A Challenge To Megan McArdle
We make fun of McMegan quite a bit round these parts. So much so, that I personally visit the Fire Megan McArdle blog a couple times a week to steal ideas for my own posts.
That said, it can’t be denied that Megan seems to have some influence on policy debate, insofar as a distressing number of people seem to take her various pronouncements seriously, perhaps giving special consideration to her perch at the Atlantic, still a respectable journal in some circles.
So I’m going to put on my serious pants and challenge her to explain something that she has long maintained regarding the likely outcomes of health care reform. It’s been bugging me for a while that she continues to make statements like this:
– By 2030, there’s an 80% chance that the government will have imposed substantial price controls on pharma and other medical technology — and this will noticeably slow the rate of innovation.
Here’s my challenge to Megan — given her certainty that government intervention in health care is going to ‘noticeably slow the rate of innovation’, how does she explain Moore’s Law?
Now Moore’s Law is a specific prediction about the increasing density of computer circuitry rather than any sort of guideline for the pace of innovation in medicine. But it’s also perhaps the most testable prediction we’ve ever had for the future pace of ANY sort of innovation. Moore’s Law — briefly, a prediction that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit will double approximately every two years — has held up since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958 to today, and shows no sign of slowing down any time soon.
These days, we credit Moore’s Law for the fact that in 2010, the processing power of a mass-produced smartphone you can buy for $200 literally dwarfs that of the NASA computers used in 1969 to land a man on the moon. And Intel co-founder Gordon Moore’s elegant little observation from back in 1965 has spawned a number of corollary ‘laws’ regarding the pace of innovation in areas like energy efficiency in computing and ever-more intelligent and useful programming code.
What we don’t often think about re: Moore’s Law is just how damn accurate it’s been at predicting the future, despite the various ups and downs of the decades in which the prediction has been operative. Moore’s Law worked when Keynesian economics ruled government policy and it worked when we switched over to Thatcher rules and Reaganomics. It correctly predicted innovation during the Great Society — when government policies like affirmative action arguably represented far greater intervention in markets than HCR will ever do — and kept right on working through the past 20 years as we dismantled many Great Society programs.
Moore’s Law worked when the economy was booming and when it was struggling. It worked leading up to the dot-com bubble, through the bubble itself and on past the crash and its aftermath. It worked when billions of potential customers in Communist states were firewalled off from Western markets by their authoritarian governments. It kept working even when government regulators in the United States, Europe and elsewhere began investigating and penalizing certain high-tech companies for anti-competitive practices — including Moore’s own company, Intel.
The point is, Moore’s Law seems like it could be evidence that there just might exist an exponentially increasing pace of human innovation that simply cannot be affected all that much by various tweaks — even fairly major ones — in government policy towards markets, or even regulation of specific industries.
If that’s true, then perhaps government policy can only do a few things with regards to an innovation cycle that appears to inexorably deliver progressively better and more varied technologies with each passing year. Policy may be able to point a segment of innovation in roughly the direction of some technological problem whose solution the policymakers consider would be socially useful. Policy may also be helpful in assuring that the fruits of innovation are enjoyed with prejudice towards the many instead of the few — for example, by means of regulation that encourages competition to produce lower-priced computer products for volume distribution and thus passes along innovation gains to consumers, while discouraging monopoly behavior or collusion to hoard Moore’s Law-driven gains by means of outsized margins that would not be possible in a legitimately competitive environment.
What any government policy — short of, perhaps, a Khmer Rouge-style outburst of Luddite insanity — cannot seem to do is to ‘noticeably slow the rate of innovation’ itself. So again, my challenge to Megan is to show that it can, with special attention paid to debunking the powerful counter-example of Moore’s Law.
Get the fuck out of here, Dan Reihl.
– By 2030, there’s an 80% chance that the government will have imposed substantial price controls on pharma and other medical technology — and this will noticeably slow the rate of innovation.
Gosh, Megs, you mean the same pharma that relies heavily on public money to do its reasearch then privatizes the results?
I don’t know why these “free-market” harpies keep making these claims. Their own free-market dogma scraps the whole idea of government-as-a-customer slows innovation.
It doesn’t take a ton of brain power to realize that corporation is still a corporation, and that innovation in new product development and more efficient manufacturing makes the corporation more profitable. Who pays the corporation is notably irrelevant. Ask any defense contractor how their R&D department is doing.
Obama’s gay Islamocommunism is so powerful that by December, our medical technology will be reduced to that of Civil War battlefield medicine, and by the end of the decade, to some sort of pre-Hippocratic, Bizarro World standard in which broken limbs will be treated with hammer blows to the face.
All true patriots must rise against the threat of the Yellow Lantern and Batzarro.
Saying M.C. Megan is not bright is an insult to dimness. Has she ever had a thought deeper than “ooh shiny!”? Criminy.
PS, thanks for the new thread, Dan. How’s Jeff doing? I worry about his health — I hope it’s declining quickly.
I’m sympathetic to the goal of debunking McArdle, but this is some extraordinarily trashy reasoning. Just because computer processor technology has shown a certain constancy of rate of development does not mean that it’s valid to extrapolate a similar constancy to other areas. And there are a good number of reasons to believe that Moore’s Law might be limited. For one thing, it was announced quite early in the development of the technology, and thus served as something of a goal that manufacturers strove to achieve. More importantly, developing a better computer chip directly aids in the development of the next generation, as more extravagant calculations and models become possible for planning it.. That kind of self-reinforcing loop simply isn’t present in healthcare technology.
There are plenty of good reasons why McArdle is full of shit, but this isn’t one of them.
There’s an even easier proof that McCardle is full of shit: innovation occurs in other countries who have full blown Universal HC, not just the incremental half step we just took, The UK hasn’t become a stagnant hellhole mired in the 70s any more than Canada or France has. Hell, a large chunk of pharm research happens in Canada,
This attitude is just more of that Rightist Exeptionalism, that the world will somehow come to a screeching halt if rich people don’t get to screw over the poor.
That is a great, substantive question that sets up a way for Megan’s rather typical conservatard/libertaryan assertion to actually be tested provably.
I don’t expect this challenge to be accepted by her.
I will say that one thing which could really make this interesting, would be to set a yardstick by which medical innovation could be measured. We know Moore’s Law is accurate for computer sciences because we can track the increase in processor speeds. What would be an equivalent measurement in medicine?
Some sort of patient sickness/recovery rates, perhaps? Overall life expectancy of people *once they need medical help* – thus screening out all the people who are living longer because of non-medicine industry things like better nutrition and better living conditions?
Just spitballing. For this rarely non-sarcastic post here, I’d love for this notion of testing gov’t influence on medical innovation to move forward.
Megan has trounced your argument by the irrefutable truth that “Michael Moore is Fat”, and his “laws” have no meaning in the right-wing reality.
@ pauly;
True, Moore’s Law is a bit arbitrary and not necessarily a way to predict the future. However, you have a couple of factors at work that make innovation line up with Moore’s Law. Antitrust and competition. If you have those two things actually performing their intended function, you will have forward movement in innovation.
This IS a reason that she’s full of shit–she cannot make that 80% claim without any supporting evidence (aka please don’t pull numbers out of your orifice), and she has nothing back the claim that industry will suddenly stop innovation because of price controls. They will still need to be profitable, which will drive innovation without fail. That’s human nature, not a law written by a computer chip CEO.
As mentioned above, most drug research into all, but the biggest sellers (thinks like arthritis and cholesterol drugs), is done through academic research largely funded by the federal government. It’s then privatised and marketed by drug companies. We don’t just subsidize their R & D, we pretty much just do it for them. The rate of innovation for pharmaceuticals is much more tied to NIH or other government funding.
Moore’s law is probably a bad example though. But she’s still full of shit.
broken limbs will be treated with hammer blows to the face
with a punishing dildo mallet.
Uh, “respectable journal in some circles.” Exactly what kind of circles are those? The ones you twirl around your ear to indicate that someone is crazy?
Moore’s law predicted increases in transistor density, but nothing else. There is no other quantifiable advance in anything that has doubled every eighteen months, ever in history. So your entire blog post is stupid and if you had spent even a moment trying to quantify what you’re saying, you’d have realized it’s stupid and not posted it.
Moreover, Moore’s law can be a smokescreen to hide wanton consumption of energy resources. An Apple II consumed 4.2 watts, and your computer today consumes about 200 watts. You’re burning almost 50x as much coal, natural gas, and uranium as an Apple II, which is perfectly adequate for email and text browsing. You call that progress?
Moore’s Law, true as it may be, doesn’t even really represent compelling innovation—just that things are getting smaller. This has some nice side effects, such as the smartphones you mention, but as far as actually moving the science of computing forward, I had a professor who argued that really hasn’t been done since RISC in the early 1980s. I think the fact that we are delving head-first into mass-produced multiprocessor systems as being the norm for the personal computer segment of the market really shows the lack of good ideas: everyone thought “ooh! dual core!” and then everyone learned that we really haven’t solved the concurrency problem.
It really is kind of surprising the lack of innovation and/or change in computing, depending on who you talk to, what you look at, and how you look at it.
” and shows no sign of slowing down any time soon.”
That isn’t true, I don’t think. We’re rapidly approaching a quantum limit. Without using words like “quantum,” we’re essentially almost at the single-atom limit. (yes, this is not 100% true, but I don’t feel like explaining confinement)
Actually I think a claim can be made that the current model of BIG Pharma is actually hampering innovation at the moment. Its long been predicted that leaner times are coming within the pharmaceutical industry due to the lack of potential new drugs in the pipeline.
Currently the bigger companies are buying up smaller more innovative start-ups and merging with each other as a result. A true test of innovation in pharmaceuticals are New Chemical Enties (N.C.Es) and the number of NCEs that have been registered in the last 15 years have dropped drastically. Yes safety, regulations etc play a part but I believe the current market structure does as well.
Megan Jane Dagny Taggart Galt McCardle’s latest screed is typical of wingnut attacks on health care reform. They’re starting to rely almost completely on hypothetical horribles situated 20-30 years into some imagined dark future, since they can’t debunk any of the immediate benefits such as ending pre-existing conditions, recission, or the donut hole in drug benefits. She might as well claim that by 2030, all the best and brightest researchers, practitioners, and most important of all, health insurance executives will have gone Galt, leaving us in the hands of unlicensed barber surgeons and chiropractors.
Moore’s Law is un-Constitutional and you cannot perpetually think you can keep increasing your spending of transistors and eventually not collapse.
By 2030, there’s an 80% chance that the government will have imposed substantial price controls on pharma and other medical technology — and this will noticeably slow the rate of innovation.
This is such patent BS. In typical Meggers fashion she completly ignores what everyone else knows to be be fact.
The Great 2020 Teatard Uprising leads to the wholesale slaughter of the intelligentsia and the resultant collapse of modern society, making America unable to implement the advanced biological technology brought to Earth by the Minoxians.
Silly woman.
pauly and ArchPundit – I think Moore’s Law is useful insofar as it really is one of the only falsifiable predictions of future innovation that we have. I’m certainly not saying that medical innovation is the same as semiconductor innovation. Human biology and all the myriad ways one might address various maladies certainly require more diverse pathways of innovation than the pretty linear path of getting more circuitry on the same sized silicon wafer.
