plausible explanation for insurance price spikes because insurance pricing changes from year to year were driven more by capital market performance and a cycle of underpricing policies in response to strong capital markets and other insurers' pricing moves and then spiking prices industry-wide when the price war becomes unsustainable. The argument wasn't that claims experience is irrelevant to insurance pricing, but only that short-term pricing changes weren't attributable to changes in claims costs (a "malpractice crisis").

223: On the minimum wage point -- the thing is, there seems to be reasonably solid data that changes in the minimum wage within the sort of range that people are talking about as likely policy doesn't have a significant effect on unemployment. That's not a claim that it is impossible that any change in the minimum wage could have an effect on unemployment -- it seems likely that a big enough one would, given the persuasiveness of the Econ 101 argument. It is a claim that the Econ 101 argument doesn't, in the face of empirical data to the contrary, establish that a couple of bucks extra on the minimum wage is going to raise unemployment by enough to make it a bad idea to do so. The Econ 101 argument doesn't add anything informative to the discourse on that topic.

On the malpractice payout question -- if you really want to make me google for this stuff, I will. What I'm remembering is studies showing caps in malpractice payouts not having a significant effect on premiums, suggesting that other elements in the cost of insurance dominate over the amount of payouts.

The general principles behind Econ 101 are, as I suggested in my last comment, known to anyone with any sense who's made it through grade school -- you don't need Econ 101 to know that things have costs. Once you start actually trying to get quantitative answers, on the other hand, Econ 101 is always going to be oversimplified. Waving Econ 101 around is annoying because it's either an insult to your interlocutor: "Because you didn't take this college course, you're too stupid to realize that you can't get anything without paying for it" -- or likely to give you a wrong answer through oversimplification: "Any increase in the minimum wage will hurt more poor people than it helps."

Here's an Ezra Klein post, linking to a study published in Health Affairs, and summarizing it as saying, in part, that malpractice payouts are going up no faster than inflation, so that if premiums are increasing faster, it's not a response to increased payouts.

The general principles behind Econ 101 are, as I suggested in my last comment, known to anyone with any sense who's made it through grade school -- you don't need Econ 101 to know that things have costs. Once you start actually trying to get quantitative answers, on the other hand, Econ 101 is always going to be oversimplified. Waving Econ 101 around is annoying because it's either an insult to your interlocutor: "Because you didn't take this college course, you're too stupid to realize that you can't get anything without paying for it" -- or likely to give you a wrong answer through oversimplification: "Any increase in the minimum wage will hurt more poor people than it helps."

Respectfully, this is silly. Because something is not a perfect framework does not mean that no framework at all is better. Making shit up and saying "I heard about a study once" is good for confirming your prejudices, however irrational, but it is not a particularly reasonable basis for sorting out the truth of stuff.

What I'm remembering is studies showing caps in malpractice payouts not having a significant effect on premiums, suggesting that other elements in the cost of insurance dominate over the amount of payouts.

It is not clear how the first sentence proves the second, but putting that to one side, that is not, of course, what was being argued in 124 and 130. The claim there was that there was no correlation between suits and payout on the one hand and premiums.

I'm done. Anyone else who wants to keep up with this is welcome to.

This is the only thing I saw in the linked post said that is relevant to your claim that there is no relationship between malpractice payouts and claims:

anecdotal evidence (and maybe statistical too, though I don't have it) says that malpractice insurance is growing rapidly in America.

This is stunning evidence. He heard someplace that premiums have risen faster than payouts. This certainly does not prove no correlation.

And of this, from a study that you claimed supported your view, contradicts the claim of no correlation:

A full analysis of the reasons for the recent rise in premiums is beyond the scope of this brief. But the available evidence suggests that higher costs for insurers (particularly from increases in the size of malpractice awards), lower investment income, and short-term factors such as cyclical patterns in the insurance market have all played major roles.

Payments of claims are the most significant costs that malpractice insurers face, accounting for about two-thirds of their total costs. The average payment for a malpractice claim has risen fairly steadily since 1986, from about $95,000 in that year to $320,000 in 2002 (see Figure 2). That increase represents an annual growth rate of nearly 8 percent--more than twice the general rate of inflation.Payments of claims are the most significant costs that malpractice insurers face, accounting for about two-thirds of their total costs. The average payment for a malpractice claim has risen fairly steadily since 1986, from about $95,000 in that year to $320,000 in 2002 (see Figure 2). That increase represents an annual growth rate of nearly 8 percent--more than twice the general rate of inflation.

From a congressional budget office article entitled "Limiting Tort Liability for Medical Malpractice":

Evidence from the states indicates that premiums for malpractice insurance are lower when tort liability is restricted than they would be otherwise. But even large savings in premiums can have only a small direct impact on health care spending--private or governmental--because malpractice costs account for less than 2 percent of that spending. Advocates or opponents cite other possible effects of limiting tort liability, such as reducing the extent to which physicians practice "defensive medicine" by conducting excessive procedures; preventing widespread problems of access to health care; or conversely, increasing medical injuries. However, evidence for those other effects is weak or inconclusive.

Interestingly, the rise in malpractice premiums in the 2000s has been largely driven by the decline in the investment payouts that the Insurance companies can get. In the 1990s, insurance companies would compete to get peoples money so they could invest it in Cisco and the like but since the end of the boom they can't do this.

Okay, this really is my last comment on this. Ideal, when you're refuting an argument that you're sure your interlocutor committed themselves to, in a discussion conducted entirely in writing, it's good practice to see if you can quote someone clearly taking the position you're arguing against. If, as here, you can't, there's a good shot you're missing the point.

Nowhere did I say or mean that there is no correlation at all between malpractice payouts and malpractice premiums -- I don't know one way or the other, I haven't seen significant data on it. The point I was alluding to, sloppily, last night, was that malpractice payouts don't seem to be driving a problematic increase in malpractice premiums (as evidence for which, the study linked in 229) and that malpractice costs in total aren't a large part of health care costs. Shearer's apparent, although vaguely made, claim that malpractice payouts were the problem, or at least a significant problem, driving increases in health care costs, is therefore bullshit.

