More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Each box became its own small, frozen world, with little ability to adapt and little interest in whatever might be going on inside the other boxes. People who complained about “government waste” usually fixated on the ways taxpayer money got spent. But here was the real waste. One box might contain the solution to a problem in another box, or the person who might find that solution, and that second box would never know about it.
“The United States doesn’t really have a public-health system,” she said. “It has five thousand dots, and each one of those dots serves at the will of an elected official.”
A system was groping toward a solution, but the solution required someone in it to be brave, and the system didn’t reward bravery. It was stuck in an infinite loop of first realizing that it was in need of courage and then remembering that courage didn’t pay.
Walking out the door, she carried with her a list of unanswered questions. Maybe the biggest was: Why doesn’t the United States have the institutions it needs to save itself?
