That is a truism, right? Currently in the US we have private pharmaceutical companies driven by a profit motive, so profits are what drives their innovation.
Setup a different system, and other motivations will drive their innovation, right?
Unless your claim is that innovation can only EVER be driven by profit?
I think the issue with that response is that [curiosity, desire, necessity] are all just specific versions of "observed value" which you are then applying to oneself. Sure, you'll have a lot of innovation if everyone is trying to satisfy their own curiosity, desire, or necessity. But you'll drive far more innovation if you have individuals who are also concerned with satisfying those needs for other people. And the easiest proxy for "someone else desires or needs this" is pricing mechanisms. Luckily, the internet / better communication methods are making it much easier to determine what is valuable to others without pricing mechanisms, but I would argue that profit motive is still the most effective method.
Yeah, I mostly agree.
Profit motive is not a terrible method on average.
I just get a bit worked up when I encounter any variant of “a corporations only duty is to create shareholder value”. :)
Curiosity does not provide funding in the quantities needed. Nor does it allocate resources towards maximizing the benefit to the maximum number of people.
But neither does profit motive. Is facebook maximizing the benefit of their users?
It’s more like maximizing benefits to the minimum amount of people at the expense of the maximum number of people.
Sure it does. Developing a cure for 100 people will generated far less profits than a cure for 100,000 people.
It's why you see cars get better every year and constant attempts to appeal to the widest customer base possible. (That didn't happen with Soviet built cars, which tended to never improve.)
As for advertising platforms, the customers are the advertisers.
But in the first paragraph, the side effect is that developing a not-quite-cure treatment for 50,000 people is more profitable than both the others.
As for the last paragraph, this is perhaps the essence of the problem. The motive is profit, so we only care about the advertisers. But the users are real people too, and they are getting screwed.
Yes but it also skews the incentives. The cure for diabetes has little meaning to pharmas. They want to keep people alive but paying for rest of their lives. That's how money shape commercial research
> The cure for diabetes has little meaning to pharmas
1. ABC develops an effective treatment for diabetes, but you have to take it for life.
2. DEF develops a cure for diabetes.
Which one do you think is going to make more money? The only way ABC can make money is if a cure cannot be developed, or ABC somehow convinced the government to ban DEF's cure.
Your theory reminds me of the 1970s when everyone was sure that 100 mpg carburetors existed but the oil companies bought up all the patents for it so they could sell more gas.
> The cure for diabetes has little meaning to pharmas
Unless you're the first to cure. The income, grants, and knowledge drain in your favor? People will continue to get diabetes and a treatment will cure it.
It was profit-seeking Bayer that found a way to make aspirin in an industrial process and put it in wide use.
"In 1897, scientists at the drug and dye firm Bayer began investigating acetylsalicylic acid as a less-irritating replacement for standard common salicylate medicines, and identified a new way to synthesize it.[2]:69–75 By 1899, Bayer had dubbed this drug Aspirin and was selling it around the world."