If you want to keep on berating me about the position you are absolutely sure I meant to be taking, go crazy.

when you're refuting an argument that you're sure your interlocutor committed themselves to, in a discussion conducted entirely in writing, it's good practice to see if you can quote someone clearly taking the position you're arguing against

I did that in 198. Your detailed refutation was related to pickles.

malpractice payouts don't seem to be driving a problematic increase in malpractice premiums (as evidence for which, the study linked in 229)

As I show in 232, the study in 229 does not support the claim. Nor does the CBO study to which you cited.

that malpractice costs in total aren't a large part of health care costs

That may be true. But my comments, which you have never addressed (or perhaps even read) addressed your claim, which you make again explicitly, that malpractice payouts do not drive premiums.

Why don't you just admit that you were being a dick and that now you are just too darn stubborn to admit that you were being a dick, just as I am too darn stubborn to leave this be and go argue about calling people antisemites or taking drugs for ADD in another thread.

Ideal, there's also a treadmill thread, if that better suits your tastes.

But my comments, which you have never addressed (or perhaps even read) addressed your claim, which you make again explicitly, that malpractice payouts do not drive premiums.

Wrong. The claim is that they are not driving a problematic increase in premiums. You 'refuted' that by saying that Klein had no evidence that there was any increase in premiums. That entirely misses the point, which is not that payouts are necessarily uncoupled from premiums, but that whether they are or not, they aren't the cause of a problematic increase in premiums -- if they're not going up faster than inflation, they really can't be.

But she likes having conservatives around to argue with, and occasionally one of them has a poin on something.

This seems like as good a place as any to record my thoughts on the above statement, from LB's bio, which are that in all my time here I've never seen anything that suggested that LB actually believes the second clause of that sentence to be true.

I just copied and pasted -- how on earth did I lose a "t"?

Regardless...

And the claim that I understood Tim to be making, that I signed onto, and that Teo agreed with, is that there are studies showing that premiums don't correlate strongly or exclusively with payouts, not that there's absolutely no connection between the one and the other. I can keep googling for studies like the one I linked for you in 229, but I'm still pretty confident about this. If you want to keep on throwing a ridiculous hissy fit about our culpable inexactitude, enjoy yourself.

Why don't you just admit that you were being a dick and that now you are just too darn stubborn to admit that you were being a dick,

I'm not inclined to.

Ideal, there's also a treadmill thread, if that better suits your tastes.

I have reached the stage where I get winded just thinking about a treadmill. I'm not up for it. Although I understand that there was a lot of basic physics--Physics 101, if you will--used to decide the debate.

More seriously, one of the things I miss about not working with my old friend LizardBreath was her ability to explain scientifc stuff like the treadmill debate (it seems to me that a treadmill is different somehow, but I have learned to trust her on most things like this). When we worked together, she even answered science questions for my kids, who e-mailed "Dr. Science" and got prompt and fascinating answers to questions which were well over my head. Just do not ask her about broccoli.

238: Nonsense. I'm not going to try to drag up examples, and will instead rely on bald assertion.

And Econ 101 is quite useful in this situation (malpractice premiums), because when putting your understanding of the market through said principles makes you expect something wildly different from what you see (i.e. premiums skyrocket, payouts do not), it's a strong indication that something is wrong with your understanding. In this case, the general stock market performance mentioned in 233.

Now of course I have no choice but to ask her about broccoli.

I have no choice but to ask her about broccoli.

Do not believe what she tells you.

Yes, well. I don't know how much it shows up on line, but a large part of my conversation in real life is 'something interesting I read somewhere' that I can't actually come up with a source for. I was working on a trial with Ideal and Mongol Rally Audrey, and mentioned that Alfred Broccoli, the producer of the Bond movies, is actually from the same family as the Italian market gardeners who in the early 20thC crossbred cauliflower and rabe to create the vegetable that they sold under their family name, Broccoli.

Turns out it's an urban legend. What can I say? I believed it.

Did you guys know that researchers in Roanoke, Virginia, have trained oysters to do simple household tasks?

What, really? I always thought that was true, too. Crap.

246: No, I didn't! That's awesome.

What can I say? I believed it.

The thing is not that she believed it, it's that when it comes to science she is so good and so convincing that she can make you believe anything. I was sure that her claim regarding broccoli made no sense, but she explained it with such conviction and so reasonably that I believed it. And then she looked it up and determined that what she had just convinced me of was not true. I remain suspicious that she really did it to prove to me that I was a gullible chump.

It takes an expansive definition of "science" to capture 245, no? I'd file that as trivia (if it were true).

Ah, but you see, that wasn't science. It was vegetable trivia.

My sister has a better story about persuading the gullible. She went to St. Johns College, which has a great books curriculum in which all the professors teach all of the classes. This works out pretty well generally, but it gets a little sketchy on math, sometimes, because while finding someone who can teach Classical Greek, French, philosophy, and literature is possible, finding someone who can do all that and arithmetic gets tricky. So the math classes have a tendency to get taken over by the student with the strongest aptitudes in that direction.

In any case, in an analytic geometry class, she proved to the satisfaction of the professor and the class that the sides of a parabola approach vertical asymptotes. She said it was terribly embarrassing, once she'd figured out her error, to go back the next day and prove to them all that it wasn't true.

It takes an expansive definition of "science" to capture 245

I was raised in the town that is the home of the University of California's farm school. Hometown pride compels me to object to the claim that horticulture is not a science.

After all, we all know that you can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.

I'm pretty sure you're now banned, LB.

re: 253. You are an exceptionally odd person.

253,255

That was Dorothy Parker, right?

239: Same place your pounds went misteriously, I suspect.

I think so. There was a word game her crowd used to play where you'd take a long word and try to fit it into a sentence made up of smaller words -- say, "Remembers: After they burned the first ream, embers lit the rest of the paper as well." And I think the 'horticulture' line was from that game.

I'm not convinced 'bout the treadmill, incidently, but even from this distance, having only met LB once, and not really getting into any arguments even about trivia, I'll concur that the force of her conviction is quite remarkable. I'm sorry that the degree to which it abashes people, men, causes her frustration; it seems to me that it's a great gift and I'm delighted to know her.

