Account

There is a flooding of donation accounts.

The Hospital Authority itself has two. There is one for the Society of Nephrology, yet another for the Kidney Foundation. I ask myself: why don’t we save all redundancy in administration and have just a few of them ?

(No, not one. Charity is a big business and we need competition; monopoly inevitably means inefficiency.)

But I am wrong. We want the beneficiaries to know we are the ones helping them – how could we hide our names inside Red Cross or MSF ? As individuals, we use our own names on the cheque. Yes, many humble and practical people make anonymous donation. But when it comes to an organization, things become slightly more tricky. Nine of the ten board members may have no problem to give the money, but the remaining one suggests, “Why don’t we set up our own account and put our names on it ? It is for the good (alas, publicity) of our society ?” How could the others disagree ?

And when your sister organization set up an account with her name, how could you lie low ?

PS. There is an important doctrine in statistics: one poorly conducted study would mess up the whole meta-analysis. Or, in traditional Chinese sayings: 一粒老鼠屎，整壞一鍋湯。(I know it is not a very good analogy, but there seems some truth in it.)