Engineering and The Tragedy of Ebola

From the David Brooks NYT column yesterday - Goodbye, Organziation Man.  Read the entire column.

 

"The Ebola crisis is another example that shows that this is misguided. The big, stolid agencies — the health ministries, the infrastructure builders, the procurement agencies — are the bulwarks of the civil and global order. Public and nonprofit management, the stuff that gets derided as “overhead,” really matters. It’s as important to attract talent to health ministries as it is to spend money on specific medicines.

 

As recent books by Francis Fukuyama and Philip Howard have detailed, this is an era of general institutional decay. New, mobile institutions languish on the drawing board, while old ones are not reformed and tended. Executives at public agencies are robbed of discretionary power. Their hands are bound by court judgments and regulations.

 

When the boring tasks of governance are not performed, infrastructures don’t get built. Then, when epidemics strike, people die."