I'm not convinced 'bout the treadmill

Somewhere, Galileo is weeping. (And his tears fall at the same rate as iron balls. At least in a vacuum. If they didn't evaporate before they hit bottom.)

193

"But the Econ 101 mockery is fair, generally. Anyone trying to apply Physics 101 to a real world problem like trying to figure out the gas mileage of your car ("It weighs X kilos, so going at 55 mph its kinetic energy is Y. So if I know how much gasoline contains that much energy, that tells me how much gas I need to accelerate the car, and then it doesn't need any more until I stop it and accelerate again.") would also get laughed at. People make Econ 101 arguments like that all the time."

I don't think this example shows what you claim. The problem is not with Physics 101 which covers things like friction and the inefficiency of heat engines, it is with the modeler who includes one effect while leaving out more important effects. It is perfectly possible to construct simplified but still useful models of gas mileage. Similarly bad Econ 101 arguments are generally not the fault of Econ 101 itself.

Consider the minimum wage. What does Econ 101 actually say about the effect of minimum wage hikes on unskilled laborers? It predicts if you raise the minimum wage by a small percentage X the demand for unskilled labor will decrease by a small percentage Y. Further for small X, Y will vary with X as Y=a*X where a is an empirical constant related to the elasticity of demand for unskilled labor. So total wages paid to unskilled laborers will vary (in percentage terms) as X*(1-a) for small increases X in the minimum wage. So if a is less than 1 unskilled laborers as a whole will be better off. Econ 101 also says a must be determined empirically as it will be different in different situations depending on how price sensitive demand is. For the current minimum wage I have seen empirical estimates of a in the range of .1-.2. I am not aware of any serious claims that it is actually above 1. So Econ 101 combined with these empirical studies says in fact that an increase in the minimum wage will be good (not bad) for unskilled laborers overall. Blaming Econ 101 for arguments to the contrary is just ignorant.

However many liberals just seem resistant to thinking in economic terms at all even when those terms favor their positions.

Blaming Econ 101 for arguments to the contrary is just ignorant.

And thinking that we're 'blaming Econ 101' for anything is mindbogglingly obtuse. We are reacting with irritation and disdain to bad arguments bolstered with 'it's Econ 101', as if the existence of a oversimplified Econ 101 argument was strong evidence about how things are going to work out in the real world.

To be clear, you didn't do that at all when you said 'Econ 101' above. People just snapped at the phrase because it's a hot button and you'd been generally annoying.

260: If there's a bottom, it's not likely to be a vaccuum, is it? Or have we got the old guy packed away in a bottle? `By Galileo's boiling tears' has a nice ring to it, though.

On the treadmill issue --- it's clear that an idealized version of the problem can be made where the runner can't tell the difference. This is wrong in practice in at least trivial ways, but perhaps moreso as well. Someone who doesn't agree with you based on intuition is talking out their ass; someone who is disagreeing based on experience may not be.

Oh, certainly the experience is different -- there's the mental factor, and the bounciness of the surface, and the perfect smoothness and lack of obstacles, and the enforced constant speed. I don't find it surprising at all that people find it easier to maintain higher speeds on the treadmill.

I've just been arguing against the position that the basic physics of the situation is different. (And I like "By Galileo's boiling tears!" If I were an entirely different and less easily embarrassed person, I might start saying that.)

I've just been arguing against the position that the basic physics of the situation is different.

I'd still argue it's different if I wasn't so lazy.

As I sadi several times on the other thread, I'd love for someone to jump in and explain the non-trivial ways in which there's a difference in the practical case. Because it sure as hell seems as if there's a difference, and I'd like to be able to explain it.

I'm pretty sure I've exhausted them -- mental differences, bouncier track, no obstacles, no wind resistance, and enforced speed. You're just underestimating the magnitude of all that. (I really like my gait theory -- the 'bouncing lope' I was talking about. Because it works just as well for covering distance without putting out as much energy on the ground as it does on the treadmill, but I have a much harder time getting into a groove with it when I'm not on the treadmill.)

262

I haven't noticed among some of the commentators here much ability or inclination to distinguish between good Econ 101 arguments and bad Econ 101 arguments, just a general hostility to economic arguments.

Try coming up with some good Econ 101 arguments sometime and see.

238

This is unfair, LB does occasionally acknowledge a conservative has a point. The extreme rarity of such events just makes them more valued.

I'm pretty sure I've exhausted them -- mental differences, bouncier track, no obstacles, no wind resistance, and enforced speed.

I confess I haven't been reading the other thread except to mock you people for it's length. But it does sound like you've covered it. Uniformity of terrain and wind resistance tend to be underestimated.

Yeah, I guess what I meant is that, while I don't have any other explanations to offer, I'm still hoping there's some sort of plausible legitimate biomechanical difference someone will offer.

Isn't bouncier track pretty biomechanical? It's also probably easy to grasp - compare w/ running shoes to without, running on soft sand / grass / concrete / a running track. Physics 101 just says that the one thing it most certainly isn't is the track's motion.

There is an interesting exchange here .

Here's the part that caught my attention:

However, research indicates that during treadmill running the shin of the support leg is less erect at contact and moves through a greater range of motion, with a faster overall angular velocity, than in normal running. If footstrike time averages 180 milliseconds (an average for good-quality runners) then the foot could move backwards in relation to the centre of mass by about 2.6 inches during treadmill footstrike. (It will actually be a little less than this, since the centre of mass and upper body will tend to be dragged along at least a little.)

This may not be a larger difference, I don't think it is. And many of LB's points, such as that much of the effort in running is the vertical anyway is I'm sure well-taken. I never said it wasn't effective, or more appropriate in some circumstances, or anything. If I seemed to, put it down to rhetorical incompetence. There are differences, physical ones, and that's the only point I really wanted to make.

Christ, I know I've seen cites on this. You people are going to go make me find cites, aren't you?

Eat

it

suckers.

Also, this, and this.

From the first link, here comes the money shot.

