raja_indy14

From what I remember, it was a mess created by people trying to "fix" regulations that weren't broken. Although they were increasingly irrelevant. By the end of Glass-Steagall many of its provisions were circumvented, so that its legal repeal was simply the nail in the coffin. But the financial sector was also under increasing pressure to expand the products that it could sell - as interest rates fell in the late 1980s from the high point of the Volcker shock, investors went looking for alternative high-return investments - and the liberalization of financial markets in London threatened to take business from Wall Street. Liberalization/deregulation had been initiated to allow Wall Street to profit from an overseas Eurodollar market that it had hitherto been excluded from; as always, the argument for deregulation came in the guise of international competition. By the late 1990s, the Quants had engineered all sorts of wonderful ways of assessing and mitigating risk, by assuming that markets functioned rationally and followed a 'random walk' around a predictable equilibrium point (once again, economics borrowed concepts from the natural sciences, particularly physics, and applied them to human systems), and by developing models of abstract risk. The collapse of LTCM in 1998 should have been a warning sign that such models were not guarantees against failure - indeed, in a crisis positively exacerbated the situation - but by then the triumph of rational-actor, mathematics -based economics had entrenched itself against all the evidence that was beginning to accumulate. The assurance of risk mitigation bred by such models was added to the constant pressure to expand and find new profitable outlets for excess capital - especially as, since the 1980s, a shrinking share of profits have been reinvested as retained earnings thanks to the concept of shareholder value. It wasn't a mess created by people trying to fix regulations, it was supported by an understanding of economics that had become ideology - that risk had been controlled, that markets were understood - combined with a relentless need to create profitable outlets for vast accumulations of money capital. Regulations didn't need to be fixed, and nor was this the mindset, instead their very existence acted as barriers to higher profitability and international competitiveness.

I don't much agree with whatever "theories" people have conjured to argue that night owls (i.e. the researchers themselves) are "more intelligent" than larks. So are they suggesting that mankind hasn't produced any smarty pants until Edison invented the light bulb? --- Studies have shown that "power napping" during the day can never replace deep REM sleep at night. Constantly changing the going-to-bed times and wake-up times will also disrupt your circadian rhythms (sleep-wake cycles) which is extremely detrimental to health (in many cases, more so than unhealthy eating habits). I don't think anybody has suggested that it is healthy.

Which is one of the major theories for why people who are night owls often display more intelligence, lateral thinking, and creativity: overriding your biological clock is a novel behaviour that indicates a suppression of natural instincts for other purposes. But, as you say, particularly since night owls have to live within a society with a much different time regime, it does lead to a higher incidence of other problems. ---- Also, I don't think it would be correct to characterize late sleepers as doing so because of parties. Throughout High School I would regularly go to sleep very late - if my school wasn't incredibly lax on attendance I would probably have failed - but I almost never partied. Most of the time was spent reading. As it relates to the OP, I would imagine that if that time was instead spent watching television in my room, the outcome would have been very different.

An article about night owls and intelligence and one about the genetic basis of sleep patterns.

This is interesting, because it's been in the news a lot in the last year or so that many studies show that there is a correlation between night owls and intelligence. Basically, people who preferred later hours and sleeping in tended to have higher IQs than those who slept and woke with patterns more in line with the daily rhythm. At the same time, they tended to suffer from somewhat elevated rates of disease and psychological disorders. I recall one study suggesting the link may be related to such sleep patterns being 'evolutionarily novel behaviour'.

I have to admit that I made an error. That breakdown is the capital investment of the city of Winnipeg. The following proportions are of the operating budget. They're more in line with what you'd expect from SimCity (although, of course, Healthcare is not really a municipal responsibility here). 44% Police and Fire Paramedic Services 25% Street System, Solid Waste Collection, Land Drainage, Street Lighting, and Insect Control 12% Community Services (Libraries, Parks) 7% Organizational Support (Legal, Assessment, IT, Finance) 5% Property Development 5% Transit Subsidy 2% Executive Costs If you look at the revenue figures, while 52% comes from property taxes, a not insignificant 23% comes from levies, sales of goods and services, interest, and fines and fees.

