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That's because consumers will allocate money to pay for baldness. That's where the money is. We all understand that, now please quit complaining and figure out how to get consumers to pay for other advances.

For example, we pay for Moore's law by buying new computers and iPhones every few years. We will start paying for huge advances in robotics once they can do more of the house chores and yard work. We need to get to the tipping point.

As for advances in biology and the cures for diseases, I'm not sure how to approach that. However, if we could funnel billions more from the consumer sector, we'll cure cancer, the common cold, etc. years sooner.




The consumer incentives encourage biological advances nearly ideally. Even diseases from which the West no longer suffers have incentives as NGOs and other organizations will pay billions for effective cures. The difficulty is that the FDA makes productive research very expensive and difficult to quickly iterate based on real feedback, and the academic publishing system is full of questionable research that slows down the advance of honest research as it is not reliable.


When I go to Pet Smart to buy dog food, the credit card reader asks me if I want to donate $1, $5, $10, etc., to help homeless animals. I imagine that if I was at Walgreen's buying NyQuil and the credit card reader asked me if I wanted to donate $1, $5, $10, toward medical research so that people just like me can get over a cold faster in the future, I'd probably say yes.


You'll spend $200 for a new smartphone every few years.

Samsung and Apple are fighting a war to make the better phone. Billions are spent. Likewise, Intel and ARM are competing for the future of the CPU. Someday soon, someone like iRobot will be competing with another company to automate the home. The "Apple II" of home robotics isn't too far off? The race starts then.

Now find a way to commercialize companies that will also do more medical research. We do have big pharma but that research takes many years.


I don't think that people want to spend money on medicine like they want to spend money on phones. Even when they are ill, it comes across as more of a necessity than something inherently desirable, though at least when feeling ill they might give more thought to how much nicer things would be if medicines worked better than they do now.

But to expect folks to cash their paychecks, run out to the store and buy some new cough syrup just because it's so cool?... that's what happens with phones, but it seems unlikely to happen with medicine.

And in fact that'd be ridiculous. If one isn't even feeling ill, why should they go out and buy medicine? Unless they are buying it for someone else, but this sort of gets us into the realm of charity and donations.

I don't know; what do you think? What sort of situation can you imagine in which a consumer treats funding medical research the same way they treat buying a new phone?


People don't fund semiconductor research directly either. Hundreds of millions of people pay Apple.




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