Redundancy and Duplication

Every day we receive requests for donations from organizations that protect animals. The ASPCA, The Humane Society and the Ethical Treatment of Animals are all examples of groups involved in caring for animals and we make contributions to most of them. The problem is that we have too many groups involved in solving the same problem: saving animals. Each of these groups has a well paid director and a fairly large administrative staff which does little to save animals.

We deal with illness and diseases in the same way. There are probably 10 organizations involved in treating, curing or preventing cancer and almost 50 YEARS after President Richard Nixon declared 'War on Cancer,' we are still a long way off from effectively treating or curing cancer.

Do you want MY take on our inability to make significant advances in many of the major issues of our time?

Redundancy  and Duplication.

You may have scientists from Sloan Kettering, MD Anderson, MIT, Johns Hopkins and Rockefeller University all working on the exact same gene problem and after 5 years they all reach the same conclusion that they have run into a dead end in their research. Too many scientists working on the same problem without collaboration. Wasted brainpower, wasted money and lost time.

How do we solve this problem?

Franklin Roosevelt created the Manhattan Project to help end World War II. He directed our top scientists to join together in Los Alamos, New Mexico to collaborate to find a way to build the atomic bomb, something that had never been done before. We know how successful that approach was and we need to approach problems of our time in the same manner. If you want to cure cancer, build a cancer research center, hire the top 250 cancer researchers in  the country (or world), give them $10 Billion and let them work together to find our solution.

Capitalism is a system that is built on competition between individuals, groups or nations and it is a system that has made our country the most successful in the history of the world. However, for some problems, collaboration and not  competition is a better answer.

Think about this.