2012 Election Season

[Alex]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

One of the points that Diamond makes is that the people of Eurasia didn't get civilization because they were so much smarter than everybody else, but because they got lucky and got beasts of burden, crops, climates not hospitable to disease, and natural barriers. Any people that got those resources would have hit the world-historical jackpot and wound up ruling the place.

Better beasts of burden might be beneficial to economic development, but they neither prove nor disprove anything about the intelligence of Eurasians, nor do they explain the vast intra-Eurasian and intra-American differences in development.

Jared Diamond does have other opinions about race and intelligence, though:

Originally Posted By: Straight from the horse's mouth

From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is.
...
That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent.

Edit: There were horses in North America, too, but they disappeared around 10000 to 7600 years ago, according to wikipedia.

[Alex]

Originally Posted By: BMA

Originally Posted By: Alex

Well, even if those noble savages hadn't been the object of colonialism, they would probably have found out at a later date that other people have cars and refrigerators, and wanted to have them, too.

While it's a fact that the colonists did bring with them some technological advancements, it would be unfair to assume that the colonies would otherwise, even now, be backward and leaf-clad.

(I hope I understood what you meant, correctly)

We may well be in agreement.

Development with colonialism tends to cause environmental issues.

Development without colonialism tends to cause environmental issues.

Note the redundancy.

Also, it would be unfair to disregard the positive aspects of development. Stone Age barbarism (a stage which not all victims of military conquest were in when subjected, of course) is like constant genocide and constant world war - albeit in smaller, more isolated worlds. Development has been nothing like genocide, if you look at the big picture, more like a mass breeding program - particularly for non-white people, actually! The population of the Americas is almost 1 billion today.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: Alex

Better beasts of burden might be beneficial to economic development, but they neither prove nor disprove anything about the intelligence of Eurasians, nor do they explain the vast intra-Eurasian and intra-American differences in development.

Of course better domestic animals say nothing about the intelligence of Eurasians. Nobody has suggested they do.

People who all had horses still wound up with quite different levels of technology, as did people who all lacked horses. So clearly horses aren't everything. But nobody who lacked horses has ever gotten very far in technology, while some people who had them went a long way. So it seems likely that having horses is one of many pre-requisites for technological development. This is Diamond's point.

[Erebus the Black]

I don't know much about the subject, but from all the old movies I've gathered that the main reason the west indians (such as the apachee) were migratory/nomadic was because they were following the bison's or buffalo's migration path, how come it didn't occur to them that instead of following the bison around they should just rope a few and domesticate them? Is there something in those animals behavioral patterns that causes them to die of depression if left in one area for long (or anything else for that matter such as an extremely aggressive nature preventing them from being useful for plowing)? Or maybe its because their religion had restrictions or customs that dissuaded people from trying domestication? Any other ideas?

[Sudanna]

Buffalo are huge and strong. They can kill you. They aren't aggressive, but are not friendly and are not docile. "Roping a few" is far easier said than done. Never mind that the migratory societies you're talking about didn't have the agricultural infrastructure to make doing it worthwhile. They didn't have a reason to stay put in the first place. They'd basically still have to migrate in order to feed any real herd. Why bother when you can just follow them around and kill them as needed?

 

There were American Indian societies with agricultural practices (In South America, sometimes very extensive ones), but they weren't the ones around buffalo.

[Alorael at Large]

It's also possible that bison aren't suited to domestication as working animals. They may be too unpredictable, too intractable, or just too stupid. They have been and are farmed for meat, but that may be the most you can do.

 

—Alorael, who also doesn't see the point of domesticating buffalo for food from the natives' perspective. They'd have to keep moving for grazing land anyway. The extra work of hunting may have been balanced by not having to do the work of maintaining a domestic herd.

[Randomizer]

Agricultural societies in the American Southwest also in spite of irrigation/canal systems still got wiped out during prolong drought periods. Except for the Colorado River which was down in a deep canyon, there aren't the major river valley systems that you have in Europe and Asia.

