{"id":36232,"date":"2018-07-27T06:12:34","date_gmt":"2018-07-27T11:12:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=36232"},"modified":"2018-07-27T06:12:34","modified_gmt":"2018-07-27T11:12:34","slug":"heres-how-systems-and-nations-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=36232","title":{"rendered":"Here’s How Systems (and Nations) Fail"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s How Systems (and Nations) Fail<\/a><\/h3>\n

These embedded processes strip away autonomy, equating compliance with effectiveness even as the processes become increasingly counter-productive and wasteful. <\/i><\/p>\n

Would any sane person choose America’s broken healthcare system over a cheaper, more effective alternative?<\/b> Let’s see: the current system costs twice as much per person as the healthcare systems of our developed-world competitors, a medication to treat infantile spasms costs $8 per vial in Europe and $38,892 in the U.S., and by any broad measure, the health of the U.S. populace is declining.<\/p>\n

This is how systems and nations fail: nobody chose the current broken system, but now it can’t be changed<\/b> because the incentive structure<\/i> locks in embedded processes<\/i> that enrich self-serving insiders<\/i> at the expense of the system, nation and its populace.<\/p>\n

Nobody chose America’s insane healthcare system–it arose from a set ofinitial conditions<\/i><\/b> that generated perverse incentives to do more of what’s failing<\/i> and protect the processes that benefit insiders at the expense of everyone else.<\/p>\n

In other words, the system that was intended to benefit all ends up benefitting the few at the expense of the many.<\/p>\n

The same question can be asked of America’s broken higher education system:<\/b>would any sane person choose a system that enriches insiders by indenturing students via massive student loans (i.e. forcing them to become debt serfs)?<\/p>\n

Students and their parents certainly wouldn’t choose the current broken system, but the lenders reaping billions of dollars in profits would choose to keep it, and so would the under-assistant deans earning a cool $200K+ for “administering” some embedded process<\/i> that has effectively nothing to do with actual learning.<\/p>\n

The academic ronin<\/i> a.k.a. adjuncts earning $35,000 a year (with little in the way of benefits or security) for doing much of the actual teaching wouldn’t choose the current broken system, either.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s How Systems (and Nations) Fail These embedded processes strip away autonomy, equating compliance with effectiveness even as the processes become increasingly counter-productive and wasteful. Would any sane person choose America’s broken healthcare system over a cheaper, more effective alternative? Let’s see: the current system costs twice as much per person as the healthcare systems […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,7],"tags":[127,150,587,21004,3721],"class_list":["post-36232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-survival-2","tag-charles-hugh-smith","tag-collapse","tag-of-two-minds","tag-system-failure","tag-systems"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36232"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36233,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36232\/revisions\/36233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}