|
I graduated in 2015 with a degree in Biochemistry, and after a kind of agonizing job search, found a job in an analytical lab. It was a Contract Research Organization, or "CRO," which used liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry (LCMS) to determine concentrations of "analytes" (usually drugs and their metabolites, occasionally some biomarker or other weird thing) in biological samples (animal or human, usually plasma but occasionally blood or tissue or ocular fluids or something else weird). We got paid to do this by big pharmaceutical companies so they could use the data to assess the behavior of their drug in vivo and maybe submit that data to the FDA to argue for approving their drug for some indication. At first this work was not especially interesting or challenging, and did not pay very well, but over the years I've moved around a few different companies and reached a point where I'm facing interesting challenges and earning a bit shy of six figures doing it, with decent possibilities for career growth if I keep at it.
My wife has an autoimmune nervous system disorder that forced her to drop out of college a decade ago and live at home with her mom while trying to get a diagnosis, treatment, etc. She was in a wheelchair for about a year not long after I met her; now she takes about 20 different medications a day and has a pretty expensive blood treatment ~once a week which still frequently leaves her too tired to get out of bed for more than a few hours a day. She's also a drug addict; she's relapsed two or three times since I've met her, and attends several meetings a week trying to stay clean.
I think she's making the world a better place. I'm not sure whether I am.
One of the foundational premises of capitalism is that different people have different skills that enable them to be of service to each other. They also have different needs that they depend on other people to meet. They're also generally self-serving, and they probably aren't going to spend all day offering their services to society unless they're getting something in return. So how about money? Everybody can try to figure out the best way they can produce value for society, and in return some of the recipients of that value will pay them money, with which they can go and purchase some of the value-production somebody else is making. Everybody will contribute to society according to their ability, and with the money they earn, they'll be able to buy what they need!
This, obviously, has run into some problems. Diagnosing those problems, identifying causes, and prescribing solutions is well beyond the scope of this blog. I do, however, want to point out that by a naive interpretation of this logic, earning potential ought to be at least a rough indicator of how much somebody is contributing to society. But I don't think anybody really believes that. Even your dyed-in-the-wool right wing conservative who worships Reagan and the Invisible Hand also usually worships, you know, Jesus. He goes to church, he thinks people should actively participate in church events, he thinks prayer and church activities bring much greater value to yourself and others than your job in food service or retail or construction or whatever. But he doesn't think church members should exchange large sums of money based on somebody's ability to say a good prayer or bear their testimony effectively. Maybe he thinks the ministry of his church should be paid (and not always even that), and he almost certainly doesn't think they should be millionaires and billionaires, despite them literally bringing God's word to Man.
No, everybody understands some version of "the best things in life are free." But I have trouble grappling with the implications. My wife, for instance, attends several addiction recovery meetings a week. She also started her own recovery study group! She has several sponsees, and spends hours a week with other addicts talking through each others’ lives and problems. They walk through the 12 steps, and try to understand how their mental illnesses and past traumas contribute to their addiction. They celebrate each other when they manage to stay clean, and they move mountains to support anyone who doesn't. None of them are paid for any of this.
If circumstances were different, my wife might be able to get some kind of job as an addiction counselor. The trouble is that jobs tend to want you to be able to guarantee, in advance, that you'll have the energy (let alone physical ability) to show up at a place at a time and do stuff for some required period, and you need to keep that guarantee relatively consistently. That might not be in the cards for her right now. But I'm also not sure how much more good she would be doing for the world in that role than in her current one. There, she'd be working for some kind of organization (a rehab or something?) that got funding from somewhere (the government? the addicts themselves?) to offer treatment for addiction. Her job would be to act as an authority figure, guiding these addicts through the process of getting their addiction under control.
She's been in programs like that. A lot of them were awful. Maybe not all of them! Maybe they don't have to be! But I'm still not sure she'd be helping more than she can approaching them, not as an authority figure, but as a fellow addict.
What about me? In theory I'm helping the world by helping pharmaceutical companies develop medicines. Medicine is good! People need it! My wife needs it! She also needs a place to live, and food, and health insurance to keep her alive. At a minimum, maybe I can claim a little credit for her good works by keeping the whole thing financially viable.
