A friend sent me this article documenting Sam Bankman-Fried’s now well known text exchange with Vox journalist Kelsey Piper. I couldn’t help but think of Alasdair MacIntyre’s characters. As MacIntyre put it in After Virtue:
Australia punches above its weight in the medical research space. The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) is the main government granting agency in the field of medical research. On October 16th, it was announced that future mid-level and senior grants will be awarded to males and females in exactly equal number.
Cross posted from Quillette from 16 Feb 2019, but now behind a paywall.
I always say that political economy is the best (or least worst) lens through which to examine how health systems work. This goes for Medicare, which is far more than a service delivery model and has massive institutional and political import.
I wrote a couple of pieces for apolitical a few years ago, but didn’t persevere. I then got an invitation to discuss my experience with the inevitable internal review and had a good discussion. Saying that apolitical seemed very optimised to its audience to me, which of course is its right. However its eagerness to demonstrate its usefulness to readers’ careers in the civil service, it rather played itself out of what I wrote about.
