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Preprints & Reprints Joined Up Economics Our world seems to have lost the ability to do joined up economics. Giant corporations, small companies and governments seem to have thrown away 60 IQ points along with the ability to make rational decisions beyond up-front costings. At home individuals thinking long term and paint the house instead of letting it rot, service the car rather than risking an accident, pay for children's education rather than rendering them unemployable later. But what do these same people do at work? Hold back on investment to secure short-term gain or favor, and neglect buildings, infrastructure, services and people training, and screw the future. How come? In a recent article on chip implants for Parkinson's and related diseases it was argued that health services could not afford the 20k per patient necessary to affect individual repairs. So thousands will be rendered virtually useless to society every year, condemned to an undignified end, at a massive opportunity cost to their families, friends, companies and the nation. Apart from humanitarian considerations, each patient will dissipate at least 30k of resource between disease onset and death. Add to this the lost productivity through an inability to work, the cost of continued sibling support etc, and it is obvious that the economics of denial make no sense. The media coverage paints CJD as an epidemic problem with Ms spent on compensation and trying to contain the problem. But so far less than 100 lives have been claimed. At the other end of the spectrum hospitals seem to have forgotten the basic hygiene lessons of Lister in 1865 and decided that money could be saved on cleaning contracts. So dirty hospitals claim the lives of over 100 people/week prematurely dispatched by MRSA and other infections. And our war chest of antibiotics continues to be depleted by overuse and abuse. In one rail crash 18 people are tragically killed and a nation is brought to a catastrophic halt. I suppose somebody decided not to invest in safety checks, new tracks, signaling equipment and rolling stock. The net result - people died, Bns were lost in national productivity and commuter time, and track repairs have exceeded 600M. And now charges of corporate manslaughter may be brought to bear on those deemed responsible. How strange when you consider we kill over 3000 people a year on our roads and fail to invest more than petty cash on this basic infrastructure. They say speed kills, but mostly it seems to be bad roads. So will we see government ministers charged with the equivalent of corporate manslaughter? I think not! The dotcom boom and bust, the stalling of the eConomy has largely been brought about by a basic lack of bandwidth. Yet the recent G3 mobile license fiasco saw the telecoms industry raped of 23Bn. If only 15Bn of that money was made available then every UK home and office could enjoy optical fiber bandwidth that would transform the economy. The list goes on! And it is definitely not unique to the UK. In Silicon Valley and much of California there are now regular, and zoned, power cuts. All brought about by the deregulation of the power industry, the non-cost effective activity of peak loading displaced by corporate greed. Who is to blame for all this? How did we become so blind and dumb? I suspect it is down to complexity and dispersed responsibility. We have deployed technology that speeds up our communication and ability to enact decisions, without investing in aids and to understanding, or appropriate management systems. It is not that they don't not exist, it seems that we have not understood or valued technology or change. Dickensian thinking will not work in a world of Star Trek technology. Word Count = 618 |