Friday, September 13, 2013

My Bias

I'm about to write a series of economics articles on this site, and one of the most important economic guidelines is:

Everybody has an economic(and political) bias (often specific to one's career choice).

In terms of economic incentives, nobody is objective , even if some of us strive to be objective.

So a fair question is: what is your economic bias?

Fair enough, although if you are reading this blog, you already know. But I'll be explicit:

I have the economic bias of an "Angry Innovator".

For decades pharmaceutical shareholders have been consistently ripped off because of the severe worker productivity problems in statistical programming services, problems that could have and should have been solved in the 1990s. I have a solution that brings the cost of statistical table production down by more than 80%. So I'm an innovator.

But I failed to understand just how deeply dysfunctional the politics and economics in the pharmaceutical industry is. It turns out that nobody in the pharmaceutical industry cares about solving worker productivity problems. SAS programmers are not at all happy about this breakthrough (they are protecting their own economic interests). Pharmaceutical CFOs don't answer my letters because they are stuck-up people who think communicating with innovators from the poor or middle class is beneath them.
So I'm angry. So now you know what my economic bias is.

But I have learned some things here, something that theoretical economists and newspaper economics columnists even today do not understand. People will often behave in a superficial or shallow manner (especially corporate executives) and that fact distorts and reshapes the economy in ways that economists don't even try to understand. The health-care industry is particularly bad, and health-care executives simply do not wish to solve long-term cost-efficiency problems and long-term worker productivity problems. And that is a big problem.

No comments:

Post a Comment