Time Zones And Education

Don’t forget that your digital devices will automatically jump forward from 2AM to 3AM Sunday morning.

Nearly half the country lives in the Eastern time zone according to this map (47.6%) . . . with 29.1% on Central Time, 16.6% Pacific Time, 6.7% Mountain time.

I just thought that was interesting.

Here — on a totally different topic — David Brooks on education.  It turns out, the Scandinavian success may not rest on the generosity of their welfare states or the homogeneity of their people, but on a word for which there’s no easy English translation . . . but that describes an educational system designed to instill a sense of mutual responsibility.

I thought that was interesting, too — if a little hard to explain, let alone effectuate.

But this idea takes just nine words to explain and would be easy to effectuate:

All medical school tuition should henceforth be 100% free. 

Not just at NYU — everywhere.

With roughly vaguely 60,000 students at roughly vaguely $60,000 a year each, that works out to $3.6 billion a year.  Add in nurses and round it up to $5 billion a year.  At which point we could more realistically expect docs to work for “normal” upper-middle-class incomes, as they do in, say, France and the rest of the developed world — well compensated, well respected, and doing something deeply satisfying, as they fulfill a great need.

This being America, there’d still be room for entrepreneurial doc in it for the money.  But gradually the emphasis would shift . . . from the McCallen, Texas, model toward that of El Paso — two similar cities whose highly dissimilar medical costs were explained in Atul Gawande’s famous New Yorker article some years ago.

How to pay for it?

Easy!

Just double law school tuition!  (Okay, I kid.  But with twice as many law students as med students, do we really have our priorities and incentives right?)

Have a great weekend.