• Discrete choice experiments allow estimation of the relative importance of different aspects of care, the trade offs between these aspects, and the total satisfaction or benefit respondents derive from health care services. Monetary values of attributes may be indirectly estimated by including time-based attributes such as "waiting time"...Ryan et al. Use of discrete choice experiments to elicit preferences

Using discrete choice experiments to inform the design of complex interventions

Marketing books are awful. I have had an aversion to the self-help business genre since somebody stole someone's cheese and the Pharma company where I was working spun off a series of nauseating workshops with the same title. But as you likely know--Seth is different. I read his books and have been lucky enough to catch him on stage at a conference or two. I handed him a gift once and he stared at me momentarily with disbelief and teared up slightly. Oh. And he hugged me.  Full disclosure it was the On Being Gathering and we were all feeling about as good as you can possibly feel underneath beautiful redwoods being fed impossibly delicious food, drinking wine, and listening to some of the most influential purveyors of intention and goodness ever imagined. ​I needed to read this book. I think there is much you might enjoy as well.

People don't want what you make

If you can bring someone belonging, connection, peace of mind, status, or one of the other most desired emotions, you've done something worthwhile. The things you sell is simply a road to achieve those emotions, and we let everyone down when we focus on the tactics, not the outcomes. Who's it for and what's it for are the two questions that guide all of our decisions.--Seth Godin This is Marketing

“The sense of having walked from far inside yourself / out into the revelation, to have risked yourself / for something that seemed to stand both inside you / and far beyond you, that called you back”--David Whyte

A thought is harmless until we believe it. It's not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering.--Byron Katie

Since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, scientists have repeatedly proposed that the laws of biological evolution apply not just to bird and beast but also to creatures of the mind.

Perhaps most famously, in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, the En­glish evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word meme to describe a “unit of cultural transmission” analogous to a biological gene.

Memes, he wrote, could be ideas, tunes, or styles of clothing—­essentially any product of human intellect. Moreover, they were not just metaphorically alive but technically living things.--The Story of Storytelling by Ferris Jabr

Unlike their predecessors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modern biologists no longer depend primarily on morphology and anatomy—on appearances—­to establish evolutionary relationships between organisms. They can also compare their DNA, which maintains a record of familial mergers and divisions over great spans of time.

As different species evolve, they accumulate genetic mutations at a more or less steady rate. In general, the more similar the genomes of two species—the more that certain key sequences of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs match—the more recently they split from a common ancestor. Using this general approach, Tehrani and a few other researchers pioneered a new kind of “phylogenetics” specifically for folktales and myths.

​The gist of their method is to reduce stories to their most fundamental structural elements—the narrative analogue to genes, sometimes called mythemes—and statistically analyze the number of discrepancies between those elements to determine ancestral relationships.The Story of Storytelling by Ferris Jabr

If we remove their layers of symbolism and subtext—which have been interpreted and reinterpreted for millennia—and focus on their narrative skeletons, we find that they are studded with practical and moral insights: people are not always what they seem; the mind is as much a weapon as the body; sometimes humility is the best path to victory.

The potential for guarantee-time bias (GTB), also known as immortal time bias, exists whenever an analysis that is timed from enrollment or random assignment, such as disease-free or overall survival, is compared across groups defined by a classifying event occurring sometime during follow-up.

​The types of events associated with GTB are varied and may include the occurrence of objective disease response, onset of toxicity, or seroconversion. However, comparative analyses using these types of events as predictors are different from analyses using baseline characteristics that are specified completely before the occurrence of any outcome event.--Challenges of guarantee-time bias. Giobbie-Hurder , Gelber RD, Regan MM.

Patients who undergo transplantation seem to have longer survival times. However, patients in the transplantation group must survive at least until donor is available (blue), and their survival reflects total time before and after transplantation (blue and gold).

More favorable survival does not result from the effect of transplantation but rather from the inclusion of extra waiting time (guarantee time). By contrast, the no-transplantation group includes all patients who died before a suitable donor could be found.

