I would add new ways of searching in Internet. If I searched for food recipes in the 2000s I would find independent blogs with some real local/family taste. Now I have a hundreds of results from click bait sites with the same commoditized recipes and the ugly blog with a good recipe deep in the long tail. We can say that we need improvements in the long tail when the tail deserves to move up (or to the left in a xy chart).
Internet search is a driver for the world economy, a tiny improvement would improve the life of entrepreneurs and their ecosystem beyond elite circles.
>A comprehensive guide to the American healthcare system.
im afraid this might be a moving target at best. So much of American healthcare is arbitrary, clandestine, and opaque. Prices are rarely made public, and justification or schedule for increase in drug prices or premiums is almost never made except in the most dire circumstances (Insulin inflation for example) and even then, its almost condescendingly boilerplate. Even seemingly simple things like ACA exchange markets and Medicare are mind-numbingly complex institutions whos coverage varies widely from state to state. Healthcare coverage is also governed by religious code in many states, where simple services like abortion, contraceptives, and family planning are subject to strict Judeo-Christian moral laws. many service providers can refuse to even process drug prescriptions should the customers request cause the employee some religious moral unrest.
>Who are the actors and what are their incentives?
Pharmaceutically these are largely institutions borne of dynastic wealth seeking profit. They run advertisements and sponsor content in local, state, and national news in order to drive customers to consume drugs and treatments, but they also lobby and in some cases bribe physicians and caregivers to give preferential treatment to their products.
Absolutely. It's like "Steal This Book" from a while back, which was effectively outdated a month after it came out -- all of the info it had was picked up on, and fixed.
Healthcare benefits GREATLY from asymmetrical information and pricing, and the moment a guide is published they'll alter the system.
When I lived in Australia I had a mole removed on my knee -- a trivially minor surgery. They were able to give me a breakdown ahead of time what everything would cost, and what potential complications could crop up (and what they'd cost). All in it was ~$260.00 AUD in 2014 dollars, with ~400 for the biopsy. My dad had a skin growth removed off his neck and pre-insurance was north of $1700 USD last year -- and he only found that out a month later when the bill showed up (insurance covered most of it)
Another straightforward appeal for transparency, transparency, transparency.
The middleman organizations that negotiate deals in private, hospitals that make different discount deals with different insurers, even the insurers internal risk assessments and differential rates, all of these factors have been at least partially investigated.
Let's combine those research results, and keep shining more light on the places where collusion and obfuscation let companies get away with sucking money out of patients, and when the whole ball of wax is exposed to the public, then we can root out the worst actors and keep digging until the system is as free of greedy manipulators as we can manage.
Or we could French Revolution the CEOs and CFOs...
Society failing some potentially super effective people is observable. If we employed half as many tricks to align people with challenging (skills-appropriate) and socially valuable work as we do to align potential buyers with products, I think a lot more would get done and a lot more people could live meaningful lives. I know several examples of people not doing things they're good at. Actively marketing yourself as a requirement for getting valuable work is an obstacle for many. Sometimes business culture is an obstacle.
Another thing is the chilling effect that our surveillance state has. Hacking away on tech in the US is not as appealing as it was (for some) before it was clear that your prospects are mostly being a cog in a system geared towards social control.
I think people need real privacy to learn, grow, and collaborate, or they just won't do that to the degree necessary to meet their potential.
Schools in the US are a big problem, and seem to be victims of broken politics and ideological battles on the regular. Profiteering in higher education also doesn't help.
"Summaries of the state of knowledge in different fields": I've been thinking a lot about this one lately. There's so much confusion (and willful disinformation) in the world when it comes to science, and so many journalists don't understand that a single article published in a journal does not mean that there is now a scientific consensus around this - that usually comes years later when a meta-study comes along. In most fields, as an outsider, you basically have to get lucky that one of these meta-studies has cropped up recently and you happen to talk to an expert that can point you at it. In medicine there is the Cochrane organization that does a pretty good job of communicating these findings in a clear way. But why isn't there something like this for all fields of science, constantly updated, so journalists, policy-makers and curious amateurs like myself have a single point of entry when we want to understand the state of the art in a given scientific field? A trustworthy source where I could check what's certain and what's still up in the air when it comes to CRISPR, which variants of string theory have we managed to disprove using colliders, which are still being considered, what do the currently best climate models look like and how certain are we of their accuracy?
