The problem is that the pharma industry wouldn't have you believe it's a bunch of pointless roadblocks. The pharmaceutical industry, as currently constituted, generally thinks the FDA's system is great, because it means that not only are smaller, novel, and foreign competitors easily closed out of the market, but that they have long-term sole approval for their drugs. The large drug companies find this an extremely comfortable relationship - it's stable, predictable, and they are well-practiced at it.
I think that it's not a problem to have an FDA which reviews and approves drugs, and even one which determines which drugs are qualified for Medicaid/Medicare payments. But what I would like to see is an "opt-out" system, where patients could sign a waiver declaring that they are aware that the drugs they would like have not been approved by the FDA and that they may be hazardous, to access otherwise-unapproved drugs. I think there are genuine costs to the current system that are too commonly dismissed: http://www.jpands.org/vol15no4/kazman.pdf
I'm not saying "abolish the FDA", I'm just saying "allow people to bypass its judgement if they really feel that they have to".
I didn't say they were on the market in other developed countries, since the drug approval bodies in those countries tend to face similar incentives. My point is that the process which requires drugs, even many existing generics, to go through extremely extensive testing for each possible application, is a problem because it means that only very large companies have the financial wherewhithal to get drugs through approval, and there is a strong incentive to focus on drugs which will be big sellers in a large market, rather than drugs for smaller markets.
The trouble is that one does not see what was prevented from existing.
The leakiest incentive is that the FDA gets in a huge amount of trouble if it lets through a drug that has unforseen negative side effects, but faces essentially zero consequences for holding up the approval of a worthwhile drug indefinitely, and requiring billions of dollars to be spent on its development.
Oh no! People might start taking drugs not explicitly approved by the government after an extremely long, expensive and monopolizing approval process, like kratom or something crazy.
- Building an engine capable of multiple restarts while facing into a supersonic headwind, which are necessary for any kind of successful propulsive landing.
- Designing a mass-thrifty first stage simultaneously lightweight enough to be able to accommodate the added weight of landing equipment, but strong enough to handle the tensile stress and buffeting of atmospheric reentry.
- Developing ultralight landing legs to enable stable landings at low mass cost.
But most of the innovation has been in the realm of integrating existing technology in new ways. They brought together cold gas thrusters, grid fins, and thrust vectoring - none of which were new - into a complete package capable of precisely controlling the flight of a 15-storey first stage from the upper atmosphere to the ground. It's the act of getting technologies to work together that is often the source of the greatest gains.
What I'm saying is that, if someone is predicting a certain amount of economic progress for the year 2000 in 1929, then the fact of the Great Depression and WWII will tend to make predictions more optimistic than reality. Those two events caused a huge amount of damage to the world economy and set it back a long way from where it would otherwise have been a few decades later.
But what I'm saying is that both paid labour and unpaid labour (or "domestic labour") are both going down in number of hours. People working in daycares and kindergartens are already counted in the paid labour hours. What technology does is make domestic labour time-effective enough so that keeping house is no longer a full-time occupation, which permits for the expansion of other kinds of work.
The inflation-adjusted price of a Model T in 1930 would be about $4000 2008 dollars, but the per capita income was only about $7000. (A big reason the Model Ts seems so cheap is because labour costs were comparatively low - but so were incomes.) Now, US per capita income is nearly $40 000, and a Honda Civic has an MSRP of about $20 000 new. So the average person is not really working more, but they're getting much more. Most modern goods really are vastly better.
And for an extra three days of leisure a week, you'd be giving up not just driving on the highway, but indeed a whole load of things.
Again - for most things, nobody is making you consume these additional goods and services above the 1930 average. But, as we can see, they're quite popular and people apparently prefer to work more and consume more rather than work less and consume less.
The curb weight of a Model T is 540 kg and its engine produces 20 horsepower, while a Honda Civic is 1150 kg, produces over 160 horsepower, and gets 35 mpg. It's moving twice as much car, with better efficiency, much faster, over a longer lifespan, with a much higher top speed. The performance of nearly all 30s cars would today be considered terrible in nearly every respect.
They've continued trending down since then, especially when you count hours of domestic labour, which has dropped a lot (and no surprise, since you're not getting paid wages for those hours generally.)
Again, my point is that the average home probably wouldn't have had a car, and if it did, it was far worse in terms of efficiency, safety and performance than all but the cheapest used cars today. This is the mis-perception I'm talking about - people imagine living in the 1930s as though they'd have been in the top 5% or 10% of the population in terms of income, but what we have to look at is the overall level. Just because some people could zip around in a sleek Plymouth Phaeton doesn't mean that everybody, or even many people, could.
It existed, but was quite expensive, and mostly not used in homes. People generally purchased ice blocks to put in small iceboxes. Not like the refrigeration that exists now.
Okay, but that means no fridge, no car, no air conditioning, no television or computer, no air travel, only a few sets of clothing, and many other things missing besides. That's what's being offered as the "1929 life". Not the life of the 1929 affluent, but the life of the 1929 average.
I know a number of people who've intentionally decided to live pretty much like that. Mostly they don't do it anymore after a few years, but it's totally an available option if you really want it. Saying "society poses" an expensive standard of living is not much proof that you're being forced to do anything.