But my point is that Moore’s Law shows us at least one way that the pace of innovation seems utterly unaffected by various lesser or greater interventions by government in the markets. Megan’s claim that HCR will almost certainly negatively affect medical innovation has no such evidence to support it, unless I’m missing something.
Moore’s Law, as inappropriate as it may be to use for reasoning out the likelihood of non-semiconductor innovation, is at least a proven fact. Megan’s prediction, conversely, seems to me to be vapor theory based on nothing but glibertarian bias.
As a child, I had several cavities. Now, if we assume that the same rate of cavity appearance continues, and not only continues but increases in a compound fashion, within a few decades I would be predicted to have billions and billions of cavities, and the world could likely not sustain the level of dental care I would need, and I would just be one of hundreds of millions of people. Ergo, people with cavities just need to lose their teeth and grow up, because the rest of us aren’t willing to live in your completely dentristy based society, where all are slave to Big Tooth.
The final end to male pattern baldness? Now, I can see interstellar faster than light travel as possible, but this seems a bit far-fetched to me.
Megan makes the typical conservative’s mistake about innovation — that the marketing departments, execs, and shareholders of large corporations are the ones doing the innovating. Those people make a lot of money, and they stand to lose the most through price controls, but they’re not creating anything.
The R&D departments are the ones actually developing new stuff. And if one pharma corporation feels it’s not worth it, don’t worry — someone else will do it, instead.
Capitalism does work, as long as the rules aren’t manipulated to favor those already with power.
Innovation doesn’t occur simply because of the profit motive. My experience, living and working in a university/industrial collaborative environment has shown me that people will keep coming up with bright ideas because it’s fun. Researchers are a curious lot. They love to solve puzzles for the sake of solving puzzles. Getting the moneybelts in a profit oriented, capitalist system to fund the research and capitalize the resulting products is another thing.
And part of the problem here in ‘merica is that, when it comes to material acquisitions, we have lost a word from our vocabularies. That word is enough. Not barely enough, as in eeking out a living, but enough as in “What could I possibly do with more?” The wealth lauded by Randroids isn’t a means to more creation. It’s a point tally in a game. The wealth doesn’t substantially improve the comfort of life or security or the ability to create more innovation. It’s an end in itself, points in the great video game of life. More is always better, just because it’s more. And it doesn’t really matter how the more is achieved. Innovation is unnecessary when competition is thwarted. It’s actually sometimes more profitable to finance the marketing of a mediocre product than to innovate, especially if the outcome of innovation is risky. (And that’s what government subsidies are for.)
CW: Build a better mouse trap, and the world will beat a path to your door.
UCW: Properly capitalize and market a mediocre mouse trap and you don’t have to build a better one.
nutellaontoast — Intel says it’s confident it can push through to the 11nm process node. Moore’s Law (and Intel’s own tick-tock timetable) schedules the 11nm transition for 2015 (Intel makes 32nm chips now). That’s another five years of Moore’s Law working at least, so we can quibble about ‘any time soon’ as I put it, but the law’s going to be operative for some time to come.
How then do you explain the fact that some cultures are more innovative than others?
China had a great headstart in science and technology; they developed a great many things centuries before we had them in the West. But then somehow innovation and experimentation pretty much stopped there.
Ditto with the Arabs. While Europe was having its “one thousand years without a bath”, the Arab world was full of scientific progress, particularly in astronomy and medicine. Again, they not only stopped, but actually regressed.
Innovation and experimentation and discovery became the hallmarks of European civilizations (inculding the ‘daughter countries’) thereafter.
Why? I don’t know the answer; perhaps someone here can suggest it.
Also, Catholic officials protecting Catholic priests who rape dozens and dozens of children, even deaf children, are the pogrom-suffering Jews of secular fascism.
You know who else was against priests raping children?
Veiled Palin 2012 reference?
Anyway, aside from everything else that’s been posted, the problem I see with Meg McMuffin’s assertion is that it’s a non sequitur. Price controls may limit how much can be charged for any single medical widget, but they don’t control how many of those widgets get bought and who they get bought from. There’d still be plenty of room for free-market brawling among the Big Pharmae, which means plenty of incentive for innovation.
Andrew – I disagree that Moore’s Law doesn’t represent innovation — ‘just that things are getting smaller’ requires considerable investment in developing new materials, tools and lithography processes. The semis of Moore’s time didn’t have the high-k metal gate, for example – that had to be invented to maintain the Moore’s Law pace.
How then do you explain the fact that some cultures are more innovative than others?
‘Guns, Germs and Steel’ is a good place to start, as far as I’m concerned.
China dramatically restricted trade with and exploration outside the empire after late 15th century Mongol attacks.
Islamic medieval science revived the ancient Greek traditions and went much, much farther, and apparently was halted in its progress and in comparison to Europe when Islamic rulers and the religious leaders were opposed to allow the hallowed tradition of Islamic calligraphy to be replaced by mechanical printing.
Europe, for its part, cannot be extricated from its ‘innovations’ in stealing absolutely mind-blowing amounts of material resources and slave / servant produced crops from the Americas and Africa, and anyone somehow overlooking this key development in the growth of Europe is simply mind-numbingly ignorant or a fantasist.
with a punishing dildo mallet.
That doctor is a quack!
The point is, Moore’s Law seems like it could be evidence that there just might exist an exponentially increasing pace of human innovation that simply cannot be affected all that much by various tweaks — even fairly major ones — in government policy towards markets, or even regulation of specific industries.
But…to be honest, this is laden with more qualifiers and hedges than a Jonah Goldberg post. And justifiably so, because as far as I can tell, Moore’s Law is sui generis. Car MPG hasn’t shown the same pattern, from what I remember, and neither has spaceflight, and neither has the development of treatments for Alzheimer’s disease (quantify that however you like). To misappropriate a theory, Moore’s Law is an example of gradualism in a punctuated-equilibrium sort of world.
UCW: Properly capitalize and market a mediocre mouse trap and you don’t have to build a better one.
There’s nothing U about this; it’s a key component of the strategy known as “planned obsolescence.”
Innovation doesn’t occur simply because of the profit motive. My experience, living and working in a university/industrial collaborative environment has shown me that people will keep coming up with bright ideas because it’s fun.
I work in the same environment, and while what you say is certainly true, it’s also true that profit *can* be a powerful motivator.
A friend of the family is a biochemist and the leader of the team who figured out how to synthesize…well, a Famous Pharmaceutical. He’s an immigrant from an Unpleasant Country, and *one* of his motives was that he could cash in, bring over some additional family members from said Unpleasant Country, and provide a good life for his kids. He succeeded, he’s rich, a lot of people are healthier because of what he did, and there’s a picture of the relevant molecule in most of the rooms of his (very nice) house. I’m inclined to give innovators as many motivators as I can.
My biggest bitch I have with the likes of Megan — other than the clinical stupidity — and other Libertardaloons is the sheer fucking greed they seem to celebrate.
For example: Yesterday, a now-former friend dropped this during an email discussion on HCR:
That is just a perfect summations of their worldview.
No concerns about actual human beings … no worries about thousands who will die horrific deaths as a result of their policies … not a second thought about basic human decency. It’s all about the money. Period.
Whether they get to save an extra $250 off their annual tax bill, or businesses are allowed to profit in any way possible, it doesn’t matter. As long as greed is celebrated and encouraged, all is right in their world.
Basically, these are the very people America has been trying to rid itself of since it’s founding.
We still have some work to do …
Wow. So Megan’s predictions are so full of loopholes that she can’t possibly be wrong. She doesn’t go out on a limb and say the government WILL impose price controls. There’s just an 80% (number pulled out of her ass) chance that it will. If no price controls are imposed, she is still right.
Her predictions:
1: She’s 75% confident it won’t happen
2: She’s “skeptical” that there will be a drop in the death rate, but if there is one, it’s meaningless variation anyway.
3: Her bold counterclaim: bankruptcies will not fall by half. She actually makes a firm, testable prediction.
4: Another real prediction; US infant mortality rate will be higher than in the Netherlands in 2018. Unfortunately, she seems to have pulled the Netherlands benchmark out of her ass.
5: At least one major funding source will be “substantively” repealed. I’m sure she’ll count any change in funding as “substantive”
6: I can’t tell if she’s saying growth in health costs will be more than 1.5% a year (i.e., less than recent inflation rates), or if year over year growth will be reduced by less than 1.5% (e.g, from 30% to 28.5%). Given the weakness of her other predictions, I’ll assume she means the former, and agree with her. Growth in health care costs will be equal to or higher than the inflation rate. She further qualifies it as “won’t be anything like 1.5%”; 0.5% and 3.0% both aren’t anything like 1.5%
7: “A fiscal crisis is quite likely by 2030, though not just because of this program”. A prediction, I suppose, but hedged so that health care doesn’t have to be the cause of the crisis.
8: 80% chance, nuff said.
So she has only has two real predictions; bankrupticies won’t fall by half and infant mortality will still be higher than the Netherlands.
@drew 42
‘The R&D departments are the ones actually developing new stuff. And if one pharma corporation feels it’s not worth it, don’t worry — someone else will do it, instead.’
‘Capitalism does work, as long as the rules aren’t manipulated to favor those already with power.’
Hmm not if marketing directs them all to the same big markets there is a problem with ‘orphan drugs’ that could work but arent brought through because its deemed not too have enough potential sales wise.
Wot you said about capitalism though!
Wow, I sound cranky. Sorry. I’m stuck inside on a gorgeous day, and I’ve been trying (and failing) to write the same paragraph for the last two hours.
Exactly. And I bet none of these principled types hold mortgages or bank accounts or have car payments and what not.
A little carpet bombing of Holland and any other European city so brazen as to be healthier than U.S. Americans, and we’ll equalize those mortality rates but quicklike. Where would be their Al Gore Jesus then, huh?
I don’t care if 1000 people die penniless, suffering deaths if 1001 people become capable of taking care of their own needs—with dignity– without relying upon other people’s contributions and government overhead.
I’m sure the former friend thinks of those 1000 people as leeches, fraudsters, welfare queens, and the like. I doubt the former friend has ever considered the possibility that those 1000 people will include an elderly and childless widow with Alzheimer’s, a young veteran with a devastating traumatic brain injury, or an orphan with a severe developmental disability. These people are unpersons to the conservative mind; if you bring them up, and ask what should be done about them, you’ll at most get a hasty “well, yeah, obviously we have to deal with that.” Ask them what sort of system should be put into place to “deal with that,” and you’ll get no coherent response.
I think it’s a symptom of the main ideological disease of conservatism, which is to see things in black and white. You’re in favor of the Iraq war, or you’re a traitor. You’re independent, or you’re a selfish leech. The observation that there are people who don’t fall into either category is distressing, and causes massive cognitive dissonance; it fucks with their starry-eyed good-vs.-evil view of the world.
in your completely dentristy based society, where all are slave to Big Tooth.