But what am I offering to the world really? If I do my job well, I accurately and efficiently generate concentration data for drugs pharmaceutical companies are developing. They can use that data to determine safety and efficacy of drugs for this or that indication. Then, if all goes well, they can sell those drugs to sick people at exorbitant prices which, if they're lucky, the sick people don't have to pay. Instead they pay insurance premiums (hopefully a bit less exorbitant) so the insurance companies can negotiate deals with the pharmaceutical companies to sell the drugs at a somewhat less exorbitant rate, and the pharmaceutical companies can still generate huge profits off of the good work of myself and a million other scientists and doctors who make the whole system go.
In theory, If I'm really good at my job, I make the process of generating that data cheaper and more efficient. That enables the pharmaceutical company to more cheaply determine safety and efficacy and get their drug approved. That, in turn, would allow them to (in theory) sell the drug more cheaply, or (more likely) generate larger profits which will help them pay for more drug development in the future. That will keep people like me in a job generating more data to demonstrate safety and efficacy of more drugs, so they can charge more exorbitant prices and we can keep the whole cycle rolling.
Sick people are getting safe and effective medicine! I'm getting paid! My wife is getting food and shelter and medical care! So why doesn't it feel like this whole cycle is a good thing?
I know I said it's beyond the scope of this blog, but to just talk about a little piece of the problem with those foundational capitalist premises I mentioned earlier: I think most people genuinely want to make the world a better place. I think if you gave them the means and opportunity to really meaningfully improve other people's lives, most of them would spend about as much time as they could doing it without any reward. But it doesn't feel like we actually get those means and opportunities very often. Most of the time what you get is little ways that you might arguably be able to help a few people at the margins, and even doing that is going to be boring and hard, but if try you might be able to convince someone to pay you for it. You get a job at a JC Penney helping people decide what clothes they want to buy, and if you're pleasant and kind, maybe you make their day a little brighter. Meanwhile JC Penney sells more clothes and you get money to rent an apartment and buy food and maybe buy some clothes for yourself.
Does it have to be this way? I don't know. I hope not. When I imagine change – real actual change, stuff I can picture actually happening in my lifetime – I imagine something like a 4-day work week. People would still work mundane jobs under capitalism, but they'd have more time to organize, to try to find ways to help each other in deeper, more meaningful ways. To create an addiction support group rather than working one more day a week in retail. Maybe over time we'd find ways to meet each others' needs more efficiently and meaningfully than capitalism does, and we could afford to work 3 days a week, or two, and still have food and shelter and medicine and try to make each other happy.
Or, I try to imagine utopia. I try to imagine a way of life completely different than ours, where food and medicine and clothing are produced and distributed without any of the corrupting capitalist systems we have now. But I can't picture it. I don't know who is producing or distributing the food and medicine and clothing. I don't know where they're doing it. I don't know if there's money, or LCMS, or addiction counselors. I don't know if I'd be spending my day on analytical chemistry or farming or playing video games. I have no idea where to even start.
That doesn't exactly qualify me a revolutionary. If a better world is possible, if there is some more utopian vision that could be achieved, I'm not doing anything to bring it about. But I'm not really sure what the revolutionaries would have me do differently. I guess I should be organizing the people around me into groups willing to and capable of fighting for change. Building "dual power" or something. But I don't know how I'm supposed to tell the people around me what they could be doing to make a better world when I don't even know that myself! My only hope would be if one of them has some idea of how to make things better, in which case I wish they would share it! What would a bunch of analytical chemists and I be able to do for the world, if we all got together and put our collective abilities to use?
I think it's good to try to imagine utopia. I think everybody should do it. Hopefully they're better at picturing it than I am. But in the meantime all I can think to do is keep trying to generate that concentration data as accurately and efficiently as I can, and come home and support my wife as much as I can, and do my best to be aware of my surroundings enough that if I do find myself with means and opportunity to help people more meaningfully, I don't miss it.
|
Did you come up with all of that on your own, or have you been reading Nietzsche, Marx, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates on your spare time? I'd prefer not to embark on a philosophical journey here, as it's all too easy to get lost in the forest of dense essays, but they're all quite interesting reads that are pertinent to what you're talking about.
