Ask me anything

From today’s newspaper, “Traffic studies have shown that when traffic starts and stops, it moves slower than if it never stops.” Who woulda thunk?

And, how much did we spend on that study? $200,000? $400,000? I’m sorry, did I say “study?” The quote cited “studies.” Maybe the first outcome wasn’t believable to some.

An associate of mine received a grant of $127,000 to do a study about if alcoholism affects productivity of employees. Probably hasn’t been looked at more than five hundred times before, so let’s pour some more bucks into it.

Let’s see, are impaired people with associated health and mental issues going to be more or less productive, or about average? Don’t tell me, I’ll guess. Less productive.

The envelope, please. Less productive. Move over, Kreskin.

I was interviewed by someone doing a grant-funded study to determine if a mental health court would be more effective locally than running the people through the present system. Mental health courts have been around for over ten years and are operating in numerous locations. How about if we just look at their actual outcomes instead of asking non-participants to guess what results would be?

It’s not just that the money is wasted. It’s money that could’ve gone toward identifying unknown problems or alleviating them.

Here’s my proposal to solve this dilemma. You want to know if stoplights slow traffic or if addicts are less productive, don’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and unnecessarily duplicate research. Just ask me. Flat rate of $25,000. I’ll tell you.

Spend the excess on real issues.