This is a difficult question to answer because, in light of your last post, it's difficult to understand what you mean by 'government', 'produced', and 'direct value'. By government do you mean the state in general or specifically people who are running the executive, legislative, and judicial branches at any given time? With 'produced', are you restricting it to goods and excluding services, specifically things that are manufactured? 'Direct value' is completely indecipherable; is it something exchanged for a surplus, something that has direct use-value for a consumer, or something else entirely? To begin with a minimalist definition of the government, I would say that the public education system, the police and fire fighting services, and a huge chunk of research and development are all examples of very important services that are provided by government. Generally, having access to education, not having my house burned down in periodic out of control fires, and using the internet all have value to me. Although is it 'direct value'? I can't be sure. Even extremely basic things like keeping track of rights to land and property ownership (which are essential services in our economy) is evidently of 'indirect value'(?) when you compare it to locations where such services are decidedly lacking. If you mean that government does not profit directly from its activities, that is correct. In part because the 'shareholders' of the government are the citizenry at large, so one might say that any return is made in services rendered. However, most government has an interest in expanding the level of production and consumption that takes place within its jurisdiction, and to the extent that it is successful in this, it expands its potential revenue stream. Lastly, if we are referring to the state in general, and not simply the governing apparatus (which I think one must, since while the legislative-judiciary-executive provide key but indirect services, they absorb a very minimal amount of state expenditure) it's fairly clear that most of the expenditure is in services that are deemed to have some sort of general value to the public. Look at national defense. A government organization purchases inputs on the market (although in many ways not a terribly efficient one) - labour, land, and let's say 'capital machinery' - it even has in-house managerial training, and produces a 'service': national security, the ability to intervene in the affairs of other nations, and a greater influence in the global pecking order. You could have this exact same process being carried out by a private organization, except that the services would be sold at a profit, and in fact lately these have become more popular. One might argue, however, that public control over such 'military services' is smarter and safer than contracting it all out to private firms (cf. Renaissance Italy). In many instances, public provision of services is more efficient than private, just read the history of fire fighting in the United States, unless in the name of free markets you prefer to have fire companies fighting each other rather than fires, or starting fires on purpose. To bring it back to a more local level, one can see in the breakdown of the budget of my city, Winnipeg, that the vast majority of the expenditure is going into services that have use value to citizens (in order of size): 40% Sewage Disposal Projects (I feel I get a direct use-value from not regularly dying of cholera) 19% Roads and Bridges (Just imagine how expensive my groceries would be if everything was carried in on toll roads or, more likely, dirt paths) 12% Transit System 10% Parks, Community Infrastructure, and Amenities (I definitely get use-values out of these on a regular basis, I'd likely be obese otherwise) 8% Water System (I'm sure hauling water several km every day has a positive impact on productivity in African countries where this is largely missing) 4% Land Drainage and Flood Control (Especially where I live, I definitely derive value from not having my house flooded every few years) 3% Public Safety 2% Solid Waste Disposal 2% Misc. Other Also, it's not true that government only derives revenue from taxes. Governments also charge user fees, for example when you obtain a Passport or visit a National Park. And, of course, this is very much America-centric, in much of the rest of the world the government also often directly owns a sizable portion of the means of production. As for the money comment, the bulk of the contemporary derivatives market is predicated precisely on the idea of making money from nothing, or at least on intangibles such as risk. 'Money is a fiction and therefore nothing' is just an empty platitude. I can't tell whether its a dig at the fiat currency system that currently presides over the globe, or some larger attack on the social nature of embodied value. In any event, it's largely irrelevant to the way money functions in the contemporary economy. An atheist would say that God is fiction, should we treat the apparatus and ideology of religion as 'nothing'?

