Business

Business has always hated competition

Full quote:

Business has always hated competition. The City of London, home to our banking sector, was founded on the trade guilds which policed quality but whose hidden agenda was to fix prices.

Sounds familiar.

Paul Lewis in the FT

Hard Thinking about the Future of Professional Schools.

by reestheskin on 30/03/2020

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COVID-19’s General Blindness is Also a Journalistic Failure

A query with the catchy expression “global pandemic” or “global pandemic preparedness” in scientific databases, restricted to a 2009–19 range, will return more than 1400 results in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), 30 in-depth papers in ArXiv (Cornell University), and a stunning 17,000 results in Google Scholar, which aggregates multiple repositories. As for the general public, it had the choice between no less than 98 TED Talks on the matter.

We had no excuses.

Some history:

Just before the H1N1 episode in 2009, France had accumulated an inventory of 1 billion high protection masks (N95 equivalent). It was the consequence of the SARS epidemic. In the same way, the government had stored 20 million doses of vaccine. Later, the Health Ministry responsible for this precaution was blasted for this “excessive” stockpile — which was eventually destroyed as it decayed.

Frederik Filloux makes (and has for a while been making) an argument about journalism and journalism schools that I have not seen advanced by anybody else. The changing economics of the press mean that the modern Fourth Estate lacks expertise across many domains of modern life. He suggests that journalism schools need to regroup and change how they work and take advantage of the fact that most expertise will reside with those who did not go to journalism school in their 20’s. Rather, the press will need to rely on those with professional skills gained in particular domains. He writes:

The shortage of experts is also rooted in a priority shift that plagues major news organizations. All of them became obsessed with not being left in the dust by digital-native organizations riding the wave of social networks. As a consequence, newsroom managers, supported by bean-counters, found it clever to hire bunches of expendable digital “content” serfs who were mandated to keep up with the social frenzy. It was seen as a better investment than keeping a former doctor turned medical correspondent, even if he or she was loaded with decades of expertise, able to lean on a reliable network on practitioners, surgeons, epidemiologists, public health officials, etc. A pure cost vs. benefit choice, and ultimately a bad one.

I do not think there will be any shortage of candidates who possess  medical degrees and medical experience.