ESSAYS ON THE PHILOSOPHY AND BUSINESS OF HEALTHCARE

 Complexity and Ethics of Gene Editing WHAT IS GENE EDITING? Human Gene Manipulation: Screening GLOBAL FERTILITY NEUROTRANSMITTER DISORDERS SECOND LAW FAT AND LIFE Water and Magic THE RANDOM AND THE STABLE IN CHEMISTRY-BASED LIFE Why Healthcare Cannot Be a Completely Free Market Tutorial on the Regulation of the Pharmaceutical Industry Two Visions for Healthcare How…

Complexity and Ethics of Gene Editing

What does gene editing mean for society? How complex is the procedure? What is the likelihood that mistakes will be made in the process? What happens to discarded embryos?

Confronting Complexity

The book you are seeing on your screen may look like a normal book; it is not. It is a conversation in which you are a participant. The book does not offer pat answers to hard questions. In fact, it barely even gives definition to hard questions. Rather, this book presents that stage in which science is most challenging and, arguably, most interesting—the period of identifying just what the problems and issues are. That is why we solicit your help in writing this story—the story of extreme events in social systems.

The participants in this book-writing enterprise are independent thinkers who wish to understand the forces impinging on social systems and the systems’ often dramatic and extreme responses to those forces. Extreme events, the sudden and discontinuous response of social systems to these forces, are what we for shorthand term X-Events. X-events We imagine the reader to be a person who wants to intelligently manage his or her actions and behaviors in the midst of an X-event—in short, to manage an organization in chaos. And not only manage, but be a beneficiary of that event. Explicitly, we understand that there are no simple answers to social questions. But but there is at least a gestalt that can help an individual anticipate and manage X-events. The program outlined here is to build the gestalt by total immersion in the topic—by examining the issues from many perspectives.

Human Gene Manipulation: Screening

Suppose you are a prospective parent. Can you and do you want to affect the properties of your baby. Would you like it to be disease free? How about athletic or intelligent? What is the science? What are the ethics?

WHAT IS GENE EDITING?

The news is full of commentary on gene editing of humans. What is gene editing? How is it different from GMOs and other types of genetic engineering? What are the ethics? How is the course of human evolution being changed?

What Is Money?

  Hello. My name is Roger Jones and I am coming to you from beautiful downtown Lisbon, Portugal. Last week I met in France with a number of thought leaders from around the world. It was a high-altitude environment, and when I left my head was swimming with new thoughts. I would like to combine…

A FISH STORY

This video tells a story, a parable rather, about abundance of water and the consequences of abundant water. The setting is Pensacola, Florida. This video is part of the Abundance Project in which citizens are invited to participate in critical thinking to create tools for policy makers.

ABUNDANCE PROJECT

A price is paid for the abundance, however. The complexity of 21st-century life increased, making many people uncomfortable with their new high-energy environment. Gradients in the distribution of abundance annoyed many more people. A populist groundswell developed around the world with the stated goal to return to simpler times.

Why Healthcare Cannot Be a Completely Free Market

The concept of supply and demand is the cornerstone of economic theory. For simple commodities, the theory predicts that the demand for a product decreases as the price of the product increases and consumers are unwilling to pay the higher price. The supply increases as the price increases and suppliers increase production to capture increased profits. The actual price of the product is a compromise between the desires of consumers and the acumen of suppliers.

Tutorial on the Regulation of the Pharmaceutical Industry

The pharmaceutical market place is not entirely a free market. The extreme demand for lifesaving products can make standard economic assumptions inoperable. Therefore, regulatory mechanisms have emerged to protect patients and to provide patients access to affordable medications. There are three aspects of pharmaceutical operations in the U.S. that are regulated by the government:

The Decline and Fall of Globalization

To understand what happened in the recent US Presidential election, we have to go back to the early 1980s. At that time the overall global social mood shot upward, probably as a consequence of growing international financial integration that tended to undermine the age-old paradigm of “international diversification”. As the social mood became ever more positive, feelings that “everyone is a potential friend” grew stronger and drove events toward increasing interdependence, trade, and cooperation. It’s no accident that the European Union was formed during this period, along with the World Economic Forum in Davos. This story is graphically shown in the diagram below, where we see globalization totally flat until the mid ‘80s, where it exploded until around 2008.