It'd be a huge undertaking - continuously interviewing researchers, quantifying and communicating their answers in a way that non-experts can understand. But on the other hand, all the science we're already doing is a huge undertaking, and it's crazy that we let all the knowledge that these experts accumulate just languish in obscure journals targeted only at other experts, and letting the 'state of the art' just be this implicit thing in the heads of dozens of experts, instead of being stated explicitly somewhere accessible.
> Life expectancy in Hong Kong is 84.23 years, more than five years longer than the US and the highest in the world. Hong Kong is not that wealthy (median household income is $38,000 USD); it’s somewhat polluted; people don’t obviously eat what seems like a healthy diet; and they don’t seem to exercise a great deal. What should we learn from this?
We should learn that Hong Kong is probably a smaller territory so any of its "average" metrics has a higher chance of being an outlier, out of sheer randomness.
IQ, life expectancy, top-tier universities, super effective, culture of excellence, higher GDP, worker productivity, state of knowledge. Given that a list of priorities betrays a view of the world, I find something eery about this one. Nothing said is obviously wrong, but there's something between the lines that I can't quite put my finger on. To retreat to imagery, I feel like a forest is being missed for the trees, but with a hint of violence.
I have to agree with you and admit that I'm somewhat relieved to see I'm not the only one who felt this way. The list as a whole reflects a certain self-unaware separateness from the "real world". It is hard to describe, but eery indeed.
I think what society is really missing is this sense of belonging. We're raised to think that wealth correlates with happiness but it clearly doesn't.
History has always formed these loops of prosperity, then spirituality. I mean it's nice not to starve, but I think people would be happier being part of a tight knit tribe who support one another, even more than having air-conditioning and dating apps.
I'm thankful that someone else wrote this comment so I wouldn't have to try and figure out how to put it into words. This list sets off minor alarm bells for me as well.
I guess part of it is that I look at some of these goals as being kind of naive, for lack of a better word? Measuring worker productivity is a good example -- if I were to try and sit down and think hard about why companies aren't moving quickly, I would say that the problems I see are related to unnecessary scaling, focusing on the wrong business goals, overcomplicating solutions and infrastructure, and an overemphasis on measurement to the point where Goodhart's Law can't possibly not come into play. I'm not sure worker productivity is a real problem that's worth prioritizing over more basic questions like, "how can businesses make sure they're building things that actually solve real-world problems?"
It's very hard to describe. I keep on seeing things that seem very very vaguely "off" to me -- sometimes that I think it's the wrong prioritization, or that there are actually already people working on the problem and the author doesn't seem to be aware of their work, or that the problem is actually more complicated than the author seems to believe it to be ("mechanisms for better matching" is a particularly strange simplification of what makes relationships work).
Anecdotally, usually when I feel this way about an article or topic, I come back later and find that it hasn't aged well. I pay more attention to these feelings now than I used to.
It all seems to be about increasing economic efficiency. Good little workers, turn dollars into more dollars as efficiently as possible! Nothing about increasing anyone's quality of life, solving environmental problems, advancing science (except tangentially for the NSF/NIH item) let alone arts, etc. It's an MBA wish list, not a human one. Not a surprise considering the source, but still disappointing.
There’s a neoliberal hierarchy implicit in the things the author deems worthy of researching. In other words, things that make more money are inherently better regardless of cultural differences or human factors and we should all aspire to be productivity porn stars. Other types of people or lifestyles don’t warrant investigation.
I expected such semi-negative, distrustful comment the second I finished reading this list. Some will dislike the individualistic, anti-collectivist character of it.
There seems to be a confidence that these things can simply be measured by some metric and then improved. That sort of implies a lack of appreciation for the nuance / complexity for some of these topics ... let alone any understanding of what happens if you do simply measure and improve such systems.
It doesn't help that there is no sense of policy or what the goal of some of these things are, like there's no policy here to indicate if we're hoping for an outcome or not...
Reminds me of the manager who shows up and says "oh man look at this mess and all these terrible metrics" and after a few months just changes the metrics and doesn't understand that the metrics themselves create problems ;)
It feels off because the author is a conservative. But he's rational and well-spoken. We should be able to welcome him with "I disagree with you but I will listen to your arguments. Sometimes they will be persuasive and change my mind and other times they will help me to strengthen my own arguments against your position".
But his arguments also attract the wackos and are used as justifications by them. Therefore we have an urge or desire to just shut him down justified by "don't feed the trolls".