The Curse of Bigness by Christopher Ketcham

​THE NEXT TIME I HEAR a politico or banker or Detroit executive talk about institutions “too big to fail,” I’ll direct them to the 34 percent of Americans who are obese. ​Last I heard, these big Americans, themselves a kind of cultural institution, were failing en masse, racked by diabetes, asthma, heart trouble, and bound for early death. The human form can only grow so big. Or I could point them to Pig #6707. ​Conceived in the laboratories of the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the 1990s, Pig #6707’s embryo was genetically altered with a human growth gene to develop a super-pig, bigger and faster-growing and more productive of meat.

But the genetic alterations produced a monster, impotent and nearly blind, its legs arthritic, its body crippled, the creature able to stand up and be photographed only with the support of a plywood board.--Christopher Ketcham

The Lochnerized first amendment and the FDA: toward a more democratic political economy

“[T]he majority has chosen the winners by turning the First Amendment into a sword, and using it against workaday economic and regulatory policy. Today is not the first time the Court has wielded the First Amendment in such an aggressive way. And it threatens not to be the last. Speech is everywhere—a part of every human activity (employ­ment, health care, securities trading, you name it). For that reason, almost all economic and regulatory policy affects or touches speech. So the majority’s road runs long. And at every stop are black-robed rulers overriding citizens’ choices. The First Amendment was meant for better things.”--Janus v. AFSCME, Justice Kagan dissenting 

THE NEW UTILITIES: PRIVATE POWER, SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE, AND THE REVIVAL OF THE PUBLIC UTILITY CONCEPT

From the control of banks over financial stability as well as access to finance and credit, to the control of internet service providers (ISPs) and telecom companies over broadband infrastructure, the problem is the same: private actors possess the means to undermine the public value of essential goods and services upon which many businesses, communities, and individuals depend.--THE NEW UTILITIES: PRIVATE POWER, SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE, AND THE REVIVAL OF THE PUBLIC UTILITY CONCEPT--K. Sabeel Rahman

Definition of social infrastructure--” Where private actors accumulate outsized control over those goods and services that form the vital foundation or backbone of our political economy—social infrastructure—this control poses dangers. By defining social infrastructure as a concept, this article provides a way to diagnose essential goods and services and therefore potentially problematic accumulations of private power."--THE NEW UTILITIES: PRIVATE POWER, SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE, AND THE REVIVAL OF THE PUBLIC UTILITY CONCEPT--K. Sabeel Rahman

Drawing from these disparate debates over net neutrality and TBTF financial firms, I extract four key elements of a twenty-first century framework for public utility regulation: firewalling core necessities away from behaviors and practices that might contaminate the basic provision of these goods and services—including through structural limits on the corporate organization and form of firms that provide infrastructural goods; imposing public obligations on infrastructural firms, whether negative obligations to prevent discrimination or unfair disparities in prices or positive obligations to proactively provide equal, affordable, and accessible services to under-served constituencies; and creating public options, state-chartered, cheaper, basic versions of these services that would offer an alternative to exploitative private control in markets otherwise immune to competitive pressures.--THE NEW UTILITIES: PRIVATE POWER, SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE, AND THE REVIVAL OF THE PUBLIC UTILITY CONCEPT--K. Sabeel Rahman

Progressive reformers thus understood public utilities not just in terms of economies of scale and laws of nature, but in moral and social terms. Industries triggered public utility regulation when there was a combination of economies of scale limiting ordinary accountability through market competition and a moral or social importance that made the industries too vital to be left to the whims of the market or the control of a handful of private actors.

This combination of economic dominance and social necessity is what created the threat of not just exploitative prices but also discrimination and unequal access. The public utility model offered a way to check this particular form of private power. Public utility regulation thus did not apply to all forms of private power—but it did address the most vexing, powerful, and dangerous private actors. At the same time, this emphasis on social importance meant that industries could evolve into utilities over time, through changes in their production and distribution model and through social changes whereby one or another good became essential to more people. THE NEW UTILITIES: PRIVATE POWER, SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE, AND THE REVIVAL OF THE PUBLIC UTILITY CONCEPT--K. Sabeel Rahman

