Most Recent Posts

Why does anyone buy Bayer aspirin — or Tylenol, or Advil — when, almost always, there's a bottle of cheaper generic pills, with the same active ingredient, sitting right next to the brand-name pills?

Matthew Gentzkow, an economist at the University of Chicago's Booth school, recently tried to answer this question. Along with a few colleagues, Gentzkow set out to test a hypothesis: Maybe people buy the brand-name pills because they just don't know that the generic version is basically the same thing.

"We came up with what is probably the simplest idea you've ever heard of," Gentzkow says. "Let's just look and see if people who are well-informed about these things still pay extra to buy brands."

In other words, do doctors, nurses and pharmacists pay extra for Tylenol instead of acetaminophen, or buy Advil instead of ibuprofen?

Gentzkow and his colleagues looked at a huge dataset of over 66 million shopping trips and found that, "lo and behold, nurses, doctors and pharmacists are much less likely to buy brands than average consumers," Gentzkow says. (Their findings are written up here.)

Pharmacists, for example, bought generics 90 percent of the time, compared with about 70 percent of the time for the overall population. "In a world where everyone was as well-informed as pharmacist or nurse, the market share of the brands would be much, much smaller than it is today," Gentzkow says.

I asked several people who had a bottle of Bayer or Tylenol or Advil at home why they'd bought the brand name. One guy told me he didn't want his wife to think he was cheap. A woman told me Bayer reminded her of her grandmother. Another guy, a lawyer, said he just didn't want to spend the time to figure it out, and decided it was worth the extra couple bucks to buy the brand.

In general, we often buy brands when we lack information — when, like that lawyer, we decide it's easier to spend the extra money rather than try to figure out what's what.

Jesse Shapiro, one of the co-authors of the headache paper, told me he buys Heinz ketchup rather than the generic brand. He likes Heinz. He thinks it's better than the generic, but he's not sure. "I couldn't promise that, if you blindfolded me, I could tell them apart," he says.

Bolivian President Evo Morales is scheduled to land in his home country late tonight, a day after his return journey from meetings in Moscow was disrupted when several European nations withdrew permission for his plane to fly through their airspace.

The delay of more than 13 hours reportedly stemmed from suspicions that Edward Snowden, the former U.S. intelligence worker who leaked secret data, might have been aboard the plane.

Morales was forced to land at an airport in Vienna, Austria, where his plane landed after France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy reportedly refused permission to fly over their territories, as The Two-Way reported last night.

"Austrian officials said Morales' plane was searched early Wednesday by Austrian border police after Morales gave permission," the AP reports. "Bolivian and Austrian officials both say Snowden was not on board."

"We're talking about the president on an official trip after an official summit being kidnapped," Bolivia's U.N. Ambassador Sacha Llorenti Soliz told reporters in Geneva, according to Britain's The Independent.

Speaking to reporters at Vienna's airport last night, Morales used similar language, adding that the governments of France, Italy, Portugal and Spain had made a mistake of historic proportions.

French President Francois Hollande sought to clarify his government's role in the incident Wednesday, saying at a press conference in Berlin that there had been confusion over the aircraft and its occupants.

"There was contradictory information about the identity of the passengers aboard one or two aircraft, because there was also a doubt about the number of planes that wanted to fly over France," he said, according to the AP. "As soon as I knew that it was the plane of Bolivia's president, I immediately gave my authorization for the overflight."

On his way back to Bolivia, the plane carrying Morales stopped Wednesday afternoon to refuel in the Canary Islands, a territory of Spain. He is currently in Brazil, taking on fuel, reports Bolivia TV.

Many Latin American governments expressed their outrage over the incident Wednesday, calling for a full explanation of why the president of a sovereign nation would be refused passage.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff expressed her government's "outrage and condemnation" over the incident, reports El Dia.

"(These are) vestiges of a colonialism that we thought were long over," Reuters quotes Argentine President Cristina Kirchner saying. "We believe this constitutes not only the humiliation of a sister nation but of all South America."

The 12-nation South American group UNASUR denounced the "unfriendly and unjustifiable acts," Reuters adds.

South American heads of state including the leaders of Ecuador, Uruguay, Argentina, and Venezuela plan to gather Thursday in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in a show of support for Morales, according to FM Bolivia and other news outlets.

The incident has also raised the ire of the Organization of American States, whose secretary general, Jos Miguel Insulza, issued a statement demanding an explanation.

Insulza expressed his "deep displeasure with the decision of the aviation authorities of several European countries that denied the use of airspace to the plane carrying the President of the Plurinational State of Bolivia, Evo Morales, from Moscow to La Paz," adding that he believes "nothing justifies an act of such lack of respect for the highest authority of a country.

Asked whether the U.S. played a role in the diversion of Morales' plane, U.S. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki refused to get into the specifics of the question, saying only that "U.S. officials have been in touch with a broad range of countries."

Psaki said she would not identify those countries, with which U.S. officials have been in touch in the past 10 days.

As reporters persisted in asking if U.S. officials asked European countries to divert the Bolivian president's plane, Psaki said, "I would point you to those specific countries, to answer that question."

As the questioning grew a bit more contentious, Psaki said simply, "We've broadly asked for Mr. Snowden to be returned."

The celebrations in Egypt continue in the wake of the ouster of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi by the nation's military, who has played a dominant role in the country since the 1952 coup.

With the overthrow of previous president Hosni Mubarak still fresh in many people's minds, the question becomes what this coup, of a democratically-elected president, means for Egypt's transition.

Egypt's military has played a dominant role in the country since a 1952 coup, and Wednesday's ouster of President Mohammed Morsi showed that the armed forces still feel empowered to intervene when they disapprove of the country's course.

"They are the center of gravity in the Egyptian state," said Jeffrey Martini, a Middle East analyst at the Rand Corp. in Washington, speaking shortly before the coup on Wednesday night. "They are the strongest player in the game."

The military's decision to push out Morsi, the country's first democratically elected leader, prompted a huge celebration in Cairo's Tahrir Square. However, it's not clear how long the military's popularity will last.

In the 2011 demonstrations that ousted Hosni Mubarak, the military was widely despised by the secular liberals who filled the same landmark square in central Cairo.

After Mubarak's ouster, the generals ran the country for nearly a year and a half, but they faced widespread opposition from many sectors of Egyptian society.

That experience may have convinced the military that it did not want to formally be in charge of the country.

After Morsi was elected and took power a year ago, the military was no longer front and center, though it retained its position as the country's most powerful institution.

And in announcing Wednesday's coup, the military said that the chief justice of the constitutional court would lead Egypt until new elections are held, though no date was set.

A Long History

As NPR's Eric Westervelt noted during the protests that toppled Mubarak:

"Since the 1952 military coup that toppled the monarchy, all of the country's leaders have come from the military. But Mubarak worked hard to keep his commanders out of politics and out of the public light. He frequently fired generals and reshuffled their commands so no one general grew too powerful or popular."