A billion pounds?

[ciphergoth]

babysimon: "You could do a lot of good with £1bn"

How would you spend a billion pounds in order to do good? You can't spend it on yourself or your friends.

Comments

[figg.livejournal.com]

Or maybe I've just been listening to too much KLF.

I don't understand the intent of this question - is it what project do you wish had more funding?

I don't think I'm at all qualified to decide how to spend that much money, and I doubt that in the end it would do as much good as changes to the law without money. For example:

You could buy drug patents, but it would be better not to have them in the first place.

Maybe I would go and get a couple of geostationary satelites and wireless kit to try and build a free global mesh network. Until it got blown up by the us military.

[andrewducker]

The problem with not having drug patents is that you've removed any incentive for drug companies to research them in the first place.

Now, if you want tighter control over drug patents, then I'd be with you.

[figg.livejournal.com]

You mean the only incentive people have to help each other is profit? Or that the drug companies only do so for profit.

Either way, why are they they ones entrusted with such a task?

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

Because generally only organisations who have cared about making profit have the capital to put into the enormous costs of developing new drugs.

[figg.livejournal.com]

Which is why there are no non-profit organisations who do medical research...

I understand why these things are, but I'm attacking the underlying assumption that we can only operate in a capitalist manner.

Or just being facetious. I'm a little cranky today and I apologise.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

It has been alleged in my presence by credible people (UCSD faculty involved in NIH-funded research) that almost all the drug research done in the USA is funded by Uncle Sam's research grants, not the drug companies.

[altamira16.livejournal.com]

Say you have a research scientist. The research scientist has to pay to support his family. The only way he could do that and still do what he loves is to find someone to pay him to do his research. Now he can go work for a big company that has a big research budget, usually profit motivated, or he can stay in academia and receive grants to do his research.

You could funnel the dollars to pay for research involved in making new drugs.

I am not convinced that the dollars spent there are nearly as much as the dollars spent on meeting the various regulations to see if the drug is safe enough to use on actual people though.

[figg.livejournal.com]

Say you live in a capitalist society....

Fair point.

I'm almost sure that more money is spent on marketing drugs than researching them though.

[andrewducker]

Entrusted? Who's entrusting anyone?

Or to put it another way - anyone can research anything they like. But they'll find it costs them a lot of money to pay for materials, researchers, permits, testing, etc. If you want anyone to invest money in those areas then you have to make it worth their while. After all, they might invest a lot of money and not find anything at all.

The alternative method is for the government to employ a lot of researchers, but generally speaking it's turned out to be more productive to let other people take the risk, letting them head off to work in thousands of areas (rather than exerting a top down control over where they should work) and letting them get on with it.

Drug patents don't actually last very long - 20 years. After which point anyone can make use of that research to make their own generic copies of the drugs.

[figg.livejournal.com]

Not to be a cynic, but copyright only used to last 15 years.

Now it is 75 and counting.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. And I think that's very, very wrong. (Having exactly that conversation on a different journal right now).