...firms and sectors that might warrant greater regulatory oversight by examining three overlapping conditions: the economics of production; the downstream uses of the good or service; and the degree to which the good or service is a necessity that makes its users particularly vulnerable to exploitation. The presence of all three features indicates a firm or sector that is “infrastructural,” where the concentration of private power over these services poses a unique potential threat to public welfare. THE NEW UTILITIES: PRIVATE POWER, SOCIAL INFRASTRUCTURE, AND THE REVIVAL OF THE PUBLIC UTILITY CONCEPT--K. Sabeel Rahman

I irregularly visit NYC on a somewhat regular basis. Business meetings, visits with family,   museums--and wonderful friends where we pick up where we left off. Kathyann and I hunted for a place to grab some lunch and talk about what old friends talk about. We settled on Distilled NY and the menu graphic captured my attention. ​I realized I am basically a data distillery.

The aforementioned Kathyann designs jewelry that matters. There is a Power Collection that reminds me of the boom and pow of old batman cartoons. Near and dear to my heart is the I AM COLLECTION. I never had the right answer when confronted with the question, "what are you?" growing up biracial during the 70s. Kathyann taught me the answer--anything I want to be. How does she describe her designs? "Uncomplicated, imbued with meaning and intention"

You pretty much can’t get away from bacon or whiskey in the south. Put a doughnut in it and you’d be good to go—Hillary Scott, American country music singer-songwriter

And I basically became very interested in the silences, what we were not allowed to talk about or what we, just by custom, didn’t talk about when we came together to talk about making the world better.

So the Aspen consensus was: You can tell the rich and powerful in our age to do more good, but you can never tell them to do less harm. You can tell them to give more, but you can’t tell them to take less. You can tell them to share the spoils of extreme capitalism, but you can’t tell them to renovate capitalism.--Anand Giridharadas

Working at the level of systems means that problem components are in interdependent and constantly changing relationships. Linear approaches that address one component or factor at a time are inadequate in addressing dynamic conditions.

Stakeholders show a variety of motives and behaviors for engaging with systems. Designers must reconcile competing goals and performance expectations through participatory methods that value stakeholder input and ongoing feedback from the system.

And issues of sustainability, technological feasibility, and economic viability are crucial to making design solutions work over time.--Trend I: Complex Problems--Meredith Davis AIGA

Why write words into conversations if you are not willing to dig deeper and illuminate contradictions? ​ I think what the investigation has left me with is thinking about, even as a writer, how do I make sure that I am using my power, however limited it is, to interrogate systems and ask the questions you’re not supposed to be asking, instead of doing the kind of journalism or thinking or speaking that merely props up power.  But it also shows up for me every day in thinking about, am I using my voice to say inconvenient things that might cause me to lose friends or social capital, to put it in those market terms, but that are part of maybe pushing us, in some small way, to where we need to get as a society?--On Being Krista Tippett in conversation with Anand Giridharadas

All around, us the winners in our highly inequitable status quo declare themselves partisan of change. They know the problem, and they want to be part of the solution. Actually, they want to lead the search for solutions. They believe that their solutions deserve to be at the forefront of social change. They may join or support movements initiated by ordinary people looking to fix aspects of their society. More often, though, these elites start initiatives of their own, taking on social change as though it were just another stock in their portfolio or corporation to restructure. Because they are in charge of these attempts at social change, the attempts naturally reflect their biases.

The initiatives mostly aren't democratic, nor do they reflect collective problem-solving or universal solutions. Rather, They favor the use of the private sector, and its charitable spoils, the market way of looking at things, and the bypassing of government. They reflect a highly influential view that the winners of an unjust status quo--and the tools and mentalities and values that helped them win--are the secret to redressing the injustices. Those at greater risk of being resented in an age of inequality are thereby recast as our saviors from an age of inequality.--Winners Take All: the elite charade of changing the world--Anand Giridharadas

Try and find the book. I think it is an important discussion that needs to happen. I agree that most of us are decent people trying to prop up an indecent system. But whom are we serving when economics of billion dollar revenues are valued instead of improved patient outcomes, when investments are made in direct to consumer advertising, lobbyists, and the latest M&A are broadcast as successes? There are harms associated with doing good. Why aren't we discussing them on a broader platform? Why are so many of us in pain? Is the solution a "pill" or upstream investments to reduce social vulnerabilities?  ​What are we actually being sold?