If this is going to be some bastard offspring of a slashdot thread about Moore’s law instead of about how stupid Mgn is, then someone needs to bring the car analogies.
Megan’s point is like saying that because there are tolls on roads then car manufacturers will stop adding cupholders.
Trilateral Chairman – well, it may be that some technologies have reached some state of near-optimal development where accelerated innovation is no longer necessary or cost-effective to address people’s needs.
That’s a giant discussion we could have at another time. My point with this post is NOT to hash out exactly how innovation works in every instance. My point is to say that look, we actually have a good example of a certain kind of innovation making better and better technology in a predictable way and despite assorted different economic conditions and government policies.
What’s Megan got to back up her prediction? That’s all I’m asking.
At some point, Moore’s Law became somewhat self-fulfilling. It did work for a while, on its own. Then everybody heard about it. And then it became a benchmark for where your competitors would be; if you weren’t going to be doubling in 18 months, you anticipated the fab down the street would be, so it’s time to pour resources into R&D to meet that mark, or allow much more expensive production equipment, or some combination.
“So Megan’s predictions are so full of loopholes that she can’t possibly be wrong.”
True, though she probably thinks that this is a sign that her theory has merit. (Which is not an uncommon problem; you’d be surprised how many of my students assumed that “unfalsifiable” was a compliment. I wish Popper or whoever had settled on “untestable” or “uncheckable” instead.)
My favorite prediction is this:
Uh-huh. Measured how? A nickel says she’d settle on an operational definition only after she’d had a chance to see if it gave her the desired result.
Happened to me.
True story.
That’s a giant discussion we could have at another time.
After walking the dog?
Government slowing innovation – right.
If that was true, could someone explain to me why so many technological advances, up to and including the Internet, are done by simply commercializing an existing military technology – yes, the military is part of the government, much as conservatives loathe to admit it – and why it was the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, not Private Innovative Citizens United for Space Travel that’s landed every single man on the fucking moon that ever walked there.
Hell, look at the tally for who put a man in space first; it goes
1) The Union of Soviet Socialist And Therefore By Definition Inefficient Republics, 1961.
2) The United States of America, a much more Keynesian nation then than it is now, its innovative class groaning under the oppressive boot of 70% tax rates, 1961.
3) A private American corporation, 2004.
For the record, I’ve been to at least one communist country in my lifetime and I don’t wish that system on anyone, whatever the ideology behind and whatever the benefits may be. But does it strike anyone else as odd that it took forty-three years for capitalism to catch up with the accomplishments of Communism and Keynesianism?
After walking the dog?
That and after I file a couple of posts on my Dan Riehl blog.
I for one welcome our coming Minoxian overlords.
But does it strike anyone else as odd that it took forty-three years for capitalism to catch up with the accomplishments of Communism and Keynesianism?
Cue the Randroid response: “it took 43 years to eliminate the crushing regulations that kept private enterprise from yadda yadda blurp blurp fiddley-fooble”
So there’s a 20% chance of a Republican coup by 2030?
I know that Megan is a complete idiot, but to imply that an exponential increase in transistor power is analogous to health care costs and benefits is ridiculous. I banish you back to Logic 101.
The pope is the Jew of liberal media fascism:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2010/04/popes_preacher_abuse_critique_like_anti-semitism.php?ref=fpa
If socialized medicine is going to “slow innovation” how come little Israel, with its mandated, government run and funded health care system, is able to churn out 60% of all the Nobel prizes in medicine?
I’ve got to challenge you on one thing, though, “D. Aristophanes” (if that truly is your real name): Why would you ever think that Megan McArdle could possibly understand the challenge you lay out in your post?
Is there anything you’ve ever read in her writing that would indicate that she possesses even the rudimentary understanding to be able to grasp what your asking her?
Why? I don’t know the answer; perhaps someone here can suggest it.
@ BAW – “Guns, Germs & Steel” has a great explanation. Basically that competition between cultures is what pushes technological innovation – and that this competition was aided by geographical boundaries which kept cultures separate.
So:
1. Europe had a later start, but was able to pursue and push innovation because natural geographic separation meant greater difficulty for instituting monopolistic control.
2. Europe and the middle east also had the benefit of a wide amount of geographic latitude – meaning the same crops could grow across a wide expanse because of similar weather conditions. As opposed to South America which had a narrow latitude, so civilizations’ growth was hampered by a lack of similar crops.
3. Europe’s colonial successes were also greatly helped by Europeans’ living in filthy cities – this led to Europeans becoming immune to superdiseases, while also spreading those superdiseases to new lands where the diseases did most of the native-killing for them.
4. Arab cilivization’s growth was hampered and then reversed by a council of clerics gaining the single and only authority to interpret the Koran – and thus halt or remove challenging scientific research as they saw fit. (this isn’t directly referenced in Guns Germs & Steel, as I recall.) The Catholic church tried this in Europe and succeeded somewhat, but was ultimately foiled by nations with differing geographic boundaries straining and defeating this yoke. as their excuse.
That’s my take on it.
As a side note, “Guns Germs & Steel” + “A People’s History of the US” + “Cartoon History of the Universe” = a better and more useful education of history than can be gotten at nearly any public university.
Because all libruls hate Israel, and this hatred collectively grants Israel superpowers.
Damn … I wish I would’ve thought of that reply.
Not just that — they **gasp** often have darker skin tones!
While you’re correct that they don’t care about those people, what stuns me is the notion they have that it will never happen to them.
They’re convinced beyond all logic and reason that they are somehow immune to losing their jobs, or being denied coverage for insurance, or needing help from anyone, at any time, for anything. And that speaks to an abhorrent type of arrogance.
What is amusing, though (in a sad and pathetic kind of way) is that the clown who has no problems with thousands dying quoted Spock before doing so! He tried to imply that letting 1,000 die so that 1,001 can get rich is somehow an example of “the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few.”
Yet when I suggested that we raise the top marginal rate by 3% — a move that would affect less than about 2 million people — in order to provide health care for 40 million people, he lost what is left of his mind.
Cognitive dissonance doesn’t come close to describing that adequately. It’s more like a psychosis …
If anything capitalism hampers innovation, because the market encourages inventors to make things that are as shoddy as possible in order to keep costs low and profits high. Without the constraints of a ‘free’ market there would be no incentives to make shitty products, inventors could be free to make things as high-quality as they possibly could simply for the pride of making something good. Randroids may believe that competitiveness is the only thing that drives humanity, but such competition has never been observed outside of market based societies. Nobody got paid for the wheel or fire or a goddamn cave painting. Human creativity is innate, it is the accumulation of capital which stifles it.
Damn, I see that El Cid already beat me to it. Serves me right for not reading the thread first.
“By 2032, there’s an 84.3% chance that the government will have imposed substantial price controls on pharma and other medical technology — and this will not noticeably slow the rate of innovation.” – Gregor Samsa
Do you think that the Atlantic will give me a gig now to counterbalance Megan? I put at least as much thought and research into my statement as she did hers!
Bold prediction: 20 years out and pretty much unmeasurable.
Whatever happened to the notion that the most wealthy would be more than happy to re-invest in the nation which allowed them to grow rich and grow richer, in order that they and their peers and heirs might continue to do so?
How can people so piously quote the Founding Fathers as 200 foot alien beings who also acted just like the angels in all of those awful cartoons on the religious channels, including slow, carefully modulated voices, and also assume that “FUCK YOU I’M RICH BITCH I GOT MINE PAL THE FUCKIN’ COUNTRY CAN GO TO SHIT ‘FAR AS I CARE”?
Oh. Right. They’re sociopaths, until at least they go through the same shit so many others have.
Trying to hold an organization accountable for covering up widespread, decades-long* sexual abuse is just like the Holocaust!
(*Yeah, probably more like centuries-long, but you work with the documentation you have)
“On July 8 2031, there’s an 84.78% chance that the government will have imposed substantial price controls on pharma and other medical technology — and this will not noticeably slow the rate of innovation. – Gregor Samsa
Will the Atlantic give me a gig now? I put as much thought a research into my statement as Megan did?
I love the boldness of the prediction: decades out, not measurable, cause and effect difficult to establish.
O NOEZ! DA FOUNDING FATHERS WERE UNCONSTUSHULL SOSHULLISTS!
AND IT WAS STALINISM IN THE NAME OF GUN OWNERSHIP TOO WHICH IS MATHEMAGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE!!!
AAAAAAA! THIS IS WRONG WRONG WRONG I LOVE GUNS I LOVE FOUNDING FATHERS BUT NOW I AM SHAKING AND HUGGING MY FAKE MONKEY MOTHER!!!
to imply that an exponential increase in transistor power is analogous to health care costs and benefits is ridiculous.
purvis – I’m not doing that. I am specifically addressing her claim of being ‘80%’ sure that the effects of HCR ‘will noticeably slow the rate of innovation’ in medicine. Your statement about ‘health care costs and benefits’ is not germane — this is specifically about innovation.
Look, maybe I didn’t say this clearly enough in the post. I’m challenging Megan to show us something. She says that HCR is likely to ‘noticeably slow the rate of innovation’ in medicine. This obviously implies that she believes that some government policy or another in a modern capitalist economy can have some demonstrable effect on the rate of innovation in some industry or another.
So in response, I want her to explain Moore’s Law. I want her to explain how it worked equally well under Keynesian economic policy and under Reaganomics. I want her to explain why it didn’t take four years to double transistor density under LBJ and just one year to do it under Reagan.
The usefulness of Moore’s Law here IS its simplicity. Not that it is a great tool for determining the pace of innovation in non-semiconductor industries. It’s a baseline test for Megan’s apparent theory about paces of innovation and government’s effect on them. If moderate to major governmental economic policy actually has some measurable effect on paces of innovation, how is it that Moore’s Law has worked with such metronome-like consistency in the midst of all manner of shifts in such policy?
Does that make sense?
Transistors are the Pol Pots of Deregulatory Fascism.
Y’all might be interesting in reading The Rhetoric of Reaction. Conservatives and Glibertarians like McMeghan are actually the first to make the same argument made here (see it really is Dan Riehl posting — that wasn’t an April Fools’ day joke at all) that no matter what gummint does it will have no effect (so all gummint programs that are, e.g., supposed to help the poor, will really do nothing except make limousine liberal do-gooders feel better).
The problem, as The Rhetoric of Reaction points out, is that while one certainly can argue “gummint programs are futile at best, perverse at worse”, conservatives arguing that government programs will have negative unintended consequences and those who argue that government programs are futile generally (even if it’s the same person making both arguments) argue at cross purposes — if a government program is unlikely to have any effect on anything, how can it be so scary, evil, etc. to destroy society as we know it?
(*Yeah, probably more like centuries-long, but you work with the documentation you have)
How long is it, Captain?
I might quibble with Gregor Samsa’s 84.3% figure, since my own ass has provided me with the superior number of 82.7%, but “whatever.”
I left the sacred boat and looked at MM’s post: the 80% is just put there, with zero support or explanation.
This “but it will stifle innovation!” is the same crappy disingenuous Eddie Haskellish argument that tax-cutters use to defend “incentive,” e.g, “But if we don’t cut taxes to 5.4%, entrepreneurs won’t have enough incentive to innovate, invest, expand, and create jobs.”
