Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! I am D-U-N done! Grades are in and I am officially on summer “break”! I put break in scare quotes because of course I will be monitoring the students while they are out on their summer internships and communicating with our preceptors. I was supposed to teach a summer version of US Healthcare Systems in addition, but we didn’t get enough enrollment, so I just got back about five weeks of my summer. Good and bad - I was kind of looking forward to teaching it again (and the extra pay - sigh - so much for my house on Martha’s Vineyard! - as if), because this would be my third iteration, and if you talk to professors, three times is where you tend to hit your rhythm for a course. Hopefully the schedule will work out so that I can teach it in the spring again and that will be my third iteration. I have several research projects I will be working on over the summer, so having the extra time will be helpful there. And I have been neglectful of my podcast during COVID, but I have a bunch of great interviews lined up for the next few weeks that will give me enough content to keep me going for a while.
The last two weeks at the LHH have seen spring really exploding. The trees went from sticks with buds to a full blow out in what seemed like a matter of days. Pic above is the view from my bedroom window - literally the first thing I see in the morning when I get up in the morning. The big garden in the middle hosts 17 blueberry bushes and a patch of raspberries which are going through their flowering process now. Won’t be long until they start to fruit! We also spent a couple of days spreading 20 yards of mulch. In case you need a visual for that - imagine two minivans parked side-by-side. That’s what the mulch pile looked like when it was delivered. Luckily we still have my daughter and her roommates living with us (post-fire), so we had a lot of help.
Earlier this week I attended the annual meeting of the Northern New England chapter of the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA). I was also invited to join their board, and so attended my first board meeting the next day. This is a group I have been tangentially involved with for a few years. They have been very supportive of my students and my program, so it was an honor to be invited onto the board. One of the things I wish I had understood when I was younger was not only the importance of membership in professional organizations, but the even greater importance of membership and participation in local chapters of professional organizations. That is one bit of advice I give out now to early careerists. It’s not enough to join a national organization - it’s essential to get involved at the local level. That is where the real value is. I look forward to helping the NNE HFMA chapter crete more value for our members over the next couple of years.
So with that, willing good for all of you, I present you with the links!
Read
What: Michael D’Antonio, The State Boys Rebellion
Why: I usually recommend articles, so fair warning, this is a book. I flew through it this week - I could not put it down. I found this book because I was doing some research for my Health Systems class, specifically for the chapter on policy. One of the topics that our textbook talked about was the horrible Tuskegee Syphilis Study , originally called the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male”. If you haven’t read about it, do click on the link above. It was a horror show run by the US Public Health Service. The USPHS allowed 399 Black men with syphilis to remain untreated from 1932 until 1973 when the Associated Press blew the whistle on the USPHS and forced them to stop withholding treatment. Because I didn’t want my students to write off such government abuse as simply something that happened in the South, I decided to do some research on something I was vaguely aware of from growing up in the Boston area. I remember driving by an abandoned school building with my mother in Waltham and asking her what the building had been for. She told me it had been a school for kids with intellectual disability, but that it had been shut down because now they were mainstreamed (probably not her words at the time, but that was the point). So I decided to look into this school. What I found was not the school I was looking for, but something far worse, and far darker - the story of the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feebleminded Youth, later renamed the Walter E. Fernald State School. What the Fernald School did to children is comparable, if not worse than the Tuskegee “Study” given its larger scale and the fact that it was done to children in the custody of the State.
The Fernald School was founded under a Progressive vision of eugenics - removing less desirable people from the population, and/or sterilizing them before releasing them back into the population so they could not reproduce. In the critical case that legalized involuntary sterilization of people asserted to have intellectual disability, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendal Holms wrote,
It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
What is stunning about this book is how it documents the fact that many of the children whom the state of Massachusetts ordered committed to Fernald were of ordinary intelligence and ability - they were just from lower class backgrounds, often victims of neglect, abuse, and abandonment. Today we know eugenics is junk science, but it was promoted by the leading “scientists” of the early 20th century - mostly wealthy, upper class elites looking to use scientific language to support their bigotry against ethnic and racial minorities and the working class. The book highlights how researchers from Harvard and MIT, working on grants from the Federal Government, ran experiments on the children confined at Fernald, including having them eat food contaminated with radioactive isotopes so they could see how the isotopes affected the children (this was in the 1950s). But much worse than that is how the book documents the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse the children were subjected to by the employees of the School while confined by the state at this “school”.
As I read this book, I kept reflecting on our recent crisis with COVID and the refusal by certain communities to take the vaccine. Many of these communities - working class, ethnic and racial minorities - were “vaccine hesitant”. I think you can draw a straight line from past abuse of “science” by elite institutions as documented in the Tuskegee Study and places like Fernald. Vaccine hesitancy doesn’t just come from ignorance, it comes from a lack of trust, often earned. Science done correctly is a humble approach - one that emphasizes our ignorance. “Scientism” is using the veneer of science to accomplish a goal.
**
What: Paul Graham, The Top Idea in Your Mind
http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html
Why: An essay exploring the role of subconscious processing when it comes to gnarly problems, and how forgiveness is essential. Sound like a weird combination? It is, but it is an excellent idea. Take 5 minutes and read.
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What: Tyler Cowen, How much should you criticize other people?
Why: Answer: not much. Short blog post with reasons why. We could all use this as a reminder.
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What: Memphis Daily News, Chris Crouch, Four Kinds of Luck
https://www.memphisdailynews.com/news/2013/sep/23/four-kinds-of-luck/
Why: Cute, short article I found while cruising around, looking at the concept of planned happenstance. Do you think you can create your own luck? I say, yes. So does this short article.
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Watch
What: TEDxUbud, Lessons from a hospice nurse: Alia Indrawan (11 min)
Why: There is so much to learn from spending time with the dying.
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Listen
What: Top Traders Unplugged: GM12: WW3 is just the beginning ft. Peter Zeihan (79 min)
https://www.toptradersunplugged.com/podcast/peter-zeihan-global-macro-series-april-27th-2022/
Why: This is an amazing tour through current events and trends - politics, crypto, the war in Ukraine, and more - through the lens of finance and investment. This podcast reminded me of why I pursued my first masters in finance. Unlike people who write opinion pieces in newspapers, magazines, or on the internet, investors actually have real money at stake. They don’t just talk, and so they have to try to get past their own ideologies and prejudices so that they don’t lose money. Politicians, public intellectuals, and journalists can go on and on because ultimately they don’t have to be right.
This conversation with Zeihan will blow you away. He has a lot of heterodox ideas that are both exciting and scary about the future.
**
What: Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Tyler Cowen & Daniel Gross - Identifying Talent (79 min)
https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/14095368/gross-identifying-talent?tab=blocks
Why: Cowen (also cited above) and Gross have a new book out about talent. I haven’t received my copy yet, but I will be reading it this summer. I share Cowen’s thinking pretty often - he is by far one of the most interesting public intellectuals alive today.
This is a discussion of how to identify talent, how to ask useful interview questions, and so forth. It’s really interesting and, I’ll use this word again - heterodox.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://markbonica.substack.com/welcome
See you next week!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Associate Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast:
http://healthleaderforge.org
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” – Pablo Picaso