Capitalism has never been about making the world a better place. All systems deal with humans and humans inevitably prefer helping out themselves and people close to them over others, which leads to corruption regardless of the system. And capitalism seems the best method for controlling innate human corruption (see China's incredible economic growth once socialism was all but abandoned for capitalism in the 80's pulling a billion people out of abject poverty).
As for investors preferring Snapchat to curing cancer? The amount of money invested in cancer dwarfs Snapchat's investments by magnitudes. You don't just cure "cancer" you find cures for the hundreds of different diseases that fall under the umbrella of cancer. There's so much money invested in cancer there are often not enough candidates for a new clinical trials.
If we have a shortage of anything, it is medical research scientists. And the way to get more of those is to change the regulations so there is more room for profit medical research.
> capitalism seems the best method for controlling innate human corruption
Capitalism seems better than past failures. But it is surely a local maximum. We have thousands of years of social evolution in front of us. Experiments have hardly been exhaustive, and material conditions seem to be changing faster than ever.
I agree. Although it will be hard to separate the need for transparency to one's rights to privacy. You can deem that some actions inherently leave you no rights to privacy, but I'm afraid it'll be only a matter of time till everything you do is under the watchful eyes. On the other hand, humans are at the best when they know theyre being watched. Its a difficult tradeoff.
The printing press was one of the main factors making the reformation possible, which later on led to the thirty year's war. So it's actually a good example of how technology has unintended consequences.
Recent historians have been looking at how the printing press was more an instrument of state power than anything else. Remember that printing shops were state-controlled and heavily censored (_The Great Cat Massacre_ has a chapter on print shops in 18th-century Paris); most of their output was royal decrees, propaganda pamphlets, and books friendly to the regime in question.
The Reformation began for good reasons -- the Church had been dragging its feet on internal reforms for hundreds of years, and finally implemented these reforms in the Council of Trent, after the Reformation began -- but its spread was normally something that governments did to their people, not something that people chose for themselves. It wasn't an extension of liberty. Henry VIII and Edward VI flooded England with mercenaries, for example; in the Germanies, whether to turn Protestant or not was a decision made by rulers (who were legally entitled to compel their subjects to follow them; some converted to Lutheranism, seized Church property, and then switched back to Catholicism, and persecuted subjects who were slow to make the change each time). First-wave Protestants -- Lutherans and Anglicans -- generally had less religion rather than a different religion; even today, there are conservative branches of the Lutherans and Anglicans who are negotiating with the Catholic Church to return as whole congregations.
Calvinism was (if I remember rightly) never imposed from the top down, and typically took power through revolts by the middle class or the lower aristocracy; but Calvinist states tended to be oppressive, warlike, aggressively-middle-class theocracies -- very bad places to be poor or dissident. (_Albion's Seed_ is revealing on this; the modern Islamic Republic of Iran is a less theocratic, less anti-commercial, less oppressive place than 17th-century Puritan Massachusetts was.)
This is not very constructive. I can tell you're being sarcastic, but if you disagree with the parent comment, then perhaps you could enlighten us why?
The fundamental problem is trying to cast individuals in heroic narratives. The mechanism for status is beside the point. People in Russia had ikons of Stalin.
I feel like somehow biasing towards nonfiction is one way to improve this, but that may just be bias speaking.
We can't be all that coherent about "greed" anyway - if we do create consumer surplus through business, then this is a good thing. If we enrich ourselves by rent-seeking and cheating, it is a not. Deciding which is which is pretty hard.
Didn't Jimmy Carter just go into complete remission from what used to be a death sentence, stage 4 melanoma? It was in his brain and liver, and now it's undetectable. He's 91 years old and a decade ago he would have stood almost zero chance of recovery.
I'm sorry the situation is so bad in research, but it does produce miracles.
The drugs that helped President Carter has a 33% success rate for people in his condition. It's only been around since 2011 and brought the survival rate up from near 0%. That's some real progress.
Yep, the miracles are what draws people to the work in the first place, but they can't sustain people forever, generally. With enough lucky breaks, it's possible.
I have to disagree with you about research funding. There is not nearly enough-most people are dissuaded from pursuing research as a career because it is unbelievably competitive to get research grants, which is why we don't have enough research scientists.
The caveat is that we are training more than enough research scientists, but we simply don't have enough jobs for them. There are some jobs in industry, but biology is not like engineering-you can't know when you will find the next breakthrough. Pharma companies are more focused on iterating on established pathways and targets (much lower risk and higher short-term ROI) and are absolutely dependent with government-funded basic research.
The clinical trials bit that you mentioned is a red herring-recruiting patients is often challenging for completely unrelated issues. I've also never heard of being unable to conduct a clinical trial for lack of patients.
As for investors preferring Snapchat to curing cancer? The amount of money invested in cancer dwarfs Snapchat's investments by magnitudes. You don't just cure "cancer" you find cures for the hundreds of different diseases that fall under the umbrella of cancer. There's so much money invested in cancer there are often not enough candidates for a new clinical trials.
If we have a shortage of anything, it is medical research scientists. And the way to get more of those is to change the regulations so there is more room for profit medical research.