Data suggest that the moving treadmill belt reduces the energy requirements of the runner by bringing the supporting leg back under the body during the support phase of running.

GSWIFT IS THE HERO!!!1!!11

this cunt wears a timex watch. =NOT RICH.

275 gets to what I was wondering about, the effect of the motor on the treadmill in reducing the amount of work you have to do. However, I remain agnostic until I hear LizardBreath's rebuttal.

All those links say is that runners tend to use a different gait on the treadmill than on the ground -- I've been clear throughout that the experience is somewhat different, and I'm not surprised that there are consistent differences in the gait used on the treadmil and on the ground.

But the explanation that it's because the motor is doing the work is physically nonsensical. Again, I think I've established that running on treadmill is physically (rather than psychologically, and ignoring secondary effects like the surface, wind resistance and so forth) equivalent to running toward the back of a train that's moving forward at the same speed -- you're stationary in relation to the surface of the earth, but the physical demands of running are the same as if you were running on the ground.

When you think of the moving surface underfoot as a train, you aren't tempted to start talking about how you're really running in place, just waving your legs back and forth, while the locomotive does the work. Obviously, you're really running toward the back of the train. (Again, this is Galilean relativity -- in an unaccelerated frame of reference, the laws of nature remain the same.) And there's no fundamental (ignoring surface, psychological differences, and so forth) difference between the unaccelerated frame of reference of the train and of the surface of the treadmill.

I should say, to be clear, that the language gswift quotes as the 'money shot' is just wrong. It's a medical paper; who said doctors understand physics?

I see the physics-based argument, I think. Put another way, if you were inside a train going 5 miles an hour, you would have to run toward the back of the train at a 5 mile an hour pace to stay even with a fixed reference point on the ground.

But that isn't the whole story. To adopt a phrase used above, aren't there biomechanical reasons that you might do less work because your legs really are doing something different?

This whole debate, while interesting, is not of that much practical interest to me because for reasons that i imagine are partly psycological and partly related to the real extra work involved in keeping my vast bulk on the treadmill, I find running on a treadmill harder than running outside.

Sure -- for psychological reasons, you might easily, and I expect people do, adopt a biomechanically different gait on the treadmill -- I'm not denying that the experience is different.

Those just don't have anything to do with the nature of a treadmill as a treadmill, rather than with all the associated facts about it. To come up with another silly thought experiment -- if you had a very long, straight track with a bouncy surface like a treadmill, and put a small opaque enclosure with motorized wheels and no floor on it, and put a runner inside, and set the enclosure to move forward at a constant speed while the runner ran inside it, I bet they'd end up running just like they would on the treadmill -- the runner would take the psychological cues of motionlessness from the motionless walls of the enclosure, and so forth.

Conversely, a treadmill surrounded by a convincing VR experience of outdoor motion? I bet you'd run just like you were running on the ground.

I guess I don't know whom you're thinking of when you say "I've established," but,

Again, I think I've established that running on treadmill is physically (rather than psychologically, and ignoring secondary effects like the surface, wind resistance and so forth) equivalent to running toward the back of a train that's moving forward at the same speed -- you're stationary in relation to the surface of the earth, but the physical demands of running are the same as if you were running on the ground.

This is exactly what I have not been willing to concede, and the cites that gswift and I found directly address the non-identity of "running" over an independently moving surface and running.

who said doctors understand physics

They don't call 'em physicians for nothing.

It doesn't seem to me clear that a conveyor belt case and the train case are analogous. The floor of the train is not imparting any different energy to the runners foot than to the runner's center of mass. Is that true in the conveyor belt case? Or maybe, why isn't this section from I don't pay's link relevant?

f you think about it for a moment you will realise that the treadmill itself and the runner on the treadmill are both moving at the same speed - the speed imparted by the rotation of the earth. The net velocity of a treadmill runner in relation to the overall treadmill is zero. However, a treadmill belt (unless it is not activated) is not moving at the same velocity as the runner. If the belt speed is set at 10mph, for example, any specific point on the treadmill below is moving away from the runner at a velocity of 10mph. That backwards motion is interrupted by the 'recycling' motion of the treadmill belt, but you get my point: the length of the belt and the overall size of the treadmill do not matter; the net difference in velocity between runner and belt will be 10mph.

When a foot hits the treadmill belt while running, the foot, ankle and shin, being momentarily 'parts' of the belt, will move backwards from the centre and mass of the body at the same speed as the belt - 10mph. This must be true unless you think of the human body as a rigid rod without segments or joints, in which case the centre of mass would also move backwards at the same speed. However, research indicates that during treadmill running the shin of the support leg is less erect at contact and moves through a greater range of motion, with a faster overall angular velocity, than in normal running. If footstrike time averages 180 milliseconds (an average for good-quality runners) then the foot could move backwards in relation to the centre of mass by about 2.6 inches during treadmill footstrike. (It will actually be a little less than this, since the centre of mass and upper body will tend to be dragged along at least a little.)

But that isn't the whole story. To adopt a phrase used above, aren't there biomechanical reasons that you might do less work because your legs really are doing something different?

Yup. When the revolution comes, LB will affix a frictionless penguin on an ice shelf to her barricade.

LB's right on the frames of reference; if it didn't generally cancel out, you'd either run off the treadmill or fall off the back. But the human leg is a reasonably complex machine, and that can change the effort you put out.

Next time you hamsters are on a treadmill, try this experiment. Set your treadmill to your normal speed. Run your normal gait for a minute. Now switch to a big loping gait. What do you notice? Now switch to a baby-stepping gait. In all three, you're not moving relative to the gym, but you're exerting different amounts of effort. And you'll find you stay in *almost* the same place relative to the rest of the gym, but you probably scoot back and forth a bit.

Now consider my hypothesis for why treadmill running doesn't translate perfectly into regular running. When you're tiring, you can't slow down like you would outside, or you'll fall off the back of the treadmill. But you can switch to a boundier, but slower-leg-motion gait. If your strides are longer but slower, the treadmill will push your foot back just a little bit, and then you push off for your next stride. I still stay in more or less the same place in my frame of reference, because the pace overall is the same; but I'm pacing myself by changing up my stride, not by moving my legs at the same speed.