As for my own thoughts: humanity is slowly, but surely evolving to become the "lesser" evil. The work we do today may seem fruitless in the moment, but it's definitely advancing humanity on the right path. However, one thing to be cautious of is moving too fast past society's "comfort level" (e.g, the right-wing movement in America at the moment).
And with regards to analytical chemistry, in combination with high-throughput screening, big data, and computational chemistry, we'll eventually be able to churn out treatments and drugs in break-neck speeds in 50 years. If you're interested in advancing your career as an analytical chemist, I'd encourage you to look to some start-ups who may require your skills in LCMS and analytical chemistry to solve current problems rather than working for a CRO. Just my opinion ofc.
|
You can have a great job with great pay and benefits, great coworkers, time off, flexible hours etc. You could love your job. But if you found out that a coworker doing the exact same job as you was earning 30% more money you would soon despise your job. At least I know I would. Even though nothing changed about the job you love just having a different perspective that displays unfairness can change how you feel about it. I think it’s harmful when people adopt this idea that no matter what their job is they are just a slave that is being exploited for their labor. Even if it’s true it doesn’t do anything for them unless your only goal is to make them so unhappy they will join the revolution.
So you could look at the bad side and look at the pharmaceutical fat cats that are going to profit off charging huge margins on medicine for poor people. Or you could look at the perspective that eventually drugs will be out of patent and affordable generics will be available for people that 99% of all people before them never had access to. All ships rising in the harbor so to speak. From that perspective, yes, what you do is very important.
|
Can't say I've read much of any of them, no. I'm vaguely aware of their ideas, probably read some excerpts in school back in the day. "Came up with it on my own" might be overstating a bit though. I dunno, man, I talk to people and they talk to people and we're all trying to figure stuff out.
I get what you're saying, but I mean... does it really feel like we're evolving in a positive direction at the present moment? There's this kind of faith in the idea of "progress" that a lot of people (myself included!) grew up with, like we're all being pulled like gravity toward a better future. Like we're inevitably freer, and happier, and less prejudiced compared to our parents, and they compared to theirs, and so on. But, like, look around! Does it seem like things are getting better? If anything I'm struggling to see how we can maintain anything like our current level of prosperity over the next, say, decade.
I hope you're right that drug development is going to get more efficient, although I don't think current trends support that idea. I don't know if you're familiar with the term "Eroom's Law" but new drugs have been getting harder and harder (that is, more and more expensive) to develop, and that's only getting worse as everybody moves toward developing biologics over small molecules. You might be right I could advance my career more (or at least make more money) at a start-up of some kind, but where I am currently, I'm at least on the front lines of figuring out how the hell we're supposed to measure all these proteins and dendramers and ADCs by LCMS (rather than transfering the project to an Immunochem/ELISA department, where you get a whole different set of issues). I'm still not sure how the hell we're going to analyze all these nucleotide therapies we've gotten in the last few years.
I dunno, maybe some smart use of AI will turn things around, but right now I think the average cost of developing a drug is doubling every nine years or so (and accelerating!). And that's with a lot of really impressive technological developments in the same time period helping develop more efficiently.
Edit:
On July 05 2022 13:52 BlackJack wrote:
You can have a great job with great pay and benefits, great coworkers, time off, flexible hours etc. You could love your job. But if you found out that a coworker doing the exact same job as you was earning 30% more money you would soon despise your job. At least I know I would. Even though nothing changed about the job you love just having a different perspective that displays unfairness can change how you feel about it. I think it’s harmful when people adopt this idea that no matter what their job is they are just a slave that is being exploited for their labor. Even if it’s true it doesn’t do anything for them unless your only goal is to make them so unhappy they will join the revolution.
