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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

A great theory but one major flaw. The utility value of most tv and movies comes when they are brand new with quickly diminishing returns afterwards.

Drugs on the other hand have equal utility for their lifetimes (until replaced by something better, which can in some cases take centuries). In fact sometimes a secondary use for a drug is found and its utility goes up.

Entertainment rarely has increasing utility. Even the biggest sleeper hits have a short peak of utility until returning to baseline.

It’s two totally different utility models and I don’t think the cost models are transferable.

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I don't understand how you're measuring.

Hep C medicine has zero utility value for me right now.

And I'm enjoying watching Brooklyn 99 from the beginning right now, because I'd never seen it. My wife is watching series after series on Netflix that are all old.

My daughter is enjoying the entire archive of Disney movies. Snow White is what, 82 years old?

When Incredibles 2 is coming out, you can bet the utility of Incredibles 1 went way up.

That said, I think you're being entirely too specific and literal. It's a bad, clickbait analogy. And? Buy medicine in bulk. Not a huge leap to make.

Maybe because that’s just you, a unique individual.

For a different unique case, such as someone who has Hep C, the utility value for the medicine could literally be everything for the person.

So, if we average the utility value for a whole population, the utility value would actually be pretty high, especially if a lot of people have Hep C.

I'm sorry, can you explain how we "average" the utility?

For me, it has zero value.

For another person, it saves their life, and they would pay literally anything they could.

How do we average that?

My hot take: We can't. Buy medicine in bulk, give it to people for free, progressive taxes to pay for it.

I like your take, but how are we going to enforce progressive taxation? The wealthiest firms escape taxation, at the moment.

I can't pretend the answer is easy, but...

Starting with personal income tax, capital gains, and estate taxes would go a long way.

I think we really need to come up with an International version of the Uniform Commercial Code. And get money out of politics.

We ought to tax wealth instead of income, and tax individuals instead of corporations. The nature of corporate wealth is that the generation of value is disconnected from the generation of cash. It’s impossible to fairly regulate the infinite shell games that result from this. The problem we are trying to fix is inequality of wealth, so we should tax wealth directly and not via proxies like corporate profits.

Yeah, you don't tear down his overall point with your anecdotal, n=1 case. It's the population average not N=1 average, that we care about in public health.

If you think you or one of your loved ones might someday need a blood transfusion I would say that's positive value right there. Even if 100% of infected blood is screened out, Hep C decreases the available supply and that will have consequences downstream.

Drug Patents come with time limits, after which any company can manufacture and sell as generics.

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