Last week I put out issue #100 with 175+ links from the previous year. It came from my other e-mail so if you missed it, check it out here. On to #101...
#1 WTF Healthcare? Why are employers still managing healthcare? Quartz covers Atul Gawande’s new company, a partnership between Amazon, JP Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway and their efforts to save money delivering healthcare to employees. This article sums up the absurdity of having companies focusing on healthcare:
Many of the executives running on-site healthcare programs use the term “industrial athlete” to describe the way they’re thinking about providing care to employees: essentially, giving them the full package of integrated health management—nutrition services, physical therapy, diagnostics, treatments—to keep them on the playing field.
The article is a bit long - you can skip the mythological stories - but the charts and main ideas are worth revisiting.
+ Bonus: Check out this fascinating New Yorker essay on the two PR consultants that helped kill universal coverage via the AMA in the 1950s.
#2 Writing: How to write better from Jason Zweig
#3 America's Story: Morgan Housel on the American economy over the last seventy years
#4: How To Read The News: This post on how management consultants are probably good for the world includes a nugget on how we should interpret the news:
It just goes to show that framing is everything. If you see a negative article about anything — whether business, politics or even sports — ask yourself two simple questions: Does this article present some rough approximation of a cost-benefit analysis? (A throwaway line or two about possible benefits does not count.) And if the article criticizes an affiliation or cooperative working arrangement, does it show an awareness of just how widespread such affiliations are, and how difficult and probably injurious they would be to avoid?"
#5 Education (Podcast): Sir Ken Robinson on the arts:
One of the reasons why the arts, for example, tend to be pushed down the hierarchy…is because education is dominated by on one hand a conception of intelligence that is rooted in the university idea of academic work and secondly our education systems are governed by some idea of utility about the subjects that will be most useful for getting a job.
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