5 ms·

The fundamental reason that most innovation has occurred in the computer/internet sector over the last 40-something years is that failure is acceptable in this

The fundamental reason that most innovation has occurred in the computer/internet sector over the last 40-something years is that failure is acceptable in this sector. That is, when a computer or webapp crashes it's not the end of the world. But a failure in a drug or car or power plant means serious consequences, and sometimes fatalities, and subsequent regulations/laws to make sure such things are never tried again. Now, you can make a pretty convincing argument[0] that we are as a society committing Bastiat's fallacy ("Seen vs. Unseen"), in that there are more lives lost due to not developing new drugs than there are due to failures of new drugs. The failures are seen, the lack of new drugs is not seen. However, the deeper point is that we are currently simply too wealthy as a society to tolerate the human costs (in deaths[1]) associated with rapid innovation in real world technologies. Wealth means necessities are met, but necessity is the mother of invention. This is why war and serious hardship gooses technological innovation. It's because life becomes cheaper, and test pilots and volunteers for new vaccines become more readily available. I don't think Thiel would disagree[2] with this analysis, but it does mean that the problem can't be solved simply through shifts in entrepreneurial focus. Americans simply aren't ready for the kind of messiness that real world innovation involves. [0] http://bit.ly/mtGRyv http://bit.ly/mtGRyv [1] Perhaps strangely, we are more ready to allow people to take futile risks like bungee jumping or skydiving than we are to allow people to consciously opt out of various health/safety/etc. regulations (and suffer the consequences). [2] Taking the totality of his statements in context, including the article on the Founders Fund website ("What Happened to the Future?"), Thiel and Levchin's point is not that the iPhone isn't innovative but more that there hasn't been much innovation in big areas like energy, medicine, and transportation. Indeed, by some measures we're moving backwards in those areas: the real price of energy has gone up, new drug approvals have stagnated, and top speeds have gone down since the Concorde was retired.