To them, and to the corporations the insufferable McArdle is afraid just won’t feel like doing good stuff for society, let us say: Fine. Then someone else will. Isn’t that what you also believe? That competition keeps everyone operating at maximum incentivity?
Yes, “incentivity.” I made it up. Fuck you, Megan.
This is the same woman who recently whined about her local Post Office because they didn’t have sufficient postage for her funky-ass invitations to her mating ritual. That’s the sort of things that she gives a shit about, not some stupid fucking prediction she made about 2030, by which time she should have gone cyber-Galt along with the Ole Perfesser and become a Hans Moravec-type robot. You can just kiss her shiny metal ass, meatbags! Now who has a fucking stamp?
*Alex Chilton RIP (better late than never)
Nobody got paid for the wheel or fire or a goddamn cave painting.
Oh, yeah? That’s not what Johnny Hart sez!
http://comics.com/bc/?DateAfter=2002-04-14&DateBefore=2002-04-14&Order=d.DateStrip+ASC&PerPage=10&x=25&y=11&Search=
Ms Megan has a problem. She is ideologically opposed to government involvement in health systems because it diminishes freedom, whether by forcing / subsidising everyone to pay for health insurance, or by taxes that funds a universally-provided health service as in most of the world.
And indeed it does, just as any taxes diminish freedom, even if only that of corporate entities. At the same time, all the evidence from countries that keep their citizens healthier than Mericans while spending less on health services is that a centrally-controlled and funded health system is more efficient, lacking the distortions and perverse incentives created by employer-paid insurance.
If Megan were honest, she would promote her preferred ideology by arguing that the greater freedom of a voluntary, individually-paid health system is worth paying more for. Instead she argues that the expected savings might not happen, and makes up stories about declining innovation (despite all the medical / pharm innovations coming from Europe).
Ergo, not honest… but her “influence on policy debate, insofar as a distressing number of people seem to take her various pronouncements seriously” rests on her willingness to ignore empirical reality and lie in defense of a failed ideology. As long as she keeps lying, the usual suspects will treat her as a qualified pundit to balance the likes of Krugman and Stiglitz.
I think that better describes innovation at the collegiate level, which I believe far outpaces commercial R&D simply for the reasons you’ve stated. Mediocrity and treading water are the negative aspects of capitalism. If an equilibrium is reached, where everyone is making money with the mediocre mousetrap, things are likely to stay that way until (gasp!) the evil socialist government comes along and forces change. Car companies are a perfect example of resistance to change for the sake of being resistant to change–even at their own peril.
I’m an ignoramus when it comes to hard economic theory. I can’t even pretend, and would only embarrass myself if I tried.
But is anyone aware of a 20 year predictor that panned out to be correct, apart from the Moore’s Law thing? Did anyone see in, say, 1987-1990 the recession we hit in 2007-present?
I really don’t know the answer. Has there been something that could successfully extrapolate data and accurately predict the status quo an entire generation later? In anything?
If there is, I’d love to know about it. But, apart from even that question, there’s a huge whiff of someone making predictions that they assume they will never be called on, that would be logistically difficult to be called on.
And then how the hell is she even quantifying innovation? New drugs per year? Because I know what I’d prefer in 20 years, if given the option between 5 Viagra clones (unveiled, unsheathed PENIS content) vs a cure for, say, HIV.
Ms Megan has a problem. She is ideologically opposed to government involvement in health systems because it diminishes freedom, whether by forcing / subsidising everyone to pay for health insurance, or by taxes that funds a universally-provided health service as in most of the world.
She also has another problem–the same problem plaguing other conservative dimwitted corporate whores. They are opposed to health care because they want that money to keep going into the pockets of big business. Since they can’t get away with saying that outright, and since they can’t attack the weak points of the law on merit (which would give the impression that they want it to actually do something), they’re forced to make up 80% of their statistics and plant legions of strawmen throughout the land. And here the teabaggers sit, talking to the strawmen, and hearing them speak back
DAS – it sounds like you’re lumping me in with glibertarians who say ‘government programs have no effect’ on anything. With regards to innovation, the topic of this post, that’s absolutely NOT what I’m saying. If you read the full post, you’ll see where I specifically name two specific areas where government policy has an effect:
Policy may be able to point a segment of innovation in roughly the direction of some technological problem whose solution the policymakers consider would be socially useful. Policy may also be helpful in assuring that the fruits of innovation are enjoyed with prejudice towards the many instead of the few — for example, by means of regulation that encourages competition to produce lower-priced computer products for volume distribution and thus passes along innovation gains to consumers, while discouraging monopoly behavior or collusion to hoard Moore’s Law-driven gains by means of outsized margins that would not be possible in a legitimately competitive environment.
Batman’s post office link is too good.
No, this is what you get when you huff glue.
Why, that’s a rather personal question!
Car MPG hasn’t shown the same pattern, from what I remember, and neither has spaceflight, and neither has the development of treatments for Alzheimer’s disease (quantify that however you like). To misappropriate a theory, Moore’s Law is an example of gradualism in a punctuated-equilibrium sort of world.
Heinlein wrote an essay some time in the 1970s in which he plotted the maximum speed attained by human beings as a function of time, pointed to its asymptotic rate of increase, and confidently predicted that we would pass the speed of light some time before 2000.
Welcome to the Singularity!
The Goddamn Batman’s Taking The Batplane, Ain’t Got Time For A Fast Train, Lonely Days Are Gone, He’s A-Comin’ Home, The Catwoman Wrote Him A Letter
Best Alex Chilton tribute ever.
Megan apparently doesn’t realize Canada and other countries make significant advances in medical science, and health care has been public for decades. Government usually funds much of this R&D. It would be interesting to know how much R&D in health the US government funds.
And where does Megan pull 80% from? Straight out of her ass is where.
I went to the post office today to mail our wedding invitations.
Not the free-enterprise alternatives? I am shocked.
Car MPG hasn’t shown the same pattern, from what I remember, and neither has spaceflight, and neither has the development of treatments for Alzheimer’s disease (quantify that however you like). To misappropriate a theory, Moore’s Law is an example of gradualism in a punctuated-equilibrium sort of world.
If you plot “speed of human carrying vehicles” from 1800 (fast sailing ship) to 1970 (Saturn V) you do get something that looks exponential, and in fact predicts that we really ought to have warp drive by now. Actually, most technologies look exponential at the beginning, but then they mature asymptotically and wind up looking like an S. Semiconductors haven’t flattened yet, because of heroic efforts and LOTS and LOTS of money, but as others have pointed out, there are quantum limits looming that may force people to look in new directions.
There might be something to McArdle’s claim, but I don’t say that to praise her. Medical research is hard. The reason we don’t have a cure for cancer, or AIDS, or Alzheimer’s, or MS, or diabetes, or even the common bloody cold is not that there are not thousands of absolutely brilliant people working tirelessly (and spending lots of taxpayer dollars) on them, it’s that they are very, very hard problems.
And solving them is NOT what pharmaceutical companies are for. It would be suicide for a company to try to cure Alzheimer’s for example, because you could spend literally billions of dollars and have nothing to show for it. Corporate R&D money goes into developing things that work, which means one of two things. (1) Paying commercialization costs for something that has already been proven to work in the laboratory and (2) Developing “me too” versions of other things that work (Cialis v. Viagra; recent SRIs v. Prozac; and so on) that you can patent and sell for outrageous prices until somebody knocks it off.
One of the ways to “bend the cost curve” down in health care is to prescribe the old, cheap, but basically effective drug; instead of the new, almost identical drug the ad last night told you to ask your doctor about. It would not surprise me if, assuming US medical costs start falling, this leads to a reduction in class (2) “innovation” from pharmaceutical companies.
Class (1) innovation, which is the kind we really need, will not stop as long as governments keep funding medical science. Every time somebody in a lab coat comes up with something that might work, somebody with money will show up to fund its commercialization. I predict that this will occur no matter what Obama says insurance companies can and can’t do.
I see Smut Clyde got to the warp drive before me. [Kirk]Got to…learn…to type…faster.[/Kirk]
No, this is what you get when you huff glue.
Oh, shit.
Do you happen to know how much glue one must huff before becoming this incredibly stupid? I just want to know to satisfy my…um…curiosity.
Got to…learn…to type…faster.
I plotted my maximum typing speed against age and discovered that in 2003 my fingers all turned into tachyons.
<i.Megan apparently doesn’t realize Canada and other countries make significant advances in medical science,
Megan is merely heeding the market forces that motivate her to remain unaware of these things.
OT and all, but Erick Erickson says that if any young government punk tries coming to his house to take his census, he’ll go all WOLVERINES! and murder them in the face with his wife’s shotgun.
– By 2030, there’s an 100% chance that McMegan will no longer be employed as a columnist and nobody will give a shit what she thinks or what she wrote — and this will noticeably slow the rate of innovative snark on the blogosphere where a mini industry has erupted as a response to McMegan’s dimwitted nonsensical glibertarian Randroid predictions and diarrhea of the mouth.
a mini industry has erupted as a response to McMegan’s dimwitted nonsensical glibertarian Randroid predictions and diarrhea of the mouth.
There was a field behind my childhood home that had a remarkable infestation of snakes in the southeast corner. The snakes bred like bunnies on the large population of mice, who swarmed several big grain sacks that had been abandoned several years before.
The internet is like that, only the grain never seems to run out.
Guess we know who carries the shells in that family, now don’t we?
Oh, and for the record: Nice fucking hire, CNN.
moore’s law violates Tacitus Voltaire’s Iron Law of Predictions:
“whatever you predict, that’s what won’t happen”
The reason we don’t have a cure for cancer, or AIDS, or Alzheimer’s, or MS, or diabetes, or even the common bloody cold is […] that they are very, very hard problems.
Corporate R&D money goes into […] (2) Developing “me too” versions of other things that work.
Have you read Le Fanu’s “The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine”? A wrong-headed book in many ways, but he argues that medical innovation is reaching a plateau anyway because the easy, serendipitous drug discoveries have all been made (antibiotics, neuroleptics, etc.), and pharmaceutical research all follows the least-patentable-difference approach of variations on existing themes.
OT and all, but Erick Erickson says that if any young government punk tries coming to his house to take his census, he’ll go all WOLVERINES! and murder them in the face with his wife’s shotgun.
Yet ANOTHER overt threat of violence, for which the dumbfuck issuing the threat will not be held to justice. I guess law enforcement is betting that Irksome is really a giant pussy who stands a better chance of shooting himself with his own gun than some poor census worker just doing his or her job.
You know, I remember the super patriotic G. Gordon Liddy refering to his “wife’s” gun collection because he was a felon and thus banned from the possession of firearms. (Even though the idiot had to know that being in his home and within his reach constitutes protection)…
Maybe we’re looking at the same thing here?
constitutes
protectionIt’s someone’s nap time…
moore’s law violates Tacitus Voltaire’s Iron Law of Predictions:
“whatever you predict, that’s what won’t happen”
It also violates Mr. McAfee’s speech about talkin outcha ass!