So you could look at the bad side and look at the pharmaceutical fat cats that are going to profit off charging huge margins on medicine for poor people. Or you could look at the perspective that eventually drugs will be out of patent and affordable generics will be available for people that 99% of all people before them never had access to. All ships rising in the harbor so to speak. From that perspective, yes, what you do is very important.
Yeah, the current catalog of generics (and the promise that currently patented drugs will eventually be generics) is one of the best arguments that the pharmaceutical industry is still doing good in the world. The trouble is, I'm not sure if it wouldn't be better to sharply curtail further drug development if it meant medicine was more affordable.
Like, me and everybody I know in industry is drawing their paycheck from those huge margins, and a lot of us are getting paid pretty damn well. If I got in with the right start-up, and put in a few years until the inevitable buyout from Pfizer or Eli Lilly or whoever, I could be a multi-millionaire overnight. The margins keep getting bigger, the development tech keeps getting more complicated and expensive, meanwhile the marginal gain from adding the new drugs to the current pharmacopeia keeps getting smaller and smaller. I mean, it has to! How are you supposed to compete with aspirin or penicillin or any of the other incredible, life-saving medicines from the last hundred years you can buy as a generic?
Don't get me wrong, the development is going to happen with or without me, and I may as well be a part of it, at least until I find something better to do with myself. The science is often pretty interesting, and I'm sure at least some of these drugs will save some lives some day. But I don't think it's obvious humanity is better off with this system than without it.
|
I can relate to much of your writing. I am a pediatrician in state/university hospital in Germany, that means I am working "pretty far" outside of the capitalist framework that is private industry. But still I get the same feeling of having no way to change the course of things. Even though I try the best at my work and on the surface I am obviously helping people, even children!, I still dont feel that this seriously impacts the world towards improvement. Even my chief is still bound by all those rules, monetary requirements, higher-ups in bureaucracy that even though he might like to improve things there is only so much he can do. That is one of the most important bits I remember from Marx, being good-willed doesnt change the world in the usual framework, people have to wear the character-mask the economy requires or they are going to be replaced. If we disregard the proposed mechanic of the working class fighting for itself there is no way to change the system from the inside.
So I tried to look into joining a party to find a way into organizing things. I met with people at a leftwing party in Germany, but most of them were old and were mostly meeting because they had done so forever. Not looking to actually do anything. Talking to people around me to see whether they agree with me is often disheartening. Lots of people are not interested in much change, and especially in my academic/medical bubble people are still pretty content. There is potential and anger out there but how to reach those people? And get to talk to them? Get them to have a shared goal?
Right now there is nothing I am doing. I am raising three children to the best of my ability and I try to teach them all the things I value in a person and life. But isnt the lower-class mother with 3 children who helps organizing some kindergarten-party doing way more than me?
I believe you actually have to start at exactly that. You have to make people see that doing things together, working on little things can improve lifes for everyone. May it be the playground next door you organize people to renovate, may it be the restricted-traffic area people would like to have. Even these small and insignificant improvements help to build a sense of empowerment and community and lets people see that change can be achieved. I don't think it's neccessary to be MLK, if you can help people around you get the feeling that they can actually change the way things go there is a lot you did. But I am not even doing that. I work, raise my children and am happy when I get some Volleyball or gaming time in. I would love to be able to do these things but I do t have the willpower to do it on top.
|
Yeah, I couldn't speak to German politics but here in the US, I definitely don't think getting involved in a political party is the solution. I'll vote when the time comes, but donating to candidates or handing out pamphlets door to door is not where I'm gonna look for change.
There's something peculiarly disheartening about the organizational dysfunction you see if you're on the ground in the system. In corporate systems, at least, there's always tiers on tiers of management. Maybe your boss actually understands what you do all day, what you need to work efficiently, what a good or bad result would look like, etc., but his boss definitely doesn't. And his boss spends all day arguing with the guy above him about policy changes that will make or break the ability for you and all your coworkers to do their jobs effectively, and neither of them have any idea what these changes will do, but you and your coworkers only find out about them once the policy is being enacted. If you're lucky, maybe your boss is well-connected enough to give your team a heads up a bit in advance.
