Month: August 2025

Brigham and Epstein Have the Guts to Nudge the Overton Window

The Overton Window is the range of “officially acceptable” or “politically correct” policy views. The left has been successful at shifting the window in their direction, for instance, in cancelling those who question any aspect of the global warming ideology for being outside polite discourse. In the face of cancel culture it takes courage to challenge the current Overton Window. Brigham and Epstein (see below) have that courage. Their views should be considered.

(p. B12) Exxon Mobil, Occidental Petroleum and other oil giants are expected to receive billions of dollars of incentives to collect and bury carbon emissions. Texas oil billionaire Ben “Bud” Brigham and pro-fossil-fuels activist Alex Epstein want to turn off the tap.

Brigham, a serial entrepreneur and libertarian from Austin, is urging President Trump and the Republicans who are considering slashing a host of energy incentives to go further and nix tax credits for carbon capture.

. . .

Brigham says he doubts carbon capture can be profitable without public funding and that it is a distraction from firms’ core mission of finding oil and gas. He says that the subsidies distort markets and encourage cronyism.

A geophysicist by training, Brigham made his fortune building and selling two oil companies for a total of about $7 billion. He is an Ayn Rand fan who has produced two movies based on the philosopher’s work. He was also a major backer of what is now the Civitas Institute, a conservative center that launched in 2022 at the University of Texas at Austin.

Brigham first met Epstein, another Rand fan, about a decade ago. The two men bonded over a common belief in the importance of free markets and fossil fuels. Epstein is the author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” a book saying that the imperative to fuel societies flourishing with oil and gas outweighs climate-change risks. It has given Republicans ammunition to counter the left’s climate push, oil lobbyists say.

For the full story, see:

Benoît Morenne. “Oil Tycoon, Philosopher Fight Carbon-Capture Goals.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., July 1, 2025): B12.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 28, 2025, and has the title “The Oil Tycoon and the Philosopher Threatening Big Oil’s Bet on Carbon Capture.”)

Epstein’s book, mentioned above, is:

Epstein, Alex. The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. New York: Portfolio, 2014.

Lucian L. Leape Was Willing to Take the Ill-Will

In an earlier entry I presented Charlie Munger’s story where a hospital administrator had to be willing to absorb the ill-will, if he was to take the actions necessary to fix a badly malfunctioning department of the hospital. Another person willing to absorb the ill-will in order to reform medicine was Lucian L. Leape whose story is sketched in the passages quoted below.

(p. B21) Lucian L. Leape, a surgeon whose insights into medical mistakes in the 1990s gave rise to the field of patient safety, rankling much of the health care establishment in the process, died on Monday at his home in Lexington, Mass. He was 94.

. . .

In 1986, at age 56, Dr. Leape grew interested in health policy and spent a year at the RAND Corporation on a midcareer fellowship studying epidemiology, statistics and health policy.

Following his stint at RAND, he joined the team at Harvard conducting the Medical Practice Study. When Dr. Howard Hiatt, then the dean of the Harvard School of Public Health (now the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health), offered Dr. Leape the opportunity to work on the study, “I accepted,” Dr. Leape wrote in his 2021 book, “Making Healthcare Safe: The Story of the Patient Safety Movement,” “not suspecting it would change my life.”

The most significant finding, Dr. Leape said in the 2015 interview, was that two-thirds of the injuries to patients were caused by errors that appeared to be preventable. “The implications were profound,” he said.

In 1994, Dr. Leape submitted a paper to The New England Journal of Medicine, laying out the extent to which preventable medical injury occurred and arguing for a shift of focus away from individuals and toward systems. But the paper was rejected. “I was told it didn’t meet their standards,” he recalled.

Dr. Leape sent the paper out again, this time to The Journal of the American Medical Association. Dr. George Lundberg, then the editor of JAMA, immediately recognized the importance of the topic, Dr. Leape said. “But he also knew it could offend many doctors. We didn’t talk about mistakes.”

Dr. Donald M. Berwick, president emeritus at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston and a longtime colleague of Dr. Leape’s, agreed. “To talk about error in medicine back then was considered rude,” he said in an interview in 2020. “Errors were what we call normalized. Bad things happen, and that’s just the way it is.”

“But then you had Lucian,” he added, “this quite different voice in the room saying, ‘No, this isn’t normal. And we can do something about it.’”

Dr. Leape’s paper, “Error in Medicine,” was the first major article on the topic in the general medical literature. The timing of publication, just before Christmas in 1994, Dr. Leape wrote in his 2021 book, was intentional. Dr. Lundberg knew it would receive little attention and therefore wouldn’t upset colleagues.

On Dec. 3, 1994, however, three weeks before the JAMA piece appeared, Betsy Lehman, a 39-year-old health care reporter for The Boston Globe, died after mistakenly receiving a fatal overdose of chemotherapy at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

“Betsy’s death was a watershed event,” Dr. Leape said in a 2020 interview for a short documentary about Ms. Lehman.

The case drew national attention. An investigation into the death revealed that it wasn’t caused by one individual clinician, but by a series of errors involving multiple physicians and nurses who had misinterpreted a four-day regimen as a single dose, administering quadruple the prescribed amount.

The case made Dr. Leape’s point with tragic clarity: Ms. Lehman’s death, like so many others, resulted from a system that lacked sufficient safeguards to prevent the error.

. . .

Dr. Gawande said he believed it was the confidence Dr. Leape had acquired as a surgeon that girded him in the face of strong resistance from medical colleagues.

“He had enough arrogance to believe in himself and in what he was saying,” Dr. Gawande said. “He knew he was onto something important, and that he could bring the profession along, partly by goading the profession as much as anything.”

For the full obituary, see:

Katie Hafner. “Lucian L. Leape, 94, Who Put Patient Safety at Forefront, Is Dead.” The New York Times (Thursday, July 3, 2025): B21.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date July 1, 2025, and has the title “Lucian Leape, Whose Work Spurred Patient Safety in Medicine, Dies at 94.”)

Dr. Leape’s history of his efforts to increase healthcare safety can be found in:

Leape, Lucian L. Making Healthcare Safe: The Story of the Patient Safety Movement. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2021.

Was Schumpeter Mean to Hayek?

I have sometimes been surprised by the level of hostility of some Austrian economists toward Joseph Schumpeter. I once asked a distinguished Austrian economist why so much hostility? His answer was: ‘Schumpeter was mean to Hayek.’ Of course, Schumpeter and F.A. Hayek disagreed on some issues of method and theory, but so did other Austrians, such as Murray Rothbard and Hayek. I have read a few biographies of Schumpeter and have never read that Schumpeter was ever personally mean to Hayek. To the contrary, when I spent a day in the Schumpeter archives at Harvard, I ran across a carbon-copy of a letter that Schumpeter wrote to Stephen P. Duggan, co-founder and president of the Institute of International Education. Schumpeter wrote that Hayek wanted to give a lecture tour of the United States in March and April and asked if Duggan “would undertake the management of the trip.” Schumpeter wrote that “very many economists in this country would like an exchange of ideas with so outstanding a man.” (The letter was dated “January 16,” with a typo in the year, but with a jotted correction indicating, I think, “1940”—Hayek did visit the United States in 1940.)

Skimming Schumpeter’s letters in the archive leaves the impression that Schumpeter was almost always gracious to everybody almost all of the time, Hayek included.