A friend posted a slide from a Goldman Sachs presentation in 2018 that says "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?"
So, I went looking to validate this and indeed, they make an observation that one-shot cures in these days of genome miracles don't leave the door open for ongoing revenue.
Which might make the argument for the cost of these cures to be extremely high if left to the free market.
Then I watched "Elysium" with Jen and here, it's world of sickness and poverty on earth, still used for production, where the rich have left the planet to live in an artificial environment orbiting the earth, where sickness and aging have all been but wiped out. A metaphor for Trumps wall or class division, it shows the stark contrast of a world where you die from things that are easily curable with modern technology.
And that's where we are. When all research is market driven, then this happens. When you take away publicly funded research, only large or sustainable revenue projects are looked at as viable by companies, because theirr focus is not on curing. Their focus is on a market.
And this is why we cannot trust capitalism to be our source of research.
Greta Thunberg recently made the argument that business should divest from oil extraction (and Stephen Miller, Trump minion, suggested she should study economics) and this is supported by science.
Monolithic business itself cannot get there. Because businesses are self-perpetuating and rarely respond to disruptive technology well. But divestment from oil, natural gas and coal have to be done, right now, in order for the planet to remain viable for life. And the way we get there is government incentives and taxes. You make it cheaper to use solar, wind and other technologies and more expensive to use oil. That's economics. It's not laissez-Faire economics where we let it run roughshod over common sense.
Business cannot monitor itself either. The profit motive is contrary to the wellbeing of people, much of the time. And while it's fine for an idea to exist in a perfect vacuum, we need to regulate in the real world, to keep that vacuum from sucking all of the oxygen out of the room. With balance and oversite, capitalism can be a positive force that helps us all grow. Left to its own devices, only those with capital benefit and they push out those with less.
So the next time your conservative friend tells you that "smaller government" is needed, you can give examples where that certainly isn't the case. We need substantial public investment in everything from research, medicine, education, to sustainable production of anything - food, machines, clothing, etc...
Socially responsible capitalism is sustainable. There are profits and growth yes. And there are social benefits and protections, that allow everyone to reasonably live through it. Anything else is greed.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/curing-disease-not-a-sustainable-business-model-goldman-sachs-analysts-say/
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/05/biggest-compliment-yet-greta-thunberg-welcomes-oil-chiefs-greatest-threat-label
