You assume that money is the only reason for people to to develop new medical devices. People could also do so because it helps people. Because the technology is awesome. Any number of other reasons. There is ample evidence that creative workers are DE-incentivized by money.
If money IS the only incentive, then reduced profits on device A might cause them to expand by developing device B.
Money isn’t the only incentive but it is an important one especially for publicly traded companies. You need lots of money to develop and test new medical devices.
There is ample evidence that creative workers are DE-incentivized by money.
If this were true then companies that succeed in producing new, creative high tech products would pay their most creative employees very little. We don’t observe this.
If this were true then companies that succeed in producing new, creative high tech products would pay their most creative employees very little. We don’t observe this.
Have you seen the music industry recently? ;) [/not sure if serious]
I meant that I wasn’t sure if I was being serious or not.
The people who make the most money in the music industry aren’t necessarily the ones doing the best creative work. For one, “ability to sell records” is imperfectly correlated with music quality, the people that are most visible might not even be all that responsible for the music in the first place, and the revenues from sales can end up distributed in all different ways. There might be composers writing songs that turn into hits when other people perform them who end up getting paid peanuts for doing it. I just don’t know.
You assume that money is the only reason for people to to develop new medical devices. People could also do so because it helps people. Because the technology is awesome. Any number of other reasons.
There are only limited resources available, including the creativity and time of engineers, and we need a way to allocate them over our (virtually) unlimited needs. If we’re not going to use a market to make those sorts of decisions, what should we do?
It may seem heartless to pass over a drug which could ‘only’ save a few thousand lives, but even if you can’t put a dollar price on human life there’s still an opportunity cost in other lives which could be saved by using medical resources more effectively. A functioning healthcare market ought to look something like triage; people who gain the most benefit from medical attention will receive prompt and effective service, while some people are unfortunately going to have to be turned away.
You assume that money is the only reason for people to to develop new medical devices. People could also do so because it helps people. Because the technology is awesome. Any number of other reasons. There is ample evidence that creative workers are DE-incentivized by money.
If money IS the only incentive, then reduced profits on device A might cause them to expand by developing device B.
Money isn’t the only incentive but it is an important one especially for publicly traded companies. You need lots of money to develop and test new medical devices.
If this were true then companies that succeed in producing new, creative high tech products would pay their most creative employees very little. We don’t observe this.
Have you seen the music industry recently? ;)
[/not sure if serious]
It was serious, but see this.
I meant that I wasn’t sure if I was being serious or not.
The people who make the most money in the music industry aren’t necessarily the ones doing the best creative work. For one, “ability to sell records” is imperfectly correlated with music quality, the people that are most visible might not even be all that responsible for the music in the first place, and the revenues from sales can end up distributed in all different ways. There might be composers writing songs that turn into hits when other people perform them who end up getting paid peanuts for doing it. I just don’t know.
There are only limited resources available, including the creativity and time of engineers, and we need a way to allocate them over our (virtually) unlimited needs. If we’re not going to use a market to make those sorts of decisions, what should we do?
It may seem heartless to pass over a drug which could ‘only’ save a few thousand lives, but even if you can’t put a dollar price on human life there’s still an opportunity cost in other lives which could be saved by using medical resources more effectively. A functioning healthcare market ought to look something like triage; people who gain the most benefit from medical attention will receive prompt and effective service, while some people are unfortunately going to have to be turned away.