My take is that the article expresses interest in topics a certain fraction of the right are interested in (IQ) but it often leans left relative to the interest in those topics (IQ is affected more by environment than 'people who care about IQ' think.)
I do find the calls for institutional criticism to be a bit thin.
In particular, the most troubling "institutions" in our society use decentralization to avoid responsibility. In health care, for instance, everybody can point to somebody else as the source of the problem -- the real case the status quo has against single payer is that now the system can limit costs by denying claims in an unaccountable manner. In a single payer system patients will descend on Washington with their wheelchairs and crutches with their airfare and hotel paid for by "charities" run by the health care industry.
Similar complaints can be made about the media. One reason people don't trust "experts" is that they've never seen real experts, they've only seen the likes of Cokie Roberts and Larry Kudlow. In a world with accountability, people like that wouldn't get traction.
> If you ask informed Filipinos why the street food is mediocre, they will tell you that Philippines lacks a “culture of excellence”.
This line in particular rubs me the wrong way. Who are these "informed" people? Who says the street food is mediocre? Have you looked at other possibilities before pointing the finger at nebulous "culture"? The line of reasoning seems very subjective and unscientific.
> To retreat to imagery, I feel like a forest is being missed for the trees, but with a hint of violence.
oof. Yikes, thanks for letting me know. I'm softblocking him right now. sorry but I saw a joke tweet of his and followed, didn't know that by being curious about research into highly effective people and institutions he was committing or advocating actual, physical harm to people.
I felt this way too. At least one thing is blatantly wrong though: there is no discipline of institutional criticism. This is literally what political science deals with.
It seems to take for granted that the domain of human affairs runs like clockwork, like a machine that merely "needs fixing". This smells libertarian and a quick google of the authors and their books confirms that suspicion. The "hint of violence" you're detecting is subtly judgemental smugness.
You do not need a Bloomberg terminal for everything but one for each industry vertical. What Bloomberg did for capital markets ..for.. healthcare...retail etc.
> South Korea and Japan have developed much more rapidly than many Asian countries, despite many others adopting relatively free “Washington Consensus”-style trade policies.
On the contrary, these two countries didn't implement such policies at all; they used the opposite method, strict protectionism and state-managed capitalism.
I think that's exactly his point, actually, although I thought that was quite well understood. E.g. "How Asia works" explained the difference between taiwan/japan/s korea on one hand, and philipines/indonesia/malaysia on the other hand exactly around this axis.
Tyler Cowen tends to be one of the few famous economist who do admit that even though not well understood, there is such a thing as "culture" that influences economics and that is important, so I guess that's his angle. Another mystery under that angle is why France managed to modernize so well in XIXth, even though it had bad institutions. See e.g. Rodrik/Cowen talking about this in https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/a-conversation-w... (search for "Barrington Moore" section). In How Asia Works, the author argued quite convincingly about the importance of land reform, and how splitting huge landlors domains into small pots of lands was critical. As each farmer would get incentivized to improve their production, skills and market mechanisms develop much more quickly.
In what sense? Surely a market involves some sort of comparative choice? Who is even in a position to do that? People get their insurance from their employers, and are treated at the nearest hospital (where the prices are an outright secret beforehand). I can't see how market economics apply even a little bit, as far as the person in need of care is concerned.
> One of the single interventions that could do the most to improve global welfare would be to improve the efficiency of the partner/marriage matching ecosystem
hilarious, are they just throwing this out there or is there anything to back this up?
From what I recall having read, there are health improvements, financial improvements, having two parents is much better for raising children (from what I recall this is independent of the gender of the two parents), and there are larger systematic issues when significant portions of the population have difficulty finding a relationship (look at the purposed roles polygamy plays in destabilizing the Middle East or the social costs of China's one child policy that strongly influence people to have a single boy now that a few decades have passed).
[+] [-] wslh|6 years ago|reply
Internet search is a driver for the world economy, a tiny improvement would improve the life of entrepreneurs and their ecosystem beyond elite circles.