In theory, none of this should bother me that much. If it were moving perfectly in concert like a well-oiled machine, all of my concerns I wrote about above would still apply. But it's exhausting! It feels like you wind up spending 20 hours a week doing your actual job and 20 hours a week figuring out how to navigate the office politics. If I do a bad job on the second part (and maybe even if I don't!), I wind up working another 10-20 hours a week of overtime that didn't need to happen, but somebody else screwed up their job and now I have to try to fix it.
Most of the time it feels like you're doing pretty well if you're managing to keep your head above water. In your case if you're managing to work full time as a pediatrician and still raise 3 kids, that already sounds like a hell of a lot to me. But obviously I don't have any answers for "how can I do more to make the world better?" or I wouldn't have written this blog!
|
“I’m starting with the man in the mirror”
|
On July 05 2022 13:54 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2022 13:52 BlackJack wrote:
You can have a great job with great pay and benefits, great coworkers, time off, flexible hours etc. You could love your job. But if you found out that a coworker doing the exact same job as you was earning 30% more money you would soon despise your job. At least I know I would. Even though nothing changed about the job you love just having a different perspective that displays unfairness can change how you feel about it. I think it’s harmful when people adopt this idea that no matter what their job is they are just a slave that is being exploited for their labor. Even if it’s true it doesn’t do anything for them unless your only goal is to make them so unhappy they will join the revolution.
So you could look at the bad side and look at the pharmaceutical fat cats that are going to profit off charging huge margins on medicine for poor people. Or you could look at the perspective that eventually drugs will be out of patent and affordable generics will be available for people that 99% of all people before them never had access to. All ships rising in the harbor so to speak. From that perspective, yes, what you do is very important. Yeah, the current catalog of generics (and the promise that currently patented drugs will eventually be generics) is one of the best arguments that the pharmaceutical industry is still doing good in the world. The trouble is, I'm not sure if it wouldn't be better to sharply curtail further drug development if it meant medicine was more affordable. Like, me and everybody I know in industry is drawing their paycheck from those huge margins, and a lot of us are getting paid pretty damn well. If I got in with the right start-up, and put in a few years until the inevitable buyout from Pfizer or Eli Lilly or whoever, I could be a multi-millionaire overnight. The margins keep getting bigger, the development tech keeps getting more complicated and expensive, meanwhile the marginal gain from adding the new drugs to the current pharmacopeia keeps getting smaller and smaller. I mean, it has to! How are you supposed to compete with aspirin or penicillin or any of the other incredible, life-saving medicines from the last hundred years you can buy as a generic? Don't get me wrong, the development is going to happen with or without me, and I may as well be a part of it, at least until I find something better to do with myself. The science is often pretty interesting, and I'm sure at least some of these drugs will save some lives some day. But I don't think it's obvious humanity is better off with this system than without it.
Yeah it's certainly a small marginal gain to create a drug for an orphan disease than affects 1:100,000 people compared to something like an antibiotic that can help millions. If I were that 1:100,000 I'd surely think it's worthwhile. At least your pragmatic about curtailing future drug development. A lot of people want to have their cake and eat it too by insisting that pharmaceutical companies that invested a small fortune to develop a new drug should only sell it for the cost to manufacture it because they shouldn't profit off of people's ailments.
|
Thanks for not deleting it like you said you might. It was good to read. I believe you'll find a way.
|
Thanks. Yeah, I’m glad I posted it. I’ve found any time I tell someone “I’m planning to write a blog about _______” it becomes absolutely impossible to do so for some reason. Probably helped to have a day off to write it (not what I had in mind with the 4 day work week bit, but I guess this is an example).
|
From re-reading your stuff, I'd maybe (emphasis on the maybe, its a very confusing road and I admit to using a lot of wikipedia and summaries to digest older works) start by skimming Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality, then maybe see where your mind takes you from there. Mix in some of Marx's analysis on captialism, contrast it with 1950"s Objectivism, throw in a little bit of deontology vs utilitarianism, with a dash of 20th century history, and then I think you'll find yourself with more questions than answers lol.
