Diagnostic Summary
Keywords
war-on-disease, 1-percent-treaty, medical-research, public-health, peace-dividend, decentralized-trials, dfda, dih, victory-bonds, health-economics, cost-benefit-analysis, clinical-trials, drug-development, regulatory-reform, military-spending, peace-economics, decentralized-governance, wishocracy, blockchain-governance, impact-investing
Before you can fix something, you need to understand what’s broken. In this case, what’s broken is approximately everything.
They say knowledge is power. In this case, knowledge is mostly just depressing. But you need it, the way you need to know your house is on fire before you can put it out.
The Daily Body Count
Every day, 150,000 humans die from disease and aging. That’s fifty 9/11s. Per day. Including weekends and holidays.
When one thing kills 3,000 people, it’s a tragedy and you start wars. When diseases kill 50 times that every day, it’s called “natural causes,” which is Latin for “you couldn’t be bothered.”
After the first 9/11, America invaded two countries and spent $2 trillion. After the fifty daily 9/11s, humanity shrugs and wonders what’s for lunch.
Where the Money Goes
Killing each other: $2.72 trillion per year Curing diseases: $67.5 billion (95% CI: $54 billion-$81 billion) per year
The real bottleneck isn’t research funding. It’s testing which treatments actually work. Governments worldwide spend $4.5 billion (95% CI: $3 billion-$6 billion) annually on clinical trials, a 604 (90% CI: 453-888) ratio, which in technical terms is called “having your priorities backwards.”
On Medical Research
Since 1970, the National Institutes of Health has spent over $1 trillion studying diseases.
Diseases cured: Zero.
Of its $47 billion (95% CI: $45 billion-$50 billion) annual budget, only 3.3% (95% CI: 2%-5%) goes to actual drug trials in humans. The other 97% goes to studying mice, building buildings, and publishing papers nobody reads. The system operates at 2% of its potential capacity to save lives.
On the FDA
The FDA makes drugs 82x (90% CI: 21.4x-195x) times more expensive than necessary. It takes 14 years (95% CI: 12 years-17 years) and $2.6 billion (95% CI: $1.5 billion-$4 billion) to get a drug from discovery to patient. That’s longer than it took to build the pyramids. The pharaohs didn’t have to file quarterly progress reports in triplicate. Ninety-five percent of diseases have zero approved treatments because the FDA is excellent at preventing any drugs from reaching people.
On What War Costs
Humanity spends $2.72 trillion every year on war. That works out to $340 (90% CI: $333-$347) per human on Earth for death tools.
This budget includes:
- Nuclear bombs (12,241 of them, because one fewer wouldn’t destroy Earth thoroughly enough)
- Bullets (many)
- AI murder robots (the future is here and it’s disappointing)
- Fighter jets that cost more than hospitals
- Submarines (one submarine = 1,000 cancer research labs)
- Probably some kind of earthquake machine
Your personal lifetime contribution to the murder budget is $74,259. You could have bought a really nice casket instead. Or, and this is just a thought, not needed a casket quite so soon.
The interesting thing about having 12,241 nuclear warheads is that after the first 100, you’re just showing off. You can only destroy Earth once. The rest are for what, exactly? Destroying Earth’s ghost?
On What Disease Costs
Disease extracts $400 trillion (90% CI: $252 trillion-$544 trillion) from humanity annually in welfare losses (2.88 billion avoidable DALYs at $150,000 (90% CI: $100,384-$198,679)/QALY). That includes 10 million cancer deaths per year and 2 billion people living with chronic diseases.
If disease were a country, it would be the richest country on Earth by a factor of ten. Unfortunately, disease doesn’t have a flag or an army, so nobody invades it.
Out of 2.4 billion people (95% CI: 2 billion people-2.8 billion people) suffering from chronic disease, only 1.9 million patients/year (95% CI: 1.5 million patients/year-2.3 million patients/year) get to participate in clinical trials annually. That’s 0.0792% (90% CI: 0.0631%-0.0975%). Half would volunteer if asked. You’re turning away 99.6% of willing participants.
On Democracy
A Princeton study found 0% correlation between what the public wants and what policies get enacted. Zero. Not “low.” Not “disappointing.” Zero. Your democracy has the same correlation with your preferences as a coin flip has with your breakfast order.
When the humans you pay to make the killing things want $100 billion, they spend $55 million lobbying for it. That’s $1,813 back for every dollar1. When you want healthcare, you have approximately zero dollars to lobby with. You spent it all on healthcare. Or you’re dead, which significantly reduces your lobbying capacity.
Meanwhile, the people who regulate industries used to work for those industries. They’ll work for them again after they’re done “regulating.” It’s called the revolving door, and it spins in one direction: toward money.
On the Fixed Pie
Money isn’t real, but resources are. Earth has 8 billion human brains. Every MIT graduate building missiles is not curing cancer. Every brilliant physicist designing warheads is not designing MRI machines. You have a fixed number of geniuses. You are using them to build things that kill other geniuses. Switzerland spends 0.7% of GDP on military and has $93,000 GDP per capita. America spends 3.5% and has $76,000.
The solution isn’t to print more money for medical research. The solution is to change the ratio. Take money from the killing budget, give it to the not-dying budget. This is called “arithmetic,” which is apparently a controversial field of mathematics.
What’s Next
The following chapters explain each problem in detail:
- The NIH Spent $1 Trillion Curing Nothing: How 97% of medical research funding avoids testing drugs in humans
- The FDA Is Unsafe and Ineffective: How “safety” regulations make medicine more dangerous
- Unrepresentative Democracy: Why 0% of what you want becomes policy
- You Are a Meat Robot: Your body is a machine, and the parts are fixable
And if you don’t fix it, you are going to die from something that could have been cured. Personally. You. The person reading this. While the Pentagon loses another trillion dollars between the sofa cushions of its accounting department.