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This is just where we arrive at a differential in positions on economic theories. My wager is that if there had been a substantial profit motive, industrial manufacturing would have started up more quickly. I don't think there is a plausible case for patenting the relevant molecule, since it can be isolated from naturally occurring molds, just the industrial processes used to manufacture it in large quantities. Here's the summary of that development where manufacturing at scale wasn't feasible until Pfizer developed the process for doing so.
To the extent that IP laws could have allowed monopolization of penicillin or regulators could have prevented competition by not allowing different companies to manufacture penicillin, these are complaints about government regulation rather than profit motive. While there are market failures, what we mostly find in competitive markets is that prices come down and goods become broadly available. Despite the object-level complaints on the price of McDonald's in this thread, pretty much everyone can afford a Big Mac and almost no one thinks that the situation would improve if governments were responsible for the manufacture and distribution of burgers.
To the Ozempic example, the ability to profit-max outside the bounds of what most would consider ethical is a product of regulatory capture, not a unique process for creating semaglutide that no one else can match.
I agree with you that repealing IP laws would increase competition and lower prices significantly — look no further than Stanley Cups, why should one company make so much profit on cups just because they have the funds to psychologically manipulate the public’s desires — but economies of scale come in and demand centralization. One or a few factories producing Ozempic will always be more efficient than a dozen or two dozen, no? It could be this way with fast food giants, as well. McDonald’s and a couple other giants simply due to economies of scale and accumulated institutional knowledge can uniquely lower food prices, but it’s unlikely this will ever happen because nothing enforces the competition past a certain point (“lower than grocery stores and not painfully higher than competitors” is all their profit needs to be, but they will never willingly race to the bottom for prices because they can anticipate lower total profit as a result)
There's more likely to be disruption.
Not everything will centralize. Innovation, differences in product, or diseconomies of scale can lead to there being other more efficient competitors.
I agree that we probably need to think more about what the best law is for drugs, but the buckets of money that are invested in researching new drugs are funded for by the expectation of future profits, so it doesn't seem to me like we can do without high profits unless we want fewer drugs. That's not to say that the system can't be improved though. We definitely don't take enough advantage of cheap effective drugs, I believe, because they don't have big producers and lobbyists?
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In what way did IP laws help Stanley sell cups? Are you seriously advocating repealing Trademarks?
Trademarks should be used to compensate for the cost of innovation. The reason Stanley profited so much from their product is that they succeeded in manipulating female buying preferences by associating it with high status. That’s it. It’s a grotesque waste of resources and predicated on manipulating the public imagination. So in the case of stupid cups and other status items, there should be no trademarks (maybe a small number on the bottom of items to guarantee quality with a trusted producer only).
It’s funny that this is where the buck stops with capitalists. No no no, you can’t regulate like this, you need to regulate like that! Changing how we regulate is unthinkable!
Am I understanding you to be arguing that female status games should be illegal?
Trademarks are valuable: brands let you know how much you can trust the product. Brands let companies convey to you more quickly what the quality of the product will be. If you get rid of them, then it becomes way harder for the consumer to know whether the product is a cheap chinese knockoff or something that actually will work well and last a while.
The evolution of humanity requires increasingly prosocial status games. For women, the status game can be intelligence (see the high STEM rate among Iranian and Saudi women), inner beauty (acts of compassion in a community, singing, poetry, see the ancient world), external beautification (beautiful prosocial religious or quasi-religious art), and fidelity (to some social principle, like anti-consumerism).
The status games we have concocted for women today are bad. Placing poison on their face, wasting their money under false allusions, social media, music festivals, tRaViLiNg… all bullshit. Because for some reason we let for-profit corporations infect the minds of the impressionable.
Bullshit male status games should also be illegal, of course.
Fair enough that those are costly socially, often for not much benefit, and not great for the soul.
I don't think they can be chalked up to "for-profit corporations" though. It's usually just from the rot within us.
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That's not what trademarks are for. Trademarks are for authenticating products as coming from one manufacturer and not another.
As far as I can tell this is false.
https://www.retaildive.com/news/stanley-quencher-tumblers-viral-success/699416/
They were not putting money into marketing or selling the product and the popularity seems to have been driven by a group of Mormon influencers who placed a bulk order for ten thousand mugs and resold them to their followers. They sold out of them in short order and only then did Stanley get in on the action.
That’s not what trademarks are for in practice. They are for signaling status. Any visible trademarked logo you see is for status. I’m all for manufacturer authentication, just not visible externally or too small to be noticed by someone else.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/how-the-stanley-cup-went-viral
Outsourcing marketing is marketing
Right, the visible trademarked logo on e.g. LingLong tires is for status.
It'll be way better when people have to show the bottom of their Stanley cups to show that they are part of the latest trend than when they show the side.
The partnership only happened after they sold the ten thousand units they bought at their own risk in no time.
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