This is only correct if by 'government' you are referring specifically to the legislative, executive, and judicial branches that govern a certain political entity. Virtually all governments, by which I mean the state, are a major producer of goods and services, including advanced capitalist economies. While in the United States, only 1% of the economy is state-owned, most other developed countries have levels of state ownership of around 10% or more, and as these are concentrated in areas such as transportation and public utilities are hardly peripheral. Even in the US, the state is a major provider of key services. In any event, states are not by definition non-productive, but it has been in vogue in many contemporary states that their productive capacities should be or have been privatized or eliminated. Taxes are not a production of value on the part of the state, but a contribution or levy made by citizens to states to indirectly pay for some of the goods and services that a state provides. Specific publicly or state-owned enterprises or institutions may also charge direct user fees. For instance, you travel on publicly maintained thoroughfares without having to pay user fees because these have been indirectly paid for through taxes. Or you send your children to a public school. Getting back to Detroit, the contracts that were made with public service unions have not been amenable to the changes that have taken place, but it is also unlikely that the level of depopulation and property abandonment that occurred could have been foreseen. Halving of urban populations and property vacancy rates of over a third are well beyond the boundaries of business as usual. That over 33% of the properties in Detroit are vacant exacerbates the problems that municipalities must already tackle in providing service in the face of significant urban sprawl. Civil service employees and rigid contracts certainly make the situation more difficult, but we shouldn't mix causes with symptoms. These become unsustainable in the face of the collapse of the local economy, which in Detroit has proceeded rapidly in the last 15 years, which is not a timeline that most civic governments are able to respond within.

One of the annoying aspects of this is that you need to have unrealistically large areas of your city zoned for commercial or industrial. When I compare the zoning of a typical SimCity to real life examples the difference is incredibly stark. It may be the consequence of Maxis wanting to make cities more balanced between the three zone types, since in game terms players might become bored with creating the vast areas of residential neighbourhoods necessary to house the workers of dense commercial office space. The most obvious examples are the low-density housing, where a single family home might house more than 10 people. In a typical North American suburb it would be out of the ordinary for more than 4-5 people to occupy such a house, and on average likely no more than 2.5.

The Korean camps are not larger than Stalinist Gulags, which covered vast territories in Siberia. Norillag included Norilsk and Krasnoyarsk, which are hundreds of kilometres apart. As for stopping humanitarian aid, I fail to see how precipitating a famine that could kill hundreds of thousands or even millions is preferable to the current situation. The regime survived the millions killed by the famine of the mid-1990s, how many would have to die before a similar crisis toppled the government now? China may or may not care what they do. At times they have been seen to rebuke Pyongyang, although not necessarily for humanitarian reasons. What is clear is that they favour a communist ally on their doorstep rather than what they perceive to be an American puppet. The creation of a unified Korean republic under the auspices of Seoul is the last thing Beijing wants.

Fort → Forget Ample

UN reform that eliminates the veto is beyond impossible. Each power guards that right jealously, none more so than the United States (which would likely leave the UN if it didn't have it). As for the water supply idea, virtually all of Syria's drinking supply comes from ground water sources so it is hardly, if at all, dependent on Turkey. From wiki: "All major cities - with the exception of Aleppo – and all rural distribution networks in the rural areas are supplied with water of good quality from springs and groundwater. Major water treatment facilities exist only for the domestic water supply system for Aleppo, which is provided with water from Lake Assad."

