Atul Gawande

Surgeon-writer who surfaces in Kyle’s notes both as a healthcare-incentives observer and as the author of The Checklist Manifesto. In Catastrophic Care, David Goldhill cites Gawande’s “brilliant New Yorker essay ‘The Cost Conundrum,’” which showed how “the incentive for excess medicine can pervert the very professional culture of medicine in a community” — McAllen, Texas performing more procedures per patient than anywhere in the country, often without doctors themselves realizing it. Gawande’s reporting is Goldhill’s evidence that “economic incentives work powerfully but often quietly.”

He also appears as the foil in Naval Ravikant — The Angel Philosopher: Naval Ravikant reads The Checklist Manifesto as “good for pilots and surgeons, not necessarily for investors,” keeps no checklist system for investment decisions, and dismisses the book as “another one of those… you read the first chapter and you’re done; it would have been a great blog post.” That skeptical take is the reason The Checklist Manifesto sits in Kyle’s anti-library rather than his read shelf.

Context: Atul Gawande is a surgeon, public-health researcher, and New Yorker staff writer, author of Complications, Better, The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal. “The Cost Conundrum” (2009) is among his most-cited essays on US healthcare economics.

Where this appears

• Catastrophic Care — Goldhill cites his “Cost Conundrum” essay on McAllen, Texas as showing how excess-medicine incentives pervert a community’s medical culture
• Naval Ravikant — The Angel Philosopher — Naval’s skeptical reading of The Checklist Manifesto; checklists “for pilots and surgeons, not investors”
• The Checklist Manifesto — the author of the book on Kyle’s anti-library, surfaced through Naval’s take