[Erebus the Black]

Doesn't the American southwest have the Amazon river and is mainly jungle and rainforest?

[keira]

That would be the South American East.

[Sudanna]

Click to reveal.. (American Southwest)

[Randomizer]

Oh, one of the high rainfall areas.

[Student of Trinity]

There's some forest up in the mountains, but it's not very rainy. That's why they keep having forest fires.

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Erasmus

Is there something in those animals behavioral patterns that causes them to die of depression if left in one area for long (or anything else for that matter such as an extremely aggressive nature preventing them from being useful for plowing)?

It's worth noting that the very similar European bison was never domesticated either, even though they were hunted for their meat, hides, and horns. Plus, American bison are a) huge and aggressive when spooked and, at the time, c) very, very wary of humans because humans were the top predator for adult bison. Not a good combination for a domestic animal.

Also interesting: horses and donkeys weren't very useful for plowing or hauling loads until after the invention of the horse collar, which wasn't until thousands of years after the domestication of the horse. Oxen (that is, cattle) were typically used for plowing before then.

Dikiyoba.

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

Agricultural societies in the American Southwest also in spite of irrigation/canal systems still got wiped out during prolong drought periods.

Dikiyoba thought the scientific consensus was that the societies weren't wiped out so much as dissolved, with the inhabitants moving off to find a better area, joining other tribes, or reverting to smaller, nomadic groups during drought periods.

[Randomizer]

it depends upon the area. Most of the Hohokam down near Phoenix moved off into other tribes. The ones up near Mesa Verde seem to have completely disappeared.

[Cairo Jim]

The only thing I can think of that could -possibly- add to this is lifestyles, competition for resources and available land areas.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

Also interesting: horses and donkeys weren't very useful for plowing or hauling loads until after the invention of the horse collar, which wasn't until thousands of years after the domestication of the horse. Oxen (that is, cattle) were typically used for plowing before then.

Right; in fact, the horse collar was a medieval innovation. I've been told by people who know horses better than me that if a horse tries to pull a load using a yoke-type harness as for oxen, the weight presses on the horse's chest so that it can't breathe. The collar puts the weight on the horse's shoulders instead, so then it works. Once you get them harnessed right, horses are somehow much better for plowing and hauling than oxen, because they can go faster, or push backwards harder with their legs, or something.

This is the sort of thing I love to learn about the roots of technology. I would never have thought of the horse collar as an important invention. I'd have thought it was either unimportant — but it made a huge difference; or obvious — but nobody in the ancient world ever thought of it.

Without properly harnessed horses pulling heavy loads, and turning mill wheels, probably nobody would even have begun to think about pulling heavy loads as something that really needed doing. People would probably have gotten along fine by just breaking up big loads into human-portable pieces, pulling small carts along flat ground with oxen, and gathering a gang of friends for the occasions when they needed to roll a large boulder. Sometimes invention is the mother of necessity.

Once heavy hauling tasks had become economically important, then somebody could look at a weird effect like the suction produced when steam cools, and realize that it might be useful if it could ever be scaled up. But without the precedent of horsepower, I think it would just have been much too big a leap of imagination, to go directly from a useless tabletop curiosity to an industrial machine. In that sense, maybe the horse collar was a prerequisite for the steam engine.

[Randomizer]

This reminds me back in the late 1970s when my high school physics teacher was pointing out how efficient front wheel drive cars were over the current rear wheel driven cars. They stopped making those back in the 1980s. Her reason was animal drawn vehicles are all pulled from the front. Not that there was less power loss with transferring power plus it created more space since you no longer had a power transfer running down the middle of the car.

 

She was struck speechless when I told her the reason animals don't get harnessed to the rear is that you can't yoke them to push.

[Dikiyoba]

Well, SoT, I guess you see technological progress as orderly and predictable whereas I see it as unpredictable and incredibly situational.

