Government Reform (FDA edition)

Via MR, I see that Rand Paul inserted language into FDA legislation recently passed by the Senate which would force the FDA to accept data from clinical investigations conducted outside the United States, including the European Union.  As Paul's press release claims, this would speed the process of getting drugs to market in the U.S., a process that has become increasingly burdensome, and unmatched to the task of reviewing the most advanced treatments.  Alex Taborrak has long advocated for automatic FDA approval of any drug or medical device that gains approval in the EU, Japan, Canada or Australia (I assume he would expand this list if offered the power to write the rules).  I'd be interested to see arguments against.  Is there a reason we shouldn't outsource this decision making, lessening the burden on U.S. govt resources and decreasing the time it takes for important medical treatments to come to market?

Driverless Cars - liability, technology, and a test drive

Continuing its very successful practice of giving test drives to journalists and politicians, Google recently took Randal O'Toole of Cato for a ride.  Some highlights:

He said the car and hardware cost about $100,000, but Google has just a handful of them. When they go into mass production, he estimated an ordinary car could be retrofitted for a couple of thousand dollars. Some cars already have many of the sensors the Google car uses, so the cost of retrofitting such cars would be much lower.

This is fantastic to hear, and something I hadnt given much thought to. If they can retrofit cars rather than having to build them from scratch, that could dramatically accelerate adoption of the driverless technology.

As we threaded through downtown DC traffic, he noted that the car relies on GPS for only the most general purposes. Mainly it relies on the information it senses and its built-in knowledge of the area. For example, Google programs the location and height of every traffic signal the car might encounter so it knows where to look for the signals.

This is also good news, as use of GPS has been a big concern for a variety of reasons.  The article does mention that the cars currently have information only about local areas - the car can drive around DC but not from DC to CA - but software updates should be able to make up for that in time.

And finally, this is encouraging in the short term, as Google leads the push for driverless cars, but does little to settle concerns that liability laws will remain a significant hurdle to widespread adoption:

Automakers probably won’t bring self-driving cars to market under current laws, he speculated–but those laws won’t stop Google. He promised that Google would stand by its software: If a self-driving car is involved in an accident, the car will have a record of what other vehicles involved were doing up to the accident. If the other vehicle is at fault, the record will prove it, and if Google’s car is at fault, Google would pay the cost and fix the problem so it won’t happen again.

Google is awesome.

End Prohibition (Organ markets edition)

Matt Welch makes the case for ending the prohibition on selling of kidneys:

Every day, eighteen people die in the United States while waiting in vain for a kidney transplant according to the National Kidney Foundation. The Department of Health & Human Services reports that nearly 92,000 patients were on the kidney waiting list as of April 6 (up from 66,000 six years ago), but that only 16,812 transplants were made in 2011. That deadly math is part of the reason that, according to the National Institutes of Health, more than 380,000 Americans are on dialysis, a punitively expensive and physically grueling death-postponement procedure. The imbalance cannot be meaningfully addressed via cadaver-harvesting alone. As the writer (and kidney donor) Virginia Postrel observed in 2009:

If every single person who died the right way became an organ donor, an optimistic estimate would be that 7,000 more kidneys a year would be available for transplant. Since the [waiting] list is now increasing by 6,000 a year, that would be enough to end it—in 80 years.

So we know that maintaining prohibition—letting the law be guided by our moral revulsion toward placing price tags on human organs—will certainly increase the body count. We know that boosting the number of kidney donations from the living is the only real way to whittle the waiting list down. And we also know, from such procedures as egg donation, that legalizing monetary rewards is a guaranteed method for expanding the pool of living donors. Your morality may vary, but mine says that sentencing more than 6,000 people a year to an avoidable death falls well short of the Golden Rule.

I agree.

In Case You Missed It

Caballo Blanco

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/sports/caballo-blancos-last-run-the-micah-true-story.html?src=me&ref=general

Self-Driving Vehicle Progress (CA Senate edition)

The California Senate has voted 37-0 to allow use of autonomous vehicles in their state.  If the law is adopted, CA would join Nevada in approving use of autonomous vehicles.  Nevada issued their first autonomous vehicle license in May 2012 for a Toyota Prius that Google had modified.  This is the first step in what will likely be a long process of adoption of this incredible technology.  There is much yet to be done, both on the technical and legal fronts, but things are moving faster than I expected.  It's very exciting.

DC Murder Map

I found this map interesting.  It depicts locations of murders in DC since 2005. 

Wednesday (and Tuesday Afternoon) Links

Too big to fail bigger than ever: The five largest U.S. financial institutions, which controlled $6.1 trillion in assets before the collapse, by the end of 2011 had assets worth $8.5 trillion.

You should be reading Evan Soltas' blog.

Migrant from El Salvador report that they would like recipient households to save 21.2 percent of remittance receipts, while recipient households prefer to save only 2.6 percent of receipts.

I think this is wrong: Obama's budget deficits are Bush's fault.  Bush was a fiscal nightmare, but that graph looks at the budget a decade after Bush left office and blames all of its problems on 1 president.  That doesnt make sense.  Then again, I'm not sure I see much utility in placing blame right now either way.

 

Least defensible claim of the day (and it's only 4pm!)

"Unpaid internships aren't morally defensible."

Somebody is Wrong on the Internet! (Yglesias edition)

Matt Yglesias argues that we need not worry about plummeting workforce participation because we still have a rate as high as Germany and higher than Sweden.

Conventional wisdom has it that the labor market in low unemployment Germany is currently quite healthy. But emp-pop says that there's been no time in all of recorded history when the German labor market has been as healthy as the U.S. labor market was at the depth of the recession. Conventional wisdom also says that Sweden make a comeback from the Nordic Financial Crisis of the early 1990s and learned valuable lessons that helped it whether the Panic of 2007 much better than the world's larger industrialized countries. What emp-pop says is that Sweden has been in a persistent depression for the past twenty years.

He seems to think that people who think this is an important measure of our current economic health are looking for the U.S. to hit some magic healthy economy number.  But that isnt the case at all.  Economists aren't worried about workforce participation because they think a healthy economy requires a rate of 62%.  If we had a strong economy but more people were choosing to stay home with their kids or retire young, no one would call that a recession (though it might raise other concerns).  The issue is when the economy is tanking and most of the people dropping out of the workforce first got fired and then spent a year fruitlessly looking for a new employer.  Traditional unemployment numbers aren't the right ones to look at because they dont count people who would gladly take a job if they thought they could get one but have given up looking. 

Bottom line: the stable long-term differences between economies reflect structural differences and different work-leisure choices.  Sudden dramatic changes during an economic downturn likely reflect the disappearance of jobs, and it isnt wise or helpful to pretend that people giving up hope of finding work isnt a problem.

How good were the Spurs, really?

Bill Simmons listed all the NBA Finals that deserve a footnote for whatever reason, usually shady refs or injuries to key opponents.

All of Tim Duncan's titles make the list. Some for a very good reason: the lockout title and the 2005 title in which they avoided the top 2 teams in the East (the Melee was the previous season and DWade was injured in the ECFs). Some for pretty good reasons: Amare getting suspended for leaving the bench, C-Webb AND Dirk getting knocked out by knee injuries.

He lists 24, which is a lot, so maybe this stuff just happens every season. And 4 titles for 1 team and one player/coach combo is obviously a lot. But still, it makes you wonder how these 4 should be compared to multiple titles won by other teams.