

Health-care reform will resemble the evolution of browsers + HTML: both are path-dependent - paulsmith
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/01/26/090126fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all

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paulsmith
I thought this piece by Atul Gawande on how health-care reform in the U.S.
will proceed was illuminating. He uses the social science term "path-
dependent" to describe systems that grow up around early design decisions, and
they win out over alternatives that purport to be better (for some definition
of "better") because those very decisions turn out to be far more
consequential than could have been foreseen at the time. He argues our new
health system will build on the existing one, and not be a from-scratch
replacement, because of path-dependence, and give examples of how other
industrialized national health plans follow this dictum.

I thought of the co-evolution of Web browsers and HTML, and the current
efforts to create a successor to HTML 4, while reading the article, and noted
the similarity. HTML 5 is expressly designed to "pave the cow-paths" of the
way HTML 4 is actually used and implemented by browsers.