I would still say that to see this simply as the work of wayward imams working on an illiterate population is overly simplistic. Islamism, whether radical or moderate, is in almost every facet a reaction against the external world, particularly Western capitalism, and its penetration or violation of Muslim-majority countries. For one thing, illiteracy cannot explain it entirely because there has always been mass illiteracy, but Islamism as a political movement only emerged slowly since the 1950s (when Western modernization first began to significantly effect Middle Eastern countries) and exploded in 1979 against Anglo-American domination of Iran and Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. If one reads the works of Sayyid Qutb, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the 1950s/60s and one of the 'founding fathers' one might say of contemporary Islamism, one finds a strong vein of disgust with the West: it's materialism, decadence, and hypocrisy. A recovered and autonomous Islam founded firmly in spiritualism and social order is held up as the object of struggle. If one were to make a broad statement about the present-day sources of Islamism, I think it would be more correct to look at the clash between capitalist globalization and local traditionalism, between the promises and results of secular modernization, and at the ongoing unequal political and economic interference in the affairs of the Middle East by the leading capitalist powers. After all, the Iranian revolution and the theocracy that followed was not largely a consequence of religion-hungry fanatics, but a widespread reaction to a foreign-dominated, illiberal regime bent on secular Westernization. That Khomeini ended up in control of a regime headed by Islamic jurists was more a consequence of political shrewdness and capacity to exploit a power vacuum, rather than a goal of the revolution. PS; zero and the decimal system was actually invented in Hindu India, but refined in Persia and transmitted to Europe via Arab North Africa. Preservation, hybridization, elaboration, and invention across a vast range of scientific and philosophical subjects occurred during this time, however. One advantage may have been that the Islamic philosophers in the period were much better able to source their ideas in the rich philosophical heritage of Greece, Persia, and India, while the Greeks who had dominated the region before looked upon non-Greek philosophy with contempt.

I am puzzled by this interpretation. Yes and no. While I tried to point out an alternative reason behind the end of the Golden Age of Islam (that is, not a general stultification under monarchical regimes), I wouldn't suggest that this can be seen as directly leading to the present situation.

I had thought about editing my post to include the factor of mass illiteracy, but decided that this could be assumed to be a generally understood. Mass illiteracy certainly enables and exacerbates the factors mentioned previously, and it interacts quite closely with at least the first two. The fact that so many governments in the Islamic world have failed to provide effective, secular mass education makes Saudi-funded madrassas much more effective and appealing. It is a signal failure of the secular modernization drives of the 1960s and 1970s. As for the history, neither the Moors nor the Ottomans ever constituted the 'most part' of the Islamic world, although symbolically the latter came fairly close. Nonetheless it still sustained a titanic and prolonged struggle against the Safavid Persians, who would not have agreed with the view that it was part of the Ottoman domain. Although I don't know enough about it to discuss in too much detail, I do know that the impact of the Mongol invasions on the Islamic Middle East were profoundly devastating. The wanton depopulation of huge areas of productive agricultural land and the discontinuation of ancient agricultural practices; the repeated invasions from the 13th to the 16th centuries annihilated such wondrous cities as Baghdad, where the Tigris ran black with the ink of texts thrown into it (not to mention the blood of the hundreds of thousands slaughtered), and the cultured urban centres of Persia; and the psychological blow to Islamic intellectualism initiated by this 'scourge from God' that, in addition to the physical destruction of libraries and learned centres, prompted a widespread philosophical retreat into conservative theology. What came out of this calamity, at least initially, were not cultured regimes with a strong intellectual bent, but warriors: the Mamelukes in Egypt, the Turks in Anatolia and Southeast Europe, and Mongols (Timurid) in Persia and Afghanistan. Although the latter two subsequently attempted to recover the culture of the shattered Persian and Mesopotamian civilization, it would be a slow process - eventually it would seem simpler to just borrow from the increasingly dynamic Europeans. Finally, I would say that what's more important is that general literacy and educational attainment would put a lot of authoritarian regimes out of work, which have always had much more political clout than clerics (well, except in Iran). @IL. Although that might be the impression one gathers from some posters, the overall tone of the thread would seem to suggest that (a) fanaticism or extremism are hardly limited to Islam and (b) that while there is much discussion of the general, this should not be taken to indicate the universal. Tendencies and patterns are drawn out for the sake of simplicity.

But Islam and Christianity have had such different historical trajectories that, even broadly speaking, it appears to impart little understanding to see the current malaise in terms of historically displaced developmental paths. At least three things seem to be far more relevant in understanding the present situation. 1) By an accident of history and geography, one of the most conservative brands of Islam (Wahhabism) ends up with a royal sponsor sitting on gigantic oil reserves and, by virtue of this position, the support and protection of the world superpower. It is free to set up conservative-brand madrassas across the Islamic world, paid for by the global demand for oil. 2) The undeniable failure of secular modernization in so many Muslim-majority countries to bring significant material improvement. If the imported ideology of capitalist/socialist progress has not been seen to work, why not turn to an indigenous traditional one? 3) The systematic violation and/or capture of secular authoritarian governments and their countries by foreign interests and states. This served as the impetus for the initial significant Islamist reactions in 1979: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian Revolution.

