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the only growth industry is excuses

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This news story (“Nuclear power plant ‘blocked after concerns for Welsh language’”) has been forwarded to me from several directions, variously described as “massive bait”, “a precision guided munition at you” and generally, the sort of thing that was bound to trigger a tetchy rant. I resisted the temptation for several seconds, then succumbed. The story is indeed very annoying, and extremely inaccurate (or rather – it’s an accurate story, accurately reporting an extremely misleading claim). But its inaccuracy, I worry, does point to a pretty deep pathology of the system. Just not the one that people think.

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To start off with – it’s just not right. The Wylfa Newydd project on Anglesey/Ynys Môn was dropped before the publication of the Planning Inspectorate report, because Hitachi and the government weren’t able to come to an agreement about financing. The Inspectorate report was later published, but they can’t block anything – they make recommendations to the Secretary of State. The report did in fact recommend that consent should not be granted, on two grounds; the effect on biodiversity hadn’t been sufficiently mitigated, and nor had the socioeconomic effects of the 9000 temporary workers that would be needed during the building phase.

If you look through the 906 pages of the report (it’s not really that long, half of them are a record of all the consultation responses), you can chase up the specific issues. In section 8.8.36 (page 199), we have:

In the conclusions on the socioeconomic section (8.8.5, p200):

And (8.10.7, also p200).

So, in other words, the issue is housing – if you try to bring 9000 workers into one corner of an island with a population of 66,000 you are going to cause chaos of many kinds. The effect on the language is one issue, but the effect on tourism (having all the B&Bs occupied for a couple of years, then suddenly empty) was a bigger problem.

Not only that, but on p201, the Inspectorate actually gave a suggestion as to how this could be mitigated. (This is quite unusual; the Examining Authority, or ExA in the documents, is usually made up of only two or three people, and isn’t set up to give detailed guidance as to how to deal with the issues it raises).

So what’s actually happened here is that the planning system noted that there was a genuine problem of accommodating the temporary workforce and suggested how it could be mitigated (they also suggested the plant would need to build a medical campus because there’s no hospital on Anglesey with an A&E department). Then the project was dropped for unrelated reasons before the Secretary of State had to give a decision. I don’t think that can fairly be characterised as “blocked after concerns for Welsh language”, it’s not the reader’s job to guess that “after” might not imply causation.

But now the factoid is out in the wild – the nuclear power station was cancelled because Homer Simpson doesn’t speak Welsh! Haw haw! How ridiculously unserious! No wonder we can’t build anything!

And it’s that last exclamation which troubles me. One of the key points in the manifesto of this ‘stack has always been “take jokes seriously and metaphors literally, you will be surprised what you discover”. And having been working in this area a bit recently, I think there’s a bit of a pattern – this, the “bat shed” and the fish deterrent at Hinckley C.

That pattern is – at an industry conference, someone who has recently been associated with a pretty big failure comes up with a striking and funny-sounding thing. The details might not check out wholly, it might be quite arguable whether it’s all that it sounds like, but the important thing is the image that it cements in the mind. Some trivial furry mammal or minority language is being allowed to stand in the way of progress! I, the Great Engineer, am being forced by Johnny Penpusher to waste my time on considering girl stuff like biodiversity or socioeconomic impact, when I could be Building!

What’s going on here is the construction of a very interesting emotional accountability sink which might be nicknamed “Tell Me More About This Not Our Fault Theory, I Find It Strangely Compelling”. If you create an image of the planning system as so ridiculous that it’s literally impossible to build anything, then nobody can criticise you for failing to build the specific thing that was your job. If you proliferate anecdotes about underwater fish discos and words with no vowels in them hahaha, then you avoid awkward questions about what actually went wrong. In general, the aim is to encourage a complete resignation that the whole planning system is broken, so as to avoid consideration of what specific things are actually broken.

