>> "All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
They were bragging that they could provoke this type of response as a result of having flown two planes into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon, killing thousands, and causing fear, panic, and self-sabotaging outsized reactions like pouring trillions into wars that accomplish nothing.
Getting a dozen of their operatives arrested for an idiotic prank that just resulted in a handful of planes being turned around would make them a laughingstock overnight.
I am baffled that we are even having this argument.
There’s evidence that not all people involved in 9/11 knew they were going to die. Yet, they were still used effectively.
Significantly less dedicated supporters are generally used as a funding source, but actual terrorist organizations have also used them for publicity events on the anniversary of attacks.
You are dodging the fact that getting a handful of planes to turn around is an act that induces frustration, annoyance, and insignificant costs at best. Not terror.
Terror is a tactic used by terrorist organizations, but it’s hardly the only thing they do.
“There’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Isn’t quite true, but publicity is inherently valuable to organizations dependent on outside donors. The Provos/IRA did similar things (attention grabbing and annoying) not just setting off bombs during the time of troubles.
You are excluding most government and charity funding into medical research.
VC funding includes firms inside of the medical industry, but also companies operating across most of the economy. It’s not just IT, but food, solar, EV’s, rockets, etc.
I'm happy to see corrections with citations. I'd posted what information I could find.
I found your original dismissal without any documentation unsatisfactory, and wanted to quantify overall rather than specific-firm-instance funding. And you're still not providing any citations for your claims.
I suspect that the overall spend going into AI / adtech / digital media is disproportionately large relative to pharma spending. Particularly given the relative social benefits of each. I'd like to be able to make an evidence-based assessment rather than just a gut feel, however.
Clear breakouts of total investment spend by sector are hard to find, presumably much of the accurate information is paywalled. However from a Bain report I'd turned up earlier:
AI pulled in about half of all US venture funding in the fourth quarter, with investment spanning infrastructure, model training platforms, and AI-native developer tools.
Other significant sectors include, presumably in order, "robotics, AI, semiconductors, and Web3 sectors", and "Early-stage activity was strengthened by AI, robotics, defense tech, and biotech". All of which suggests that biotech is a small fraction of the overall total, and new drug discovery a smaller fraction of that.
Total US pharmaceutical industry R&D spend per a 2021 Congressional Budget Office report was $83 billion.
US federally-funded medical research largely occurs through the National Institutes of Health, which has an annual budget of $48 billion. I'd be quite surprised if state-level and other countries' spend doubled that. It increases my earlier figure by about 20%, which isn't nothing, but pales next to the venture tech investment. Again, that's all medical spending, not limited to new drug discovery.
As the previously-cited CBO report notes: "Much of that [NIH] funding has supported basic research (in genomics, molecular biology, and other life sciences) that has identified new disease mechanisms." So, not strictly new drug discovery, though not entirely unrelated either.
Most new drug discovery is likely not venture-backed, so considering my top-line $400 billion vs. $200 billion still seems to point to a roughly-appropriate comparison ratio. If anything, further research suggests the $200 billion value for pharma is probably high-side when it comes to drugs.
The 425B VC numbers are global, and again include some medical funding 25B in 2024, so ~25B in 2025 seems reasonable thus non medical VC at 400B flat is a reasonable number. https://dealroom.co/guides/healthtech-guide
“In the US, the federal government, private companies, universities, states, associations, and philanthropic foundations collectively invest more than $245 billion (PDF)Note 2 in medical research each year. https://unbreaking.org/issues/medical-research-funding/
That suggest the numbers work out to global non medical VC funding at 400B vs 500B for medical research globally.
I’m not saying these numbers are particularly accurate, and they aren’t limited to drug research, but it does provide a different perspective.
PS: As to US federal funding of medical research quite a lot is sitting in the tax code rather than being handed out as grants, it’s not directly relevant. Except it rather inflates what companies label as medical R&D. This makes my position worse, but I bring it up because the actual numbers are dependent on how you interpret what’s going on. Do we include VC funding that’s essentially a private sale of equity from the founders to investors which doesn’t provide the company money? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That greatly depends on how much handholding is required and for how long.
