Ok, so there’s lots of blogging and arguing and anxiety about health care. Most of what I read is relatively unhelpful, and some of it is downright misleading. I don’t know whether the mis-leaders are doing it on purpose or not (they might not know either).
Dean Kamen, on the other hand, is a pretty smart guy. I think you’ll have a different appreciation for the debate after reading this Popular Mechanics piece.
I have to link to this article, For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics mostly because of this quote:
“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”
Works for me. There’s also a nice example at the end of the article about how just finding relationships in data is not always enough:
For example, in the late 1940s, before there was a polio vaccine, public health experts in America noted that polio cases increased in step with the consumption of ice cream and soft drinks, according to David Alan Grier, a historian and statistician at George Washington University. Eliminating such treats was even recommended as part of an anti-polio diet. It turned out that polio outbreaks were most common in the hot months of summer, when people naturally ate more ice cream, showing only an association, Mr. Grier said.
Here’s a good quiz. I thought of another, operations version:
You’re the gate agent for Delta and the flight is overbooked by two people. You announce in the gate area that anyone who wants to take a later flight should get in line. You’ll give everyone who volunteers a $1000 voucher for future travel on Delta. After you’ve given four vouchers, and you realize there are ten people still in line, do you call you boss to see if you can continue to give out vouchers? Or do you realize you probably should have offered $100 vouchers?
Just wondering.
Now, I cannot vouch for the details of this article, which claims that Jerks help traffic move faster and keep jams from happening – hard to believe, eh?
Well imagine that at the busy grocery store, people stood twenty feet away from the end of the checkout counter and waited for the person in front of them to leave before they started putting their food on the checkout counter. The cashier would be standing their with nothing to do during the time between customers, and we can all see that the waiting time for all the other shoppers would go up, right?
Now next time you’re stuck in traffic and notice an empty piece of road in front of you. Many car lengths of bare pavement. Think about the fact that in order to process traffic, each segment of road is like a cashier waiting to “check you out” as you pass by. Cashiers with nothing to do means that there will be a longer wait for you, further back in line.
Now there is a “safe” distance between cars, so I am not advocating tailgating (we all know how badly traffic is affected by rear-end collisions). But excessive amounts of “idle road” means that everyone behind that road space is going to wait longer. So do your part to keep the road filled in.
But try not to seem like too much of a jerk when you’re doing it.
There isn’t a magic solution, but I do think that markets would help in bringing down medical costs. If I have insurance and can go to a doctor for free (no co-pay insurance from my company) or stop by the Minute Clinic and see someone who can give me the same care (or send me to the doctor if they are not sure) but I have to pay $20, I know I’ll choose the doctor. Even though I know the social costs are much, much higher, and that by going to the doctor, I’m making it harder for the Minute Clinic to stay in business and reduce health care costs.
But the idea that someone can decide all this stuff for me, so I don’t have to think about it, or worry that I made a mistake and chose the wrong thing, is pretty appealing to many (me?). So I understand the appeal of centralizing the process, either with an insurance company bureaucracy or the intervention of some government. But I also know that centralization can never work very well (information economics) and will stifle innovation (a hard to determine but real cost).
Here’s a reasonable article arguing for the market solution. But I think there is a way to explain this even more simply and convincingly. I hope someone tries.
Here’s a post from Wired magazine that is similar to the annual professor lists of the historical events that we share, but that happened before our students were born. These are some of the technologies that no longer exist (but that we thought were cool). I actually remember 24″ data packs that held (wait for it) 5MB of data. Must have weighed 10-15 pounds each. I also remember when you needed to not only know the email address of your recipient, but also the internet nodes along the way to that person. So email addresses got long and complicated.
Here are some pictures we took from the top of the Campenile. My family has finally arrived, so the last two pictures are of me with my favorite person (not one of you guys, sorry), but the other pictures show most of the main highlights of Florence.
Have a safe trip home, and relax a little back in the states. See you in the fall.
The class is almost over. I will check the wiki on Thursday and Friday and assign grades after that. If you have any questions, please send me an email and I will get back to you.
Thanks for all your cooperation during the trips and in the classroom. I hope you had a great time and please feel free to stop by and say hi when we’re all back in Storrs.
We will wrap things up starting at 10:00 on Wednesday in the classrooms for each group (Santa Maria Novella for UConn, Classroom #3 for PSU). See you then.
It was long and it was hot, but it was worth it because we saw the production lines for Ducati, Pagani and Lamborghini. There are no pictures allowed in the factories, but here are pictures from the showrooms there. Some happy students with big Italian supercars.