Because as well as creating a duty on you to make positive suggestions as to how to fix them, that might involve someone noticing that “where are the workers going to live” is not actually an unreasonable thing to expect the developer of a nuclear power station to have an answer to. A lot of people who don’t want to come out with their whole chest and say “biodiversity is just not something we can afford” or “minority languages are worthless” seem to be trying to achieve the same goal by delivering the funnies and leaving “well, what are we going to do then? Get rid of it all” hanging in the air. “Builders”, in this model, should only be concerned with things that look like technical issues of engineering; everything else is to be swept out of the way.

I might do a post on Friday about the things I learned from Will Butler-Adams, the CEO of Brompton bikes, but the single phrase of his that has stuck with me the most is “respect for the problem”. It’s just kind of dishonest from an engineering standpoint to fail to properly engage with the full set of tradeoffs and constraints - you just identify the most difficult parts of the problem as nothing to do with you, and then you can deliver a perfect solution which will remain perfect because it can never be implemented. The British problem isn’t NIMBYs - it’s NOMFUPs.


Some disclaimers that arguably should have gone at the top: I know quite a bit about Ynys Môn / Anglesey because I grew up there, and I’ve kept in touch with its political news because I was at school with Rhun ap Iorwerth, the current leader of Plaid Cymru and AS for Ynys Môn. It’s also fair to say I have a generally sceptical attitude to the nuclear industry, mainly because of all the PR people who used to regularly visit schools in North Wales. I also have a particular set of experiences with respect to the specific question of influxes of temporary workers into Welsh-speaking communities, because my family happened to move to Anglesey in 1977, at the same time as a large proportion of the construction workforce for the Dinorwig “Electric Mountain” pump storage station.

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denubis
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Pessimistic thoughts about the left

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I am of the left in my bones because I believe in protecting the vulnerable. I think top marginal tax rates should be in the range of 70-90% and very probably over 80% [believe it or not the economic literature largely supports this]. I believe we should massively reduce the prison population. I belive in a transition to post scarcity communist economy. I cannot stand the right and sometimes I am sorely tempted to hate them. But the left? The left really irritates me. Not, however, in the typical kind of “dissident self-described heterodox leftist” kind of way, but in a way that as far as I know is unique to me. The left won’t grapple with tradeoffs because it doesn’t want to upset its own constituents.

Marx as popularly received (not necessarily the actual Marx) said that we don’t need to think too hard about a future communist society because there would be a revolution and then it would sort itself out. To plan was to be presumptuous- the democratic masses would iron out the kinks in their spontaneous enthusiasm and democratic wisdom. This is what we in the ideas business call a very bad idea. Thus started a long and illustrious tradition of dealing with all apparent tradeoffs by saying that come the revolution it will all be sorted out. This habit continues, like a specter haunting, even among those who don’t believe in The Revolution.

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I was having coffee with a trot friend of mine once. I spoke about the genuine difficulties that would face any kind of actual leftwing government. He assured me that this was nothing to worry about because once the workers took over [everywhere, simultaneously], their inborn ingenuity and knowledge of the actual conditions of their labor would lead to a joyous explosion in productivity like never before seen in history. This included annual growth rates of up to 50% a year and at the beginning a large and instantaneous explosion of new productivity, etc., etc.

There is no reason to believe this, and in the absence of these miraculous fruits, with or without a revolution, any left-wing regime newly ascended to power will have to face tradeoffs. This is true regardless of whether its economic model is a command economy, market socialism, or social democracy.

The left has equated thinking about tradeoffs with neoliberalism, but neoliberalism isn’t thinking about tradeoffs, it’s thinking about tradeoffs with the wrong set of priorities.

Let me give an example. The other day I attended a politics in the pub discussion. The speakers were an Australian senator, a candidate for parliament, and a senior union activist. It was quite good, all things considered. I was particularly gratified that the speakers raised the issue of University Democracy- universities used to have governing boards that were much more composed of students, staff, and alumni. Over the years, and with encouragement from the government, universities altered their own constitutions to tip the balance of their councils towards people nominated by the governing body themselves, and in the case of Sydney University, persons directly selected by the minister.

