Not in my world.
By assumption, he is not productive.
He is experienced and could be highly productive, but he is not.
He coasts and is less productive because he wants to spend his time elsewhere (making a decision that fits his personal utility:
)
Don’t you think that scenario happens somewhat?
I do and I bet the rest of the world does as well.
Not in my world.
By assumption, Sally is ready for the next role and outperforms Oscar, who was coasting.
Don’t you think that scenario happens somewhat often?
I do and I bet the rest of the world does as well.
Here’s the economic and behavioral problem with assuming all of the worst outcomes: people are naturally incentivized to choose the better outcomes.
That’s why people advocate for the free market model: it has some natural selection, optimizing properties towards better outcomes.
But you know that.
Given a future set of positive versus negative economic outcomes, history shows a bias towards the positive economic outcome.
The line of US per capita productivity goes up and to the right.
That line is the outcome of a large collection of individual decisions.
More output per worker also facilitates more leisure time as we can produce the same output with less effort.
Human behavior is naturally incentivized towards positive outcomes for both economic productivity and leisure time.
The whole purpose of this thought experiment is to understand if we can:
- get more positive outcomes
- by de-linking health care from employment (keeping costs fixed - in the thought experiment)
- so that individuals have a larger “eo” set
- and therefore a higher chance of obtaining a more positive outcome than without the de-linking
The thought experiment clarifies high-level, strategic goals.
It is not a detailed plan for policy implementation, which has real challenges, but the goal here is not to try to solve every single thing that is wrong with health care delivery in the US.