Mvandenbergh 15y ago
Drug trials fail all the time though, and not only because of risk aversion. If you look at the first 50 years or so of the pharmaceutical industry, there were wonder drugs being discovered every year. We may simply have exhausted a lot of the low hanging small molecule fruit. Also, if risk aversion was slowing pharma innovation then we'd see a lot of potentially efficacious compounds failing safety trials. Instead what we see is that the cost to discover candidate compounds before they're ever tested on humans.
- ramanujan 15y ago
  It's absolutely true that risk aversion is not the only thing holding back drug trials. But it's definitely part of the problem. Think about insulin. In 1921 Banting and Best had the idea. It was in a patient's arm by 1922. And they won the Nobel Prize by 1923. http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/insulin/discovery-insulin.html Early in 1921, Banting took his idea to Professor John Macleod at the University of Toronto, who was a leading figure in the study of diabetes in Canada. Macleod didn't think much of Banting's theories. Despite this, Banting managed to convince him that his idea was worth trying. Macleod gave Banting a laboratory with a minimum of equipment and ten dogs. Banting also got an assistant, a medical student by the name of Charles Best. The experiment was set to start in the summer of 1921. ... In January 1922 in Toronto, Canada, a 14-year-old boy, Leonard Thompson, was chosen as the first person with diabetes to receive insulin. The test was a success. Leonard, who before the insulin shots was near death, rapidly regained his strength and appetite. The team now expanded their testing to other volunteer diabetics, who reacted just as positively as Leonard to the insulin extract. The news of the successful treatment of diabetes with insulin rapidly spread outside of Toronto, and in 1923 the Nobel Committee decided to award Banting and Macleod the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. That was before the FDA gained the power of premarket approval, a time when pharma moved at the speed of software. Nowadays that past is characterized as a time of patent medicines and scam artists. But if you actually get into the history books you'll see that description is like characterizing the modern internet as a giant repository of spam and scams. In other words, absolutely that spam/scam stuff existed (and indeed crystals and faith healing persist to the present day), but real innovation in drugs also occurred at the same time. The fundamental point there is that Banting and Best could do empirical human trials. You can't predict what a novel drug will do without humans who are willing to risk their lives. In computers these people are called early adopters. If risk aversion was slowing pharma innovation then we'd see a lot of potentially efficacious compounds failing safety trials. Instead what we see is that the cost to discover candidate compounds before they're ever tested on humans. Yes, the thing is that drug companies face a significant penalty with the FDA if they fail a safety trial. It's not just a one off, it influences the FDA's perception of them as a "reputable" company. If the FDA thinks of you as disreputable or a cowboy, they will inspect the hell out of you and issue Form 483s [0] till the cows come home. And that's not even including the PR impact and the market sell-off should you ever actually have a TGN 1412 incident[1]. So there is a very significant economic risk to "failing fast" in pharma. Over and above the hit to brand, if the PR fallout is bad enough the FDA has a number of tools with which to criminalize failure. The Park Doctrine[2] is what they do for "off-label marketing", and they would escalate considerably if they felt public opinion demanded it. Anyway, this is why drug companies are doing all these simulations and iterating primarily around drug molecules that are known to be safe. No one ever got fired for buying IBM, and no one ever got fired for trying molecules compliant with Lipinski's rule of five[3]. Sure, that's still a pretty wide class of molecules, but "radical innovation" in compounds is just not going to fly with the FDA. After all, it took the FDA more than a decade to begin considering adaptive clinical trials[4] in lieu of the standard Phase I/II/III design. How long will it take them to agree that aging could be treated as a disease, or to allow the development of enhancing drugs? These things probably won't happen until there's some sort of major conflict in which enhancing drugs become the difference between victory and defeat. Then the floodgates will open. [0] http://blog.fdazilla.com/2011/09/fda-will-issue-10000-483s-in-2011-one-every-52-minutes/ http://blog.fdazilla.com/2011/09/fda-will-issue-10000-483s-i... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGN1412 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGN1412 [2] http://www.gatewayfda.com/fda-regulations/under-park-doctrine-fda-can-prosecute-individuals-for-company-violations-of-fdca/ http://www.gatewayfda.com/fda-regulations/under-park-doctrin... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druglikeness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druglikeness [4] http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/102/16/1217.extract http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/102/16/1217.extract
Vindexus 15y ago
According to Guns, Germs and Steel, necessity is not the mother of invention. In fact the opposite is true: inventions appear when the needs of the inventors are already met. I really recommend the book, it's a great read.
- ramanujan 15y ago
  Jared Diamond notwithstanding, WW2 led directly or indirectly to: 1. The atomic bomb 2. Jet aircraft 3. The digital computer 4. Modern rocketry And the Cold War gave rise to 1. The internet 2. The space program 3. The interstate highway system These are the kinds of big swings that Thiel is talking about and that's just off the top of my head. You can go through previous wars as well. Wouldn't be surprised if WW1 was a real shot in the arm for aviation, for example. Probably the biggest peacetime innovation since the end of the Cold War has been the sequencing of the human genome. But arguably that was also a computer science innovation, as it revolved around better assembly algorithms and required no test pilots, clinical trials, or atomic bomb detonations.
  - borism 15y ago
    Cold war wasn't a war. Work on jet engine began long before WW2 (and it failed to accelerate during WW2). So did the work on nuclear fission (if it wasn't for top scientists incl. Einstein convincing US President to fund it, there wouldn't be Manhattan Project at all. German scientists fortunately failed to persuade Nazis even though they were much closer to nuclear device.)
  - cop359 15y ago
    The whole war = innovation thing never held much water for me. First of all, there is no way to know what would have happened if there was no war. Some of those things might have been invented anyway. Maybe other more important things would have been invented. Also, if you look at non-war years they too are full of innovation. The period just before WW1 brought us the light bulb, the telegraph, the phone, skyscrapers, the type writer, etc. etc. I mean, it was over a slightly longer period of time, but I don't think it would be outrageous to argue that the rate of innovation was just as high as during WW2.