The difference between mostly right and actually useable without supervision is why self driving cars still aren’t ready. When someone says AI can do job X, they rarely mean it’s good enough for anyone to blindly trust the results of it doing that job.
Yea, the first few percentage points are underrated.
Dropping from 90% of the population being ~farmers to 80% of the population being farmers doubles the amount of time people can spend doing everything else including research, manufacturing, education etc.
In many ways it was equivalent to the drop from 51% being farmers all the way down to 2%. However, it wasn’t nearly as obvious because 90% farmers looks a lot like 80% of the population being farmers and the transition was relatively slow and unevenly distributed.
A large fraction of the people using Google probably have no idea DDG exists. So the backlash is likely significantly larger than just the 0.2% who left to this search engine.
Net deaths is what matters here. Obviously they aren’t perfect, but no human system is.
The market for effective drugs is global. FDA regulations have a significant but not that burdensome influence on drug discovery. At the other end, the opioid epidemic is a demonstration of just how many deaths can result from insufficient regulation of just a single drug family.
Which is why FDA regulations vs zero regulation have saved vastly more lives than they cost. Conservative estimates put it somewhere in the 2 orders of magnitude range.
> Which is why FDA regulations vs zero regulation have saved vastly more lives than they cost.
The first book I linked to did the research and showed otherwise. The key aspect usually not admitted is the deaths caused by drugs not developed due to costly regulations.
I hope you can understand why a book with a “Publication date : December 31, 1974” might have some gaps here in terms of relevant research and current regulations.
As to the leaded gas issue, that’s a function of less strict regulations allowing unleaded gas. Many countries have banned it without issue.
Peltzman had 10 years of statistical data to make the case. Any subsequent study that does not take into account lives saved by drugs never developed because of regulation costs is not a useful study.
As for leaded gas, the problem was changing the engine designs would require recertification so expensive that people just keep using 1960s engine designs.
Regulations have an effect of stifling new development - in drugs and airplane engines.
As for drugs, there is a way out. Allow legally consenting adults the right to sign a piece of paper stating that they understand that drug X is not approved by the FDA and they take it at their own risk.
> Peltzman had 10 years of statistical data to make the case. Any subsequent study that does not take into account lives saved by drugs never developed because of regulation costs is not a useful study.
You say that as if no such study exists. They do and the costs are known to reasonable levels of accuracy, what’s generally excluded is the benefit of drug regulations. Regulations on opioids alone (granted there’s a lot of opioids) have saved million of American lives since that book was published, but it’s easy to exclude such numbers if you want to make regulations look bad.
> As for leaded gas, the problem was changing the engine designs would require recertification so expensive that people just keep using 1960s engine designs.
Nope, ~80% of existing light aircraft in the US can 100% legally fly on unleaded gasoline. This isn’t a technical problem or the burden of regulations. This is a group of people that didn’t want to spend money because the transition isn’t free.
> Regulations on opioids alone (granted there’s a lot of opioids) have saved million of American lives since that book was published, but it’s easy to exclude such numbers if you want to make regulations look bad.
Opioids were approved by the FDA, and were by prescription only.
How did your studies account for drugs never developed? The rate of new drug development dropped drastically after the 1962 Amendments.
By prescription only is a regulation. Without that Coca-Cola would still have coca leaves.
> drugs never developed
The way you get good data on that is to look at the actual drug discovery process and how decisions are made.
Automated in vitro testing has been used, but the number of potential compounds make that impractical even with essentially zero regulation at that point. Once you get down to some actual evidence for a drug funding is surprisingly plentiful. The often quoted 2 billion per drug includes all the failures, for any given candidate the cost is low at every individual stage until you have something with significant promise. Which makes sense as the average drug is worth vastly more than 2 billion so at every stage further investment looks viable.
> would result in a prison sentence
That doesn’t seem like a significant deterrent here.
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