 

And that's as far as Dikiyoba can go in this discussion, since Dikiyoba knows so little about technology-ology.

[Student of Trinity]

No, my point is precisely that it is situational and unpredictable. I'm just not satisfied to stop at that vague statement. I'm interested in understanding just what difference the situation makes.

 

In particular you can make some strong negative statements, about what situations should prevent certain innovations. Once all those major obstacles are eliminated, though, there's no telling when the now-possible innovation will actually occur, if it ever does.

 

It could be that an invention always comes quickly once its time has come, but that historians may misjudge when the time really came, by overlooking some show-stopping obstacles. Or it could just be that the last thing you always need is a lot of luck, and sometimes it takes a long time for that luck to turn up.

[Harehunter]

I recall there being a series on History Channel about how the chain of inventions works. It was called "Connections". The teaser line at the beginning of the show would tie together the ends of this chain which on the surface you say, "no way". Then they proceed to fill in the links in the middle to show how the evolution of invention occurred. The point being that invention is more an elongated case of serendipity than a logically thought out progression.

[Student of Trinity]

Yeah, I loved that show. Though I always felt that the chain they presented was probably somewhat arbitrarily selected. I suspected that in reality it's more of a tapestry, with many parallel chains interweaving and converging, rather than a linear progression.

 

Technology development is something like evolution. The mechanisms are different, of course, but there are a lot of parallels.

 

The only really big difference I see between evolution and invention, in fact, is that they tell their stories in opposite directions. With invention, achieving powered flight is the conclusion, and the economic travails of the Wright brothers are plot features. With evolution, though, we tell the story the other way around. Solving the problem of eating high leaves is not the denouement, and natural selection and heredity are not plot complications along the way. The denouement is the proliferation of the giraffe genome, and the advantage of eating high leaves is an element in the plot.

 

The reason this makes a big difference is just that every evolutionary story has the same kind of conclusion — gene proliferation — while invention stories all end differently — the achievement of different tasks. So the story of technology seems more complicated, in this significant respect, than evolution. Of course this difference would go away if we just decided to think about technology in the same way as evolution, by making the widespread production of a patented design the end of the invention story. But we don't do this, because we care about achieving powered flight in a way that we don't care about eating high leaves.

 

Anyway, the main similarity I see is that invention and evolution both proceed gradually, but the gradual processes can eventually make huge changes. There could in principle be 'hopeful monsters' — radical new designs that emerge, full-blown, in one step. But in practice that is just much too unlikely, and the stories of invention and evolution are both overwhelmingly dominated by the slow and steady accumulation of small refinements.

 

It may seem silly to say that about invention, since although gradual refinement of a mature technology certainly happens, it seems that radical innovations do often occur as well. But my point is that, when you understand just how much previously existing technology is required to make a radical innovation possible, then even the radical innovations come to seem like small refinements, compared to the far more enormous task of really making a novel technology completely from scratch.

 

Since evolutionary change isn't literally continuous and infinitesimal, either — each generation is a finite-sized step — the issue is only one of degree: just how big a change can be made in one step? The point is that there's a limit, and although it isn't zero, it's very small compared to the range of change that we see over history.

[Lilith]

another important difference is that taking ideas from disparate sources is significantly more ubiquitous than horizontal gene transfer. as a result you can combine an internal combustion engine with a computer more easily than you can combine gills with milk

[Harehunter]

There may not be a mammal with gills, but there is a species of critter that is mammalian and lays eggs!

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: Harehunter

There may not be a mammal with gills, but there is a species of critter that is mammalian and lays eggs!

There are five species of monotremes actually: the platypus and four species of echidna.

[Callie]

Gaffe! Gaffe! Gaffe!

[Actaeon]

Do these things really have an effect? Romney's policies carry the same message as his words. What's the difference?

[Callie]

Originally Posted By: Actaeon

Do these things really have an effect? Romney's policies carry the same message as his words. What's the difference?