By 2030, there’s an 100% chance that McMegan will no longer be employed as a columnist and nobody will give a shit what she thinks or what she wrote.
Why wait until 2030 when I can refuse to give a shit about her now?
It’s okay for Megan to pull the 80% prediction thing out of her ass; she’s always got her trusted “such is the nature of blogging” and “it wasn’t a statistic, it was a hypothetical” excuses to fall back on. If those won’t work, it’ll simply be a matter of you misunderstanding her point.
Surely Urk Urksum will soon explain that he shouldn’t really be held to account for something he said a long, long, long time ago, eons measured in hours and shit.
Also, I’m impressed by the stupidity of Urk Urksum’s readers who would even believe for a moment that blowing off the Census would get you captured and sent to jail.
The Census has been going on for, I dunno, at least a year or two, and the ACS, for like, over 8 months or maybe even longer, and I don’t think there’s much of a history of people getting arrested.
You know, libraries keep records of people with overdue books and most people with such a late fee don’t seem to get caught up in black helicopter sweeps of SWAT teams blasting through the front door and tossing flash grenades in the den in pursuit of the Gubmit Liberry’s $2.75.
, it’ll simply be a matter of you misunderstanding her point
Which will devolve into libz is da real sexists. Lookit how they jump all over Megz! Then will come the alpha dogz to the rescue of poor lil megz, complete with idle threats, and finally, accusations that we really do it because we want her…
In short, we’re all sexist, pervy douchebags for not letting Megz get away with being an uninformed Chicken Little twunt.
I was thinking that maybe Georgia had barred him from possessing firearms due to the self-evident mental illness.
Also, this is the towering intellect that wanted to abolish the police force because they were talking about unionizing, yes? Bet the cops would just love to respond to that call.
“Hey, you had your chance, it’s my turn to tase him in the nuts!”
Look, just because Megan McArdle knows nothing, lies, and simply spews loads of bullshit from made-up statistics is no reason she shouldn’t be treated as an important intellectual voice on the American scene.
After all, except for working in different media with more editing, what the fuck does George Will offer different?
You know, libraries keep records of people with overdue books and most people with such a late fee don’t seem to get caught up in black helicopter sweeps of SWAT teams blasting through the front door and tossing flash grenades in the den in pursuit of the Gubmit Liberry’s $2.75.
It would make returning books worth it, though.
Of course, there’s the point that the kind of idjits who would go all WOLVERINGZ!! don’t use the liberry to begin with, either ’cause they carry unholy secular filth or they’re Pigmanoids who figure they’re rich enough to buy whatever they want to read.
You’ve never heard of the Library Police?
*shudder*
OT and all, but Erick Erickson says that if any young government punk tries coming to his house to take his census, he’ll go all WOLVERINES! and murder them in the face with his wife’s shotgun.
This is just fabulous.
As someone who hopes to earn a little extra scratch as a census field worker I really, really appreciate Erk’s helpful comments and instructions to the retard community that constitutes those who take him seriously.
I was thinking that maybe Georgia had barred him from possessing firearms due to the self-evident mental illness.
HAHA! Yes, following that “pizza guy incident”–I remember now.
I don’t care if 1000 people die penniless, suffering deaths if 1001 people become capable of taking care of their own needs—with dignity– without relying upon other people’s contributions and government overhead.
That is just a perfect summations of their worldview.
No concerns about actual human beings … no worries about thousands who will die horrific deaths as a result of their policies … not a second thought about basic human decency. It’s all about the money. Period.
And if they or their own are one of the 1000, well… THEN they have no problem sucking at evil government’s tit, but close it off for everyone else when they are done dammit!!
one would have to pre-suppose the dominance of non-republican government in the next twenty years for this to be remotely plausible
“Guns, Germs & Steel” has a great explanation. Basically that competition between cultures is what pushes technological innovation – and that this competition was aided by geographical boundaries which kept cultures separate.
1. Europe had a later start, but was able to pursue and push innovation because natural geographic separation meant greater difficulty for instituting monopolistic control.
Another J seems to be saying that innovation is stifled whenever a strong patent system can be enforced that allows vested interests to monopolise particular resources or technologies.
This is unpossible.
When my brother first found out about percentages in grade school, he would throw them around like this. 50% this, 90% that. He grew out of it.
Thanks for the serious post about innovation, it was quite interesting.
As someone who hopes to earn a little extra scratch as a census field worker
Census workers get free scratches? Wait until the cats hear about this.
Census workers get free scratches? Wait until the cats hear about this.
And all the mice we can catch.
I don’t care if 1000 people die penniless, suffering deaths if 1001 people become capable of taking care of their own needs—with dignity– without relying upon other people’s contributions and government overhead.
What if 1001 people die penniless, suffering deaths and 1000 people are capable of taking their own needs? Also, is half of humanity being wiped out each year or each generation? Because a 50% cut in the worker/consumer base is bad for small businesses.
Moore’s Law obviously doesn’t count because Michael Moore is fat.
Comment on Redstate:
They’re putting their *heads* together to figure out a way to manipulate the census results by returning them in some areas, not returning them in others…I’m reminded of a cartoon…
“Wile E. Coyote: Super Genius”
Michael Moore is fat.
But Julianne is hot–that skews the results, no?
“Wile E. Coyote: Super Genius”
Unless I am mistaken, the job I will be doing is to go out and find the people who have not filled out the census and mailed it in. Then I ask them questions that duplicate those asked on the form.
“Delivery for Wile E. Coyote, from ACME Rocket Skate Company.”
If I (and enough like-minded conservatives) do not return the census, my city of New York will be under-counted and, thus, under-represented and under-funded.
Hrm, I wonder if DHS money is allocated by census results.
Nice that they feel like manipulating congressional district population counts is more important than say…getting an accurate count so that representation is FAIR and CORRECT.
Looch; Avoid the color blue at all costs! Hope you’re safe through this!
Hrm, I wonder if DHS money is allocated by census results.
No, it is allocated by Republican % of the vote. That is why grain silos in Nebraska get funding, but not NYC.
Hrm, I wonder if DHS money is allocated by census results.
I’m pretty sure that damn near every federal, state, county and municipal service is put together from census data.
And if they or their own are one of the 1000, well… THEN they have no problem sucking at evil government’s tit, but close it off for everyone else when they are done dammit!!
Well, yeah, but that’s because when they look for government support, it’s because they’ve fallen on hard times through no fault of their own…actually, they probably wouldn’t have lost the job if it weren’t for all the damned regulations and taxes and affirmative action police and whatnot.
On the other hand, when THOSE PEOPLE go on government support, it’s because they are shiftless and idle and their culture encourages laziness.
It all makes sense, if you are a racist asshole.
fallen on hard times
through no fault of their ownbecause of crushing liberal taxes to fund welfare queen Cadillacs and crack.Fixed to properly convey the depravity of conventional conservative
wisdompsychosis.Nice that they feel like manipulating congressional district population counts is more important than say…getting an accurate count so that representation is FAIR and CORRECT.
Hopefully it’s just more Going Galt-ish wankering on their part, but since not responding to the census is something that can be accomplished by “not doing something”, it’s got a lot better potential to happen than something that requires action since the average wingnut is a big ball of intertia anyhow.
In any case, it’s stupid, shallow, childish and will ultimately be counterproductive, so it’s right up their alley.
Looch; Avoid the color blue at all costs!
Right! Wear pink.
For the 1990 census I was visited by a census worker. I was young and had misplaced and/or forgotten about the census form, so somebody showed up one day (and I lived way the fuck out in the country at the time too) and was very pleasant about asking me the questions, filling out the form, and leaving. Very simple, very convenient, actually. (Note who was preznit at the time and that I was just as rabidly liberal as I am now, and I wasn’t protesting the census because of “oh noes the ebel gubmint gwine git meh!” — I was just lazy and/or careless or both.)
Why the fuck are these people so scared by this?
I should probably just self-fixxor that to “Why the fuck are these people so goddamn scared of everything?”
I know I lose a job a week cuz of those damn regulations and affirmative action!
I should probably just self-fixxor that to “Why the fuck are these people so goddamn scared of everything?”
I have a theory. They’re afraid of everything for the same reason that dogs are terrified of vacuum cleaners, despite the vacuum demonstrate (at least once a year in my apartment) that they are completely harmless. The sound provokes a response. Similarly, everything the federal government does has GOT to be bad. Except fight wars n junk.
My dog goes absolutely apeshit over the vacuum. Attacks it and bites the hose and everything. (painful VPR)
If that’s what the teatards are like, Looch is gonna be in for some fun.
Hee hee–OT, but too funny not to share:
The fact is, libraries are socialist and take money from me to buy books and fund programs that are left leaning and biased. Libraries never buy books by conservatives because they hate America, they are all on the Saul Alinsky plan.
I buy my own books and only share with them with those I can trust. I get my other information from Fox News and the unbiased part of the internet, so I do not need libraries.
Hey Gary, lookin good, baby. Can I suck your dick?
Private industry only innovates if a buck can be made off of it. Even more importantly, private industry will not innovate if there is a significant risk that they might lose a buck off of it.
And just as importantly, if private industry feels that an innovation from a rival will take money from them, they will try to quash it. A lot of innovative space is locked down by protective patents that are not being used to innovate, but are instead being used to prevent rival innovation.
Note that Citizens Against Legalizing Marijuana = CALM
Libraries across the nation will shelve my book-length closet drama, Chimpy McHitlerburton: White House Party 3.
Tagline: “It’s the Socialest!”
I just assumed that “impose” had the same meaning it does in the health care debate: “reluctantly passed by Congress in response to widespread public outrage over the status quo.”
Off topic, but on tangent…..
What does it say about McMegan and McMegan’s glibertarian Randroid theories of economics that I pay nothing to read her, yet pay to read those who lampoon her gibberish.
If a McMegan goes Galt in the blogosphere and nobody is around to not read it, does it destroy teh economy?
Note that Citizens Against Legalizing Marijuana = CALM
I notice that, besides the teabonics, their one post has this headline:
Man Crashes 13 Times – Says He Was High on Pot
Kraken, if they want to start comparing accidents caused by alcohol-impaired vs. marijuana-impaired drivers, methinks they’re gonna have a hard time winning their argument.
Kraken, if they want to start comparing accidents caused by alcohol-impaired vs. marijuana-impaired drivers, methinks they’re gonna have a hard time winning their argument.
That certainly won’t stop them. They’ll take the few examples they can find and make up a whole bunch more. I can see it now, by the year 2030, 80% of all crashes will be caused by drivers impaired by marijuana…
Will no one think of the children???!!!????
I feel a blog entry coming on…
I feel a blog entry coming on…
It helps if you shut your eyes and squeeze hard.
It helps if you shut your eyes and squeeze hard.
Last time I did that I had an accident…
Moore’s Law brings in many irrelevant factors, one of which is that there is little or no government involvement with the IT industry.