If I take that long, lopey gait outside, I'm not going to get the small boost from the treadmill moving my leg a bit back. In fact, in order to use that long, lopey gait, I'll have to exert a little more effort in the glutes to pull myself along.

It's not a huge difference, which is why one of the earlier studies in the thread found that how much the treadmill affected your regular running depended on your normal speed. But it's not *just* a matter of psychology.

283: I know you haven't been willing to concede that, but you're wrong. I don't have a more convincing argument than the 'structurally unsound train' hypo in the other thread, but you are mistaken not to be convinced by that argument. Go back and look at it, and see if you can figure out any reason why it's invalid -- it isn't.

284: The floor of the train is not imparting any different energy to the runners foot than to the runner's center of mass. Is that true in the conveyor belt case?

That is true in the conveyor belt case. Think of it this way -- there's only one way for force to apply to the runner (other than gravity, which, at right angles to the motion we're talking about doesn't affect things); by contact between the soles of her shoes and the surface she's running on. On a train, the speed of the landscape moving by outside exerts no force on her so long as the train is moving at a steady speed; on a treadmill, the stationary floor of the gym exerts no force on her.

Let me try the train again -- this time, flatcars. The train is in motion forward at 5mph and right next to it, an inch away, is a treadmill sitting on the ground and running at 5 mph. One runner is on the train, running toward the back at 5mph; the other is on the treadmill next to her. They stay next to each other, and run at the same speed exerting the same energy. Now the one on the treadmill takes half a step to her left, and runs with her left foot on the train, and her right foot on the treadmill -- is there anything physically different between what her left foot and right foot are doing?

As to the link: the first paragraph is wrong:

If the belt speed is set at 10mph, for example, any specific point on the treadmill below is moving away from the runner at a velocity of 10mph. That backwards motion is interrupted by the 'recycling' motion of the treadmill belt, but you get my point: the length of the belt and the overall size of the treadmill do not matter; the net difference in velocity between runner and belt will be 10mph.

Everything there is precisely true of the relationship between the runner and the ground for someone running over ground -- the net difference in velocity between the ground and the runner is 10mph if that's the speed the runner is running at. It's not a difference between treadmills and running over ground.

The second paragraph is just describing differences in runners' gaits on a treadmill, which are explained by secondary factors.

286: I'm sticking to my frictionless penguin. When Galileo says 'no difference between the laws of motion in two unaccelerated frames of reference' he means 'no difference', not 'no difference on average, but some little differences that aren't a big deal'.

That longer, boundier gait you're talking about doesn't get a 'small boost' from the treadmill dragging your foot backward underneath you in a way that wouldn't be available on the ground. If you adopted precisely the same gait on the ground, the stationary ground would 'drag your foot backward' with respect to the forward motion of your body in exactly the same way.

The biomechanical differences in gait are attributable purely to psychology and to the secondary factors I've referred to elsewhere.

Poor LB. Let me throw out another hypo for people. Put a treadmill on a train pointing forwards. Suppose that the train is going 10 mph (forward), and suppose that the treadmill is going 10mph (backwards). Surely even those of you who don't seem to believe in Galilean relativity will grant that the being on a train shouldn't change the physics of running on a treadmill.

Now, if you stand still you are actually motionless relative to the ground. If you run forward at all you actually are moving at that same speed relative to the ground. Thus the basic physics is *exactly the same as running on the ground* (modulo psychology, bounciness, etc.). But since you are running on a treadmill you'd run like you would on a treadmill.

I'm sticking to my frictionless penguin.

How did this become the beastiality thread? And if it is frictionless, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

289: Oooo, that one is nice.

290: The frictionlessness does make it hard to stick to.

The problem of 289 is that it does not get to the point of debate. The question is not whether you need to run at speed X on a train moving at speed X to stay at the same spot relative to a fixed point on the ground. The question is whether it takes the same amount of energy to do that as opposed to runing at speed X on the ground.

I'm going with LizardBreath's explanation because experience has showed me that she usually is right about this stuff, but my intuition still tells me I am wrong (and, of course, I am stil scarred by the broccoli incident).

293: Huh? But the track is motionless relative to the ground. In the situation that I've described everything (except the composition of the track and what you see) is physically identical to running on the ground. Thus *everything about them* is physically identical. In particular once you fix the track material and your biomechanics of running, everything you could measure is identical. In particular, energy use.

You guys are still arguing about this?

Wait a second. There is a difference. It's not a physics 101 difference, but it's a real one. It's also not one that any of you physics-haters have brought up.

Air resistance.

On a treadmill the bulk of your body isn't moving relative to the air. When running it is. An ordinary train is like running on the ground in this way (because the walls cause the air to go at the same velocity as the train), but a flatbox train is like a treadmill.

Basically, running on a treadmill at 10mph is physically identical to running on the ground *with a 10mph tailwind*.

This is easy to ignore because physics 101 generally ignores air resistance. (Just as Econ 101 ignores a hell of a lot of stuff, explaining why it gets minimum wage issues empiracally wrong. Of course, actual economists, like actual physicists, eventually take other classes.)

293, 294: Pause, what happened there is that Ideal dropped back to doubting Galilean relativity (that is, that running on a moving train is physically equivalent to running on the ground) at all. See this:

The question is not whether you need to run at speed X on a train moving at speed X to stay at the same spot relative to a fixed point on the ground. The question is whether it takes the same amount of energy to do that as opposed to runing at speed X on the ground.

He's not even talking about your treadmill hypo (which is charmingly elegant), but on the base assumption about the train.

This whole conversation is making me feel much better about political arguments. It's terribly easy, when you can't convince someone, to think that they're being obtuse in bad faith because they have some hidden political agenda they aren't willing to examine openly. It's worthwhile being reminded of how hard it is to convince someone of something with a clear right answer, even when no one actually has any emotional reason to give a damn about what that answer is.

Argumentative charity for all!

(On preview: Actually, we did talk about wind resistance back when this started -- I guess I've been leaving it out of the repeated lists of secondary factors, but it did get acknowledged to begin with.)