[+] [-] nimbius|6 years ago|reply
im afraid this might be a moving target at best. So much of American healthcare is arbitrary, clandestine, and opaque. Prices are rarely made public, and justification or schedule for increase in drug prices or premiums is almost never made except in the most dire circumstances (Insulin inflation for example) and even then, its almost condescendingly boilerplate. Even seemingly simple things like ACA exchange markets and Medicare are mind-numbingly complex institutions whos coverage varies widely from state to state. Healthcare coverage is also governed by religious code in many states, where simple services like abortion, contraceptives, and family planning are subject to strict Judeo-Christian moral laws. many service providers can refuse to even process drug prescriptions should the customers request cause the employee some religious moral unrest.
>Who are the actors and what are their incentives?
Pharmaceutically these are largely institutions borne of dynastic wealth seeking profit. They run advertisements and sponsor content in local, state, and national news in order to drive customers to consume drugs and treatments, but they also lobby and in some cases bribe physicians and caregivers to give preferential treatment to their products.
[+] [-] blaser-waffle|6 years ago|reply
Absolutely. It's like "Steal This Book" from a while back, which was effectively outdated a month after it came out -- all of the info it had was picked up on, and fixed.
Healthcare benefits GREATLY from asymmetrical information and pricing, and the moment a guide is published they'll alter the system.
When I lived in Australia I had a mole removed on my knee -- a trivially minor surgery. They were able to give me a breakdown ahead of time what everything would cost, and what potential complications could crop up (and what they'd cost). All in it was ~$260.00 AUD in 2014 dollars, with ~400 for the biopsy. My dad had a skin growth removed off his neck and pre-insurance was north of $1700 USD last year -- and he only found that out a month later when the bill showed up (insurance covered most of it)
[+] [-] zentiggr|6 years ago|reply
The middleman organizations that negotiate deals in private, hospitals that make different discount deals with different insurers, even the insurers internal risk assessments and differential rates, all of these factors have been at least partially investigated.
Let's combine those research results, and keep shining more light on the places where collusion and obfuscation let companies get away with sucking money out of patients, and when the whole ball of wax is exposed to the public, then we can root out the worst actors and keep digging until the system is as free of greedy manipulators as we can manage.
Or we could French Revolution the CEOs and CFOs...
[+] [-] analog31|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slumdev|6 years ago|reply
This is dishonest. Philosophers call it "begging the question."
For someone who considers a fetus to be a human life, distinct from the mother's, with all its own dignity, this is not a "simple service".
[+] [-] smolder|6 years ago|reply
Another thing is the chilling effect that our surveillance state has. Hacking away on tech in the US is not as appealing as it was (for some) before it was clear that your prospects are mostly being a cog in a system geared towards social control.
I think people need real privacy to learn, grow, and collaborate, or they just won't do that to the degree necessary to meet their potential.
Schools in the US are a big problem, and seem to be victims of broken politics and ideological battles on the regular. Profiteering in higher education also doesn't help.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] m12k|6 years ago|reply
It'd be a huge undertaking - continuously interviewing researchers, quantifying and communicating their answers in a way that non-experts can understand. But on the other hand, all the science we're already doing is a huge undertaking, and it's crazy that we let all the knowledge that these experts accumulate just languish in obscure journals targeted only at other experts, and letting the 'state of the art' just be this implicit thing in the heads of dozens of experts, instead of being stated explicitly somewhere accessible.
[+] [-] jamix|6 years ago|reply
We should learn that Hong Kong is probably a smaller territory so any of its "average" metrics has a higher chance of being an outlier, out of sheer randomness.
[+] [-] dmos62|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xwowsersx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muzani|6 years ago|reply
History has always formed these loops of prosperity, then spirituality. I mean it's nice not to starve, but I think people would be happier being part of a tight knit tribe who support one another, even more than having air-conditioning and dating apps.
[+] [-] danShumway|6 years ago|reply
I guess part of it is that I look at some of these goals as being kind of naive, for lack of a better word? Measuring worker productivity is a good example -- if I were to try and sit down and think hard about why companies aren't moving quickly, I would say that the problems I see are related to unnecessary scaling, focusing on the wrong business goals, overcomplicating solutions and infrastructure, and an overemphasis on measurement to the point where Goodhart's Law can't possibly not come into play. I'm not sure worker productivity is a real problem that's worth prioritizing over more basic questions like, "how can businesses make sure they're building things that actually solve real-world problems?"
It's very hard to describe. I keep on seeing things that seem very very vaguely "off" to me -- sometimes that I think it's the wrong prioritization, or that there are actually already people working on the problem and the author doesn't seem to be aware of their work, or that the problem is actually more complicated than the author seems to believe it to be ("mechanisms for better matching" is a particularly strange simplification of what makes relationships work).
