At least the pharmaceutical companies are hard at work finding new drugs to make your eyelashes grow longer.
In general, folks tend to produce things that other people are willing to pay for. Why should pharma be any different? And why is this wrong?
You want more drugs that save peoples lives? Great! So do I. Here's how we do it.
Make it possible for folks to get rich on drugs that save people's lives. Note - cost controls won't do it (unless we're talking about controlling regulatory costs).
Antibiotics are inherently less profitable than other drugs because doctors try to avoid using new ones so that the bugs don't develop resistance to them. By the time they're freely used, the patent might have expired, as patents of the kidney-killing drugs mentioned in this article have decades ago.
I don't really see a good market-based solution here.
Because having individuals with limited resources independently pursuing their own goals doesn't necessarily maximize overall utility, or even any actual individual's utility. It's entirely possible to have a scenario where, say, nobody would individually pay for something to be researched, but everyone would be willing to chip in a small portion of the cost if everyone else did the same. Since it's difficult to ensure wide-scale cooperation, it doesn't happen and the result is that everyone is worse off.
I don't understand the mindset that sees a problem that, by elementary game theory, doesn't have an optimal outcome reachable by simple self-interest, and proposes that what we need is more self-interest.
If folks would rather spend their money on Viagra than antibiotics....
> It's entirely possible to have a scenario where, say, nobody would individually pay for something to be researched, but everyone would be willing to chip in a small portion of the cost if everyone else did the same.
The problem with that theory is that it doesn't account for the claimed observation that eyelash extenders get funding while antibiotics don't.
So, either the theory or observation is wrong.
> I don't understand the mindset that sees a problem that, by elementary game theory, doesn't have an optimal outcome reachable by simple self-interest, and proposes that what we need is more self-interest.
Are you actually claiming that the vast majority of people have more self-interest in eyelash extenders that antibiotics?
Politicians are likely to nationalize/cost control/otherwise interfere with lifesaving drugs. Standing up to those greedy people trying to make money by preventing people's suffering is just good media exposure.
On the other hand, cost controls for an eyelash extender? Seems less likely.
From a business perspective, why develop something if you are never going to be able to sell it in decent enough quantities to make a profit? Now, you could argue that at some point in the future, that drug will become standard line therapy when all the current front line drugs are completely useless. Unfortunately, by that time the drug is off patent and generic competition will ensure there won't be much profit.
This is a complex situation, and I'm not pretending that there is an easy solution. It seems there are a confluence of regulations and politics that conspire to prevent serious attempts at new antibiotics development. The situation is changing somewhat, and my hope is that once the problem becomes more acute, the necessary incentives will be aligned.
It's already developed, and they don't want to commercialize it, so why not sell the IP to the government or a charity. (The government could even theoretically compel the agreement via eminent domain. Or, the pharmaceutical company could donate the drug to the public domain and take a massive tax write off.)
But all that aside, there is nothing stopping the NIH from starting a research program and developing their own antibiotics (or any academic institution). This happens a bit already, but then it comes time to run the clinical trials and develop the research compound into an actual medicine. This requires expertise and infrastructure that does not exist in the public sector at a sufficient level to get the job done.
(My eyelashes seem to be getting longer as a consequence of getting myself healthier. But I can't imagine anyone wanting me to say "Just spend 10 years working on your basic health instead of using this stuff". It's really not hip to be square.)