Jim Manzi on the Oregon Medicaid Study, Experimental Evidence, and Causality

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2013

⏱️ 60 minutes

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Summary

Jim Manzi, founder and chair of Applied Predictive Technologies, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and author of Uncontrolled, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the Oregon Medicaid study and the challenges of interpreting experimental results. Manzi notes a number of interesting aspects of the study results that have generally been unnoticed--the relatively high proportion of people in the Oregon study who turned down the chance to receive Medicaid benefits, and the increase (though insignificant) in smoking by those who received Medicaid benefits under the experiment. Along the way, Manzi discusses general issues of statistical significance, and how we might learn more about the effects of Medicaid in the future.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:06.4	I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:11.0	Our website is econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this podcast, and find links
0:16.3	and other information related to today's conversation.
0:19.0	You'll also find our archives where you can listen to every episode we've ever done going
0:23.3	back to 2006.
0:25.4	For email address ismailadycontalk.org, we'd love to hear from you.
0:32.8	Today is May 21st, 2013, and my guest is Jim Mancy.
0:37.8	Jim has thought a lot about what we can learn from experimental data.
0:41.1	He's the chairman of Applied Predictive Technologies.
0:44.5	He's the author of Uncontrolled, which Jim and I discussed in a podcast in June of 2012
0:49.6	last summer.
0:51.4	That's a book about the challenges of teasing out causation in a complex world.
0:56.2	Today we're going to go a little deeper than we have in the past, or at least continue
1:00.5	to go deeply into the Oregon Medicaid study, a subject of a recent podcast with Austin
1:06.2	Fract.
1:07.2	You might wonder why are we doing a second podcast, a second episode, on this one study,
1:13.0	and two reasons.
1:14.0	First, I think that over the next year and a half, you're going to be hearing a lot
1:17.0	about the Oregon study.
1:18.5	I think it's going to play an important role in the continuing conversation about implementing
1:23.8	Obamacare.
	...

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