Lynne Kiesling
OK, so I’m a week behind the ChicagoBoyz, but hey! I’m the one with the bona fide shoe fetish! Manolo’s Shoe Blog is a great find, and find it I did via a Technorati cosmos crawl to see what new folks out there were linking to Knowledge Problem.
This is hilarious. And if it wasn’t for the Manolo, I would not now be coveting these Pucci pumps:
I agree with the Manolo: Puuuuuucciiiiiiiii!
Michael Giberson
The headline for Jerry Knight’s column today in the business section of the Washington Post reads “Got the Flu? Blame the Free Market.” Writers are not always responsible for their headlines, but the headline clearly reflects what Knight writes. If you get sick this winter, he writes, call it the “free market flu.”
Calling it a “free market flu” is just plain cukoo.
Knight blames the problem on the “free market,” and then proceeds to detail various federal government supports, limits, and controls over the vaccine market. Here are some samples from the article:
Protecting the nation from the annual, inevitable bout with influenza has been left entirely to the private sector, even though every year the flu kills many more Americans than have died in the Iraq war — 36,000 of us annually, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Other kinds of vaccines can be grown in tanks, which is much quicker. But if a drug company wanted to switch to that kind of technology for flu vaccine, Pavia said, federal regulations would treat the new version as if it were an entirely new drug, which would have to go through the lengthy Food and Drug Administration approval process before it could be sold.
That issue might be tackled with tax incentives, says the Infectious Diseases Society, which began worrying about the vaccine market long before this year’s shortage. There are already research and development tax credits, but Pavia suggests tax incentives that would be given to companies only when they bring a badly needed new product to market.
[The federal government] buys about 20 percent of the flu vaccine for the military and federal health programs. (While the prevailing view is that Americans don’t want the government dictating drug prices, the government does dictate what it pays for flu vaccine, demanding a price drugmakers say is unprofitable.)
So apparently, leaving flu vaccination “entirely to the private sector” includes restrictions on research and development, tax incentives for research and development of certain drugs and vaccines, and government purchase of 20 percent of the market at prices chosen by the government.
Knight also quotes a specialist in infectious diseases as saying that the consensus among flu experts seems to be the market has failed.
It was not explained how flu experts arrived at this conclusion. However, I wouldn’t naturally turn to medical researchers, no matter how expert they are concerning infectious diseases, for assessments of market failure. It does appear that there will be a shortage of vaccine this year, but not every shortage is a market failure.
UPDATE: The interested reader can find much more commentary on flu vaccine issues at Marginal Revolution (Search link), including Tyler Cowen’s ahead-of-its-time posting from December 11, 2003, “How to conserve flu vaccine.”
Michael Giberson
The headline for Jerry Knight’s column today in the business section of the Washington Post reads “Got the Flu? Blame the Free Market.” Writers are not always responsible for their headlines, but the headline clearly reflects what Knight writes. If you get sick this winter, he writes, call it the “free market flu.”
Calling it a “free market flu” is just plain cukoo.
Knight blames the problem on the “free market,” and then proceeds to detail various federal government supports, limits, and controls over the vaccine market. Here are some samples from the article:
Protecting the nation from the annual, inevitable bout with influenza has been left entirely to the private sector, even though every year the flu kills many more Americans than have died in the Iraq war — 36,000 of us annually, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Other kinds of vaccines can be grown in tanks, which is much quicker. But if a drug company wanted to switch to that kind of technology for flu vaccine, Pavia said, federal regulations would treat the new version as if it were an entirely new drug, which would have to go through the lengthy Food and Drug Administration approval process before it could be sold.
That issue might be tackled with tax incentives, says the Infectious Diseases Society, which began worrying about the vaccine market long before this year’s shortage. There are already research and development tax credits, but Pavia suggests tax incentives that would be given to companies only when they bring a badly needed new product to market.
[The federal government] buys about 20 percent of the flu vaccine for the military and federal health programs. (While the prevailing view is that Americans don’t want the government dictating drug prices, the government does dictate what it pays for flu vaccine, demanding a price drugmakers say is unprofitable.)
So apparently, leaving flu vaccination “entirely to the private sector” includes restrictions on research and development, tax incentives for research and development of certain drugs and vaccines, and government purchase of 20 percent of the market at prices chosen by the government.
Knight also quotes a specialist in infectious diseases as saying that the consensus among flu experts seems to be the market has failed.
It was not explained how flu experts arrived at this conclusion. However, I wouldn’t naturally turn to medical researchers, no matter how expert they are concerning infectious diseases, for assessments of market failure. It does appear that there will be a shortage of vaccine this year, but not every shortage is a market failure.
UPDATE: The interested reader can find much more commentary on flu vaccine issues at Marginal Revolution (Search link), including Tyler Cowen’s ahead-of-its-time posting from December 11, 2003, “How to conserve flu vaccine.”
Lynne Kiesling
I’d have to say the simple answer is “yes”, although the nuances of those changes are a lot more difficult to predict. Ronald Bailey writes at Reason about a recent nanotech conference he attended that made some predictions about how nanotech is likely to affect our lives in 2025. Of course, such long-range predictions are fraught with error and uncertainty, but it still behooves us to think about the possible.
One prediction that Ron describes is that the generation and distribution of energy will differ dramatically in the future because of nanotech applications:
The sturdy plastic panels are composed of “failsoft” nanocells that automatically reroute electric flows if the panels are cut, nailed, or damaged. As evidence that such panels are possible, Bruns cited the work of Konarka, a company developing cheap solar panels that come in rolls like Saran Wrap.
One thing we talk about a lot in electric power is that in comparison with telecom, electric power has never had the disruptive technology that the cell phone has been. Sure, we’ve had the combined-cycle gas turbine engine (as one of my co-authors describes it, a jet engine mounted on a platform!), but that was only disruptive in one part of the value chain. Nanotech has the potential (granted, the long run potential) to be a disruptive technology in many parts of the value chain — generation, transmission, distribution, devices.
In addition, as a technology that is by its nature distributed and automatically adaptive, nanotech has the potential to contribute to the “self-healing grid” that we’ve heard so much about since last August’s blackout.
Every once in a while I’ll sound a cautionary note that if our incumbent government-granted monopoly utilities do not adapt to such technological changes as these, we’ll get to the point where we have a system that innovated around them and made them obsolete. If I’m a utility shareholder I say better to hop on the train than to have it steamroll you, much as the telecoms finally concluded with cellular and wireless. But few utilities are this dynamist in their thinking.
Arnold Kling discusses the Bailey article and says that nanotech makes him more sanguine about the future:
I am becoming increasingly bullish on materials science and nanotechnology as solutions to problems of energy conservation, energy production, and health care.
On a related note, Randall Parker at Futurepundit describes advances in nanotech for low-pressure hydrogen storage.