It's very easy to be pessimistic about today's society, especially with all of the negativity in the news. But when you say "look around", I must ask: where? If you're talking about any news source, most of their articles are edited to be click-bait. If you're talking about your daily life, I have no idea what your life is like, other than what I've read in this thread. And if I read in-between the lines -- where the entire world peace, prosperity, and safety hinges on the delicate balance of senile, benighted men with nuclear bombs versus the apparent resurgence of human ignorance and stupidity + global warming -- then yeah it's easy to think that everything is going down a deep, dark path.
But let's throw some reality in here. Bad things and good things come and go like the tides of an ocean. Before the Renaissance you had the Bubonic Plague, before the 14th amendment you had the Civil War. We may be in bad times now, but neither you or I are fortune-tellers. However, I'm a strong believer in history, and historically, bad times and good times come and go. And to throw in a quote from a book I really should read sometime: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.
One might think that we are the weak men creating hard times right now, but if you really think about it, the "weak men" are all of the old-ass politicians in office creating all of the bad things you're probably hearing about. We're the strong men who will change things for the better. We just have to be careful that these weak men do not embrittle our resolve (easier said than done, we're discussing this on a video game forum for crying out loud).
My view on drug development is admittedly biased since I work for a start-up company that more-or-less exclusively deals with uHTS, small molecule TPD, and DEL combinatorial libraries. My entire network is basically in the small molecule field as well. I feel like I'm contributing towards the advancement in R&D land, but we definitely use a lot of CROs to help us get to where we want to go.
I knew of Eroom's Law but not by name, only by my coworkers saying how insanely difficult and expensive it is to create a single FDA-approved drug. Things are getting more and more expensive for sure, regardless of technology, which is why I think uHTS is something that needs to be advanced asap. If we're going to pay more money for 1 drug, we might as well pay more money for 1 drug + a million other failed drugs. The knowledge of what works and what doesn't is valuable either way.
Segue back into philosophy, a lot of your critques of captialism is basically what Marx describes in his works as the capitalist business owners and the objectification of labor or "proletariat" force. To borrow a paraphrase from Investopedia: Laborers do not own or have any claim to the means of production, the finished products they work on, or any of the profits generated from sales of those products. Rather, labor works only in return for a money wage. Marx argued that because of this uneven arrangement, capitalists exploit workers.
Does your company have any claim to the IP of the work that is contracted to you? And even if you do, it was the other company's idea to begin with right? If this is the case, then this is is more or less in-line with what Marx believes: a pure-play CRO would be a laborer, and the company who contracted you would be the capitalist business owner.
And then analogously, the work you're doing would be no different than making a single part on a car engine: without you, the car doesn't run, if the car doesn't run, the ambulance can't rescue the injured person, so on and so forth, but you wouldn't actually be credited with the ambulance for saving lives? Somewhat similar to your JC Penny example? Whereas your wife, whose product of labor is not objectified as a commodity, can be seen as being altruistic? If this is something that bothers you, one counter point is that altruism can be argued to be inherently selfish, at least according to Aristotle (blurb here from Stanford).
I don't mean to back-handedly insult your wife by saying any of this, but I think the work that you're doing is at least equally, if not more important. Even if you don't see the end product of your labor, it's as you said -- companies are using your work to make life-saving drugs.
Or perhaps, if you'll indulge me a little bit, assume that by working for big pharma, that we are working for an immoral institution? I know for a fact that my coworkers and I feel some bit of guilt working for the a part of the process that drives up our health care premiums and insurance rates. If Kantian freedom describes "a free will and a will under moral laws are the same", by working for a hypothetically immoral institution, does that mean that we have no free will?
There's also a conspiracy theory that the government, big pharma, big food, healthcare, and health insurers are in cahoots with each other to ensure we have no time to focus on our health, so we eat fast food 24/7, get addicted to unhealthy foods, get fat and sick, and then pay high premiums for costly drugs. By unconsciously or consciously recognizing this cycle, you may feel some guilt as a member of this cycle and seek some kind of punishment?. The Nietzsche wiki I linked earlier also mentions this conscience of guilt in his Second Treatise.