Anecdotally, usually when I feel this way about an article or topic, I come back later and find that it hasn't aged well. I pay more attention to these feelings now than I used to.
[+] [-] notacoward|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] faitswulff|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] svara|6 years ago|reply
That said, I found him very insightful when he came on Eric Weinsteins podcast recently.
[+] [-] sebsito|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|6 years ago|reply
It doesn't help that there is no sense of policy or what the goal of some of these things are, like there's no policy here to indicate if we're hoping for an outcome or not...
Reminds me of the manager who shows up and says "oh man look at this mess and all these terrible metrics" and after a few months just changes the metrics and doesn't understand that the metrics themselves create problems ;)
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|6 years ago|reply
But his arguments also attract the wackos and are used as justifications by them. Therefore we have an urge or desire to just shut him down justified by "don't feed the trolls".
[+] [-] tootie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|6 years ago|reply
I do find the calls for institutional criticism to be a bit thin.
In particular, the most troubling "institutions" in our society use decentralization to avoid responsibility. In health care, for instance, everybody can point to somebody else as the source of the problem -- the real case the status quo has against single payer is that now the system can limit costs by denying claims in an unaccountable manner. In a single payer system patients will descend on Washington with their wheelchairs and crutches with their airfare and hotel paid for by "charities" run by the health care industry.
Similar complaints can be made about the media. One reason people don't trust "experts" is that they've never seen real experts, they've only seen the likes of Cokie Roberts and Larry Kudlow. In a world with accountability, people like that wouldn't get traction.
[+] [-] jgwil2|6 years ago|reply
This line in particular rubs me the wrong way. Who are these "informed" people? Who says the street food is mediocre? Have you looked at other possibilities before pointing the finger at nebulous "culture"? The line of reasoning seems very subjective and unscientific.
[+] [-] bitwize|6 years ago|reply
oof. Yikes, thanks for letting me know. I'm softblocking him right now. sorry but I saw a joke tweet of his and followed, didn't know that by being curious about research into highly effective people and institutions he was committing or advocating actual, physical harm to people.
[+] [-] pgorczak|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nathan_compton|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] crispyambulance|6 years ago|reply
It seems to take for granted that the domain of human affairs runs like clockwork, like a machine that merely "needs fixing". This smells libertarian and a quick google of the authors and their books confirms that suspicion. The "hint of violence" you're detecting is subtly judgemental smugness.
[+] [-] secstate|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaimebuelta|6 years ago|reply
Well, from the point of view that it sets a bad example, it is...
[+] [-] AznHisoka|6 years ago|reply
What domains do you suppose will have the biggest impact?
[+] [-] nicholast|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greatestdana|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kd5bjo|6 years ago|reply
“Underfunded research initiatives” seems like a reasonable start, but maybe someone can come upwith something better.
[+] [-] monkeydust|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skuthus|6 years ago|reply
Isn't that Wolfram Alpha?
[+] [-] wazoox|6 years ago|reply
On the contrary, these two countries didn't implement such policies at all; they used the opposite method, strict protectionism and state-managed capitalism.
See "kicking away the ladder" by Ha-Joon Chang.
[+] [-] cdavid|6 years ago|reply
Tyler Cowen tends to be one of the few famous economist who do admit that even though not well understood, there is such a thing as "culture" that influences economics and that is important, so I guess that's his angle. Another mystery under that angle is why France managed to modernize so well in XIXth, even though it had bad institutions. See e.g. Rodrik/Cowen talking about this in https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/a-conversation-w... (search for "Barrington Moore" section). In How Asia Works, the author argued quite convincingly about the importance of land reform, and how splitting huge landlors domains into small pots of lands was critical. As each farmer would get incentivized to improve their production, skills and market mechanisms develop much more quickly.
[+] [-] ptah|6 years ago|reply
i would say it is more of a market than a system
[+] [-] dTal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c0l0|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] type-2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathan_compton|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perfunctory|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seoservicedelhi|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] GoodJokes|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] haskellandchill|6 years ago|reply
hilarious, are they just throwing this out there or is there anything to back this up?
[+] [-] SkyBelow|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harimau777|6 years ago|reply
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/103/36/13271.full.pdf
This one seems a little odd, but I included it for completeness. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00220027156031...
[+] [-] aabhay|6 years ago|reply