In light of the very slim volume called Rules of Conduct for Vessels Meeting at Sea otherwise known as the Collision Regulations, I find it hard to fathom what this poster is getting at. Simply affirming, in response to 'I had always thought the "going down with the ship" has been taken out of context over the centuries,' that the idea had originated fairly recently and also in a relatively confined cultural context.

Thankfully, wiki has a list for that. Damascus and Jericho seem to be at the top of the list.

It's also important to remember that that tradition is culturally specific, arising from a Victorian sensibility about honour and chivalry. Although the concept of the captain's fundamental responsibility has now been enshrined in international law, many other cultures did not have the same tradition.

I find it incredibly difficult to see in religions any 'intrinsic' characteristics that are fundamental and in any sense 'real', from which certain actions are merely unthinking, illogical deviations. As a socially constructed entity, a religion is however it is viewed, defined, and performed at any given time in any given social context. To argue that 'well those aren't real [insert religious group]' because they deviate from a certain, subjective understanding of what that religion should be is illogical. Essentially, religion is what people make of it, and many of the holy scriptures can be interpreted in a myriad of different ways to justify or condemn a range of activities and moral perspectives. Both Christianity and Islam have histories of being deployed to justify and exhort to massive violence, are the people who did/do this not Christians or Muslims? To make blanket statements about Islam being fundamentally a religion of tolerance is nearly as bad as making blanket statements about it being a fundamentally violent religion. Neither is really an accurate descriptor of such a vast (both spatial and temporal) social construction. Also, Timbuktu is not the oldest city still extant.

This is a bit archaic, and actually the tradition was simply that the captain (and men) should be the last one(s) off the ship, and that he should stay until foundering becomes inevitable. There is certainly no compulsion that captains should die if their vessel sinks (in the popular imagination this has been cemented by the story of RMS Titanic), and this has rarely occurred historically (excluding cases where all or most people on board died). Captains do have legal obligations for the security and safety of a ship and its complement, however, hence the arrest of the Captain of Costa Concordia.

I might agree if 'society' wasn't so hypocritical and inconsistent about drugs. There's also the fact that social stigma's are context-dependent. If you are out on the streets drunk in the mid-afternoon there is a huge social stigma attached, while if you get completely trashed in a club or at a house party it is generally acceptable (although it varies greatly between different people). There already are significant social stigma's associated with the use of certain drugs and high variability between drugs. Often, certain drugs are considered more glamorous (generally associated with the drug of choice for the wealthier classes) and others more degenerate (generally associated with those drugs available to marginalized people). For instance the difference in social perception between powdered cocaine versus crack cocaine, while marijuana is decidedly 'middle class'. Personally, I drink alcohol and I wouldn't want those stigma's attached to me. Ethanol is one of the most addictive and harmful drugs and yet one of the most widely consumed, regardless my government (Manitoba) has a monopoly on the distribution and retail of liquor. That is perfectly socially acceptable while Ecstasy, a far less harmful and addictive drug, is illegal and criminal (even though practically the only danger associated with it is through toxic additives and impurities associated with the fact that its production is unregulated). Other drugs are considered perfectly acceptable, even desirable (caffiene), while others have only recently had stigma's attached after massive public advertising campaigns (tabacco, although even now the stigma is attached to smoking rather than the nicotine itself). Many prescription drugs are widely available that have affects similar to illicit drugs or with potentially life-threatening side effects. Overall, there are many cases where the social and legal acceptability of a drug is completely irrational and not based on the potential for harm or dependence. Reducing the use of certain harmful drugs could be reduced by greater emphasis on treatment and prevention instead of criminalization. Other drugs could be rendered more socially acceptable and less harmful through regulated legalization. Many of the social harms associated with the drug trade are identical to the ones that arose during the era of Prohibition.