Lastly, I'd be very cautious to always make sure that revolutionary ideals is accompanied by motivated, literate, and autonomous individuals. The last thing we want is a singular entity with a culture of ideas to take over the mainstream. All it takes is one Hitler or Stalin, a mistranslated or misunderstood book, and an echo chamber to propagate a toxic revolution. Case in point: Hitler really fucking misinterpreted Nietzsche, and Stalin really fucked up Marx's work.
And with that, I'm going to shut up now cause the only thing I ever learned in philosophy class is that you can spend as much time as you want reading as many papers as you can, but the only answer you'll ever come up with is that there is no right answer to begin with. This is why I didn't want to do a deep philosophy dive lol...this itch is never worth scratching because it keeps on itching.
Oh and this blurb on utilitarianism is a precursor to utopian idealism.
|
Are you in contact with the people who are organizing in your area? You just talked about organizing your friends as the creator of something, but you could be part of an already existing framework if you aren't.
(Not judging, I'm not either. I should be doing more.)
|
Or perhaps, if you'll indulge me a little bit, assume that by working for big pharma, that we are working for an immoral institution? I know for a fact that my coworkers and I feel some bit of guilt working for the a part of the process that drives up our health care premiums and insurance rates. If Kantian freedom describes "a free will and a will under moral laws are the same", by working for a hypothetically immoral institution, does that mean that we have no free will?
There's also a conspiracy theory that the government, big pharma, big food, healthcare, and health insurers are in cahoots with each other to ensure we have no time to focus on our health, so we eat fast food 24/7, get addicted to unhealthy foods, get fat and sick, and then pay high premiums for costly drugs. By unconsciously or consciously recognizing this cycle, you may feel some guilt as a member of this cycle and seek some kind of punishment?. The Nietzsche wiki I linked earlier also mentions this conscience of guilt in his Second Treatise.
The middle ground is usually true. All the conspiracy theorists achieve is to make the opposite side more appealing, and their existence alone buries legitimate criticism of processes by more critical people, not to mention it allows them to be put into the same corner.
Big pharma is a necessity. But they're also money makers and them financing studies to suggest that a newer more expensive drug is better than an old cheap one is not a conspiracy theory.
Same for bribing MDs mostly indirectly to prescribe their product.
In Europe the incentive is greater for that to happen since health care is dependent on health insurance to get paid and since it's much cheaper, health care workers also get paid less.
It's a case of blame the game, not the players. The financial system that worked for quick growth during the industrial revolution is idiotic and the decision makers at the top obviously cling to it to preserve their status.
It's nothing new under the sun.
I'd also add that Kant read to me a lot like he picked up where Plato left and added more of his own thoughts to it.
Fundamentally, I can get behind the idea that everyone should behave in a way that would please most human beings past, present and future.
|
On July 08 2022 17:57 Nebuchad wrote:
Are you in contact with the people who are organizing in your area? You just talked about organizing your friends as the creator of something, but you could be part of an already existing framework if you aren't.
(Not judging, I'm not either. I should be doing more.)
Not really, although it would help if I got a better idea what kind of group I was looking for. I went to a couple BLM protests in 2020. I tried looking into the local Food Not Bombs, which IIRC seemed to have shut down or gone inactive after the city made it illegal to feed the homeless (that’s its own fucked story I guess). There’s still a couple other chapters in quite a bit more distant parts of the city.
But basically, I haven’t done the research I probably should. Good thought!
|
It's a very complicated question I guess.
On one hand, it does cost a lot of money to develop drugs, and the vast majority of those fail. The few that are proven safe and effective need to not only cover their R&D cost, but also the others that failed.
And generally when people stump up a large chunk of capital to look for a return that might or might not materialize in 30 years, they are looking to have a really good rate of return, hence the requirement to make profit.
On the other hand, healthcare does cost way too much in the US. But I'd say partly that is because of the middlemen, the insurers, rather than the pharma company. The insurers really provide no value. People on the right in America often point to Canada as an example of how nationalized medical care doesn't work well - it's really because they don't have private healthcare as an alternative, and people who want to pay for better care can't get it there.
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
