Julio García, a colleague and friend, from the Menéndez y Pelayo Institute of Barcelona, member of the english choir, has just recommended that I speak slowly to reduce the resonance that occurs in the old church of the Sant Domènec convent, today converted into the Aula Magna of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Girona. In fact, it would only be up to me to express my gratitude to an AES Board that has proposed my recognition as an honorary member of AES and to an Assembly that has approved it. After all, the honor of being a member was enough for me.
It is, however, difficult to escape the attempt to search for an explanation that fits the realization that there are many who deserve this recognition more than me, starting with the seven perpetrators of the laudatios. One, Salvador Peiró with a 150 meter track. The remaining six with words: another broad-spectrum researcher on health services, Ricard Meneu, three prominent economists (Beatriz González, Guillem López and Rosa Urbanos) and two references in clinical and health management and primary care (Josep Casajuana and Olga Pané ). ). There is even a hint of unease that recalls Primo Levi, and his essential ‘If this is a man’, when he thinks that perhaps the survivors of the camps were not the best: they had faltered at some point and that had allowed them to save . the skin.
Due to a mere biographical chronological difference, no one could refer to the important management experience at the San Pablo Hospital in the early seventies lived as Assistant Manager and as Administrator. He had to transform a charitable hospital, without hired doctors, with recently inaugurated common rooms and emergencies, into a very different reality than the one he contemplated when he was born in the year 1401. Management and innovation are children of necessity.
In São Paulo, the first assistance agreement was signed with the National Pension Institute and 500 million pesetas in obligations were issued to finance the transformation. In addition, doctors were hired, nursing was professionalized, and a collective agreement was negotiated with clandestine union representatives. It was also translated from English to create the general intensive care unit and the first analytical accounting was available, between porter notices about the entrances and exits of the members of the political-social brigade or calls to the Civil Government, when the Domènech i Montaner It was occupied by the newly created riot units of the armed police.
With the manager, Elvira Guilera, the manager of the Puigvert Foundation, Esperança Martí, and Joaquim Espriu, we taught several Hospital Management courses at ESADE; the first, in 1973, with success derived both from the lack of competition – there was only one School of Hospital Management, in Madrid – and from the clinical and scientific development of the hospital during those years. Thanks to the meritocratic hiring of outstanding professionals (including Lluís Bohigas after his time at IESE), San Pablo became an example and school for many.
The Franco regime ended and the management followed, becoming more sanitary and clinical each time. The university landing, starting in 1984, has been key in the development of health economics and, curiously, again, its usefulness for health policy and management, the best measure of its relevance.
Perhaps a moment to remember a person who never had an act of recognition. Elvira Guilera, manager of San Pablo, promoter of the Oncological Hospital of which she was manager between 1975 and 1981, General Director of Health Care, dedicated and decisive professional. Very generous, possibly excessively generous, whose premature death has caused a forgetfulness of what was almost certainly the first woman and the first non-doctor to direct a hospital, a great hospital. And she achieved this without university studies despite coming from a wealthy family (see photo taken in 1950 at the family residence in Gaudí’s Bellesguard where Elvira is the youngest of her three sisters). Her father, Luis Guilera, a prominent doctor, was responsible for the San Pablo Oncology Service since 1929, where Elvira would go to work wearing short socks. From the administrative direction of the Oncology Service she moved to the Management of San Pablo, in 1971, as the first leap of an outstanding professional career, long before she began to be aware that management matters.
Guilera Soler family in Bellesguard, 1950. Elvira, the younger sister, with ringlets.
Source: Amelia Guilera Roche. https://bellesguardgaudi.com/lluis-guilera-molas/
Surviving sure matters. What do the awards tell us? Oscar?
Indeed, survival matters, something that skewed the results of Donald Redelmeier and Sheldon Singh (2001), when they review the vital statistics of the 762 actors and actresses who had been nominated for the Academy Awards in leading or supporting roles, including 235 winners, since the first awards were presented at the 1929 ceremony. They also designated a group control of 887 actors, matched as closely as possible by age and sex, who had appeared in the same films.
The researchers found that life expectancy was 3.9 years longer for winners than for controls (79.7 vs. 75.8 years). The life expectancy of the nominees who had lost was more similar to that of the controls, with a life expectancy of 76.1 years. The results could not be explained by the Oscar winner’s age, country of birth, number of films made (an indicator of income), or other factors; Redelmeier suggests that ‘peace of mind’ from winning an Oscar can make a person much more resistant to all kinds of stress.