Melons will fall from the sky, the media will have a circus, and Obama's ad team will have a nice glass of wine.

[Jerakeen]

And I will make popcorn.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Actaeon

Do these things really have an effect? Romney's policies carry the same message as his words. What's the difference?

There's a reason that Romney has refused to put out specific policy proposals, and that is because if he did a point-by-point listing of what he would do and how he would do it, he'd alienate three quarters of the electorate. He has tried to refrain from doing so by simply offering quantum policies, wherein his opinion on any issue depends on the observer, but people are starting to wise up on this and demand he collapse his political wave-function.

Also, the more important thing about this gaffe is that Romney believed it in the first place, not that he said it. It's not "OMG, Romney said he isn't concerned about the very poor", it's "Romney literally does not understand how things like 'taxes' work".

[Randomizer]

One of the many articles that quotes Mitt Romney as defining middle class as $200 to 250 thousand a year income. Now I know that with inflation the limits of the different classes has increased, but until now I never knew that I was lower class.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

One of the many articles that quotes Mitt Romney as defining middle class as $200 to 250 thousand a year income. Now I know that with inflation the limits of the different classes has increased, but until now I never knew that I was lower class.

What, you don't know that the correct upper bound of "middle class" is "whatever I make, plus ten grand?"

[Harehunter]

IMHO, it is not that he doesn't care about the very poor. It is just this; in his estimation about 47% of the population will vote for Obama regardless of what he says. Period. On the other hand, there is about 47% of the people who will vote for Romney, period. The 6% that lies in the middle are the true independents that he needs to reach out to in order to be elected.

 

Why is it he says that the very poor are in the 47% for Obama? People who are dependent on governmental entitlements would gain only if the party that supports larger funding for those entitlement programs are elected. Typically those people are Democrats. On the other of side of the coin (literally) are the people who pay taxes to fund those entitlement programs. They prosper when unemployment is low, more people are paying into the tax system, and fewer people are taking out of the system.

[Callie]

I'm not sure that Democrats actually spend more on entitlements than Republicans do ( This article suggests that entitlement spending increases at a greater rate under Republican administrations) . If Republicans control the white house, they are quite happy to increase speeding on entitlements such as Medicare.

[Randomizer]

"I just want my fair share." - Sally Brown in Merry Christmas Charlie Brown

 

Everyone wants government entitlements although the rich call them something else when it's tax breaks that only affect them or other special interest laws.

[Harehunter]

Excalibur, you are more perceptive than most people. The problem with much of the electorate is that they don't want to be confused with facts. I don't claim to know all the facts about all issues, but I do at least attempt to learn both view points. Call it an occupational obsession of a computer analyst.

 

(And that cuts both ways, conservative and liberal, republican or democrat.)

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Harehunter

IMHO, it is not that he doesn't care about the very poor. It is just this; in his estimation about 47% of the population will vote for Obama regardless of what he says. Period. On the other hand, there is about 47% of the people who will vote for Romney, period. The 6% that lies in the middle are the true independents that he needs to reach out to in order to be elected.

Meanwhile, back in reality, the numbers are close to 50-45 than 47-47. There is a good reason that Obama is given 9:1 odds to win the election by the scarily accurate Nate Silver in his NowCast. Also keep in mind that elections aren't decided by people, but by states, and Obama has leads ranging from somewhat tenuous to downright commanding in, ah, ten out of the ten major swing states. Plus, with all the bad news coming out of Romney's campaign recently, he's not exactly running the lean, mean, election-winning machine that would be able to surmount this hole.

Originally Posted By: Harehunter

Why is it he says that the very poor are in the 47% for Obama? People who are dependent on governmental entitlements would gain only if the party that supports larger funding for those entitlement programs are elected. Typically those people are Democrats. On the other of side of the coin (literally) are the people who pay taxes to fund those entitlement programs. They prosper when unemployment is low, more people are paying into the tax system, and fewer people are taking out of the system.