Surely a better challenge would be just to look at a country that has had socialised medicine for the last thirty years, and work out if it’s had any influence on medical innovation, or some other metric.
for one thing, bayer is a german firm. grep-ing randomly about the innertubes doesn’t immediately turn up anything to support mcgargle’s assumption – quite the opposite
Will McMegan post her response on an Internet developed by the private sector? And will they publish their RFC and API analogues?
The fact is, all of these so called liberal facts prove nothing. Socialism has never caused innovation, only sloth and waste and laziness, and causes the productive among us to withdraw our talents and services. The American Free Enterprise System drives all drug research and innovation whilte teh rest of the world leaches from us. And yet the liberal global intelligentia calls US the worst country in the world, while, yeah, right.
Yes, Gary, I concur.
Libraries never buy books by conservatives because they hate America
Hmmm…It’s getting hard to tell. If it’s posting false “facts” that can be refuted by anybody with access to a library (ie: the entire reading public), does that make it more likely to be real Gary or fake Gary?
Here are two data points that relate to the original claim. (1) I got Liberal Fascism from the library of a publicly funded Canadian university. Reading it to poke fun, I could justify. Funding Goldberg’s lying slacker habit, I could not justify. (2) While looking in the same publicly funded university library for books about Leo Strauss, the books that said Strauss was a monstrous authoritarian were outnumbered 4:1 by the books that said Strauss was just a harmless philosopher and only antisemites disagree.
I think that is sufficient evidence to rebut the claim that libraries never buy books by conservatives, but I just report. You decide.
BTW, to Smut Clyde:
Have you read Le Fanu’s “The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine”?
I haven’t read it, but thanks for the recommendation.
the fact is
Patents are particularly important in the pharmaceutical sector as a means of protection and patent statistics therefore measure part of technological innovation, although they should never be used as the sole indicator of innovation, partly because results can be biased by defensive patenting in which companies compete to patent similar chemical compounds. Table 2 gives the share of all US pharmaceutical patents by the nationality of the applicant. Both Germany and the UK show a substantial rise in patenting in the late 1970s and early 1980s followed by a decline since the mid-1980s. The EU share has been falling since a peak in the late 1970s.
Another measure of innovation in the pharmaceutical sector is the number of launches of new chemical entities (NCEs) and the number of products among the 50 top-selling prescription drugs. Both Germany and France have launched a relatively large number of new drugs, but in 1990 German firms had only five and French firms none of the major sellers. In contrast the UK has had fewer launches of NCEs but 12 top-sellers. This compares with 27 top-sellers from the US and six from Switzerland.
To summarise the results so far, the US is the strongest player in the pharmaceutical industry. It is a significant exporter and has the largest share of the 50 top-selling drugs. In Europe, the UK has had the greatest success, while the performance of Germany has declined over time. France and Italy have a strong R&D performance but have failed to develop any of the top-selling drugs. These trends at the country level are also reflected at the firm level, where the rank of German firms among the world’s 20 largest pharmaceutical firms by sales has slipped, while British firms have moved up.
For the 20 largest R&D spending pharmaceutical firms, there is little correlation between measures of innovation such as R&D spending, patenting, the number of new drugs under development (in R&D), or the number of top-selling drugs, except for a positive correlation between R&D intensity and the number of new drugs as a percentage of sales. Six EU firms are among the 20 largest firms in the world in terms of R&D expenditures on pharmaceuticals. Data on R&D, patents, and drugs under development are given in Table 3 for these six firms plus, for comparison, the American firm Merck. The relationship between R&D intensity and the number of top-selling drugs depends on the firm’s current strategy and the success of its past R&D. Some firms with very high R&D intensities, such as BI (Boehringer Ingelheim) have no drugs among the top 50 while Merck has a relatively low R&D intensity and ties with Glaxo for the largest number of top-selling drugs. This illustrates how a high R&D intensity is not necessarily a sign of innovative success. Instead, it can mark an attempt to move to a virtuous cycle in which R&D leads to a high number of successful products.
The large number of drugs that are being developed under license is not a sign of weakness in innovation, but is related to the trend for large firms to ally themselves with small dedicated biotechnology firms that do not have the knowledge to take drugs through the clinical trial process.
It is worth emphasising the importance of companies to innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. The infrastructure and environment of a country may be conducive to innovation, as it appears to be for the UK which has attracted both foreign firms and allowed domestic firms to grow, but each company has its own profile of innovation.
http://cordis.europa.eu/eims/src/eims-r32.htm
conclusion: the fact is, facts are boring and full of details, and hard to hit other people over the head with
Louis, you and Gary might be on to something!
sloth
ai haz it
Next thing we know Gary will complaining that Postmodernism and Indian cuisine have inherent liberal biases.
So by 2030, there’s an 80% chance that Big Pharma will have decided to quit paying more than any other industry in the country to lobby Congress? Or an 80% chance that those Congressmen will decide to spit Big Pharma’s cock out of their mouths?
and causes the productive among us to withdraw our talents and services.
Assumes facts clearly not in evidence.
Off-topic, but a good link to PJTV;
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/the-war-on-radical-islam-can-be-won-the-war-on-terror-cannot/2/
with the gold going to this sentence at the end;
A sinner saved. Hallefrigginlujah! It’s only the exact same argument liberals have been making for nine frickin years, while the Bush government fought elections tooth and nail in Venezuela, Haiti and Palestine while praising Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s three-decade president, as a model of moderate democracy.
He does raise an interesting question. Could the islamists win in an open intellectual forum (democracy) against the rivals currently running their countries? Don’t know, but if they focus on the many ways in which the current governments have let down their people – and allying with the United States and Israel as they gleefully murder thousands of innocents in Iraq, Lebanon and Gaza – I suspect they could score many points regardless of the fact their alternative isn’t so hot.
(Anyone worried about the possibility of the right wing turning soft will be heartened to read the many comments severely berating Mr. Mauro for his irresponsibility in believing that sand niggers have the same right to democracy as our enlightened selves).
Hey Mark D,
They’re convinced beyond all logic and reason that they are somehow immune to losing their jobs, or being denied coverage for insurance, or needing help from anyone, at any time, for anything. And that speaks to an abhorrent type of arrogance.
This is called white privilege. Whites are seemingly immune to losing their jobs, being denied coverage, or needing help. The scaffolding of America is such that if any malady does befall a privileged cracker a systemic benefit of some sort will swoop in and make their failure invisible (rich white people are “too big to fail”). Often, this is government programs that they won’t even notice as such (cobra, fmla), while they wait for white privilege to work its magic (being handed a new job from a similarly privileged in-network acquaintance, rich parents, friendly hard-luck media coverage).
So Megan can’t buy the stamps she wants to buy. At the Post Office. Maybe I’m naive, but I doubt the accuracy of this statement.
Moore’s Law brings in many irrelevant factors, one of which is that there is little or no government involvement with the IT industry.
Quite, and that’s the easiest response to D.’s argument. The government fiddles with healthcare in all sorts of ways, for better or for worse, but there’s nothing saying that IT must produce THIS product by THIS date, or that it will reimburse THIS price and no more. Whether all of this matters is a more complicated argument, but it’s hard to imagine that it doesn’t.
So Megan can’t buy the stamps she wants to buy. At the Post Office. Maybe I’m naive, but I doubt the accuracy of this statement.
Well…you *can* go to the Post Office and end up with some crazy person who doesn’t know what s/he’s doing and can’t be fired because of the usual civil service deal. Some years ago, I had to explain to such a person that, yes, there was such a thing as a flat rate envelope; that delivery confirmation was in fact available for such a shipment; and that the price was this-and-such (which I read off the sign above her head). In my more cynical moments, I believe that conservatives comprise people who encountered such an individual and falsely generalized, while liberals comprise people who encountered someone far more competent but nonetheless made the same false generalization.
Quite, and that’s the easiest response to D.’s argument. The government fiddles with healthcare in all sorts of ways, for better or for worse, but there’s nothing saying that IT must produce THIS product by THIS date, or that it will reimburse THIS price and no more. Whether all of this matters is a more complicated argument, but it’s hard to imagine that it doesn’t.
The government doesn’t intervene in IT? Uhm, ARPANET? NASA? Cryptology?
Granted the form is different and if anything the government is bolstering and supplementing technology innovation, but they’re in the space, and the classic libertarian position on that is supposed to be that every dollar of government investment in research is crowding out a real dollar that would be better invested by some rational actor seeking to maximize their gulchitude.
Also, glibbies like McMegan decry corporate taxation, regulation of capital markets, labour laws and so forth as all hampering private company activity so all the technology companies participating to make Moore’s law a reality would be affected by all these things. In theory Intel should have found it easier to raise capital after Reagan began the big deregulation push and taxes on capital gains decreased, they should have found it easier to operate after various employee protections were weakened and they could kick the crap out of their staff. So DA is not off base that Moore’s law might have been expected to accelerate once Reagan’s era got into the swing of things.
I think the key here is that “innovation” is just such a nebulous concept that is so difficult to measure in any empirical way. Moore’s law is at least one such item that could be graphed to compare its progress against various broad government schemes. Otherwise Megan can claim that “innovation” decreased and make anecdotal claims and there’s really no way to know what would have happened.
Thanks, TF. You are explaining my point pretty much the way I was hoping to do it the first time around. I wanted to make it clear that irregardless of all the other factors that we look at to form complex opinions, we DO have this one data set — Moore’s Law’s accuracy over a full half century — that suggests that ‘various broad government schemes’, as TF puts it, had little or no effect on its measurement of the ‘rate of innovation’ in semiconductors.
Which again, was Megan’s formulation that she was predicting against, vis-a-vis HCR’s potential effect on innovation in medicine. I would literally LOVE her to show us a countermanding example.
There is a funny little wrinkle in McMegs argument. Basically she has to posit the market as being incredibly weak and sensitive in the face or government policy while Aristophanes is positing a strong robust market that will innovate regardless of what the pointy heads try to do.
Normally libertarians take the robust market thesis, so it is a bit weird to see McMegs defending the fragile market position.
Another J seems to be saying that innovation is stifled whenever a strong patent system can be enforced that allows vested interests to monopolise particular resources or technologies.
That’s not quite what I’m saying.
More precisely, that innovation gets stifled whenever one group of people develops enough power that they can stop ideas *entirely*, or stall them enough that their effect is negated.
While the patent system can be used to do this, a more apt example would be what happened to Tucker cars in the US after World War II. Rather than compete with a better car, the Big 3 basically tied Tucker up in court and “somehow” his Tucker’s production facilities were burned down by “random troublemakers”.
All of which is supposed to be impossible under capitalism, because completely unregulated corporate power always and only produces awesomeness.
Jesus, NO – does that make me the TRUE glibertarian? Everybody was right … I really am Dan Riehl!
Seriously, though, I think that ‘the market’, as you put it, is a red herring. Truthfully, I feel that I’m playing the historian, or perhaps the archaeologist, making the case that the fossil record suggests that we humans are pretty well decorated in developing progressively better tool-making skills. Regardless of whether our social organization is hunter-gatherer, feudal, oligarchal or quasi-democratic.
But contra-glibertarians, I’d also suggest that we have not been so good at distributing the fruits of our innovative capacity in as egalitarian a way as we have the capacity for. We can do better in that regard. It would be healthy and beneficial to our species to get better at that. That, I think, is what separates me from Megan, at the end of the day.
