Comment by thousand_nights
7 hours ago
yeah but the pharma comapnies are only in the business of selling drugs so they would need to diversify into retirement homes or somnething to profit from actually curing people
7 hours ago
yeah but the pharma comapnies are only in the business of selling drugs so they would need to diversify into retirement homes or somnething to profit from actually curing people
Or some kind of organization, some kind of union of all people, could pool their money and invest in such a thing.
That sounds like theft!
/s
I mean, that's one way to look at it I suppose, and it's why you see Healthcare Insurers and Private Equity diversify into elder care for a captive audience.
In reality though, I was not-so-subtly trying to suggest that if something is necessary for the public good (curing diseases) but a bad business model, then perhaps Capitalism itself is the wrong vehicle for that segment of industry and a different option - be it an incentive structure, government-owned pharmaceutical research, or managed economy - is needed.
Society fundamentally needs things that are simply bad business - sheltering everyone (lowers long-term housing revenue), feeding everyone (lowers long-term food revenue), healing everyone (lowers long-term healthcare revenue), educating everyone (lowers the value of degrees/credentials). If our economic model prohibits or discourages achieving optimal resource usage and human outcomes, then it's our obligation to explore and identify alternatives that may improve those outcomes respectively.
> In reality though, I was not-so-subtly trying to suggest that if something is necessary for the public good (curing diseases) but a bad business model, then perhaps Capitalism itself is the wrong vehicle for that segment of industry and a different option - be it an incentive structure, government-owned pharmaceutical research, or managed economy - is needed.
I believe the great innovation of capitalism is markets, and the next era of economic and social progress will be driven by mixed capital/social good markets.
For example, what if you tied the tax rate for an industry to a combination of broad social goods (say, homelessness) and industry-specific goods (say the incidence rate of cancer for cancer drug companies), such that if we’re in a the middle of a homelessness crisis and many people have cancer, the tax rate might be 50%, vs if there is virtually no homelessness and we’ve cured cancer, maybe it’s 10%. Obviously there are other market approaches but eventually they would be converted to capital markets, so something like the above makes sense to me as a start.
I think we've discovered that markets are great for some things, and disastrous for others. e.g. fire services, and health.
isn't this just a way of saying that markets aren't representing externalities correctly?
a company doesn't have to pay for bad things they produce as a byproduct (e.g., pollution) and they dont get to benefit from good things they produce as a byproduct (e.g., curing a disease).