LETTERS
LETTERS Digital Alarm In an otherwise insightful review of In Search of Excellence ["Economics Without Numbers',' March], Phillip Keisling made a conspicuous slip. He writes, "One wishes the...
...He writes, "One wishes the authors had given the important question of worker ownership more attention ." This may be an important question but Mr...
...The best quantitative analysts I have run across, in government and in business, are quick to recognize the limitations of their models...
...They guarded their self-interest and behaved for pay, an all American virtue...
...ROBERT J. KEEFE Washington, D.C...
...Why have public health officials ducked all responsibility for what goes on within workplace walls, deferring to EPA or OSHA, and then avoiding any information actually pried out of those agencies...
...So writers prefer to harp on the crimes of the trial lawyers, or very rarely to air the disgraceful behavior of the defense bar in compensation cases...
...Noah, and we all saw the elephant and never were the same...
...Applying this, Dakota teachers are more highly paid than those in D.C...
...What's a neoliberal to do...
...Even "60 Minutes" had a hard time making an exciting story out of the brown lung tragedy...
...Human nature didn't take some giant leap towards real altruism in the sixties but the people who were preaching it did get a lot of press...
...How can this system change...
...Second, the subtitle is Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies...
...Getting Fad Press Timothy Noah seems to have the same romanticized notions about the sixties that Bob Dylan has about Woody Guthrie ["The Big Massage,' February...
...My candidate for achievement in this area is New Hampshire...
...Budgetary constraints are increasing...
...Keisling missed something of the essence of the book which is neatly summarized by its title...
...You say your job is to help people and you haven't helped a one...
...True, models rarely can take into account complex realities like human behavior...
...Good managers need the strength of both types of information...
...A South Dakota school student does have a 25 percent better chance of graduation...
...The sixties generation (those not suckled on TV) was no better than any other generation...
...TIM PETERSON Cuba, New Mexico Taken for Granite In your monthly "Tilting" column you impose a high standard of consistency on tiltees...
...Louis, Missouri Waiting Intern You are on target pointing out Ann Landers's poor excuse justifying the ridiculous hours worked by interns and residents in this country...
...None of the best-run companies (nor probably the next 1,000 runners up) is worker-owned...
...I just can't figure it out...
...Any one of them worth his or her salt will tell you where the conclusions and methods are weak...
...JOY PICUS Los Angeles, California...
...Maybe they really deserve all that attention we politicians pay them every four years...
...Why have these public officials utterly failed the public interest for no personal financial gain...
...May I propose a truce between Mr...
...If most bureaucrats were held to the lowest standards of production workers, they'd be gone in a week...
...So long as equal access to medical providers does not exist, the system will not change...
...Or corrupt...
...Remember a large percentage of private physicians do not accept Medicaid patients...
...They are as stuck as the interns who actually provide subminimum-wage labor to these institutions...
...MITCHELL ZUCKER Mendocino, California 'Tis Pity She's So Poor I was appalled you found it admirable that Joan Burton, deputy clerk of Chase County, Kansas, refused to accept a pay raise because she didn't believe the rural county could afford it ("Tilting at Windmills:' March...
...At the same time, the number of patients being seen at public facilities has increased in the past two years...
...The South Dakota consumer price index is only 55 percent of the District of Columbia's...
...Certainly they wish to deny the ugly reality of lingering occupational diseases, chemically induced cancers, excruciating disabilities...
...And yet they lead the nation in SAT scores and are in the top ten in high school graduation rates...
...If I did my job in the mills the way you do your job down here, I'd be fired in a week...
...They have paid their dues...
...As a result, department chairmen can easily spend more time placating faculty members than worrying about the health of their residents, let alone the daily problems of the patients who justify hefty department budgets...
...They are the unlucky Medicaid recipients who Mr...
...They are not the Reagan suburban crowd with tax-free Blue Cross benefits...
...Reagan thinks drive Cadillacs but who, in reality, have no access to physicians in private practice...
...That they now seem complacent, self-centered, hedonistic, is really only raised eyebrows caused by eye fatigue accompanying the hypnotic disbelief of so much pap...
...It's true...
...Public health officials and industrial commissioners (who sit on workers' compensation boards) on the other hand are paid by the public...
...First, the main title is not In Search of a Collectivist (or a Socialist or Communist) Ideal but one fundamentally and irreconcilably different...
...This press led to the misconception that something was afoot...
...Those receiving these services are members of what a former professor of mine called the "unsuspecting public...
...FRANK BLECHMAN St...
...She is one of so many who have been brainwashed by the men they work for and with and who establish their salaries, to the point they have no sense whatever of the value of the work they perform...
...yes) 011ie Boykin, an active worker (who would die within three years of brown lung disease) who had not wanted to speak, but who had wanted to come to the meeting to watch and learn was moved to speak up...
...Of course they do not perform open heart surgery, but they do procedures like C-sections and appendectomies...
...Nothing could have been further from the truth...
...yes) 2) Is it true that there are 25,000 cotton mill workers in South Carolina disabled by exposure to cotton dust...
...It is not enough to say that they are stupid...
...Frighteningly enough, such comments often come from persons my own age, and not from people of Ms...
...The plain truth is that interns and residents do routine medical work without having slept for 34 to 36 hours...
