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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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I would argue that it depends. Taken literally, you could not distinguish a hospital aiming to save a fixed fraction of cancer patients and one who tries to save as many of them as possible, given other constraints. An advocate of (C) should default to the fixed fraction model, because it avoids having to ascribe intent to people (which might not even be directly tied to direct financial incentives of individual actors) and the alternative requires a lot of assumptions on what fraction of cancer patients can be saved at a given tech level.

And it is clear that this leads to wrong predictions about what would happen if the hospital got some new tech which saved an additional ten percent. (C) would predict that the survival rate would not increase, because the fixed rate is the goal. Perhaps the doctors all stop working Friday afternoon to compensate, instead, people preferring free time to work is a well supported finding.

My (B) like model of the hospital can take into account the fundamental motivations of people who work in health care as well as the outcomes and direct incentives of the actors. It is much more complex and relies on a lot of assumptions, but I would argue that it is likely to outperform (C) models.