But one also has reasons to be a rational pessimist about innovation in large part because our society is hamstrung by free lance regulators who are able to use the government to impose the precautionary principle or their own biases on the public as a whole. We have become a nation of tattle-tales, whiners and instant experts who confuse a foot-noted declarative statement with wisdom.
Take this most recent example:
"Impressionable utes weren't the only ones watching when Cincinnati Reds owner Bob Castellini (right) passed out victory cigars and then lit up after his team clinched the NL Central title at Great American Ball Park on Tuesday.
Also watching at home on television were at least five whistle-blowers who noted that the Reds were violating Ohio's indoor-smoking ban. They called Cincinnati's health department to report the team and now the Cincinnati Enquirer reports the club is under investigation.
In case you're wondering, the answer is yes — I'm extremely sorry to report that there are people living among us who would actually do this."
Me too. Here is a list of the people and organizations among us who are now enriching themselves or making themsevles famous by using government to impose their views on the rest of us, crippling innovation in the process.
1. The anti-Avandia axis of Gardiner Harris, Steve Nissen and David Graham who have use innuendo and meta-analysis to drive Avandia into near extinction. Perhaps the FDA's decision to keep the drug on the market can be considered a victory of sort, but as someone said, another victory like this and we are done for.
2. The comparative effectivness crowd that will be telling us how much a life or product is really worth. Imagine if the same experts who now raise questions about whether a cancer drug is worth it because, on average, it adds a few months of life and costs $100k a year made the same determination about HIV drugs in 1987. In today's dollars AZT would cost $21000 a year and based on initial studes added on average about 6 months of life to patients who still suffered horribly. Today of course the cost of AZT is much lower and as Tom Philipson and co-authors found "ex-post value of hope associated with treatments for HIV patients to be as much as four times as high as standard per-capita estimates of treatment effects and as many as two and a half times as high as aggregate values across all cohorts." (Meaning across time and society.)
www.nber.org/papers/w15649.pdf
3. The board of governors of the so-called patient centered outcomes research institute which has as a member a chiropractor who lead the American Chiropractor Association and who believes that immunization should be "voluntary."
4. Those at the NIH and FDA who have hijacked The Critical Path to fund basic research that has nothing to do with creating tools that contribute to accelerating product development. You see, 'regulatory science' now means anything that could be used down the road in the development process. Basic research is much sexier and easier to get money for and avoid being attacked as providing aid and comfort to industy.
Lots of other countries provide generous R and D tax credits. They provide struggling companies with cash flow in the short term. But they are no substitute for a culture that embraces innovation. And start ups rarely become engines of commercialization and innovation.
So I am pessimistic because unlike Ridley so many people take innovation for granted and confuse. Worse, unlike Ridley, as AEI's Alex Pollock writes:
"there is a danger with intellectual brightness. It is to overemphasize and develop a bias for cleverness, quickness, facility with data, and the ability to persuade." There is a danger we all face in underestimating the pernicious influence ideas have when armed with the power of the media or government.
Pollock adds: Max Planck, the great physicist, made this provocative observation: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
www.american.com/archive/2010/september/it2019s-easier-to-be-brilliant-than-right
Will we waste a generation ignoring the constants that enrich civilization in favor of shorr term policies, sound bits and cleverness with wisdom?