I happen to fund "entitlement programs" with my income tax dollars to a non-insignificant degree, and I see nothing wrong with this, nor am I somehow getting all in a tizzy about how "OMG the money I built myself by being John Galt is going to lazy poor people!". I fail to see how I would somehow be better off if, say, the government stopped funding Pell grants and instead used my cash to pay down the deficit, or if they decided to cut the EITC in order to force poor people to "pay into the tax system". In fact, I would probably be worse off if they did that. Educating our population, in addition to being somehow philosophically desirable, also carries tangible economic benefits. Ditto for the EITC- even if I don't use it personally the economic benefits trickle up (ha!) to me.

Plus, y'know, I'm a safely employed unmarried engineer with no dependents in my early 40's without mortgage or major debt. I honestly don't even need most of the money I make at this point. I'd hardly even notice if the Feds took 30 or even 40% instead of the twentyish I pay now, and I'd be super-OK with them doing it if they money went towards things like jobs programs and stimulus to get us out of this anemic recovery, effective single-payer healthcare, enhanced education funding, efficient national defense, and quality infrastructure.

[Alorael at Large]

Giving up on 47% of the electorate might make political sense, but it's also a bad idea to say it. Someone in that 53% might get nagging suspicions that they're on the wrong side of the line, and then you've lost them.

 

More importantly, half of the country paying no federal income tax doesn't mean all that much. A big chunk of them haven no real income: students, the elderly, dependents. Another chunk are just too poor for federal income tax, although they're still paying other taxes.

 

Romney's implication, which he comes very close to stating outright, is that 47% of Americans are freeloaders doing nothing and living off of a fat paycheck from Uncle Sam. That is insane. Besides the elderly living on social security, and that's often not a very pleasant subsistence without large supplemental savings, there just aren't that many people who are on the dole. Unemployment insurance counts, but that's a problem of the economy at large and not some kind of moral failure. From experience, I can say that there are some people receiving disability insurance who really shouldn't, but there are also many who should and don't; it's not as easy as many seem to think.

 

Most of all, this is a strange issue to fixate on. Government spending on the extremely poor is tiny compared to other places where revenue goes, notably Bush-era tax cuts. The loss of money to taxes that the rich don't pay outstrips the money spent on the poor probably by an order of magnitude or more.

 

—Alorael, who is willing to wager a lot of money himself that he has spent more time with people living on disability and entitlements than Romney has. They are not, generally, happy people. They do not, for the most part, revel in their work-free existence. If there were an out they would seize it gladly.

[Kelandon]

I suppose this is a particularly offensive version of the "welfare queen" myth that has been rattling around for decades. I think it was particularly offensive because of the number of inappropriate linkages and assumptions that you have to make in order to come out saying what he ended up saying.

 

First, you have to sneer at government assistance in general (including to, say, veterans). Second, you have to sneer at people who support government assistance for anyone (most notably liberals). Third, you have to make some sort of screwy connection that this is self-interest and not concern for your fellow man, because you sneer at concern for your fellow man. Fourth, you have to ignore all facts that show that this connection is false or irrelevant; government benefits are most highly concentrated in conservative states, not liberal ones. (The voters themselves may be liberal, but that's not giving Obama any electoral votes.) And on it goes.

 

At the end of it, in order to say what he said with a straight face, you have to sneer at the very notion of caring whether your neighbors live or die, after those same neighbors have provided service to you, either by building the society that you've inherited (seniors) or by trying to keep you safe and secure (veterans) or in any of a number of other ways.

 

In short, he's a jerk.

[Prince of Kitties]

What really disturbs me about this is that anyone is willing to let their fellow citizens hang out to dry like that.

 

It's one thing to say that the Democrats' policies aren't helping people, and alternative solutions are needed. It's another entirely to say that no solutions are needed, and that it's okay to have lots of citizens with no access to food, housing, and/or medical care. The first is a difference of opinion. The second is at best denial of reality, and at worst a failure of basic ethics.

