Links: freedom for nonprofits, fun RFPs, car-free LA, health insurance weirdness, grant $ spent at strip clubs, and more!
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* “Jeff Bezos is quietly letting his charities do something radical — whatever they want.” “[Bezos] has given them life-changing money with virtually no restrictions, formal vetting, or oversight, according to Recode’s interviews with eight of those funded by him and others familiar with his donations.” This is what giving looks like when it’s supposed to be about getting the work done, rather than increasing the status and stature of the funder; note that almost no funders operate this way. This is also somewhat closer to how many VCs operate: they give money to the entrepreneur and tell the entrepreneur to implement more or less as she sees fit. We’ve also written about narrative as Amazon’s competitive advantage.
* “New federally funded clinics in California emphasize abstinence and ‘natural family planning.'” What could go wrong? But, importantly, we also wrote a bunch of Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE) grants back in the day, and they were an interesting lesson in how to write “evidence-based” applications when the evidence seemed to point in the opposite direction of what the RFPs required.
* “Baseline Inventory and Assessment of Newly Acquired Lands” is the title of an actual RFP in the Federal Register. I also like this, from grants.gov: “Batty about Bats program.” This program is meant to “increase public education about bats, white nose syndrome, and the importance of bats to the environment.” In Tucson I lived near an underpass that was famous for also being a bat house, which could be better than living near a frat house.
* “Car-Free in L.A.? Don’t Laugh.” There are two major spending categories—housing and transportation—that can be substantially reduced with existing technologies, provided the politics can be solved. Healthcare and education cost rises, however, seem to be due to Baumol’s cost disease and for that reason are likely resistant to substantial reform. But housing (typically the largest cost for a given individual or family) and transportation can both be made far less expensive.
* Insured price $2,758, cash price $521. Perhaps our policy makers ought to do something about this?
* “‘It’s going to be a crisis’: D.C. may be left without a halfway house for men returning from federal prison.” Another story that’s fundamentally about zoning, NIMBYs, and land costs.
* “American With No Medical Training Ran Center For Malnourished Ugandan Kids. 105 Died.” This is the space where “good intentions” meet “lack of knowledge.”
* Is the AIDS Healthcare Foundation fraudulently misusing savings from a federal drug-discount program designed to help poor patients? I have no idea about the merits of this story. Still, it is one of the rare mentions of the 340(b) program I’ve seen in the larger media, although we mention 340(b) in just about every proposal we write for FQHCs—which means we write about 340(b) “a lot.”
* Simple cash transfers might be the optimal way to reduce severe global poverty.
* “A Gates-funded program meant to keep low-income students pushed them out instead.” The author observed on Twitter, probably correctly, “I kind of always beat the same drum when it comes to education policy: we don’t really know how to turn money into results and most programs fail.” Nonetheless, I predict more confident predictions about improving education policy. Confident predictions of success are also an important element of grant proposals.
Plus, “Fail” is a bit tricky when it comes to grants: most grants have multiple purposes, including PR cover and employment, beyond their putative purpose (many high-flying Silicon Valley types miss this distinction and so find grant-funded programs very strange).
* Why is California seeing housing starts decline by 20% amid a housing shortage? These kinds of stories explain why, adjusted for cost of living, California is the most impoverished state in the nation.
* “The Fastest Growing Jobs in America Don’t Require a College Degree.” This is heartening in some ways (college is not the apotheosis of human existence) but also points to some of the bad public policies of the last two decades. We need more work in apprenticeships and less in traditional four-year degrees.
* “Malaria breakthrough as scientists find ‘highly effective’ way to kill parasite.” This is likely to be bigger news than anything else you read this month, if it’s true.
* Health insurance coverage was down in 2018, according to the Census. Does anyone else remember the sound and fury accompanying the Affordable Care Act (ACA)? The way it dominated headlines and generated millions, if not billions, of words, from all kinds of people with all kinds of writing skills and knowledge? And yet it’s turned out to neither be the major blessing supporters hoped nor the catastrophe its opponents feared.
* Greedy hospitals fleecing the poor. And not just the poor, either, as I’ve unhappily discovered.
* “‘Out here, it’s just me’: In the medical desert of rural America, one doctor for 11,000 square miles.” Unfortunately, without comprehensive reform of the medical training and credentialing systems, this is unlikely to change. Most doctors are ritzy cosmopolitan types who want to live in or near big cities and can afford to do so. They didn’t go through four years of undergrad, four years of med school, and then three or more of years residency only to live somewhere they don’t want to live.
Right now, this problem is partially being made up for by fly-in doctors who, at great expense, fly into rural areas or hospitals, work a couple days or a week, then fly home.
* “The Atavism of Cancel Culture: Its social rewards are immediate and gratifying, its dangers distant and abstract.”
* Death By 1,000 Clicks: Where Electronic Health Records Went Wrong.
* “Drexel engineering professor ‘blew $190k in federal grant money on strip clubs, sports bars and iTunes over 10-year period.’” This is not how you’re supposed to manage your grant, in case you’re wondering.