WalterBright 15y ago
Sam Peltzman's book "Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation" makes a statistical case that the FDA's "safe and effective" mandate has cost more lives than it has saved. From the back cover: "The 1962 Amendments by Sam Peltzman concludes that the 1962 ("proof of efficacy") amendments to the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 (1) have cut the number of new drugs (new chemical entities) brought to the market each year by half with no corresponding reduction in inefficacious drugs, (2) have doubled the costs of drug development, (3) have have increased drug prices by reducing competition among drugs (so that the sick pay $50 million more each year for drugs), and (4) have imposed substantial net social costs from death and illnesses that could have been prevented if the development of new drugs had not been hampered by the amendments. These conclusions are reached despite the fact that Professor Peltzman has assumed for the amendments benefits that cannot be proven and may not have taken place."
- cma 15y ago
  HIV has been cured for Simian monkeys for quite a while because we could invasively experiment on them; so, the FDA stopping us from invasively experimenting (including involuntary innoculation of disease free subjects) on humans may have "statistically" cost more lives than it saved, but you'd have to be a Nazi to advocate it.
  - WalterBright 15y ago
    That is not the thesis of Peltzman's book. Peltzman compares pharmaceutical innovation before the 1962 FDA amendments with after in the US, not with nazi germany.
potatolicious 15y ago
I disagree. The reason why the most innovation has occurred in this sector is because we're some of the best-funded. Look at the arms industry and you will see a similar pace of advancement - mostly due to the bottomless and nigh-unchallengeable defense spending of Uncle Sam. Why this unprecedented level of funding? IMO this really is the heart of Thiel's argument: internet companies are capable of general obscene, absurd, ludicrous profit margins. Think about a company like Facebook - employs a few thousand engineers, but generates revenue and impact far in excess of what you might expect from a crowd of that size. And this is really Thiel's argument, the way I understand it. He's not saying that the iPhone isn't a "technological" breakthrough, but rather it's not a "societal" breakthrough. In the old days, when someone introduces a product, it creates new jobs across the board. When Ford introduced a new car, it didn't just mean jobs for the people in the boardroom and drafting tables. It created jobs in their factories, and indeed tens of thousands of jobs across a wide supply chain necessary to build the product. It created new jobs in dealerships, and auto shops. The job-creation effects of a product were incredibly far-reaching. Now, fast forward to today. What jobs are Facebook creating besides the ones inside their walls? There is no employment ecosystem, no supply chain. And in this way, while Facebook is extracting record revenue from their business, the rest of America is no better off. It used to be that success in capitalism is the tide that floats all boats, but this is increasingly not true, especially in our sector.
- ramanujan 15y ago
  Look at the arms industry and you will see a similar pace of advancement - mostly due to the bottomless and nigh- unchallengeable defense spending of Uncle Sam. But I don't think you're really disagreeing here. The DoD is a lot less squeamish than civilians about experimental projects that result in death. Leave aside the issue of whether this is good or bad. For them, they are going to be seeing dead bodies as a natural course of doing business, and they want fewer ones, and so they're (much) more willing to pursue riskier projects that may cost lives. Soldiers can be ordered to run into enemy fire, so they can also be ordered to test drive automatic cars (funded by DARPA). Autonomous helicopters that could slice someone in two if the programming goes bad nevertheless get the green light because there are already people being sliced in two, and DoD wants to reduce that number. DoD is really pushing robotics and cybernetics forward in particular because those two result in less dead soldiers and (in the future) soldiers who can function even after losing limbs and eyes[0]. Perhaps the most concrete example of this thesis is what happens when the priorities of DoD and FDA collide. Take a look at the Pathways to Innovation program that FDA just greenlit[1]. On a Tuesday afternoon call with reporters, Shuren said he expects just one or two devices to be approved through the new pathway each year. The first device up for review under the new pathway comes from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research arm of the Department of Defense. The brain-controlled prosthetic is designed to restore near-natural arm, hand, and finger function to patients suffering from spinal cord injury, stroke, or amputation. An implanted microchip on the surface of the brain records neuronal activity, decodes the signals, and activates motor neurons that control the prosthesis. The first chip will be implanted in a patient within six months, Geoffrey Ling, MD, PhD, program manager at DARPA, told reporters. There is a very good reason why no private company has yet gotten this kind of fast track, but the DoD has. From FDA's perspective, DoD is a (more powerful) fellow agency which deserves professional courtesy. Moreover, FDA doesn't suspect DoD of just being in this to make money. Thus a dot mil is allowed to play by fundamentally different rules than a dot com. This is my point: when lives are on the line, people will be willing to risk lives to innovate. If not, then not. [0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW78wbN-WuU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW78wbN-WuU [1] http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/FDAGeneral/24762 http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/FDAGeneral/24...
chollida1 15y ago
Here is where the first footnote[0] links to: http://progressivefix.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/06.2011-Mandel_How-the-FDA-Impedes-Innovation.pdf http://progressivefix.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/06.2011...
Someone 15y ago
I would say it is because a) there is a lot of money to be made and b) Moore's law forces one to move fast to corner a market because one can almost guarantee that someone will disrupt it within a few years. Early customers were knowledgeable about this. Because of that, they accepted (partial) failure of products in exchange for earlier delivery and/or lower prices. Those customers, in turn 'educated' the masses to accept crashing products.
krausejj 15y ago
We've had tremendous innovation in the medical field - just look at life expectancies over the last few decades. Thiel's argument on transportation is also weak - cars/planes haven't gotten faster but they've gotten much more efficient. The biggest innovation failure lies with the government. And governments can certainly test things out and 'fail' as we can in consumer Internet. In fact these days, almost every government policy seems to fail! This is probably due to the cumbersome nature of the democratic process - whereas entrepreneurs can quickly disrupt inefficient systems and rely on the market to validate them.