 

I'll admit I haven't had all that much contact with people living below the poverty line, but I've done some volunteer work. There are parts of the nearest city, even suburbs, that are in terribly bad shape. You drive around, and nobody you see looks healthy; the houses are all in shambles, and everyone is missing teeth.

 

To my mind, the belief that this is reasonable state of affairs probably indicates a kind of social Darwinism. And if that's not scary, I'm not sure what is.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: iLorael

Romney's implication, which he comes very close to stating outright, is that 47% of Americans are freeloaders doing nothing and living off of a fat paycheck from Uncle Sam. That is insane. Besides the elderly living on social security, and that's often not a very pleasant subsistence without large supplemental savings, there just aren't that many people who are on the dole. Unemployment insurance counts, but that's a problem of the economy at large and not some kind of moral failure.

plus it's called unemployment insurance for a reason: in the US it's paid for by employers and only available to people who have been employed and were dismissed from their jobs under specific conditions. complaining about people living off unemployment insurance and not getting a new job immediately is like complaining about someone saving up their car insurance payment to spend on public transport instead of buying a new car. also one of the reasons it exists is precisely so that unemployed people won't be forced to rush into a new job they're overqualified for: it's not like having a bunch more people desperately competing for jobs would make the job market better for employees

if you're a single person with no children, no disabilities and not recently unemployed, the only form of welfare you're likely to qualify for is food assistance, and that's about $200 a month. try living on that

[Alorael at Large]

[Edit: Dantius was right at the time, but the NowCast is now almost 19:1 in Obama's favor even as the forecast has just stabilized at 3:1 after declining from its 4:1 high. Do I watch obsessively? Yes! Good statistical models are beautiful.]

 

Right. Welfare queens, if such creatures exist, don't live on unemployment insurance. At least not for long.

 

—Alorael, whose impression of SSDI is that the only people happy to be getting that particular benefit are those with crippling injuries who are grateful for the help even as they're angry about their illness or injury. Even those with chronic schizophrenia are usually desperately trying to get a job, any job. It's not just money, although that helps. Romney seems to believe there are gleeful leeches who have no desire to work; psychology shows most people have a desperate desire to feel useful, and in fact unemployment is psychologically damaging and steady work, even if it's volunteering, is therapeutic.

[The Mystic]

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

One of the many articles that quotes Mitt Romney as defining middle class as $200 to 250 thousand a year income.

Must be nice to make that much money. At the moment, I'd be happy to settle for 10% of that.

Originally Posted By: Burning Times (8am-6pm weekdays)

Welfare queens, if such creatures exist, don't live on unemployment insurance. At least not for long.

Welfare queens do exist, and I've had the (mis)fortune of meeting several. You're right about one thing, though: They don't live on unemployment insurance. They live on other income sources they have but don't bother to declare (trust me, you don't want to know anything more specific). The money they get from unemployment insurance is used to make payments on their Cadillacs.

[Prince of Kitties]

IMO the occasional person who leaches off the support system is the price you have to pay for a support system that works. Some people are going to be lazy no matter what, but the net drain from their laziness is less significant and less important than the net gain of actually providing for people who are in need.

 

Not that I am in any way happy to see my taxes go to waste, but a little inefficiency is better than a lot of suffering.

 

Also, I must admit that taxes don't bug me nearly as much as health insurance...

 

- You pay an outrageous sum ever month in case something bad happens.

 

- And also so you can afford medications you need, which cost almost nothing to manufacture, but are worth their weight in raw emeralds including the lactose filler.

 

- And which the insurance company gets bargains on, but without them you'd have to pay the full price.

 

- On top of which, if something bad does happen, the insurance company reserves the right to refuse payment for all manner of things, and for all manner of reasons.

 

There's a phrase for that... The phrase is "protection racket."