Being my usual difficult self, I decided that I wasn’t satisfied to ask a Dorothy Dixer question. For some reason I wanted these poor individuals to weigh in on an issue that is genuinely vexing me. How should we think about “administration” in the university context? We know there are a variety of non-academic costs. We know that some of them represent inefficient creeping corporate bullshit. Consider the category of administrative expenses- we know that, for example, the deputy vice-chancellor for best excellence strategy is administrative bullshit. We know that the person who helps students sign up for courses is not administrative bullshit. Somewhere in between those two, we flip over into corporate bollocks- but how to draw the line both politically and economically? That’s a tricky question.

For my pains, I received a very definite and even (slightly) hostile response. The official position of all the speakers was that all administrative waste comes from the C-Suite employees, and no one who isn’t earning more than, say, 300,000 a year needs to go.

I don’t want to exaggerate how big a problem corporate bullshit spending is because it is frequently exaggerated. I believe, although I am not certain, that it is a worse problem in the US than in Australia. Even in America, I suspect it is exaggerated a bit. Nevertheless, it is a real problem and one that, while we could maybe get away with ignoring it at the moment, will tend to get worse for structural reasons unless checked.

Here are some figures from the American context:

Interest in administrative staffing, raised by Veblen (Citation1918) a century ago, has carried through to today, in part due to the rapid growth in non-academic employment in higher education. As seen in Table 1, between 1976 and 2018, the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the US increased by 92%, during which time total student enrollment increased by 78%. During this same period, however, full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164% and 452%, respectively. Meanwhile, due in part to the proliferation of part-time and adjunct faculty, the percentage of full-time faculty decreased from 67% to 54%, whereas the percentage of administrators who were full-time increased from 96% to 97%

Ideally, we need to fire many deputy vice-chancellors, probably also many of their flunkies, and possibly a bunch of senior administrators who aren’t flunkies in the C-suite. Now, to reiterate, when we’re talking about the portion of university administration that may have to go, we do not mean the beleaguered individual who handles enrollments or advises you on completion requirements; we mean Bob.

Bob works for the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for international excellence as a “best practice analyst”. Bob is not a bad guy. Bob’s salary is not even that high compared to a lot of people- some of them academics- tramping around the university. Bob probably believes in what he does. Nevertheless, there’s a good chance that in a truly well-structured university, Bob would have to go. At the very least, a hiring freeze on new people like Bob would have to be implemented. Some people like Bob have an academic background, and could perhaps be transitioned back to research and teaching. Others could be moved across to more useful areas of administration. Nevertheless, the headcount of Bobs has to be decreased. Maybe this could be accomplished satisfactorily with a hiring freeze and a voluntary redundancy package offer, but only maybe- no promises.

This would be true even in the best possible circumstances. There is too much bad in the world that needs to be combatted to waste bright people as the deputy junior international vice practices excellence senior intern manager.

Worse, we are obligated not just to fire them, but to undeniably fuck them over. There is no plausible method of making the transition a net improvement for them. Being fired is one of the worst things that can happen to a person psychologically. Theoretically, we could compensate them enormously in such a way that made the net effect on them neutral, in practice this is politically impossible. Overall there will be net gains from moving them from largely useless to useful work, but those gains will not primarily accrue to them. Maybe in an overall sense, a leftwing government will benefit them, but this particular action will not.

But the left can’t talk about this, because it never, ever, wants to say “no” to those in its coalition, and then in the rare situations in which we find that we do have power, suddenly we have no plans, and just have to turn to the existing neoliberal playbook because that’s what’s on offer.

Somehow the right never seems troubled by the symmetrical problem- their supporters just assume that the leopard will never eat their face. Even now we are hearing stories of fired government bureaucrats who voted Trump and thought they would never lose their jobs because “they were one of the good ones”. The right just says “no” to whatever and people read an exception for themselves into it. The left won’t upset anybody in the economic realm, and this comes out in, among other ways, a refusal to make serious plans that tackle the hard questions in advance. And again, all too often that means when we take power we meekly pick up the existing playbook because it’s the only thing on offer. We haven’t done the group assignment prior to the due date for fear of offending someone in the group.

