> Private industry has been very effective indeed at hooking millions of people on opiates. Meanwhile, where are all those new antibiotics?
I'm not sure what your point here is. Do you think pharmaceutical companies aren't trying to produce new antibiotics? Do you think there isn't any money in that? Because there most certainly is. It's just a hard problem, we've mined a lot of the low hanging fruit in the antibiotic space and squandered it on colds and farm animals.
> Market competition is an important element missing from government research, but commercial entities have their own pathologies.
I agree with this.
> I favor acknowledging that all markets are constructed, even supposedly "unregulated" ones. The trick is then to construct hybrid models incorporating marketplaces and informed by the limitations of both government and industry.
I'm not sure what you mean here by 'constructed'. Unregulated markets are genuinely not 'constructed', they are truly organic. That doesn't mean they are morally good, just that they aren't constructed.
I agree that hybrid models are desirable. I'm not sure what the right answer there is. My intuition about markets tells me that the best approach might be for the government to provide guaranteed cash prizes for drugs meeting certain criteria, rather than funding specific projects. That would allow the market to choose how best to meet those criteria, while still incentivizing the stuff the public wants incentivized. That being said, if you define metrics, they can get gamed, so figuring out how best to define those things is difficult and essential.
I'm not sure what your point here is. Do you think pharmaceutical companies aren't trying to produce new antibiotics? Do you think there isn't any money in that? Because there most certainly is. It's just a hard problem, we've mined a lot of the low hanging fruit in the antibiotic space and squandered it on colds and farm animals.
> Market competition is an important element missing from government research, but commercial entities have their own pathologies.
I agree with this.
> I favor acknowledging that all markets are constructed, even supposedly "unregulated" ones. The trick is then to construct hybrid models incorporating marketplaces and informed by the limitations of both government and industry.
I'm not sure what you mean here by 'constructed'. Unregulated markets are genuinely not 'constructed', they are truly organic. That doesn't mean they are morally good, just that they aren't constructed.
I agree that hybrid models are desirable. I'm not sure what the right answer there is. My intuition about markets tells me that the best approach might be for the government to provide guaranteed cash prizes for drugs meeting certain criteria, rather than funding specific projects. That would allow the market to choose how best to meet those criteria, while still incentivizing the stuff the public wants incentivized. That being said, if you define metrics, they can get gamed, so figuring out how best to define those things is difficult and essential.