Andrew Lo, an MIT professor, hears that his mother has
cancer and sets out to do his own research on cancer treatment. He’s lucky, his
colleagues at the school have contacts in a biotech firm, and they’re
developing a new cancer drug. The problem is in the money, and I don’t mean HIS
money. The firm is at the mercy of investors in order to fund the research and
testing, and the investors want huge guarantees that the drug will work. This
isn’t news to me, I remember a 1990’s article about the eight-figure cost of
testing McCavor (a cholesterol reducing drug, if anyone still takes it) and all
the other medicines, most of which were eventually outclassed. What surprised me
in this book is that the drug companies are all moving to Ireland to get tax
breaks. Not only is the USA losing the jobs, but the CEO’s might not have to pay tax on the money.
The author blames
part of the problem on the MBA degree, because, according to her, it teaches
useless theories and not real-world finance. Okay, we all remember the scene in
Back to School, where Rodney
Dangerfield one-ups the stuffy professor and schools him on the realities of
business. I can believe that scene, the professor obviously has never been out
of academia, so he has no idea of what really goes on. But I disagree with the
author’s argument that the MBA is to blame; if the drug companies need
financing, they should be hiring pitchmen who can negotiate with potential investors.
Next comes the
charity director (in this case Josette Sheeran of the UN world food program) with
a prop that she brings to meetings, and how she shows skeptical plutocrats how
hungry the kids are. I disagree again with the author’s argument, in this case
blaming capitalism for the worldwide rise in food prices. She doesn’t question other
possibilities, like the people in the USA, Britain, and Europe who reject
farming as an occupation. She also ignores the fact that India and the Arab oil
states are importing more food than ever before. She also ignores the
possibility that a country’s farming practices are unsound. No mention is made
about unsound farming methods, which George Washington Carver spent years
trying to change. It reminds me of the people who cure themselves of illness,
and reduce their medicines from 20 to two, by simply cutting processed foods
and losing weight.
I think the problem
here is that the author is going for the most expensive solution to a problem,
rather than starting at the bottom. She blames the rising corn prices on
ethanol in gasoline, but she doesn’t realize that all processed foods use corn
syrup as a sweetener, and most US livestock is fed on corn. If Americans were
to reject processed foods, corn prices would drop, and with that, the price of
beef, pork, poultry, dairy, and eggs. Maybe the problem is entirely on
Americans eating too much junk? I had a similar (and funnier) argument once
from an old Israeli, and it went like this; “Ben-Gurion brought has own lunch
to work and ate pita bread and goat cheese, then Yitzhak Shamir liked to sit in
cafes and drink coffee, but now Netanyahu wears $1000 suits and eats $300 steak
dinners, and the steaks are all imported.”
To sum up, I
disagree with everything the author says. The problem is not Wall Street, the
problem is materialism. If Americans weren’t glued to the TV and stuffing their
faces with junk food, the USA would not be dependent on corn and drugs.
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