Oh ok. I'd actually bet that the tailwind explains almost all of the effect, with the rest being taken care of by the track material. Psychology is probably mostly irrelavent. People's bodies are usually better at physics than their brains are.

Ideal dropped back to doubting Galilean relativity

Dude, I said in 293 I was going to accept your explanation even though my intuition was other. Heck, most Catholics do not show the Pope that much deference any more.

The thing is, 289 does not answer the question for me. I assume that the real work is done by this sentence: If you run forward at all you actually are moving at that same speed relative to the ground. True, of course, but if you put 50 pound weights on your ankles and run forward at all you actually are moving at the same speed relative to the ground. The example does not answer the question of whether there is something about running on the ground that is different from running a treadmill, where the surface on which you are running is being moved underneath you (an input of energy into the situation not present when you run on the ground).

Possible, but think about running at high speeds -- if you speed up even a little past the speed of the belt, you kick the front and trip. That's got to make you flinchy on some level about controlling your speed perfectly, which is going to muck with your gait. The air resistance is a big part of it, I'm sure, but I'd bet you'd get some differences from a long treadmill with space to speed up a little without instantly running into an obstacle. But this is pure speculation, not physics.

But in my hypo the treadmill isn't being pulled underneath you because the train is balancing that out. The treadmill in my situation is only being pulled underneath you in exactly the same way as the ground is when you're running!

It's worthwhile being reminded of how hard it is to convince someone of something with a clear right answer, even when no one actually has any emotional reason to give a damn about what that answer is.

This is why I generally don't bother.

296: Air resistance has been mentioned several times. It's a factor (and a small one at low speeds) but not related to the basic physics being discussed. L.B. is right & has been right from the beginning.

because the train is balancing that out

This is the problem I have with the example. Since we are all assuming away other factors (rotation of the earth, wind resistance, sun spots etc.) all we are worried about is two things--you and the surface on which you are running. Saying that the train cancels out the effect of the treadmill assumes the answer.

I should give this up. I admit to the superiority of LizardBreath's scientific knowledge (my only physics class was in high school. I took the teacher's word that we would get a C just for signing up and attended only the first few weeks of classes and cut the rest in favor of hanging out in the park or lunch room with my friends (not a sound decision in retrospect, but high school sure was a lot of fun)

I don't understand how we can seriously be having this discussion while we are all standing on a 750 mph treadmill.

Try running east, try running west. Feel any difference? Didn't think so. Even though in one case the ground is being pulled underneath you at 750 mph.

299: Let me walk through it again. Start by assuming that a moving train is just like a stationary gym -- your speed over the ground is irrelevant, all your energy output is determined by your speed relative to the train. If you ran circular laps around the perimeter of the flatcar, you wouldn't be expending different amounts of energy when you were going toward the back of the train than when you were going toward the front of the train -- all that matters is your speed in relation to the train.

Now put a treadmill on that train -- all the concerns about treadmills being not real running apply equally to a treadmill on a train. If the treadmill on the train is real running, a treadmill in the gym is real running; if the treadmill on the train is waving your legs as the belt drags them backward, than so is the treadmill in the gym.

But now look at Pause's hypo -- if you set the treadmill up right, you can make the belt stationary with respect to the ground. Just as I said in the other hypo, you could have one runner running along the station platform, and another keeping pace on the treadmill on the train. The surfaces they were running on would be motionless with respect to each other -- if they ran at the same pace, they would stay next to each other (that is, the station-runner would pace the train, staying next to the treadmill). Someone could run with one foot on each, and not feel any different forces from the different surfaces. Therefore, running on a treadmill on a moving train is physically equivalent to running over the ground, therefore, running on a treadmill in the gym is physically equivalent (secondary factors, air resistance, and so forth ignored) to running over the ground.

(And I know you said you trusted that I was right -- I'm just trying to get your intuition in line.)

299: an input of energy into the situation not present when you run on the ground)

That seems to be the thing that's bothering people. That energy is just cancelling the horizontal motion of the runner so there's no fall off the front or back of the treadmill. You don't feel any difference running with or against the rotation of the Earth, right? That's about 1000 mph at the equator.

The only problem is, LB, that the second order effects don't seem to be ignorable in practice.

Wasn't everyone agreed hundreds of comments ago that the perfectly idealized case is equivalent?

The difference (and there seems to be a difference) must be made up of biomechanical issues, psychological issues, and higher order physical effects.

For example, air flow isn't just a resistance, it changes the way you percieve your motion; it might change your breathing too (I don't know).

Oh, nm LB, sorry --- I see on reading back some people were having trouble understanding the simplified ideal case....

Yeah. I think it's breaking down more on attachment to the Earth's surface as a privileged frame of reference -- there's a temptation to say "Sure, you can say that all that matters is motion relative to the surface of the belt, and so the physics is just the same as if the belt were stationary and the runner were moving forward. But we all know that really the belt is moving in relation to the ground -- that has to be important."

310 to 207. To 308 and 309; yeah, I think it's just hard to accept how much of a difference the secondary effects make to how it feels.

311. Yeah, for example it would be interesting to know how much pacing variability is normal when running on flat ground. On a treadmill, you have instant feedback for that.

Let me try this again. I'm really not denying physics 101.

When Galileo says 'no difference between the laws of motion in two unaccelerated frames of reference' he means 'no difference', not 'no difference on average, but some little differences that aren't a big deal'.

Sure, but the claim is here that Galileo's theory needs to accommodate for the fact that runners on treadmills don't stay perfectly in the same place. I'm not denying Physics 101, I'm saying that the model doesn't match up with reality once in you add in things like friction, the bounciness of the belt, and non-fixed stride lengths. You're perfectly right if we just analyze force on the treadmill belt, but that's not the only motion going on.

That longer, boundier gait you're talking about doesn't get a 'small boost' from the treadmill dragging your foot backward underneath you in a way that wouldn't be available on the ground.

