The recent tragic suicide of Dave Duerson, a great professional football player, who made a conscious decision to end his life in a way that enabled his brain to be donated to Boston University’s Center for Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, reminds us of a profound truth about our nation’s health care crisis: we have to address the root causes of unhealthy and destructive behaviors before we can change the behaviors.

The assumptions underlying many of our health care policies are that people are most motivated to do what is healthy for them and their families, and if we could only get them good information, and good and affordable care, they would do the right things.  Unfortunately, the reality is much more complex.

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Every once in a while, an article about the economy cuts through conventional thinking and gets right to the heart of a critical issue.  One such article is Andy Kessler’s Op-ed piece in the Thursday, February 17, 2011, Wall Street Journal, entitled “Is Your Job an Endangered Species?”

What makes this article insightful is that it takes apart batches of job tasks and looks at the skills required for each one, and their replaceability by technology or self-service solutions.  Beyond the obvious example of toll takers, which, thankfully for all drivers, are rapidly disappearing, he points out that jobs which exist because of the need to move physical items or information, jobs which exist solely because supply is artificially limited or restricted, or which exist because of artificial or gimmicky price and value differentiations, or because of government-conferred monopolies will disappear over time.

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President Obama has proposed billions of dollars for rebuilding America’s transportation infrastructure.  Many others, including the America 2050 project, have very thoughtful plans for more intelligent transportation networks that will enable America to be globally competitive.  As a person who has been a strong advocate for transforming our transportation infrastructure, I could not agree more with the goals of better use of our transportation infrastructure and more public transportation in place of single-occupant vehicles.  The one place in which I might take a different view from those who advocate building new transportation systems is that I believe we need to repair, maintain and getter better yield from what we have.

However, I also believe that we could reduce the stress on our transportation systems with three non-transportation initiatives, all of which are far less expensive to implement than building a lot of new transportation infrastructure.

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