DOGE pessimism, Grandma died (again), and Bezos. Plus gratuitous bread.
RWL #425
Greetings from The University of New Hampshire! Finals are done, and little Durham has emptied out. I’m a little behind today because I did my first Flourishing in the World interview in a while. I basically had to take the fall off from podcasting because I was so busy. But today I talked with my colleague Kim Nesbitt, PHD, from our Department of Human Development and Family Studies. Kim studies, among other things, playful learning, or how kids can learn by engaging in play. We talked about play and child development, and she gave some ideas about how people can use play with the small humans in their life. We also talked a lot about joy, which was somewhat unexpected, but makes sense given we were talking about play. I think it was a great convo, and I look forward to sharing it with you in the New Year.
This past weekend I had the urge to bake some bread, which I had not done in a while. I started a loaf that I intended to make for dinner Saturday morning, but we wound up going out instead, so I let it rise overnight in the fridge and made us cinnamon raisin bread for breakfast on Sunday. Pretty simple - I just folded some raisins, cinnamon, and sugar into the dough. It was wonderful hot out of the oven. There’s just nothing like steaming hot, homemade bread. I didn’t follow this recipe exactly, but if you’re looking for super easy homemade bread, you can’t go wrong following it.
As usual, willing good for all of you!
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Read
What: Eating Policy, Bringing Elon to a knife fight
Why: This is an entertainingly written, but not optimistic essay about DOGE and why it is unlikely to be successful, even with Elon Musk in charge.
I remember when I was the CFO of a mid-sized Army hospital. My colleague, head of contracting for the hospital, asked me to come to a meeting with some consultants. If I remember correctly, it was the two of us, plus the director of managed care and the director of logistics (supply chain and facilities). It turned out the “consultants” were three young men, probably barely 30, who wanted to get us to hire them to help us run the hospital more efficiently. Their qualifications? They had MBAs from various Ivy League B-schools. None of them had actually worked in healthcare, but that was supposedly an advantage. We sat there politely while they gave their pitch. When they finally left, we all just kind of looked at each other and said WTF? And the director of contracting apologized.
You see, we knew what made our hospital run inefficiently. It wasn’t a mystery to us (even with our non-Ivy League MBAs). Our problems were way above our pay grade - it was the bureaucratic rules that made our hospital run the way it ran. Most, though certainly not all, of those rules were put in place by well-meaning policy makers. But it’s really hard to run an organization the size of the Federal Government. The legendary economist Ronald Coase wrote a paper in 1937 called “The Nature of the Firm” that basically explained why large organizations are inefficient. The problem is information and incentives, and as a firm (or government agency) gets bigger, its decision makers get farther from reality and get into their own little bubble.
DOGE might make some impact around the edges, but the problem with the Federal Government is simply size. If it did less, that would help.
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Watch
What: Grandma died, again (about 1 min)
Why: We’ve just made it through finals and you know what that means - grandmothers were piling up like cordwood - most finding themselves in the hospital, on hospice with only days left to live, or maybe they had even suddenly passed in the night - right before the final, of course. And couldn’t the student just take the exam remotely? Or maybe just have it waived? I mean, how many times can Grandma die?
You get a bit cynical after a few years of excuses like that, and Grandma being sick/facing impending doom/suddenly passing is right at the top of the list.
One of my kids saw this and sent it to me because they hear me griping about it at home. It’s definitely worth one minute of your day - very funny. Then you can feel my pain.
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Listen
What: NYT DealBook SUmmit, Jeff Bezos Talks Innovation, Progress and What’s Next (65 min)
Why: Despite what I said about DOGE above, I am a fan of Musk, and I am a fan of Bezos. Bezos does not seek the spotlight the way Musk does, so we don’t have as many interviews with him. This was a wide-ranging interview where I feel like we get some real insight into how he thinks. It’s worth a listen, as the piles of Amazon boxes pile up on you porch this holiday season.