Gaaaaah, you said irregardless now I know you really are Dan Reihl. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irregardless
The relationship between R&D intensity and the number of top-selling drugs depends on the firm’s current strategy and the success of its past R&D. Some firms with very high R&D intensities, such as BI (Boehringer Ingelheim) have no drugs among the top 50 while Merck has a relatively low R&D intensity and ties with Glaxo for the largest number of top-selling drugs. This illustrates how a high R&D intensity is not necessarily a sign of innovative success. Instead, it can mark an attempt to move to a virtuous cycle in which R&D leads to a high number of successful products.
This overview annoys me because of the bollox it makes of the baseline the fact of the matter is that it is not the fact that you have an exiciting new product that is the factor but if it will sell in a large market that decides its success. Marketing plays way too large a part in what drugs get brought thru to sale. limiting themselves no?
But yeah McMEeee! cant consider items that don’t include herself either directly or through her sadly limited imagination so anything contradicting that premise is like totally Wrong.
AJ – as I recall, Diamond makes a similar point to your Tucker car example with regards to Chinese exploration at the beginning of the European colonial era. The Chinese, it seems, were positioned at the start of the ‘Age of Exploration’ to beat the Europeans to many new lands (noting that these were not unoccupied lands, just places where superior tech and germs could be relied upon to butcher the natives). By the 12th and 13th centuries, they’d already sent their junks to far-flung lands that the Portuguese had yet to even dream of visiting.
But the Chinese, having a more centralized government than any of the competing European explorer states, ran into a problem. Namely, the emperor of the time decided, somewhat quixotically, to halt further exploration because he saw it as a threat. That served to halt all Chinese exploration of the ‘New World’.
Conversely, because European states at the time had no central authority issuing wide-ranging rules that would be obeyed, had any of the individual European exploring states decided to stop exploring, other states would have continued with that endeavor and made up for the theoretical dipshit Emperor’s decree. Hence, Europe, by its decentralized nature, was better positioned to take advantage of the crucial couple centuries that netted it enormous new lands and resources than was China.
Sheesh – but I did that just to maintain my cover. Irregardless of all the cognoscenti who are on to my little game.
Universities, though, still produce a ton of research, and there are bunches of people working on drugs to do this and that, which often spin off and out into companies. Big fucking deal for the private sector regardless of Moore’s Law ttype theorizing.
Don’t worry Meggerz. They’re just jealous of you and me because we’re part of the new Smart Set. Was anyone in the Smart Set fat and smelly? No? Sorry, Yglesias, you can’t join.
Ezra – point taken. But can you tell Megan to at least make a show of looking presentable for the cameras? I don’t know if you had just read the meter at your Malibu beach house right before her recent ‘diavlog’ with Diane Sawyer, but really, would a fucking hairbrush kill her before going on national TV?
Fuck this noize. I’m going out drinking. Happy Good Friday to ye all, b’god.
Related: OH NO!
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/02/great-story-on-legal.html
SM – somehow that story reminds me of attempts by Big Aggro (Monsanto, etc.) trying to patent the seed genomes for assorted food crop species in tropical countries. Bullying is all it is … ‘might makes right’ via the patent office.
Yup.
Yesterday my cow of ill omen Burly died pre-emptively. She fought that lobotomized crucian carp but couldn’t last. My question is to Zeus… Why did it have to be my Burly?
While I don’t think the application of Moore’s Law quite works here, I will say this: Megan McArgleBargle is a total fraud. She’s just another of the recent crop of careerist positionites (see also pretty much everybody ymockt here on Sadly, from Ross Funnelcake in the Inquisition’s corner, over to Eric The Unready as CNN’s sympathy fuck) that have found a sinecure as members of the “well of course that’s how it is” chorus that provides harmony whenever somebody higher up in the food chain of unbridled greed and hatred decides to ass-launch a new benchmark in the selfish asshole sweepstakes.
She’s a genuine nobody, as with the rest of them, male and female alike: unattractive, uninteresting, of middling intelligence and modest energies, but blessed with insatiable ambition — not to accomplish anything important or exciting, but just to have everybody notice them. These people as a class are lazy, intellectually dishonest, and totally untrustworthy. Rely i=on these nouveau intellectuals? You’d be better off trying to fuck a hyena in the ass with your balls covered in peanut butter.
The worst thing about Megalodon, other than everything, is how very much like the rest of the Kewl Kids she is. They run in a pack. None of them know how to drink, or how to comport themselves in social situations that weren’t engineered to welcome them. Their entire oeuvre is a series of quickly ginned-up notions that have, of course, been thoroughly explored in the past, and reliably debunked by history, but they don’t know any of this. They’ve been anointed as brilliant thinkers by a bunch of spineless entertainment bureaucrats trying to beat last year’s media polls, and because they’re not particularly clever or insightful, they go ahead and bend to accept the laurel crown.
I think the only thing that distinguishes this particular dishrag from the others is that Ms. M has a certain guilelessness that K-Lo, for example, lacks. She’s locked in a mental space most of us associate with sophomore year in college, a time of prancing around on heavily trodden paths and finding it all new, a time of finding our own callowness to be, rather, a fresh and unspoiled eye.
That said, I hope her asshole explodes.
I think you’re missing the point about Moore’s Law. If you want to use it, you have to show why it’s a useful proxy for the possible future of health care. You’re leaving the gate open for someone to find a proxy in the IT world that was adversely affected by government intervention, and to claim that that is more analogous.
If Moore’s Law is not affected by environmental factors, all that shows is that it’s an unusal phenomenon, not that it’s indicative of anything in general, or has any predictive power. You also have to show why the IT industry is similar to the health care industry.
I can’t understand why no-one picked up my main point about simply doing a comparative analysis of countries that have had socialised medicine programs and those that haven’t.
The Moore’s Law challenge just seems like a very crude debating point.
D.A. that was kind of my fault. There are only so many mirrors at my fam’s beach house and I was using them all at the time.
Moore’s Law is not a “law” at all. It is the opinion of an Intel executive who wants to hype his product. The calculus of technique is that technology will grow geometrically as we “progress”. This simple-minded theory would be obliterated in a matter of seconds with that other child of high tech, thermonuclear war
If Moore’s Law is not affected by environmental factors, all that shows is that it’s an unusal phenomenon, not that it’s indicative of anything in general, or has any predictive power.
Honestly, this doesn’t make sense to me. To go to the last point first — Moore’s Law DOES have predictive power. Proven predictive. That a prediction about something so specific to the issue at hand — the ‘rate of innovation’ in Megan’s own wording — would actually be in our toolkit, is in fact, important.
You also have to show why the IT industry is similar to the health care industry.
Why? This is ultimately a discussion about a provable or not-provable metric — the ‘rate of innovation’. I have shown that this is measurable and provable by one type of accounting. It is in Megan’s court to show the counter-example that proves her point. I don’t think she can do it.
Too Fucking Spooky:
A drug is discovered in the soil of Easter Island which may cure Alzheimers.
The government doesn’t intervene in IT?
Imagine how much longer it would have taken to develop computers like ENIAC or Colossus or Zuse’s machines , if governments had become involved.
purvis ames – I really don’t know the motivation for Gordon Moore’s enunciation of his eponymous ‘law’. Nor do I particularly care to wade into a semantic discussion of what a ‘law’ is versus a marketing stratagem.
To me, this isn’t really important to the issue at hand. Which is, bluntly, what tools do we have to actually measure what Megan’s talking about, which is ‘the rate of innovation’.
Moore’s Law, marketing tool or not, has been demonstrably effective at predicting one type of ‘the rate of innovation’. The density of circuitry on computer chips has in fact doubled every couple years since he predicted that would happen. That’s kind of astounding, though the superlative nature of the prediction is also not at issue here.
What’s at issue is Megan’s total dearth of evidence for her own prediction.
You’re leaving the gate open for someone to find a proxy in the IT world that was adversely affected by government intervention, and to claim that that is more analogous.
Great. Show us that proxy.
It’s not hugely edifying to just say that some such example might exist without at least trying to tell us what it is.
Okay, Mr. D, point taken, but as I mentioned in my first post, Megan is an idiot and we don’t need any law to prove that.
Well, I do agree with you fully on your ‘Megan is an idiot’ point.
I guess my point is that maybe we haven’t fully convinced enough people of that. I’m getting kinda serious about all this (and believe me, the debate has been invigorating) because I think that sometimes it’s useful to have more than mockery and disdain at our disposal.
Also: PENIS
First mistake; taking anything mcmegan says seriously. She’s the poster child for the disingenuously moronic, gimme mine now position on anything.
Mockery is the most powerful (and non-violent) weapon ever conceived. As a member of the Aristophanes family, you ought to know that.
Good evidence suggests it can be ready for attack in approximately 45 minutes.
Yeah, you’re right. More shorters and mocking xtranorml vids tomorrow … it’s a date.
ObCensus:
I suspect the penalties for threatening a census worker with one’s wife’s shotgun are substantially higher and more likely to be enforced, but you do what you have to do, Erick.
Has it always been thus? Have the vast majority of the columnists who fill the spaces between the advertising in your newspapers and journals always lacked any hard-won training in the subjects on which they pontificated, or any access to inside information (and in passing, if a columnist did have access to special information, then I would prefer to READ THAT rather than the opinions based thereon) — instead being hired for the debating-club sophistry with which they promote their uninformed opinions?* Or was there a Golden Age when columnists were valued for knowing stuff and being right?
If the latter, was there a particular time when subscribers suddenly became happy to read this crap? (I can see why the newspaper publishers prefer to publish the crap, it being cheaper than actual investigative journalism).**
Because as Disraeli famously said, When I want to hear an uninformed but eloquently-defended opinion, then I go down to the pub and listen to myself.
* Of course there are distinctions to be made here between columnists who are professional propagandists for a particular political party, hired because they have name-recognition value or because they bolster the newspaper’s credentials, and who gain their uninformed opinions in an e-mail from head office; and the professional contrarians who don’t care about their opinion so long as it is interestingly different; and the bipartisan bullshit artists. Fortunately it’s not my job to make those distinctions.
** Scholarly reference here to Hesse’s essay on The Age of the Feuilleton.
Has it always been thus?
Yup. I’ve been reading op-ed pp.* since the late ’70s (started innocently enough, long commute pre-
WalkmaniPod, urges to throttle whoever was sitting in front of me had to be curtailed) & it’s always been as partisan (&/or Broderian centrist). By then U.S. snoozepapers were already in decline & looking to economize; during the ’50s & ’60s (more or less) actual investigative journalism was done by nationally-syndicated columnists (& their researchers).Beyond whatever change technology has caused, some say that the Woodward/Bernstein breaking of Watergate led to a surfeit of weenies & assholes deciding journalism would be a keen place to be a weenie & a-hole (See the Ezra Klein who posts here.) which caused too many journalism schools to be opened.
