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Ideally the drug company making this thing would just stop being boneheads about pricing. I think this is silly. We don't expect that companies "stop being bon

by harryh 9y ago

Ideally the drug company making this thing would just stop being boneheads about pricing. I think this is silly. We don't expect that companies "stop being boneheads" (by which I assume you mean act more ethically) when it comes to the pricing of televisions, or food, or household goods, or practically anything else. Why should we expect it for these pills? That expectation will be doomed to failure in many instances. A more ideal scenario would be to examine the underlying reasons that allow the company to charge so much for something that apparently costs so little to make. If we can understand that problem we should be able to implement fixes that lead to proper pricing without the expectation that profit seeking corporations will magically decide to forgo profit just to be nice.

justin66 9y ago
> We don't expect that companies "stop being boneheads" (by which I assume you mean act more ethically) when it comes to the pricing of televisions, or food, or household goods, or practically anything else. Why should we expect it for these pills? Sure we do. Companies react to non-market concerns like ethics, civics, reputation, government and public pressure at the expense of short-term profit all the time, in addition to reacting to market competition. Even if you accept the notion that the corporation (if it were a person) should be considered a sociopath, it is not at all obvious that market factors or regulation will be as effective in any given case at moving a company's leadership to behave ethically as, say, negative PR that will keep the CEO from getting laid. (not that you'd want to base an economic system on that...) > A more ideal scenario would be to examine the underlying reasons that allow the company to charge so much for something that apparently costs so little to make. That is not the important question at all. (do you really want to argue that charging a lot for something that "costs so little to make" is inherently a bad thing?) The important question in this case is why the same company can sell the same thing in two different markets with a 10,000x price difference.

by harryh 9y ago

justin66 9y ago

> We don't expect that companies "stop being boneheads" (by which I assume you mean act more ethically) when it comes to the pricing of televisions, or food, or household goods, or practically anything else. Why should we expect it for these pills? Sure we do. Companies react to non-market concerns like ethics, civics, reputation, government and public pressure at the expense of short-term profit all the time, in addition to reacting to market competition. Even if you accept the notion that the corporation (if it were a person) should be considered a sociopath, it is not at all obvious that market factors or regulation will be as effective in any given case at moving a company's leadership to behave ethically as, say, negative PR that will keep the CEO from getting laid. (not that you'd want to base an economic system on that...) > A more ideal scenario would be to examine the underlying reasons that allow the company to charge so much for something that apparently costs so little to make. That is not the important question at all. (do you really want to argue that charging a lot for something that "costs so little to make" is inherently a bad thing?) The important question in this case is why the same company can sell the same thing in two different markets with a 10,000x price difference.