[Alorael at Large]

Yes. I think there would be less hatred of health insurance if it were expensive but functional. Expensive and dysfunctional, though? We pay money because not having more likely to be catastrophic than having it, even though insurance only just increases the odds. Denial of coverage is crazy. Losing coverage due to unemployment because you are ill is crazy.

 

—Alorael, who is curious. Obviously someone with undeclared income streams can put unemployment money towards anything, but what are the actual sources of welfare income on which anyone is buying Cadillacs? The closest he's ever seen to that is some of the heavier alimony payments, and then unemployment is usually uninvolved.

[The Mystic]

Originally Posted By: Burning Times (8am-6pm weekdays)

—Alorael, who is curious. Obviously someone with undeclared income streams can put unemployment money towards anything, but what are the actual sources of welfare income on which anyone is buying Cadillacs? The closest he's ever seen to that is some of the heavier alimony payments, and then unemployment is usually uninvolved.

I'd like to know that too, but they can and do do it, apparently. As near as I can figure, they've been in the system so long, and know it so well, that they find ways to milk it for all they can. The Cadillacs they drive are usually more mid-range models, not luxury ones, so it may be possible (at least in theory).

[Prince of Kitties]

Even "expensive but functional" doesn't cut it; you still have people who can't afford insurance on a day-to-day basis, and when something bad does happen to them, they end up in debt for the rest of their lives - or, in some cases, dying slowly and miserably. I haven't been in that boat (yet), but I've known people who were, and am friends with people who are close to it. And none of those people are anything close to "welfare queens"; most of them have work ethics (and personal ethics) that make me feel ashamed of myself.

 

There are really good human beings out there, that this country treats like dirt. Personally I would be fine with tax hikes - and even lower quality medical care for myself - if it meant that everyone would at least get halfway decent healthcare.

 

BTW, before this post gets too ranty, please don't take the above as a political attack. There are things that free markets work great for... IMO it just happens that healthcare is not one of those.

 

Edit: re Cadillacs, I don't think I've ever seen anyone younger than 60 driving one.

[Callie]

Originally Posted By: Miramor

- And also so you can afford medications you need, which cost almost nothing to manufacture, but are worth their weight in raw emeralds including the lactose filler.

Most of the cost isn't really incurred during the manufacturing process, but the research and development process. A drug company might test hundreds of different compounds before developing a potentially marketable drug, but the drug has to be tested by the FDA first, and the FDA only approves about one third of the drugs it tests. By the time a drug company has a product it can legally sell on the market, it has easily spent at least ten years and billions of dollars in the development process. The high price reflects the high development cost. And drugs are hardly the only aspect of the healthcare industry that have a high research and development cost.

As far as manufacturing is concerned, it's not necessarily cheap and the cost depends on the drug. Pharmaceuticals generally require a process in which a chemical of a low concentration and mass is uniformly distributed throughout a fluid (often throughout the entire process), and that's not easy to accomplish! If a tablet is supposed to have 180 mg of a drug in it, it had better have 180 mg of drug in it! The various constituents of a drug tablet have differing mass, density, surface area, sphericity, heat capacity, porosity, viscosity (for fluids), acidity/basicity, solubility, etc., etc. etc. All of that has to be accounted for to achieve that desired uniform distribution.

There's also the synthesis aspect, which I don't know much about. I'd imagine that a drug like ibuprofen is fairly easy to synthesize, but that wouldn't be true of a drug that requires careful biological synthesis in a lab setting. But even ibuprofen has two primary stereoisomers (configurations, basically) with different effects, and nobody has really figured out a practical way to separate them.

[Prince of Kitties]

In that case I stand corrected; thanks. I had no idea that the manufacturing process itself could be so involved.

[The Mystic]

You'd be surprised, if you aren't already. If you want a clearer idea, I suggest reading any pharmaceutical company's annual report cover-to-cover. It's painfully dry and boring stuff, but can be a real eye-opener if you know how and where to look.