J.M. Keynes was basically just spitballing when he said that, in an article called "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren". Basically a non-academic article to make some long-term predictions based on trends of the time. Also this was 1929 and some notable events happened not long after.
It also has to do with legislation and with marginal value. Above 40 hours or so, a lot of countries have laws, like overtime pay and what have you, that start to kick in and make it less worthwhile for an employer to ask for those hours. As well, most people find that above that amount of time, the value they get from increased income starts to go below the value they get from non-paid-work time. It's sort of a normal equilibrium.
Sure, most cryptocurrencies will probably fail over the long run. But the comment I was responding to was asserting that Bitcoin would fail because it lacks "underlying usefulness" or "commodity backing". I disagreed with that concept of money - but I didn't say that possessing the aforementioned properties of money would ensure that Bitcoin, or any currency, would not fail.
I wouldn't quite agree that tax requisition is "the thing" that gives a paper currency value, though of course it is one. (I mean, lots of people/companies hold USD, EUR, CHF, JPY, etc., without ever needing to pay taxes in those currencies.) But my main point is that it's not commodity backing that matters, and that currencies don't need to have "intrinsic value" in some other use than as currencies.
In any case, I find it kind of amusing how much incensed criticism Bitcoin gets simply for being a currency that exists. It's like, imagine people wrote thousands of angry, scathing articles and comments all over the internet about the Azerbaijani manat or something.
But the value of Bitcoin is that it is durable, portable, divisible and uniform - and basically in limited and predictable supply (unlike the Weimar Reichsmark or the Hungarian pengo.) That's what makes it useful. Why does a currency need to have other "functions"? Its usability as currency is its underlying usefulness.
Lots of perfectly reasonable and useful modern 'paper' currencies are not backed by any commodity nor have been since their most recent introduction. Money is useful as money, that's generally good enough.
The usefulness of nuclear explosives is in their high energy-to-weight ratio. It's very easy to mount them on rockets, guide them to targets and detonate them precisely. A short burst is as good as a long push if the total force is the same, and nuclear explosives provide lots of that.
Most ideas for using nuclear explosives for asteroid redirection don't involve buryingit into the surface, but rather a "stand-off" explosion that occurs some distance from the asteroid's surface. This would massively heat that side of the asteroid and cause a layer to puff off, acting as reaction mass, and not fracturing the asteroid itself.
And if an asteroid really was blown apart into smaller fragments, that would be an improvement. Even a small relative velocity between fragments would spread them out to a much larger area than the earth's diameter, meaning that fewer would probably hit. Also, smaller meteorites are typically much less destructive than larger ones, measured by weight. It's not linear - one hundred meteors of a hundred tons each is basically harmless, but one ten thousand ton meteor can blow a chunk out of a city. Blowing an asteroid into a 'million fragments' would be a job well done.
Humans already have the technology - nuclear explosives, and a lot of them.
And I don't see how it's a bad time for space-oriented stuff in the USA - it hasn't been this good for years! What makes you think NASA is going to get defunded?
I think it's the structure of rights-of-way, pole-attachments and so forth as monopolies that props it up. The fact that municipalities get sued for trying to sell bandwidth is a problem, but it emerges, I think, because of the fact it's centralized in a government institution.
Let me clarify: I'm saying that the "well, your objections are just psychological" aspect is the weakness. Sure, to have a psychological theory is fine, but too often it drifts into essentially "objections to our theory are merely based in the same psychological malformation that is produced by the current system - therefore when we get rid of the system, the objections will go away too". This is a weakness, I think.
Well, Comcast's oligopoly is largely established by the fact that rights-of-way and pole-attachment rights are monopolized by municipalities, which tend to approve only a single, or few providers. It's not a natural monopoly.
Well, that's a big weakness of these theories, I think. My question is not terribly complex or dependent on unusual or unrealistic situations.
I would also note that sometimes, people operating off a 'psychologist' basis like you've identified, misunderstand the critiques of others as being also 'psychologist'. For example, the Hayekian critique of central economic planning is often characterized as a psychological argument that "people are naturally selfish and greedy". Thus, if you can get them to stop being so selfish, the objection is overcome. However, what the critique is actually about is inherent limits to knowledge and information, which would apply regardless of psychology.
But are collectives allowed to exclude people? If not, how will they select appropriate workers? If you can just show up at a collective and say "I want to work here, and you can't exclude me or kick me out" then how will they be able to function? People will just leave collectives with poor returns and make collectives with good returns take them on.
But if people can freely organize themselves into collectives or communes, then some of those collectives will be more successful than others, and without mandatory redistribution, you'll have inequality again. Also, if people can leave collectives, then inevitably there are going to be collectives with few or only one single member left, and you're back to individual ownership.
But the comment he was responding to said "humans in more permissive societies habitually live in relative harmony even more than those in less permissive ones."
So the fact that, upon trivial examination, a society is revealed to not actually be that permissive, is not evidence against the assertion that permissive societies are harmonious. I mean, I don't think RodericDay was saying that those two examples were impermissiveness that actually increases harmony.