And you thought everybody knew

I went to the SCCIE-RIE conference this weekend. While listening to the presentations, I was very puzzled by the style of most presenters. John Cochrane, a finance professor at the University of Chicago's business school, has a fine piece of advice for writing and presenting (click here). It was written a while ago and the principles in the article actually have been talked about for a long time. And you thought everybody in the trade knew...

Alas, nobody takes the advice by heart. For presentations, Prof. Cochrane urges the presenters to put the main results upfront. You don't spend your precious first 30 minutes on motivation and another 30 minutes on literature review. That, unfortunately, was what most of the presenters at the conference did.

How could this happen? There are many possibilities. First, those presenters have no idea what the best way to present is. That I cannot help. Secondly, they may intentionally ignore the advice. Either they believe it sucks or they have better ideas in their minds. Well, their "better ideas" didn't work--- I was so sleepy throughout the conference and got very little out of it.

My ass-kissing disclaimer: There were a few gems, though. I learned a lot from a discussant in our department and also from my adviser, even though my adviser told too many unappreciated jokes in his presentation.

(Picture: Prof. Cochrane, GSB, The University of Chicago)

Americans contribute to the world

I meant to write about this story long time ago.

I know "the plural of anecdote is not evidence", but what is happening in the U.K. is very likely to be what Americans will get if Mrs. Clinton gets elected as President. In any universal health care system, citizens are treated equally and expected to see doctors at their own convenience. But people react to incentives. When you can eat anything in a buffet by paying a fixed amount of admission fee, are you going to stop when your stomach is just slightly filled? Most of the people will choose to eat as much as they can physically take in. That buffet concept is exactly what a universal health care system is for.

You can imagine what can happen in such a system: expenses blow to the roof and eventually bureaucrats have to butt in.The first principle the bureaucrats operate on is to treat every body "equally". By equally I mean equally bad. That is why we see this New York Times story.

One of the reasons why Canadians and Brits can sustain their universal health care is they piggyback on Americans. Americans literally subsidize every one in the rest of the world by paying the big pharmaceutical companies big bucks for their prescription drugs. When the liberals yell at you that Americans don't help the world and are so selfish by not signing the Kyoto Protocol, tell them the story about prescription drug subsidies and shut them up.

It is silly to see the liberals both demand the U.S. help the poor in the world and want a universal health care system. I am not disdaining them for no reason. When Mrs. Clinton was put in charge of coming up with a universal health care plan when her husband was first elected to the White House, big pharmas saw the writing on the wall. The CEO of Eli Lilly, one of the bigger pharmas, once talked about their desperation of diverting money to buy up HMOs from R&D expenditures. That happened when the reform was only in the talks. What would have happened if the plan went through? Curing cancers? Fighting Alzheimer's? Tackling AIDS? In your dreams, maybe.

Not only the U.S. should not adopt a universal health care, but the rest of the developed world should begin to switch back to a market-based system. That is the only way we can see real progress in medicine.

(Picture: New York Times)