My son and I misspent his ski-holidays from school visiting Paris because none of us liked winter sports and my son claimed that he had forgotten how Paris looked like. When we visited Paris together last time, he was only 5 years old and had neither interest for history nor for fashion. He was then still a carefree child with a predilection for elevators and escalators. So the Louvre and Parisian metro were great, but Notre Dame couldn’t keep him for more than 5 minutes–there was no elevator or escalator at all.
Nowadays the same kid has turned a thoughtful teenager who knows more about European history than I do. Instead of just being taken to somewhere, he now enjoys discussing with me about the places to be explored. Paris was his idea and he told me that he would like to enter Notre Dame. I happily agreed. This time we spent almost a whole hour quietly observing the Mass in Notre Dame. Seldom did we have such a long duration of silence with each other. My son seemed to be magnetized with the elegance and serenity of the ceremony. I keep wondering what thoughts were crossing his curious mind, but decided not to disturb the peace.
Standing still In the imposing cathedral resounded with celestial music, I couldn’t help thinking about those recurring questions from my son and myself. Does God exist? Why do people believe in God? I had honestly admitted to my son that I don’t know whether there is a God or not. But it doesn’t really matter, I explained to him, people, even very knowledgable people, need to have faith in life because it is impossible to know or control everything. That faith will liberate you from anxiety and fear as long as you don’t doubt about it. ”Ha, then I got it. It is good to have God then.’ I wonder whether he really did, but I was happy that he got the chance to know more about it. When I was a teenager, I never understood why scientists like Newton and Einstein would even consider God. At that time I thought that belief in God equalled ignorance and irrationality. Only much later did I realize that the ignorance was mine. It can be a perfectly rational choice to just believe.
After one sole visit to the high school nearby, my son told me that he would go there.
“But you don’t have to decide now. Let’s visit the other two schools too, so you know which one is the best”. As a decision analyst, I try to use all opportunities to teach my son making rational decisions.
“No, I don’t want to visit other schools. This school meets all my expectations, why should I look further?” My son was surprisingly resolute.
I thought about convincing him of the importance to know all the options and choose the best one, but his firm attitude convinced me not to do so. He is happy about his own choice and I get to save all the time and efforts of knowing other schools. Why bother looking further? After all, there is nothing wrong being a satisficer instead of a maximizer.
So the decision is made, and I feel relieved. Rationalizing a decision made is much easier than making a rational decision.
Concerns for antimicrobial resistance evolve like fashion: it gets hip, fades out, then gets hip again. These days antibiotics hit the news again after the consumers organisation announced that almost all chicken in the supermarket is infected with ESBL (an enyzme that makes bacteria resistant to most antibiotics). As the news travels, everybody at work is talking about antibiotics: not only my colleagues who have been busy monitoring veterinary antibiotic use in livestock sectors for years , but also colleagues who had never thought about antibiotics as something interesting are considering research on antibiotics.
I am concerned and excited at the same time. A year ago, when the ’antibiotic alarm’ was sounded in the media, I had the idea of conducting research on the economics of anti-antibiotics to analyse the economic aspects of reducing antibiotic use in livestock production. It seemed to me that many arguments for restricting antibiotic use in livestock production were not well grounded and the pros and cons are far from being well understood. Most people are not aware of the fact that the presence of resistant bacteria poses merely a hazard to human health and not per se a high risk. Antibiotic resistance is primarily a microbiological phenomenon which may or may not have clinical implications for human beings. Also less known is that veterinary antibiotic use is merely one of many sources that contribute to the increase of antimicrobial resistance.
From the perspective of managing antibiotic sensitivity as a ’man-made’ non-renewable natural resource and treating resistance as an externality not properly priced in the market, I believe that economic analysis has a great potential to generate feasible and efficient solutions to the antibiotic issue. Unfortunately, my research proposal was considered too general at that time. That was reasonable because I had done but a little empirical work back then. In the months there after, I have been looking at our monitoring data on antibiotic use in combination with our farm accountancy data and busy writing up the findings. Much can be said about the claim that antibiotics are overused or misused in livestock production, but it is clear that economic analysis is far from being well-developed in this field. Perhaps the time is finally ripe to go deeper into the dust cloud of the media hype to look at the forces that are fundamentally at work. (to be continued)