Too bad a new analysis of the data disproved the conclusion that Oscars live longer (Marie-Pierre Sylvestre, Ella Huszti and JA Hanley, 2006). To estimate the longevity benefits of winning an Oscar, the comparison should begin at the time each artist first wins, and the remaining longevity contest should only include those living at the same age as the winner was when he won. . . It is not possible to compare George Burns, dead at 100, Oscar at 80, with Richard Burton, dead at 58, 4 nominations and no Oscar.
As early as 1843, William Farr had described the statistical artifact created by classifying people by their status at the end of follow-up and analyzing them as if they had been in these categories from the beginning. He used as examples the greater longevity of people who achieved higher ranks within their professions (bishops versus priests, judges versus advocates general and lieutenants). Despite textbook warnings, analyzes that overlook this subtle bias are still common today. Calculating without bias of immortality, Jean Marie-Sylvestre and others. find a statistically non-significant 1-year advantage for Oscar winners.
In 2022, Redelmeier and Singh returns to the load. They expand the sample and the years of follow-up, choose better controls, try to avoid immortality bias, dynamically classify social status to find an association between Oscar winners and 5.1 more years of life compared to the nominees . , even greater than that of his article 20 years earlier. Without the possibility of randomly assigning statuettes, the issue remains pending the implementation of methodological advances in the analysis of causal relationships (Nobel 2021 to Angrist and Imbens, without Nobel – David Card built the shortlist – the statistician Donald Rubin, whose paternity of the potential outcomes approach – or counterfactual models – is widely recognized).
Social welfare reasons for selecting winners where productivity losses are lower there. What do the Nobels tell us?
Winning a Nobel Prize can be bad for your productivity. Jay Bhattarcharya and others. (2023) analyzed data on Nobel Prize winners in physiology and medicine between 1950 and 2010, and recorded how three factors changed after their awards:
- the number of articles they published;
- the impact of those documents, based on the frequency with which they were cited;
- and how novel his ideas were.
The researchers compared the Nobel winners to winners of the same age of another prestigious medical award, the Lasker Prize. The Nobel laureates’ productivity declined significantly, and they eventually fell below Lasker’s winners on all three measures. As happened with the Oscars, the analysis avoids talking about causality. Borjas and Dorán (2015), who have studied the career effects of winning a Fields Medal, the equivalent of the Nobel in mathematics, say the results are consistent with their own findings, which have shown that mathematicians also appear to suffer declines in productivity after a victory.
Nobel: Event that changes the lives of most scientists. They may be inundated with speaking opportunities, media interviews, or book offers… it may be a good idea to reserve recognition for scientists later in their career, to avoid interrupting our brightest minds at their best.
One of the oldest health economists (author of a book on a very popular sport in 1973) identified himself as the ‘silly brother’. I always found him sensible. Any trajectory can be interpreted as a story of failures and successes and those with whom we have shared some stage of our professional journey, to take different directions, provide us with a counterfactual for the experiment without repetition that is life. At Miguel Bleach’s school in Hostafranchs, attended mainly by the gypsy population, many were left behind, quite a few in elementary school and few after that. Very brilliant elements in the aforementioned Menéndez y Pelayo (with the landing of the entire German School in Preu), in ESADE and in Economics that allow the landing at Purdue the same year that one of its aeronautical engineers, Armstrong, steps on the Moon for the first time once in the history of humanity. Already in 1970 he was recruited by Arthur Andersen & Co with one of the most brilliant and well-known executives in this country. Since then I have had the great luck of having very often been the ‘dumb partner’ and the relationship of ‘travel companions’ would be too long, not in the sense of ‘sympathizers’ but of militants in the motto of Beatriz González de ‘science, action and consciousness’.
I must recognize that – as Salvador Peiró says – the biography is more important than the resume and that the true resume of people are the people they have met, those people who at AES form the professional and vital critical mass of so many of us. My many opportunities have come largely from people who were, or would be, members of AES. he networks It provides the essential critical mass that stimulates, encourages learning, allows teamwork and provides scale to research projects and helps in internationalization.
There is no better gift than one from highly appreciated colleagues. There is no greater incentive than honoring that recognition.
Your point of view caught my eye and was very interesting. Thanks. I have a question for you.