Megan McArdle's Word Games

The mind also reels from her first hypothesizing that 80% of drug profits come from American companies and then positing that the disappearance of all of those profits would harm health care for Europeans. What does she thinks would happen to those American companies from health care reform in this country? That they would be swallowed whole into the earth? A more intelligent commentator would have at least postulated that health care reform would reduce drug company profits by some factor, not wipe them out wholesale, but that intelligent commentator is not Megan McArdle.

However hypothetical [and ludicrous] McArdle's point is it still does not resolve the question of how important profit is in motivating people to be innovative. And this is why the contest between "selfish" and "selfless" behavior has never really been won or lost. It just gets kicked down the road until someone interpolates it into a new context.

Human motivation is always extremely complex and is ever rooted ambiguously in the manner in which we come to internalize one frame of mind rather than another.

Consider this for example:

Jules Henry quoted in Michael Novak's, The Experience of Nothingness:

"Boris had trouble reducing 12/16 to the lowest terms, and could only get as far as 6/8. The teacher asked him quietly if that was as far as he could reduce it. She suggested he 'think'. Much heaving up and down and waving of hands by the other children, all frantic to correct him. Boris pretty unhappy, probably mentally paralyzed. The teacher quiet, patient, ignores the others and concentrates with look and voice on Boris. After a minute or two she turns to the the class and says, 'Well, who can tell Boris what the number is?' A forest of hands appears, and the teacher calls on Peggy. Peggy says that four may be divided into the numerator and the denominator."

Henry remarks:

"Boris's failure made it possible for Peggy to succeed; his misery is the occasion for her rejoicing. This is a standard condition of the contemporary American elementary school. To a Zuni, Hopi or Dakota Indian, Peggy's performance would seem cruel beyond belief, for competition, the wringing of success from somebody's failure, is a form of torture foreign to those non-competitive cultures. Looked at from Boris's point of view, the nightmare at the blackboard was, perhaps, a lesson in controlling himself so that he would not fly shrieking from the room under enormous public pressure. Such experiences force every man reared in our culture, over and over again, night in, night out, even at the pinnacle of success, to dream not of success but of failure. In school the external nightmare is internalized for life. Boris was not learning arithmetic only; he was learning the essential nightmare also. To be successful in our culture one must learn to dream of failure."

George:

This is no less applicable to the different attitudes we have about the profit motive.

Human identity and the motivation behind it is a profoundly problematic and precarious work in progress...a prefabricated point of view that is always subject to change without notice.

Suppose you think about who you are. Suppose you then imagine how that might have been different had you been born into an 11th century aboriginal tribe in Australia....or into a Samurai community in 16th century Japan....or into a late 20th century Taliban faction in Afganistan. Suppose you subtract out the particular parents who raised you or the particular community you grew up in or the particular demographic parameters of your particular social interactions. Suppose your gender or race had been different. Who are you then?

See what I'm getting at here?

Not to worry. I didn't really expect you to.

george walton
d/a

I would have a lot more sympathy for the moaning from the likes of Megan McArdle about the research risk faced by pharmaceutical firms had Pfizer, for example, not spent less on R&D ($7.9B) than it spent on dividends ($8.5B) in 2008.