A blog about health care policy, higher education, media, research evidence and other topics, using economic theory, academic studies, analytical thinking, common sense and whatever approaches make sense for a question.

I am a professor at the School of Public Affairs, Baruch College, City University of New York, and the Economics Department at CUNY Graduate Center. I have spent most of my career as a health economist in interdisciplinary settings. Now I am also doing research on higher education, the media, and poverty measurement–and writing for broader audiences.

One of my great loves, and a central part of this blog, is economic theory–in everyday words!–applied to policies and everyday life. But I also love many non-economics forms of analysis and they also figure in the blog. Another love is helping people understand research studies–and which conclusions are and are not justified. One of my research and analysis students once said it perfectly: “This course is about does the study say what it says it says.” Co-author Gregg Van Ryzin and I do that in our textbook, Research Methods in Practice, whose second edition just came out in April 2014.