Comment by _4ziu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _4ziu | Hacker News Reader

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Unregulated capitalism, their research suggests.

Opioids have few regulations on how much are prescribed. This ties in directly to the healthcare issue.

Private Prisons are run by using prisoners as workers for less than a dollar an hour. This is constitutionally legal. This means there is a financial incentive to imprison people.

Elections are influenced by corporate lobbying. The state works for businesses at least as much as it works for the people, but guess who gets first preference.

Healthcare is based on profit and not on saving lives. Self explanatory and this has been talked about countless times throughout the past 4 years.

Education I don't know much about.

Re: education, I think Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson have got this one right: it's 80% about signaling and conformity, and only 20% educational payload (on average). As with so many bad systems, perverse incentives and social normalization prompts the vast majority of the participants to keep playing along, not despite the inefficiencies of busywork and administrative overhead, but precisely because of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education

http://elephantinthebrain.com/

Aside from the role of unethical opiod producers and marketers (which to be fair does fall under the umbrella of unregulated capitalism) weren't there plenty of preceding examples in Russia and even the USSR with first deaths by alcoholism and then later infamous krokodil deaths? The latter is more small scale addict enterprise even if it is again not exactly regulated capitalism. The point being that the system isn't the direct cause even if it allows it.

I don't argue for that system, I argue for whatever the rest of the world on average seems to be doing since opioids are much less of a problem in countries comparable to the US. The US must be doing something wrong with a lack of regulations in this industry, and the only common factor is unhinged profit-seeking.

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