| >the core idea behind Curtis' work is perhaps simply that ideas can be extremely dangerous or powerful That's as good a description as I'm likely to come up with. Aside from the delivery, which is at once engaging and completely lacking the nuisance necessary for a topic like this, my issue is that the core idea is a truism and I'm not sure he actually makes an interesting point, much less offers alternatives (he'd have to make that point first). He does however touch on interesting topics. He then attempts to find causal relationships between events, but I believe doing this to arrive at a conclusion is intellectually dishonest. He must know that, which makes me more frustrated. That's personal preference. If I was trying to convince someone of something, this is not how I'd go about it. Re NHS: ask anyone who designs incentive programs and they'll tell you that it's a cat and mouse game. I fail to see how hospital managers gaming the system implies "KPI + autonomy about how to achieve it" is a dud idea entirely, and that proponents of such systems are paranoid RAND Corp game theory psychopaths stuck in the Cold War. Incentives need to be tweaked just like anything else, and the rational agent model need not be a complete description of human behaviour for it be useful. It need only be sufficiently descriptive of portions of workplace behaviour that designing incentives raises KPIs. If those KPIs aren't working you tweak them, using those dreaded numbers Curtis despises so much. Models are useful until they aren't. But as someone said- they're all wrong. We modify them or replace them as necessary. Sometimes that takes longer than we'd like. We'd still be bashing each other with clubs without them. I'm not sure what Curtis proposes, which is perhaps why I watch these movies over and over again- trying to get the point. Or maybe it's just soothing to hear vague thoughts about economics and systems theory set to music and stock footage. As others have said, perhaps it's more useful as a conversation starter than a thesis. Don't get me wrong. I love the damn movies. |