September 10, 2012 at 12:30 pm
Austin FraktThis is a FAQ entry. See the main FAQ index for others.
Aaron has done a lot of blogging on big pharma. He emailed me what he thinks is a comprehensive list of his posts to date:
- The majority of research cited in pharma patent applications was done in academic centers, 15% by the industry [chart]
- Don’t we need to pay for innovation?
- How the industry uses patent infringement suits
- Pharma and the free market
- How the industry pays their competitors to keep cheaper generic competition off the shelves
- How much the industry spends on promotion vs. R&D
- The inner workings of the pharmaceutical industry
- How drugs contribute to making the US health system so expensive
- Despite the spending, many people can’t afford to take recommended medications
- The bizarre support for drug importation
- Spreading the blame around for pharmaceutical policy
- Newer drugs aren’t always better
by pcm4 on September 10th, 2012 at 12:21
The link “How much the industry spends on promotion vs. R&D” is not working for me. Tried it a few times.
by Austin Frakt on September 10th, 2012 at 12:43
Fixed! Thanks.
by Floccina on September 11th, 2012 at 11:58
I think that we could live without patent but if we have patent I do not see how we could justify denying it to big Pharma. If what I read is correct patent system does not work well or the way most people assume it works. I would like to see serious patent reform.
by Politics Debunked on May 11th, 2013 at 20:24
Since this is a FAQ I’ll comment here on an old page rather than on the link. I’d suggest some on this blog need to read up on how innovation spreads. One of the links on this page claims “You know what needs no promotion? Awesome new drugs that save lives. ” Try looking up the book “Diffusion of Innovation”, an academic work which points out how even free life saving innovations *don’t* automatically spread quickly, there is resistance to change even to new and better things. Yes, it does vary by culture, but often people vastly overestimate how easy it is. (talk to the many startup companies that failed due to poor marketing despite a great product). Or books on tech marketing like “Crossing the Chasm”, innovations can be costly to spread. Economists need to have more of a grounding in how the business world really works, rather than naive fantasies.
Yes, they may spend too much on marketing&promotion for various reasons. That is complicated and in part due to ways this isn’t a free market, where regulatory capture and a badly broken approval process slows competition (which tends to force companies to be less wasteful) and interferes in ways I don’t have time to go into now, a ripple of unintended consequences of bad policies throughout the system. I’ll just suggest that if you folks are going to be covering a business realm, you folks need to consider descending from the ivory tower higher level of economics and learn to think like entrepreneurs and investors and business people. (based also on the comments on profit and other topics as well).