Science Confirms: Watching Online Cat Videos Is Good for You
Looking at Grumpy Cat’s underbite and feline dwarfism just might just make you feel better about your bratty kid, your nagging spouse or your demanding boss. That’s right, according to a new study published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, watching cat videos online reduces our negative feelings while raising our sense of well-being and boosting our energy levels.
Grumpy Cat, whose real pet name is Tardar Sauce, shares a manager with fellow YouTube stars Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat. Last we checked, the famous feline had 7.7 million Likes on Facebook. In all, more than 2 million cat videos were posted on YouTube last year, gathering nearly 26 billion views. Cat videos had more views per video than any other category of YouTube content. That makes kittens more valuable eye candy than, say, Maxim’s Hot 100. (Taylor Swift topped the list this year, just in case you were wondering.)
Related: The Internet Power of Kim Kardashian’s Butt
For the new study, Jessica Gall Myrick, an assistant professor at the Indiana University Media School, surveyed nearly 7,000 Internet users about how watching cat videos affects their moods. She got a little help from Bloomington, Indiana resident Mike Bridavsky — the owner of Internet celebrity cat Lil Bub — who used social media to recruit participants for the survey.
The results should make you feel a bit less guilty about clicking through one cat video after another: “Even if they are watching cat videos on YouTube to procrastinate or while they should be working, the emotional pay-off may actually help people take on tough tasks afterward,” Myrick says.
Don’t think watching cat videos online is a pop culture phenomenon worthy of academic research? Myrick disagrees: “If we want to better understand the effects the Internet may have on us as individuals and on society, then researchers can’t ignore Internet cat videos anymore.”
Read the original paper on emotion regulation procrastination, and watching cat videos online here.
Chart of the Day: High Deductible Blues
The higher the deductible in your health insurance plan, the less happy you probably are with it. That’s according to a new report on employer-sponsored health insurance from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Los Angeles Times.
Chart of the Day: Tax Cuts and the Missing Capex Boom
Despite the Republican tax overhaul, businesses aren’t significantly increasing their capital expenditures. “The federal government will have to borrow an added $1 trillion through 2027 to pay for the corporate tax breaks,” says Bloomberg’s Mark Whitehouse. “So far, it’s hard to see what the country is getting in return.”
Chart of the Day: 2019’s Lobbying Leaders
Roll Call reports that trade, infrastructure and health care issues including prescription drug prices “dominated the lobbying agendas of some of the biggest spenders on K Street early this year.” Here’s Roll Call’s look at the top lobbying spenders so far this year:
Can You Fix Social Security? A New Tool Lets You Try
The Congressional Budget Office released an interactive tool Wednesday that shows how some widely discussed policy changes would affect the long-run financial health of the Social Security system.
“This interactive tool allows the user to explore seven policy options that could be used to improve the Social Security program’s finances and delay the trust funds’ exhaustion,” CBO said. “Four options would reduce benefits, and three options would increase payroll taxes. The tool allows for any combination of those options. It also lets the user change implementation dates and choose whether to show scheduled or payable benefits. … The tool also shows the impact of the options on different groups of people.”
Click here to view the interactive tool on the CBO website.
Why Prescription Drug Prices Keep Rising – and 3 Ways to Bring Them Down
Prescription drug prices have been rising at a blistering rate over the last few decades. Between 1980 and 2016, overall spending on prescription drugs rose from about $12 billion to roughly $330 billion, while its share of total health care spending doubled, from 5% to 10%.
Although lawmakers have shown renewed interest in addressing the problem, with pharmaceutical CEOs testifying before the Senate Finance Committee in February and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMS) scheduled to do so this week, no comprehensive plan to halt the relentless increase in prices has been proposed, let alone agreed upon.
Robin Feldman, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of Law, takes a look at the drug pricing system in a new book, “Drugs, Money and Secret Handshakes: The Unstoppable Growth of Prescription Drug Prices.” In a recent conversation with Bloomberg’s Joe Nocera, Feldman said that one of the key drivers of rising prices is the ongoing effort of pharmaceutical companies to maintain control of the market.
Fearing competition from lower-cost generics, drugmakers began over the last 10 or 15 years to focus on innovations “outside of the lab,” Feldman said. These innovations include paying PBMs to reduce competition from generics; creating complex systems of rebates to PBMs, hospitals and doctors to maintain high prices; and gaming the patent system to extend monopoly pricing power.
Feldman’s research on the dynamics of the drug market led her to formulate three general solutions for the problem of ever-rising prices:
1) Transparency: The current system thrives on secret deals between drug companies and middlemen. Transparency “lets competitors figure out how to compete and it lets regulators see where the bad behaviors occur,” Feldman says.
2) Patent limitations: Drugmakers have become experts at extending patents on existing drugs, often by making minor modifications in formulation, dosage or delivery. Feldman says that 78% of drugs getting new patents are actually old drugs gaining another round of protection, and thus another round of production and pricing exclusivity. A “one-and-done” patent system would eliminate this increasingly common strategy.
3) Simplification: Feldman says that “complexity breeds opportunity,” and warns that the U.S. “drug price system is so complex that the gaming opportunities are endless.” While “ruthless simplification” of regulatory rules and approval systems could help eliminate some of those opportunities, Feldman says that the U.S. doesn’t seem to be moving in this direction.
Read the full interview at Bloomberg News.