Now, maybe this is just one of those problems we shouldn’t touch. Maybe we should spend zero political capital on it and save our powder for other targets, but we should still talk about it openly and frankly among ourselves. Further, the problem is more general than any one case. As long as it persists, we lose the power to make real proposals to structurally alter society and instead just imagine a version of society like it is now, but with fairy dust sprinkled all over it.

I know why, structurally the speakers are forced to give the answer they gave me. That’s the problem. I’m not saying that the problem is that the left has chosen to refuse to think about these tradeoffs out of malice or stupidity. We are structurally obliged to think this way- e.g. because we represent unions that represent all but the most senior of bureaucrats (at least theoretically- how many of these people working for the deputy Vice-Chancellor For Best International Practice Excellences even are members anyway?)

Overall I’m pretty pessimistic about this. I don’t see a politically viable solution. We just have to do that work we can, and hope that somehow in the tumult of history, it works out. We need to start thinking very clearly about leftwing economic planning starting with the baseline material of a society built for the alien values of capital accumulation and the hobby horses and empire-building dreams of oligarchs, only indirectly concerned with human welfare.

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A majestic bear wearing an academic gown and robe sits in a historic university quadrangle. The bear has a wise and contemplative expression, holding a book in one paw. The quadrangle is surrounded by grand, ivy-covered stone buildings with arched walkways and well-manicured lawns. The setting exudes an atmosphere of scholarship and tradition.
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denubis
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Stand Up And Be Counted

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Here’s an editorial by Adam Feuerstein at Stat that points out that in all the uproar about the Trump administration’s attacks on the NIH (and the NSF, and NOAA, and other science-based agencies), there’s a conspicuous zone of silence. And that’s the biopharma industry. It’s clear that almost everyone is keeping their heads down in the interest of “keeping lines of communication open” and so on.

“Thanks for checking in. Nothing to share on this now,” a PhRMA media representative told STAT. 

Gilead Sciences, Eli Lilly, Biogen, and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals declined comment, or didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“Personally, I think people have commented negatively too much in the public domain in ways that could alienate the administration,” another biotech CEO told STAT, requesting anonymity to speak freely. . .

. . .STAT reached out to a broad swath of biotech and pharma executives, Wall Street analysts, and other observers, seeking to understand why the industry has chosen not to publicly defend universities and other academic research institutions facing  steep cuts in NIH funding. No one was willing to speak on the record.

Well, I'll speak on the record. Get this down: it’s even worse than it looks. This gets back to my “three levels of corruption” idea, which I would summarize this way: Level 1 is “Slip us come cash and we’ll do something extra for you”. Level 2 is “Slip us some cash and we’ll actually do our job for once”. And Level 3 is “Slip us some cash and nobody gets hurt”. The biopharma executives who are flying in for personal audiences with Trump or staying quiet while muttering about needed to keep up good relations are hoping for some Level 1 action, bracing for a lot of Level 2, and are terrified at the thought of Level 3.

They should be. Level 3 corruption is where government short-circuits into becoming a protection racket. And that, I should add, is one of the only ways in which our current president is capable of seeing the world and all the transactions in it. He’s a real estate developer from Queens who came up as a protegé of Roy Cohn - of course he does. His approach to dealing with Congress, to international relations, to trade, to most any issue at all is that of a mob boss: who’s shaking down whom, who gets the payoffs, who owes the favors, who takes a cut. (Any attempts to argue this point in the comments will be ignored; this stuff has been glaringly evident for many years).

But that worldview is not (thank God) the ironclad rule of all human existence. Look at drug research: do big and small biopharma companies have an intellectual debt to NIH research? Oh, hell yes. Of course we do. A lot of academic research is purposely foundational - how would we not end up building on it? This is one of the many reasons why gutting academic research the way the administration proposes is such a catastrophically bad idea, but if you're a mob boss you're not equipped to understand that. Mind you, if you're a mob boss you might not care even if you did understand it, but still.

