Alex Telford: “The cost to discover and develop a drug today is orders of magnitude higher than in the 1950s. Despite this, the probability that a drug entering clinical trials will eventually reach the market has hardly improved in the intervening years. If [Paul] Janssen were born today, there’s little chance he would be able to repeat his success. He would probably not even get the chance to start. What changed? Some lay the blame for these deteriorating conditions on regulators like the FDA, claiming that if we were to abolish regulators we would release the stranglehold on industry and unleash a deluge of stalled medicines. Others blame ‘big pharma’, claiming the industry is suppressing cures — more interested in price gouging on old drugs than investing in R&D. These explanations lack nuance. In reality, the productivity crisis in the pharmaceutical industry is the culmination of decades of just about every aspect of drug discovery and development getting gradually harder and more expensive.”
David Schmidtz and Jason Brennan: “As trade emerges, there emerges with it a new way of being self-sufficient: in a market society, people can produce enough to meet their own needs by producing enough to meet other people’s needs. Freedom of commerce under the rule of law empowers people to cooperate on a massive scale, liberating each other from poverty.” [via CafeHayek]
PWC: “Synthetic data is often a lower-cost, faster way to access vast quantities of data than traditional data collection and curation methods. This means it has the potential to turbocharge the data-driven transformation of every industry by becoming the foundation for training machine-learning models and AI, which in turn enables the development of new products, services, and ways of working—finally delivering on the promise of “big data” that got us all so excited a few years back. Synthetic data is already being used in many industries. Amazon used synthetic data about speech patterns, syntax, and semantics to improve multilingual speech recognition in its Alexa virtual assistant. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has converted real-world data on patient admissions for accidents and emergency (A&E) treatment into a statistically similar but anonymized open-source dataset to help NHS care organizations better understand and meet the needs of patients and healthcare providers. This kind of health data has also been leveraged by Alphabet and US insurance company Anthem to improve insurance fraud detection.”
Ishan Bakshi: “India’s workforce rose from around 460 million in 2017-18 to roughly 560 million in 2022-23 — an increase of 100 million workers over a five-year period. But, during this period, employment in the more productive manufacturing sector grew by just a shade above two million on average each year, while in the less productive agriculture sector, it rose by more than eight million. (The absolute numbers are based on population projections). Second, not only were seven of 10 new entrants to the workforce self-employed, but almost seven of the 10 new entrants were also women, with a greater share from rural areas. These new entrants were more engaged in small establishments or as unpaid helpers in household enterprises, and not in regular salaried or casual wage employment…It should be a matter of concern that this seemingly healthy economic momentum has, so far, not translated into a commensurate increase in more productive employment opportunities for the millions entering the labour force every year.”
