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The Need for Clear Boundaries The CEP Blog This is the second in a series of six blog posts. It has become an article of faith that the "boundaries are blurring" between nonprofits and companies, and that this is inarguably positive. But what we need, today, is a clarifying – not a blurring – of what differentiates the sectors. The proponents of boundary-blurring are often business school faculty, and they've been at it a while. Harvard Business School (HBS) Professor James Austin predicted , hopefully, more than a decade ago that, "We'll see the stark differences between NPOs and business diminish, revealing a new world of integrated, rather than independent, sectors." (Note: I feel compelled to say that I took a course with Professor Austin while a second-year student at HBS and he was among the best professors I had during my time there, but I disagree with him on this issue.) In a more recent report on trends in the...

Realigning Health with Care SSIR Articles Everyone knows the US health care system is in crisis. We spend far more on health care than any other nation—a breathtaking $2.6 trillion annually, according to a 2011 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The US Department of Health and Human Services estimates that health care expenditures will be 25 percent of US GDP by 2025, twice what many developed countries currently expend. The burden of rising health care costs falls not just on individuals—half of all personal bankruptcies are at least partly due to medical expenses—but also on US companies. At General Motors, health care costs put the company at a $5 billion disadvantage against Toyota. 1 The same is true for federal, state, and local governments. In Massachusetts, for example, school employees' health care costs rose $1 billion from 2000 to 2007, crowding out growth in nearly every other area of the state budget. 2 Despite such ...

Making Banks Small Enough And Simple Enough To Fail The Baseline Scenario By Simon Johnson Almost exactly two years ago, at the height of the Senate debate on financial reform, a serious attempt was made to impose a binding size constraint on our largest banks. That effort – sometimes referred to as the Brown-Kaufman amendment – received the support of 33 senators and failed on the floor of the Senate. (Here is some of my Economix coverage from the time.) On Wednesday, Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, introduced the Safe, Accountable, Fair and Efficient Banking Act, or SAFE, which would force the largest four banks in the country to shrink. (Details of this proposal, similar in name to the original Brown-Kaufman plan, are in this briefing memo for a Senate banking subcommittee hearing on Wednesday, available through Politico; see also these press release materials ). His proposal, while not likely to immediately become law, is garnering s...