I think some of the healthcare changes during my lifetime have increased efficiency and been fine (maybe even good) for patients.
I used to have my vitals taken by the doctor. Now, that’s a nurse. Used to get vaccine shots from the doctor, now a nurse. I feel like docs used to do blood draws, now a nurse. All of that is good, IMO. Doctors may not like the 20 minute blocks, but overall I can get the same care at a lower total cost and the nurses are probably better at the job they do twice as frequently than the doctor whose head might be somewhere else during the “boring parts”.
I suspect aspects of this apply to teaching (why does every calc teacher need to give the lecture? Why not have the top 1% of them in that skill record lectures with excellent production quality/editing and have students watch those?)
Yes, there are upper bounds, but I think even +50% or +100% might be possible with minimal (or in the calc case, negative) losses. Those efficiencies can really matter when someone else has to pay the bill.
I question your teaching comment. Sitting there and receiving a lecture is a rather small part of learning (varies per student). For the rest of it you're going to find that class size is by far the biggest determiner of success.
I wonder how the best teacher in the world teaching 5 classes of 40 would stack up against 200 people chosen at random from a pool who had already passed that class working 1:1 for 1 hr per day. Probably the ideal case is somewhere in the middle, but the point is that it's allocation of the teacher's time, and not production quality, that's the bottleneck when it comes to scaling teaching.
I meant to expand that to clarify that other aspects (supporting students as they work to apply the lectured material) would/must be done 1:1 in person, but the core lecture can/should be delivered by those with particular skills in that area and that we could apply extra effort to editing/production value.
My son's calc class is taught via watch the lectures online/at-home and then apply them in class and at-home via exercises. The only difference from what I proposed is that the same teacher pre-recorded the lectures, which seems to a practical solution but not an inherently necessary constraint (and there are likely thousands of calc teachers making average quality such videos).
But absolutely a personalized teacher must be available 1:1 for at least part of the overall process.
>I used to have my vitals taken by the doctor. Now, that’s a nurse. Used to get vaccine shots from the doctor, now a nurse. I feel like docs used to do blood draws, now a nurse. All of that is good, IMO. Doctors may not like the 20 minute blocks, but overall I can get the same care at a lower total cost and the nurses are probably better at the job they do twice as frequently than the doctor whose head might be somewhere else during the “boring parts”.
The statistical you is paying statistically much more than the historical equivalent. The situation is far more complex than that. There's a million variables here. Changes in services rendered, changes in outcomes, relative wage differences, more parties taking a cut of any given transaction, more "make work" prior to rending specialized care, etc, etc.
Outcomes are better than they were 40yr ago but is that because of the changes or despite them?
> Used to get vaccine shots from the doctor, now a nurse. I feel like docs used to do blood draws, now a nurse.
Weren't these always done by nurses? The doctor would do the determination of what you get, but nurse being the one executing these is something that was here for decades.
I used to have my vitals taken by the doctor. Now, that’s a nurse. Used to get vaccine shots from the doctor, now a nurse. I feel like docs used to do blood draws, now a nurse. All of that is good, IMO. Doctors may not like the 20 minute blocks, but overall I can get the same care at a lower total cost and the nurses are probably better at the job they do twice as frequently than the doctor whose head might be somewhere else during the “boring parts”.
I suspect aspects of this apply to teaching (why does every calc teacher need to give the lecture? Why not have the top 1% of them in that skill record lectures with excellent production quality/editing and have students watch those?)
Yes, there are upper bounds, but I think even +50% or +100% might be possible with minimal (or in the calc case, negative) losses. Those efficiencies can really matter when someone else has to pay the bill.