Mvandenbergh 15y ago

Drug trials fail all the time though, and not only because of risk aversion. If you look at the first 50 years or so of the pharmaceutical industry, there were wonder drugs being discovered every year. We may simply have exhausted a lot of the low hanging small molecule fruit. Also, if risk aversion was slowing pharma innovation then we'd see a lot of potentially efficacious compounds failing safety trials. Instead what we see is that the cost to discover candidate compounds before they're ever tested on humans.

ramanujan 15y ago
It's absolutely true that risk aversion is not the only thing holding back drug trials. But it's definitely part of the problem. Think about insulin. In 1921 Banting and Best had the idea. It was in a patient's arm by 1922. And they won the Nobel Prize by 1923. http://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/insulin/discovery-insulin.html Early in 1921, Banting took his idea to Professor John Macleod at the University of Toronto, who was a leading figure in the study of diabetes in Canada. Macleod didn't think much of Banting's theories. Despite this, Banting managed to convince him that his idea was worth trying. Macleod gave Banting a laboratory with a minimum of equipment and ten dogs. Banting also got an assistant, a medical student by the name of Charles Best. The experiment was set to start in the summer of 1921. ... In January 1922 in Toronto, Canada, a 14-year-old boy, Leonard Thompson, was chosen as the first person with diabetes to receive insulin. The test was a success. Leonard, who before the insulin shots was near death, rapidly regained his strength and appetite. The team now expanded their testing to other volunteer diabetics, who reacted just as positively as Leonard to the insulin extract. The news of the successful treatment of diabetes with insulin rapidly spread outside of Toronto, and in 1923 the Nobel Committee decided to award Banting and Macleod the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. That was before the FDA gained the power of premarket approval, a time when pharma moved at the speed of software. Nowadays that past is characterized as a time of patent medicines and scam artists. But if you actually get into the history books you'll see that description is like characterizing the modern internet as a giant repository of spam and scams. In other words, absolutely that spam/scam stuff existed (and indeed crystals and faith healing persist to the present day), but real innovation in drugs also occurred at the same time. The fundamental point there is that Banting and Best could do empirical human trials. You can't predict what a novel drug will do without humans who are willing to risk their lives. In computers these people are called early adopters. If risk aversion was slowing pharma innovation then we'd see a lot of potentially efficacious compounds failing safety trials. Instead what we see is that the cost to discover candidate compounds before they're ever tested on humans. Yes, the thing is that drug companies face a significant penalty with the FDA if they fail a safety trial. It's not just a one off, it influences the FDA's perception of them as a "reputable" company. If the FDA thinks of you as disreputable or a cowboy, they will inspect the hell out of you and issue Form 483s [0] till the cows come home. And that's not even including the PR impact and the market sell-off should you ever actually have a TGN 1412 incident[1]. So there is a very significant economic risk to "failing fast" in pharma. Over and above the hit to brand, if the PR fallout is bad enough the FDA has a number of tools with which to criminalize failure. The Park Doctrine[2] is what they do for "off-label marketing", and they would escalate considerably if they felt public opinion demanded it. Anyway, this is why drug companies are doing all these simulations and iterating primarily around drug molecules that are known to be safe. No one ever got fired for buying IBM, and no one ever got fired for trying molecules compliant with Lipinski's rule of five[3]. Sure, that's still a pretty wide class of molecules, but "radical innovation" in compounds is just not going to fly with the FDA. After all, it took the FDA more than a decade to begin considering adaptive clinical trials[4] in lieu of the standard Phase I/II/III design. How long will it take them to agree that aging could be treated as a disease, or to allow the development of enhancing drugs? These things probably won't happen until there's some sort of major conflict in which enhancing drugs become the difference between victory and defeat. Then the floodgates will open. [0] http://blog.fdazilla.com/2011/09/fda-will-issue-10000-483s-in-2011-one-every-52-minutes/ http://blog.fdazilla.com/2011/09/fda-will-issue-10000-483s-i... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGN1412 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGN1412 [2] http://www.gatewayfda.com/fda-regulations/under-park-doctrine-fda-can-prosecute-individuals-for-company-violations-of-fdca/ http://www.gatewayfda.com/fda-regulations/under-park-doctrin... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druglikeness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Druglikeness [4] http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/102/16/1217.extract http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/102/16/1217.extract

