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Comment by ridaj | Hacker News Reader

> areas that need it

The premise of capitalism is that enterprising individuals and institutions will respond to the monetary incentive created by these needs.

Could it be that what is unprofitable to treat is maybe not that big of an actual need? Can I argue that I'm happy that there has been no research on feline urinary tract disease as long as human cancer isn't solved yet?

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Putting aside cats, there are plenty of diseases that impact humans which don’t get researched enough due to very rare, e.g. <1 in 100 million people.

> maybe not that big of an actual need Not that big of a need to who? It’s certainly a very big need to the people who suffer from or are dying from rare problems.

> Putting aside cats, there are plenty of diseases that impact humans which don’t get researched enough due to very rare, e.g. <1 in 100 million people.

Sure, and is that a problem? Should we as a society not apportion medical research spend to the most impactful areas? I'm curious to what extent the misalignment of incentives is due to capitalism as opposed to the actual need being lopsided

> It’s certainly a very big need to the people who suffer from or are dying from rare problems.

I totally agree. At the same time society cannot put all of its resources in support of very rare cases at the expense of common issues of similar seriousness

Sometimes fixing rare, obscure bugs others haven't bothered with can lead to massive discoveries. Everybody could be banging their head into the wall because it looks most profitable, maybe you could be the one to crawl through the window instead.

Your premise doesn't really survive the fact that death by starvation, thirst and exposure are still a thing.

The best counterexample I can think of is the unwillingness of drug companies to produce new, narrow-spectrum antibiotics. We're facing a looming crisis of bacterial antibiotic immunity, we know that producing the aforementioned antibiotics will resolve it, but the low profit margins prevent pharmaceutical companies from doing research.

Capitalism pursues profit growth, not human need. There may be some correlation between these two forces but it's obviously not perfect.

Yes this is a more plausible example of needed regulation to align capitalistic incentives on societally beneficial outcomes (vs cat UTI research)

There isn't money in narrow spectrum antibiotics, because there isn't need yet. We don't have infinite resources, so putting effort into a looming, but not yet existing crisis can very easily lead to worse outcomes.

In my (admitedly idealistic view) research is something that a society should fund without the expectation of it always returning a ROI. I dont know what the minimum level of monetary support should be and am aware that it could lead to bad actors. But I dont think capitalism should be the primary motivator for deciding what path research should take. We can always research things in parallel. One might even help the other. But we wont know unless we try it

It’s tricky for both sides to go for a pure capitalist point of view:

- human cancer might never be solved if strong business entities were to rely on the prevalence of cancer

- death of cats might have secundary, tertiary effects that are not clear enough to push businesses to enter the market. We would be looking at the negative impacts without ever realizing what the cause is.

> Human cancer might never be solved if strong business entities were to rely on the prevalence of cancer

Given the amount of money someone with a patent on a cancer treatment or cure would make, it's hard for me to imagine that

You are referring to a technical solution, but the patented miracle cure could be limited to 1% of the patients and never make it to the rest, if for whatever reason it didn't make economical sense to do so. It's a bit of goal pushing, but I wouldn't call that "solving" cancer.

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