Supporters of the practice dismiss questions about the free market implications of "needing" federal funding for a practice that is purportedly so promising. My friend Sean Braisted asserts that funding for research represents a market failure . . . I didn't really have an answer for that, though I perceived I was less inclined to believe in market failures than Sean.
Well, today I came across this article ("The Rise of Stem Cell Research") in Reason magazine that bolsters the free-market argument:
"It is a truism among academic researchers and many economists that Federal funding is necessary for basic research and that such funding is perpetually inadequate. However, a 2001 study by Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development researchers found that in fact that higher spending by industry on R&D correlates nicely with higher economic growth rates. In contrast to the academic truisms about the need for Federal funding, the study found that “business‑performed R&D … drives the positive association between total R&D intensity and output growth.”"
3 comments:
From the same study, "non-rivalry and less than full excludability of advances in knowledge mean that there are spillover effects which imply that without policy intervention the private sector would likely engage on less R&D than is socially optimal."
I'll be honest, I didn't read the full study, but I'd imagine that they were looking at all medicines in general. So yes, when you factor in the lil' blue pill and blood pressure medications; the majority of "profit" comes from private industry related R&D. But the sort of "treatments," not necessarily medicines, that could potentially be discovered as a result of embryonic stem cell research, may not have the profit incentives that would be required to ensure that none of the equipment and/or staff used to do the research have in any way been funded by Federal monies.
Bush's ban on funding hampers the potential for discovery in the field of embryonic stem cell research. The medical community is not entirely comparable to the defense community, because in the medical community much of the research done by academics is then shared via peer-reviewed academic papers.
To borrow a theory from your side, the medical research community is irreducibly complex.
It's appropriate to remember on this day, 6 years after Bush ignored 40+ warnings of an impending al Qaeda attack, what his big priority was at the ranch in Crawford that August '01. The stem cell issue.
That should put this issue in perspective.
Yeah, and I'm sure that the most anal retentive president in history was too busy fooling around to do his job. It kind of "puts in perspective" or casts in a different light Clinton's in-the-oval-office shenanigans, though.
But we're having a discussion on "connecting the dots" elsewhere, William. I'd say y'all need to make up your mind about when it is Fascism and when it is "good gov't" to "connect the dots."
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