Vindexus 15y ago

According to Guns, Germs and Steel, necessity is not the mother of invention. In fact the opposite is true: inventions appear when the needs of the inventors are already met. I really recommend the book, it's a great read.

ramanujan 15y ago
Jared Diamond notwithstanding, WW2 led directly or indirectly to: 1. The atomic bomb 2. Jet aircraft 3. The digital computer 4. Modern rocketry And the Cold War gave rise to 1. The internet 2. The space program 3. The interstate highway system These are the kinds of big swings that Thiel is talking about and that's just off the top of my head. You can go through previous wars as well. Wouldn't be surprised if WW1 was a real shot in the arm for aviation, for example. Probably the biggest peacetime innovation since the end of the Cold War has been the sequencing of the human genome. But arguably that was also a computer science innovation, as it revolved around better assembly algorithms and required no test pilots, clinical trials, or atomic bomb detonations.
- borism 15y ago
  Cold war wasn't a war. Work on jet engine began long before WW2 (and it failed to accelerate during WW2). So did the work on nuclear fission (if it wasn't for top scientists incl. Einstein convincing US President to fund it, there wouldn't be Manhattan Project at all. German scientists fortunately failed to persuade Nazis even though they were much closer to nuclear device.)
- cop359 15y ago
  The whole war = innovation thing never held much water for me. First of all, there is no way to know what would have happened if there was no war. Some of those things might have been invented anyway. Maybe other more important things would have been invented. Also, if you look at non-war years they too are full of innovation. The period just before WW1 brought us the light bulb, the telegraph, the phone, skyscrapers, the type writer, etc. etc. I mean, it was over a slightly longer period of time, but I don't think it would be outrageous to argue that the rate of innovation was just as high as during WW2.

WalterBright 15y ago

Sam Peltzman's book "Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation" makes a statistical case that the FDA's "safe and effective" mandate has cost more lives than it has saved. From the back cover: "The 1962 Amendments by Sam Peltzman concludes that the 1962 ("proof of efficacy") amendments to the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 (1) have cut the number of new drugs (new chemical entities) brought to the market each year by half with no corresponding reduction in inefficacious drugs, (2) have doubled the costs of drug development, (3) have have increased drug prices by reducing competition among drugs (so that the sick pay $50 million more each year for drugs), and (4) have imposed substantial net social costs from death and illnesses that could have been prevented if the development of new drugs had not been hampered by the amendments. These conclusions are reached despite the fact that Professor Peltzman has assumed for the amendments benefits that cannot be proven and may not have taken place."

cma 15y ago
HIV has been cured for Simian monkeys for quite a while because we could invasively experiment on them; so, the FDA stopping us from invasively experimenting (including involuntary innoculation of disease free subjects) on humans may have "statistically" cost more lives than it saved, but you'd have to be a Nazi to advocate it.
- WalterBright 15y ago
  That is not the thesis of Peltzman's book. Peltzman compares pharmaceutical innovation before the 1962 FDA amendments with after in the US, not with nazi germany.