*Hell, I can remember Krauthammer & Ledeen (Per Wikiwiki, TNR is to blame for both these poxes on the body politic.) weighing in on Iran & the hostage crisis (Or perhaps on Iran but post-hostage, but damn close to 30 yrs. ago either way.) in the L. A. Times. Now Pantload’s there on a wkly. basis. Worse or better? You decide.
I remember encountering one of Krauthammer’s essays in the late 70s (in Time IIRC) in which he claimed that America was not torturing enough people. It stuck in my mind for the sheer sociopathy. Even back then he was using the ticking timebomb scenario as his central argument. The man is certainly persistent.
I remember encountering one of Krauthammer’s essays in the late 70s (in Time IIRC) in which he claimed that America was not torturing enough people
The Soviets had a crucial lead in torture victims. We needed to close the Torture Gap to have any hope of prevailing, but that damned Jimmy Carter wouldn’t let us.
Um, I don’t think Moore’s Law is a good example. Biology is just plain harder than physics, because we don’t understand it as well, and there’s more complexity.
Shrinking a chip die might be hard to implement, but the physics are pretty well understood. (It’s getting to the point where the thingies are small enough that it gets weird, but it’s worked well until now.)
I mean, look, when was the last time an integrated circuit went out on the market, sold millions, and then it turned out that not only was the chip not much more effective than random chance would predict, but that it could actually be harmful?
Happens all too often with medicine.
Also, silicon has the advantage that new systems are often built around the new silicon. They aren’t trying to integrate Cell processors with the PDP-10 hardware and software. Medicine and biology don’t have that advantage. They have to work with what we have (our bodies). It’d be a lot easier for medical technology to replicate the advancement rate of IT if companies could produce new medical tech *and* newly designed bodies that work just great with the new tech.
So… bad example.
George said,
If anything capitalism hampers innovation, because the market encourages inventors to make things that are as shoddy as possible in order to keep costs low and profits high.
Also, ask anyone who works in a tech field about “patent trolls”. Once they get finished foaming at the mouth in pure rage, they’ll explain that Patent Trolls are people or corporations who get the patents to interesting new technologies, wait until someone else does the work of making a sellable product that might be infringing on their patent, then swoop in and demand a cut.
And on th4e front of cultural innovation, there’s our absurd copyright laws which guarantee that nothing with Mickey Mouse in it will EVER enter the public domain.
I’m no defender of Ms. McArdle, as is evidenced by the time that I devote to critiquing her arguments on her blog, but the Moore’s Law analogy doesn’t work too well for reasons stated by others here.
That being said, it isn’t particularly difficult to torpedo her arguments vis-a-vis healthcare, as they are so overwrought and based upon basic factual errors that her points are easily dismissed. For example, it’s fairly easy to quantify the substantial amount of pharma innovation that occurs outside the US, in nations that are enslaved by this horrible socialized medicine stuff that threatens to kill us all. Likewise, it isn’t hard to show that her specious claims about US infant mortality rates being calculated differently than they are abroad is false (even if every rightish blogger wants to claim otherwise.) They make a lot of mistakes and it shouldn’t be tough to exploit them.
This Moore’s Law angle is setting yourself up for creating a distraction that benefits her side. They’ll end up using the metaphor against you by arguing its flaws, while simultaneously using it to avoid the more fundamental issue of how their “facts” are often just made up out of whole cloth. You know that they’re relying heavily upon Big Lie tactics that would make Goebbels proud (i.e. making stuff up, then repeating it incessantly), so call them out on it.
Government interventoin in healthcare certainly has not slowed the pace of innovation in Canada, noticeably or otherwise. I compiled a partial list of Canadian healthcare innovations (with links to a more comprehensive list), here: Oh Canada I Stand On Guard For Thee
Also, ask anyone who works in a tech field about “patent trolls”.
And that’s not the only thing impinging on innovation; my understanding from multiple entrepreneurs and VCs is that almost every new business gets sued or threatened with a lawsuit, often more than once, very commonly by the entrepreneur’s last company. The cases are typically weak to non-existent, and often cross the line into illegal business practice, but the big company has the money to be a bully and the new company often doesn’t have the money to fight it. It is a HUGE problem across the board, in every field.
They make a lot of mistakes and it shouldn’t be tough to exploit them.
That would require for MM to accept an invitation to a public debate with a suitably-knowledgeable economist.
I certainly expected more intellectual honesty and less willful ignorance of the relevant facts from a health-care columnist who devotes half of her blogging to her life partnership with a professional astroturfer of phony health-care protests.
Mockery is the most powerful (and non-violent) weapon ever conceived.
Good evidence suggests it can be ready for attack in approximately 45 minutes.
There was a great deal of evidence that Saddam was planning to use dramatic irony against western targets. We are confident that his hidden stockpiles of litotes will eventually come to light and vindicate the decision to invade.
We are confident that his hidden stockpiles of litotes will eventually come to light and vindicate the decision to invade.
I am not unconvinced that you may not be wrong.
Moore’s Law is the classic inductivist turkey. It might get fed tomorrow, or it might get its head cut off.
I’m not here to edify you, I’m just saying why I wouldn’t adopt that approach – it has an inherent vulnerablilty.
By the way, D, you seem to think I’m the enemy. I’m not. I live in Australia, where we’ve had public health care for almost forty years. I just don’t think the Moore’s Law analogy is very helpful. I think there’s a better response. I said what it was.
Ezzthetic – I get where you’re coming from with this:
Surely a better challenge would be just to look at a country that has had socialised medicine for the last thirty years, and work out if it’s had any influence on medical innovation, or some other metric.
Trouble is, I’ve seen what the glibertarians do with this. They say that any success by pharma companies (for example) in countries with socialized medicine is due to the double-plus-good US free market and long patents paying for it via US consumers. This is dumb, but it can tough to show how it’s dumb.
A problem we have given her construction of ‘the rate of innovation’ is that it’s just really tough, I think, to figure out what exactly that rate is in a field like pharma. Cures for ailments don’t just come rolling out of pharma companies like clockwork, as the shrinkage of processor dies do from semi companies.
Okay, fine. So we could easily just say that Megan is pulling something out of thin air and making a prediction that will ultimately be untestable. That would be true.
But I decided to look at it differently, and try to find some ‘rate of innovation’ … any ‘rate of innovation’ really, that was measurable and testable. Hence, Moore’s Law.
And look, I see that many here don’t agree with me, but I think we do something like this all the time in other areas. For example, you would probably agree with me that cricketers of today are better athletes than they were 60 years ago. In the sense that if we pulled a good, intact squad from 1950 out of time and made it play a good squad from 2010, we’d all guess that the 2010ers would win.
But how do we know that? Certainly not because players today score twice as many runs as they did in 1950. In fact, it may be that they scored more runs back then. So stats within cricket itself might not be particularly useful for proving that today’s players are better than yesterday’s.
So instead, we (consciously or unconsciously) extrapolate from a set of stats from a completely different sport. For example, the 100 meter dash, where the WR today surpasses the WR of 1950. This shows that sprinters today are faster, e.g. better athletes, than sprinters of 1950 … and it also shows that it’s pretty likely that cricketers are too. Even though nobody thinks sprinting, which is a pretty simple athletic endeavor, is very similar in kind to cricket, which is a pretty complicated athletic endeavor.
This is what I’m trying to show vis-a-vis Megan and her difficult-to-test prediction regarding the ‘rate of innovation’ in medicine. I’m saying, look, I don’t have any idea what the rate of medical innovation is supposed to look like going forward, neither, I suspect does Megan, because it’s really complicated. While on the other hand, we do have this one measurable rate of innovation — granted it’s way simpler and pertains to a different industry — but the fact that this simpler rate of innovation has pretty much plowed along unchanged for 50 years amidst assorted economic schemes might be interesting and perhaps even instructive as we judge Megan’s claims about a government policy screwing with a rate of innovation.
“..Megan’s total dearth of evidence for her own prediction.”
not a bug; a feature.
Thinking is hard; logic is confusing; pulling half-remembered and made-up-on-the-fly-but-ideologically-correct assertions out of your ass to support the conclusion you started with is easy. The extra-special benefit, of course, is that these Rohrschach-blot columns are pure win: the Right sort of people will see only correct in them (keeping the paychecks coming), while the Wrong sort of people will spend hours of time and reams of virtual ink trying to come to grips with something as concrete and substantial as a Will-o-wisp. And on such nice day, too.
I’ve seen what the glibertarians do with this. They say that any success by pharma companies (for example) in countries with socialized medicine is due to the double-plus-good US free market and long patents paying for it via US consumers.
Well, you have to expect them to offer some sort of rebuttal. Fortunately, there is no shortage of data available that can be used in turn to rebut their claims.
That being said, perhaps part of the problem is that you are hoping to find converts from their side. But you should accept that you won’t. Libertarianism is a small, devoted political cult that is driven by ideology, not by data, wrapped in a pseudo-intellectual package. They have their canned talking points, and they’re resolute enough to stick with them.
To the extent that you want to tangle with them, I’d confine yourself to two goals: (a) to reach the centrists and undecideds who happen to be reading it but who aren’t committed followers themselves and/or (b) to amuse yourself. (I tend to stick to the latter myself.)
The cultists who do most of the posting don’t want to be swayed, no matter what any of us have to say. If you add up the number of frequent respondents, then you’ll see that the number of regulars is actually not that high; you could use your fingers and toes to account for the majority of them.
In that context, do remember that pure libertarianism is really a tiny fringe movement, and that Ms. McArdle and most of her devoted commentators are really pro-corporate Republicans who wish to maintain an illusion of independence. She probably gets more attention than is warranted — she is but one blogger out of a universe of thousands — and you don’t do yourself any favors by serving as her unwitting publicist.
“The Goddamn Batman’s Taking The Batplane, Ain’t Got Time For A Fast Train, Lonely Days Are Gone, He’s A-Comin’ Home, The Catwoman Wrote Him A Letter* said,
April 2, 2010 at 21:42”
I want to take this post out on a date, have sex with it and have a lot of little posts.
Post of the year.
Genomic sequencing (more directly related to healthcare) has been advancing at a rate faster than Moore’s law for the last 2 decades. You can do in 10 days with $50K what took 10 years and $3 Billion dollars 20 years ago. Most of this advance is gov driven through research grants, since there isn’t much profit (yet) in sequencing people’s genomes.
Cricket? ohferfucksakes – you got any murrrkin sports analogies?
Moore’s Law is the classic inductivist turkey. It might get fed tomorrow, or it might get its head cut off.
True. Like Newton’s law of gravity.
But here’s the thing: there’s no middle ground with Moore’s Law which makes it by definition a useful example. It can’t be half right: either it’s wholly right, or a better theory pops up to take its place.
Your inference is that there was no basis in observation or logic to dictate a predictive ability on the part of Moore’s law. True, there wasn’t, on the other hand it has in and of itself become its own evidence, just as Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics will probably be the standards industry use when robots become fairly common.
Why? Because they are achievable, sensible, and take into account enough of the processes involved that they end up being a lot more true than not.
Dr. Cox said,
April 4, 2010 at 19:25
You keep pedalling that tricycle, Sally, and one day you’ll make it to the Kindergarten X-Games.