Never forget, though that the academic labs have intellectual debts to the industrial ones, too. We’re the people who put far more expense than they ever could into trying to turn these foundational ideas into disease treatments, to see if the hypothesis pans out, if there really are molecules that can do what is proposed, to exhaustively improve them until they could be human therapies, to find out (the hard way) what their liabilities might be, and to take on the ferocious financial burden and risk of taking them through controlled human trials. And we generate a lot of otherwise-unobtainable information along the way, as well as piles of useful tools for further research. We owe each other!

It is a terrible mistake to look at all this as a zero-sum game of extortion and theft. As out of fashion as it is to talk this way, we are all really in this together. Academia and industry do different things most of the time, and we each benefit from that. And that’s why the silence from industry about what’s going on with the NIH et al. is so infuriating. It’s not that I can’t understand it; I see the self-preservation instincts. It’s just that I think they're being short-sighted, because fear does that to you.

So allow me to advocate a larger view. Gutting the NIH, NSF, CDC and others will demolish one of the pillars that holds up our entire research establishment. It will have terrible follow-on effects in all of biopharma - not tomorrow, not next week, but soon enough. And by the time you can unequivocally point to things that have started going wrong in industry because academic research has been stomped flat, it will be far too late to do anything about it. What's more, the methods being used to attack these agencies are illegal and unconstitutional. I am not exaggerating nor am I making some sort of joke here. If we let this happen - which will mean letting the Trump administration ignore the federal judiciary, or alternatively letting the judiciary neuter itself for fear of being completely brushed aside - then all bets are off. Look up one of the Trump movement's favorite legal scholars if you want a preview. We will have moved into a post-Constitutional era and will have become another country entirely and we're damned close to doing that now. And I think that Leonard Cohen was right when he said "You're not going to like what comes after America".

Biopharma CEOs: what will protect you then? Speak up, speak up now. Because as it stands, you're forming up on the wrong side of a very important line. Time will not be kind.

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denubis
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Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Touch

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Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Just trying to give a vision of utopia.


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denubis
7 hours ago
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Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Chaos

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Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
I really need to put together a book on how to disappoint children.


Today's News:
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denubis
22 hours ago
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Why should you care about an indirect cost?

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In my prior life, I was an assistant professor at the University of Texas, leading a research lab focused on a single mission: breaking the cycle of violence using infectious disease modeling. This sounds technical and high-level, and if you looked at any of my 100 publications, they would be barely understandable to the populations they served.

In reality, it wasn’t theoretical. I partnered directly with survivors of child abuse, sex trafficking, and domestic violence. We collaborated with police officers who witness trauma daily. And, together, we built solutions: a new police dispatch system, domestic violence screening integrated into medical records, and better EMT training to detect elder abuse. These efforts had a real-world impact. Police suicides declined. More patients are connected to victim services. More seniors were protected.

All of this work was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

This week NIH is facing a major funding shift that could reshape the future of research in the U.S. The fallout has been swift. While 22 states have filed a legal challenge, universities in other states are either halting research or continuing with immense uncertainty.

The biggest challenge in all of it, though, is that people don’t know what NIH does or how its funding positively impacts their lives. If the public doesn’t understand, feel, or recognize it, how can we expect them to defend it?

Center of the changes: indirect costs

The latest debacle centers on “indirect costs.” For every NIH grant awarded for research, funding is divided into two categories:

  • Direct costs cover the actual research—salaries, fieldwork expenses, stipends for study participants, etc.

  • Indirect costs cover the infrastructure that makes the research possible—rent, electricity, internet, security, compliance, human ethics review, administrative support, and even toilet paper in buildings.

At my university, the indirect cost rate was 56%. That meant if I received a $100,000 grant, the university would receive an additional $56,000 to cover research infrastructure. So, a total of $156,000 would come through the door from NIH.

Indirect costs are specific to each institution, so they vary. In some cases, the percentage is as low as 10%, but in some, it is upwards of 80%. They often reflect the location of the institution and the service provided to the researchers. For example, in the graph below, New York University is higher than the University of Wisconsin, in part because of rent. The rates are negotiated with NIH every few years.

