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If We Can Put a Man on the Moon...

I guess it has been awhile since I last posted!!

I'm currently reading If We Can Put a Man on the Moon...Getting Big Things Done in Government by Bill Eggers and John O'Leary. Eggers is the public sector research director at Deloitte (aka, "the man") and frequently puts out some interesting material about increasing competitiveness and efficiency in the public sector. I'm on a team now trying to formulate how Eggers' framework as laid out in this book can be applied to Health Information Technology (HIT).

The book is pretty good so far. I especially enjoy the Indiana Jones references, as of course I am a huge fan.

About 40 pages into the book, Eggers goes as far to almost discredit all of the current stimulus efforts and rampant money-printing that is going on today, comparing it to the 1970's and the days of "Tricky Dick's" attempts to stabilize the economy. He makes the point that nobody ever set out to define inflation in the first place, and therefore were unable to combat something they knew nothing about. Then he draws a parallel to today's credit crisis. I think there is definitely truth to his argument. The government has gotten to a point now where money is thrown at every problem under the sun, without first attempting to analyze the problem and decide whether or not adding money to it would even be a worthwhile idea.

Apparently some business professors in Copenhagen did a study a few years back on international development efforts, and which ones actually warranted spending based upon anticipated ROI. They found that child deworming programs and other similarly "non-sexy" initiatives actually paid off many times over, whereas global warming spending would do more harm than good (coming from a team of very left-wing researchers, I found this to be pretty impressive). They concluded that global warming spending would do more good if it was reactionary vs. proactive. I'm going to try and find more info on this research center and post more about this.

UPDATE: Copenhagen Consensus info can be found here.

posted by Ashley @ 11:10 AM