This is a motorized treadmill with a fixed speed, yes? So it's going "backwards" at 5 miles an hour. To stay in the same place, I need to go forward at 5 miles an hour. To not fall off the treadmill, I need to do that on average: I might move back and forth in quarter-inches. But I have a lot of options on how I do that, and some expend more energy than others, and some mean that my foot is in contact with the belt more. If you charted my motion, I might be moving backwards in the frame of reference, then hopping forwards, then backwards, &c.

The comparison isn't that the ground doesn't push your foot back. We can make the ground push your foot just by setting what we call zero in a different place. But I'm probably just going to slow my pace down if I'm running outside, since I'm not going to fall off the back of the pavement.

I don't know if you want to call that psychology, but the key to the difference with a motorized treadmill is that the pace is fixed, so I'm going to have to change my stride or my leg-speed as I tire so I don't fall off. As you say:

That's got to make you flinchy on some level about controlling your speed perfectly, which is going to muck with your gait.

Yes, and in mucking with that gait, you train different muscles. That's one of the nice things about treadmills; I can't cheat my speed. But I will probably do that by changing my stride, and when I'm outside without the fixed pace, and I don't have to change my stride in order to keep from falling over, I am going to notice a difference, namely, that I find it harder to keep up because I'm not using the same muscles that I would be on a treadmill.

It's really not because I don't understand how a frame of reference works. It's just that the runner isn't a point-mass remaining in the exact same spot.

"Pugh also showed that at the speeds at which middle-distance track events are run (6 m/s or about 67 seconds per 400m), about 8% of the runner's energy is used in overcoming air resistance."link

8% is pretty big.

Cala, the only bit of your previous comment that I object to is: "If I take that long, lopey gait outside, I'm not going to get the small boost from the treadmill moving my leg a bit back. In fact, in order to use that long, lopey gait, I'll have to exert a little more effort in the glutes to pull myself along." That's just nonsense.

Your points about the secondary affects are good ones. I would still argue that air resistance has a larger affect than regularizing pace, but that's an empirical question, and I wouldn't be shocked if you were right.

Yeah, I should have tweaked that because I was half thinking about inclines & glutes. Point is, when I use a longer stride to keep up a pace, I'm using different muscles, and absent pressure to keep the pace (i.e., not going to fall on my ass), and I'm going to be accelerating in little bursts. Outside, if I do the same thing, I'll do the same thing (except going forward over the ground), but I'm probably not going to bother engaging those muscles and will drop a little bit off the pace.

You do learn to "run to the treadmill", a nice, flat, consistent springy surface with a good grip; I'm mostly objecting to the idea that it's some psychological fact about gyms where if we put up a nice view screen we'd all run like we were outside.

The comparison isn't that the ground doesn't push your foot back. We can make the ground push your foot just by setting what we call zero in a different place. But I'm probably just going to slow my pace down if I'm running outside, since I'm not going to fall off the back of the pavement.

I don't know if you want to call that psychology, but the key to the difference with a motorized treadmill is that the pace is fixed, so I'm going to have to change my stride or my leg-speed as I tire so I don't fall off.

Yeah, I do want to call that psychology. Anything dependent on what the runner is choosing to do because they're afraid of falling off the belt is psychology.

the belt is moving in relation to the ground -- that has to be important."

No. I think we all get the basic point with the train. I think that part of the problem with my intuion is based on how treadmills really are rather than the theoretical treadmills we have been discussing. On a real treadmill, when you get on, you are being pushed backwards, and you body has to work to fight that backwards momentum. Thus, to run on solid ground, you are pushing yourself forward, on the treadmill, you are fighting a force that is pushing you backwards (albeit by pushing yourself forward). However, if you had an extra-long treadmill and just stood still on it, you soon would not feel the backwards accelleration, and it then seems more reasonable that running forward on the imaginary long treadmill is exactly like running forward on the ground. The unresolved question is whether on a real treadmill the effects on the body are really the same. Plus all the stuff Cala said in 313.

On the earth's rotation, 307 proves too much. We do not factor it in because in running we are not off the earth enough that we lose the imparted momentum in a way we can sense, particularly given that the atmosphere around us also shares that imparted momentum. Not so with a treadmill moving a 5 mph below us. Also, artillery trivia: the earth's rotation does not have no effect on things. When you try to calculate where an artillery round will land accurately, you have account for the fact that the earth turns under the round.

Anything dependent on what the runner is choosing to do because they're afraid of falling off the belt is psychology.

That is like saying that the only difference between weight machines and free weights in psychology because the things the weight lifter chooses to do to keep the bar level in lifting free weights is psychology. No it's not. It's extra work by extra muscles.

And that was brusquer than I should have been.

But this:

I'm mostly objecting to the idea that it's some psychological fact about gyms where if we put up a nice view screen we'd all run like we were outside.

I think you just aren't thinking of what a really nice viewscreen would do. With a fan to blow air in your face, and a long enough treadmill not to put immediate pacing pressure on you (that is, if you were a couple of strides from the front and the back of the belt), at some point it really does become the same thing. Calling the difference psychological doesn't mean that if people just sucked it up they could run exactly the same on a current treadmill than on the ground outdoors -- psychological differences can be really important.

317: I'd be inclined to call that biomechanics, since before you were talking about psychology as taking cues about motion from the environment. I think the difference is mostly the need to keep a perfect pace, and that's going to have physical effects which probably won't be replicated when running outside, because it's easy to fall off a pace. If we were on a self-powered treadmill, we'd probably just slow down. But you know, potato, potahto.

Plus, Idealist's point about imparted momentum is worth considering.

320 to 316.

To 318: However, if you had an extra-long treadmill and just stood still on it, you soon would not feel the backwards accelleration, and it then seems more reasonable that running forward on the imaginary long treadmill is exactly like running forward on the ground. The unresolved question is whether on a real treadmill the effects on the body are really the same

So if a long treadmill is like running over the ground, how could a short treadmill be different? Put the long one next to the short one, and blindfold the runners on each: how would they tell the difference?

Plus, Idealist's point about imparted momentum is worth considering.

Really, no.

Sure it is. It's an acceleration. We sense accelerations, not velocities. Not a lot of imparted momentum means I'll sense a deceleration (which I don't sense if I jump up in the air.)