...But mathematical models present vast amounts of information in rational, understandable form...
...yes) 3) Is it true that NO worker in South Carolina has ever gotten compensation for brown lung disease under South Carolina worker's compensation...
...As grant monies dry up, departments are forced to reduce intern and resident positions...
...Having just completed a residency at a university medical center, I cannot tell you how many times I have heard, "Oh, you'll make a lot of money some day...
...But the salary schedule for teachers would suggest that the Washington, D.C., teachers make less in real terms than their South Dakota colleagues...
...Although you say that The Washington Monthly is "argue edited:' it is obvious that the above reference to Joan Burton either completely escaped this process, or your staff is made up of sexist clones...
...Are we actually expected to be contrite because it was laid upon us and not upon our younger brothers...
...I will no more be blamed for the fact that he wasn't there when I got maced in 1969 than he should be...
...JOHN PERRY BARLOW Cora, Wyoming Timothy Noah revealed the real difference between the sixties generation and his own without realizing it when he chose to center his story around movies...
...Women have been taught to work for the love of it, and that the money doesn't really matter...
...Congress being led by the noses by insurance and Chamber of Commerce lobbyists, I expected their behavior and prepared for it...
...Why have they behaved so uniformly and disgracefully...
...they just remembered growing up in a world where politics was associated with morality rather than makeup, and they were outraged...
...Women have been programmed for generations to believe that the work they do is not worthwhile...
...The rate of graduation is indeed a significant statistic...
...There was a Mighty Sound, Mr...
...Joan Burton and the many others like her are to be pitied, not admired, for the 20-year-old women's movement has left them untouched...
...They serve as good tests of intuition and personal observations, just as instinct and experience should temper judgments about what the numbers show...
...Why have the industrial commissions, faced with the parade of broke and broken workers, puffed themselves up into quasijudges, pretending quasi-decorum, and demanding quasi-legalisms...
...Talk with older physicians and you will find that they did have it worse...
...They often have no recourse but the county hospital...
...Certainly they want to go home to their families to live a "normal" life...
...How do you keep your job...
...It's the visual media that created the greatest generational differences...
...You follow this passage with a dissertation on "argue editing:' in which an author's ideas are examined and intellectual loopholes are discovered and filled...
...Joan Burton is representative of thousands of women who drastically undervalue their contribution to the economy...
...They rank 27th in per-pupil spending...
...Certainly their social aspirations make them wish they could be closer to the prosperous defense lawyers than to the victims...
...It is disappointing to see you use numbers in the March issue in a way you might describe as a cheap shot under other circumstances...
...Why have genuinely conservative political thinkers supported public handouts rather than insist that industries be required to pay this most direct cost of doing business...
...I am referring to your comparison of the District of Columbia and South Dakota school systems...
...Very early in the brown lung movement in a meeting between disabled cotton mill workers and the chairman of the South Carolina Industrial Commission, folks planned to ask three questions: 1)Is it your job to help workers injured on the job...
...Noah's generation and mine...
...Even if senior faculty members pulled night call at the intern level and attained a more heightened level of awareness, they would be bureaucratically impotent to implement change...
...This is double jeopardy...
...We are producing a new era of physicians who I had hoped would be a long-term catalyst for changes in this most traditional of professions...
...But managing the economy or a business "without numbers" is equally as silly as running things only on the basis of equations...
...Fewer physicians in training are left to do more work...
...They pay their teachers less than South Dakota does...
...BILL PATRICK Austin, Texas Timothy Noah's generation feels left out and is developing a rapid inferiority complex as a consequence...
...In the context of the analyses and objectives of the book, the authors gave the subject the attention it warrants...
...If they are as straight as they're stereotyped to be, they'll be just right for the job...
...More to the point, there is an old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times...
...Or venal...
...L. DAVID TAYLOR Alexandria, Virginia Disabled Democracy Your article in the March issue on workers' compensation ["Adding Insult to Injury',' Teresa Riordan] touched the surface of the problem, By treating the story as another case of "rich lawyers get richer while some others suffer" you obscured the total abdication of authority by the agencies nominally responsible for administering workers' compensation and protecting public health...
...Yet the educational system and an'ever-shrinking economic pie create attitudes that are ever more self-serving...
...In my ten years of involvement as a researcher, organizer, adviser, neighbor, and victim in the occupational health movement, I was often angered by the performance of lawyers and doctors, but was never surprised...
...But the subject is messy and boring...
...Someone's going to have to look after us in our premature senility...
...Sir' ,' he said, speaking from the back of the room, "I have a question...
...But the public health officials and the industrial commissions get off free and anonymous...
...Primarily, however, they get away with their neglect because no one expects them to do a better job...
...Similarly, while disappointed to see "honorable" state legislators and the U.S...
...There is nothing in theory or practice that implies worker ownership results in an exceptionally well-run company...
...Landers's generation...
...The arithmetic is clear...
...FREDERICK W. MOSSER Bethesda, Maryland In his haste to unload quantitative analysis, Phillip Keisling is falling into the same mind trap that has caught those he criticizes: ignoring an important part of the full spectrum of information which a manager should have before making decisions...
...True, quantitative models used blindly are dangerous and often plain wrong...
Vol. 16 • May 1984 • No. 4