potatolicious 15y ago

I disagree. The reason why the most innovation has occurred in this sector is because we're some of the best-funded. Look at the arms industry and you will see a similar pace of advancement - mostly due to the bottomless and nigh-unchallengeable defense spending of Uncle Sam. Why this unprecedented level of funding? IMO this really is the heart of Thiel's argument: internet companies are capable of general obscene, absurd, ludicrous profit margins. Think about a company like Facebook - employs a few thousand engineers, but generates revenue and impact far in excess of what you might expect from a crowd of that size. And this is really Thiel's argument, the way I understand it. He's not saying that the iPhone isn't a "technological" breakthrough, but rather it's not a "societal" breakthrough. In the old days, when someone introduces a product, it creates new jobs across the board. When Ford introduced a new car, it didn't just mean jobs for the people in the boardroom and drafting tables. It created jobs in their factories, and indeed tens of thousands of jobs across a wide supply chain necessary to build the product. It created new jobs in dealerships, and auto shops. The job-creation effects of a product were incredibly far-reaching. Now, fast forward to today. What jobs are Facebook creating besides the ones inside their walls? There is no employment ecosystem, no supply chain. And in this way, while Facebook is extracting record revenue from their business, the rest of America is no better off. It used to be that success in capitalism is the tide that floats all boats, but this is increasingly not true, especially in our sector.

ramanujan 15y ago
Look at the arms industry and you will see a similar pace of advancement - mostly due to the bottomless and nigh- unchallengeable defense spending of Uncle Sam. But I don't think you're really disagreeing here. The DoD is a lot less squeamish than civilians about experimental projects that result in death. Leave aside the issue of whether this is good or bad. For them, they are going to be seeing dead bodies as a natural course of doing business, and they want fewer ones, and so they're (much) more willing to pursue riskier projects that may cost lives. Soldiers can be ordered to run into enemy fire, so they can also be ordered to test drive automatic cars (funded by DARPA). Autonomous helicopters that could slice someone in two if the programming goes bad nevertheless get the green light because there are already people being sliced in two, and DoD wants to reduce that number. DoD is really pushing robotics and cybernetics forward in particular because those two result in less dead soldiers and (in the future) soldiers who can function even after losing limbs and eyes[0]. Perhaps the most concrete example of this thesis is what happens when the priorities of DoD and FDA collide. Take a look at the Pathways to Innovation program that FDA just greenlit[1]. On a Tuesday afternoon call with reporters, Shuren said he expects just one or two devices to be approved through the new pathway each year. The first device up for review under the new pathway comes from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research arm of the Department of Defense. The brain-controlled prosthetic is designed to restore near-natural arm, hand, and finger function to patients suffering from spinal cord injury, stroke, or amputation. An implanted microchip on the surface of the brain records neuronal activity, decodes the signals, and activates motor neurons that control the prosthesis. The first chip will be implanted in a patient within six months, Geoffrey Ling, MD, PhD, program manager at DARPA, told reporters. There is a very good reason why no private company has yet gotten this kind of fast track, but the DoD has. From FDA's perspective, DoD is a (more powerful) fellow agency which deserves professional courtesy. Moreover, FDA doesn't suspect DoD of just being in this to make money. Thus a dot mil is allowed to play by fundamentally different rules than a dot com. This is my point: when lives are on the line, people will be willing to risk lives to innovate. If not, then not. [0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW78wbN-WuU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW78wbN-WuU [1] http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/FDAGeneral/24762 http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/FDAGeneral/24...

chollida1 15y ago

Here is where the first footnote[0] links to: http://progressivefix.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/06.2011-Mandel_How-the-FDA-Impedes-Innovation.pdf http://progressivefix.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/06.2011...

Someone 15y ago

I would say it is because a) there is a lot of money to be made and b) Moore's law forces one to move fast to corner a market because one can almost guarantee that someone will disrupt it within a few years. Early customers were knowledgeable about this. Because of that, they accepted (partial) failure of products in exchange for earlier delivery and/or lower prices. Those customers, in turn 'educated' the masses to accept crashing products.

krausejj 15y ago

We've had tremendous innovation in the medical field - just look at life expectancies over the last few decades. Thiel's argument on transportation is also weak - cars/planes haven't gotten faster but they've gotten much more efficient. The biggest innovation failure lies with the government. And governments can certainly test things out and 'fail' as we can in consumer Internet. In fact these days, almost every government policy seems to fail! This is probably due to the cumbersome nature of the democratic process - whereas entrepreneurs can quickly disrupt inefficient systems and rely on the market to validate them.