I agree that the first couple seconds of running on a treadmill are different. But once you're running, that affect goes away.

But once you're on the treadmill, nothing's accelerating -- it's moving at a constant velocity. You accelerate when the treadmill starts, just in the same way that you accelerate when you start running on the ground, but once you're in motion nothing's accelerating.

Or what Paws said.

imparted momentum is worth considering.

Only when you start, stop, or otherwise change the speed, and then you have to consider it or really look foolish. I've done that on occasion when the timer runs out and I wasn't paying attention.

What's needed, as you alluded to above, is a sensor array on the mill and a feedback system that would adjust its speed to keep you in a "box". Then you could vary your own speed and gait and so exercise different muscle cells.

First spring-like day of the year today, therefore: first run of the year today. Painful. Ack.

First spring-like day of the year today

*looks out window*

*contemplates aching shovel-muscles*

*sobs, quietly*

But the snow is nice too, Redfoxtailshrub.

At first, but not any more.

I haven't been following this that closely, so I might be repeating someone else.

I suggest it is in fact possible for your foot to be carried back because your body is not in fact an infinitely rigid object, and your feet and legs can move independently of your main mass in your torso. When your foot hits the moving belt it along with your leg can be accelerated backwards without transferring all of that to the rest of your mass. I'm pretty sure this would account for the observed greater angular velocity of the leg on the treadmill vs. overground running.

333: Again, that isn't different from running over the ground. If your body is moving forward at a (reasonably) constant speed, as it does when you run, when your foot hits the stationary ground, your foot accelerates backward with respect to your body in exactly the same way.

Then why the difference in angular velocity?

Are you proposing it's pretty much all air resistance?

BO-RING

Air resistance, track differences, and the psych. effects from being locked into a precise speed for fear of injury -- if you stride out too far, you hit the front and trip, and if you slow for a stride, you fall off the back (and, I suppose, any other psych effects from the motionlessness of the gym around you). That's all that can explain the difference: there's nothing else.

Seems reasonable. Almost all my physics exposure relates to chemistry. Get thee hence harmonic oscillator.

It's also worth pointing out that no one is arguing that the effects in 338 are small. Runners wear tight clothing, track running is much faster than sidewalk running, and track teams have coaches to make sure that people are running with a regular stride.

One small effect from the smoothness of treadmill tracks. I'd bet people are less worried about tripping on them and so don't waste as much energy vertically.

What Gramma said.

LB is right about the treadmill. She is also right about 297.

LB tghe physics car mileage argument was just GRAND.

Two things:

(1) LB has demonstrated truly admirable tenacity. All this, to persuade a bunch of yahoos that they are "clearly" wrong about an issue that she admits she has no "emotional reason to give a damn about"? Wow.

(2) Galileo can suck it. He never even had a treadmilll to run on, did he? I'm sure if he did he'd have revised his theories, which are clearly incomplete.

I feel a certain responsibility to my commenters. What kind of blogger would I be if I let you go around being wrong the next time this issue came up if I could have prevented it with just a little sticktoitiveness? But it's all right, you don't have to thank me.

Isn't there some experiment with a rubber band we could perform to settle this?

re: 345. You are the Johnny Appleseed of physics.

That would explain the saucepan on my head. I'd been wondering about that.

Funny the way this has circled back to parallel the earlier part of the thread, on Econ. All real-world ancedotal and experimental data indicates that there is, in fact, a significant fundamental difference between treadmill and stationary-surface running. And yet LB simple-mindedly clings to her "Physics 101" theories to dismiss all that as mere drivel of the uneducated, and uses her neat little napkin-drawings and thought-experiments to "prove" that our experience isn't really what we think it is. My, how the tables have turned...

349 me.

You know, Brock, it's amazing how liberating and freeing it can be to say "I was wrong." Try it: "I misunderstood the basic physics of the situation, and I was wrong." Feels good, doesn't it -- all honest and unashamed, right? (Or anyway, so I'm told. I wouldn't know from personal experience.)

I did that in the other thread.

Wow. I didn't think the discussion could get much more condescending. I was wrong!

(That did feel good.)

I don't care about the moving surface aspect of the debate, but to add to 338: turns vs. straight ahead is another difference. I've seen a lot of advice for people who run only on tracks to run both clock and counterclockwise to avoid exercising unevenly the muscles involved in lateral movements. And sharply turning tracks - I think there's a standard range of sizes for turning radius on tracks, but older tracks vary - can cause more strain. Banked indoor tracks are a different experience, too, though I haven't run on one. I assume these muscles don't do much at all on a treadmill, unless you've got some kind of crazy flailing technique.

When I ran cross-country in high school the university track nearby always felt more wearing on my legs than dirt roads or even asphalt. I've never used a treadmill. I also haven't read this or the other thread.

The track at my university would switch the direction of traffic every hour or so just to prevent that sort of imbalance.

354: The number and sharpness of the turns make a big difference in the "How far can you get in 12, 6, etc. minutes" tests used by the docs to gauge basic fitness, recovery after treatment, and like that. If you have a balance problem you're going to do much better on a straight line course than if you have to spin around many times in a narrow corridor, for an obvious example. There's no course standard for those tests so different docs can come up with widely variant results.

353: It can get worse. Much worse. Far, far worse. This place at its nadir is a model of polite discourse and good feelings compared to others I've sliced and diced in. In any event, as long as physics is going to be argued in terms of subjective experience and experience in terms of physics there can't be much agreement.

I'm starting to think this might be why the infallible Catholic church never much liked that Galileo fellow.

353: Hey, I'm sorry -- I just meant to be a smartass back at Brock. No hard feelings?

Nah, I lub my feisty lawyer too much, but if we ever meet up, I will have to present you with a little toy penguin.

Excellent. I'll expect the penguin.

349

Actually this shows there is hope for LB, she isn't ignorant about everything. Now if we can just get her to read an Econ 101 textbook some weekend maybe we can covert her to the dark side.

Since we have clear evidence that reading Econ 101 textbooks can cause brain damage, I think she should forbear.