No alt text provided for this image
Ad Verum Partners' evaluation of the impact. Source: Tim Pavlis

The new administration has slashed “indirect costs” from research grants to 15%, down from a previous range of 30-80%, to slim down government spending. In my $100,000 example, cutting the indirect rate to 15% would mean $15,000 for the infrastructure to do my research, leaving a $41,000 shortfall. This could mean no internet for my computer to analyze police officer surveys or no internal team ensuring that all my research was up to ethical and human standards.

This deficit adds up fast grant after grant. Universities will lose hundreds of millions in funding, regardless of whether they are in a red or blue state.

Source: United for Medical Research

Universities will somehow have to compensate for these losses. That could mean:

  • Hiring freezes and layoffs (fewer faculty, larger class sizes)

  • Limiting research volume (accepting fewer grants, reducing innovation)

  • Higher tuition and reduced financial aid

  • Cutting ethics and compliance oversight (fewer safeguards for research integrity)

  • Eliminating non-grant-funded academic programs

Private universities, like Harvard, may have endowments to cushion the blow. Public universities do not. Many already operate on razor-thin budgets and will be hardest hit.

Why should you care?

Americans have little empathy for institutions, and I would argue, rightfully so. Ivory towers often come off as sterile robots—disconnected and paternalistic. Even with this news, headlines and talking points on social media are high-level.

However, academic institutions are a part of your community. In some states, like Alabama, universities are the largest employers. Nationally, this sudden indirect rate cut puts 400,000 jobs at risk and threatens $80 billion in economic benefits—not to mention the economic benefit of progress in cancer, diabetes, heart disease, mental health, and services for victims of violence, for example.

Okay, what is the solution?

It’s not surprising that the public has questions about indirect costs—even researchers are often frustrated by them:

  • Where does this money go?

  • Why do some universities charge more than others?

  • Could institutions allocate funds in ways that benefit research more?

I don’t oppose a legitimate audit of federal functions to determine where we are overweight. Reimagining the health agencies is a useful and healthy process. Changes must be made at NIH and universities in the short term. For example, I have often thought our indirects were inflated, but without financial transparency, it’s impossible to know.

But a rushed, two-day policy change is just reckless. Destruction seems to be the goal rather than a healthy, helpful scalpel. And it certainly feels targeted, as it’s unclear how a $4 billion cut will make a big impact on a $1 trillion goal of cutting government spending, especially when the proposed cut has a direct return on investment ($2.46 of economic activity for every $1 in NIH funded research).

The scientific community has to get much better and smarter at communicating with the public.

Regardless, from the undercurrent of conversation on indirect costs, it’s clear that researchers can no longer afford to remain silent. Scientists and institutions have relied on papers locked behind paywalls, buried in jargon, and detached from real-world storytelling. Their work has remained invisible to most Americans, and this strategy has failed. We cannot wait for a crisis to explain why research funding matters. Community engagement has to be a central core of research.

As a professor, I would assemble infographics and send them to the participants, like police officers, to show that their insights were valued and drove tangible change. But this was done in my free time. When I was getting ready to go up for tenure, YLE— which would get more than 1 million reads compared to my scientific articles that got 10—was represented as one buried bullet under community service. I never took one hour of class that taught the value of stakeholder engagement, scientific communication, or science translation. And many, many colleagues often question why I write YLE or why scientific translation is needed in the first place.

All of this has to change. Through institutional incentives and support, and culture change.

Bottom line

I’m not surprised that people have legitimate questions about the institutions that are supposed to serve them. I, too, have questions. Reimagining the health agencies is a useful and healthy process. But this change with a 48-hour deadline is a punch to the jugular.

Research (including the fine print of indirect costs) isn’t abstract—it shapes our communities’ economies, our families’ health, and the future of innovation.

Love, YLE


Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) is founded and operated by Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, MPH PhD—an epidemiologist, wife, and mom of two little girls. Dr. Jetelina is also a senior scientific consultant to a number of organizations, including CDC. YLE reaches over 320,000 people in over 132 countries with one goal: “Translate” the ever-evolving public health science so that people will be well-equipped to make evidence-based decisions. This newsletter is free to everyone, thanks to the generous support of fellow YLE community members. To support the effort, subscribe or upgrade below:

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denubis
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