While Buenos Aires' claims on the Falklands are mostly absurd, the Argentine economy should no longer be considered an economic basket case. It seems pretty unlikely that Argentina would go to war over the islands at this juncture, it is no longer ruled by a military junta set on distracting the population from the imminent collapse of the national economy. The Drug War in Mexico cannot be seen in isolation from the American War on Drugs. Federally funded think tanks have concluded that a greater emphasis on treatment and education of drug users (to shrink US demand) and a reduction in the focus on interdiction of supply and criminal punishment of drug users would be more effective in curbing drug-related violence. Unless the US strategy shifts towards limiting the demand for cocaine and other drugs instead of relying on law enforcement, drug-related violence is unlikely to abate. Decriminalization and legalization along with regulatory controls and public health policies would be far more effective in reducing the power of the cartels than the current 'war'. In addition, a huge percentage of the assault rifles used by the Mexican cartels have an American origin. Cocaine can hardly be the root of all evil, for obvious reasons.

I live on my own and do all my own grocery shopping, and I can assure you that making your meals at home is almost always cheaper than eating out at a fast food joint or purchasing heavily processed junk/prepared foods. The real reason people choose it over home-cooked meals stems from its convenience and its addictive/pleasurable properties. This article explains in more detail. I tend to only eat at fast food restaurants when I'm inebriated (although in those situations I can binge horribly). Where I live there are any number of ethnic restaurants where one can get much healthier, tastier food for comparable prices.

I have bolded the operative part of that post. In fact, there are many reasons that per capita healthcare in the United States is roughly twice as expensive as in Canada (and most other developed countries), and prescription drugs are an excellent example of why this is (although for the opposite reason that you have cited). Earlier you mentioned that private insurance companies are the most efficient at reducing overhead costs. In reality, however, private American insurers had overheads of 11.7%, which compares unfavourably with Medicare (3.6%) or Medicaid (6.8%), and is roughly ten times the overhead of Canada's provincial plans (1.3%). Per capita, spending on insurance overhead is five times higher in the United States relative to Canada. The Canadian single-payer system also drastically reduces administration costs, which are also far higher in the United States. The percentage of administrators (excluding insurers personnel) in the American healthcare industry has increased much more rapidly since the 1970s (to almost 30% as opposed to less than 20% in Canada), while administrative costs across the board are significantly higher. For instance, while Canada spends $8 per capita on employer management of health benefits, the United States spends $57, which places American firms at some disadvantage. Ironically, the American system supports a bloated bureaucracy relative to Canada's 'socialist' system. While the ratio of employees per 10,000 insurance enrollees at major American insurers ranges from 14 to 35, Canadian provincial insurers have ratios of just over 1. Taken together, healthcare administration consumed $1059 per capita in the United States compared to $307 per capita in Canada (in 1999 US$).1 Overall, between the fragmentation of insurance providers and the adoption of greater market competition has contributed to a significant rise in prices. One key reason for this is the perception in the United States of medical services as a marketable commodity rather than a right or public good. Medical services (excluding elective procedures), however, do not really function as a commodity should on a free market for some very simple reasons. Free markets, theoretically, assume that consumers can delay or avoid purchases and compare between different providers in both price and quality and that both consumers and providers have perfect or equal knowledge. While these are never fully realized, in the case of medical services they are pushed to breaking point. Particularly, the issue of discretion is paramount, since consumers generally cannot delay or avoid treatment without posing significant risks to their future health or life, giving providers a significant advantage that they do not possess in other markets. However, because medical services in the United States have been marketized to a considerable degree, there is still the compulsion to avoid medical services whenever possible (on the part of both consumers and insurance providers). This leads to a significant reduction in the use (and availability) of primary medical care that can maintain general health and identify problems before they become serious - something that can often save considerable sums of money later on. Returning to the question of prescription drugs, the culprit again appears to be fragmentation relative to the single-payer system (in collusion with the fact that biotechnology and healthcare and related services appears to have been chosen by the US federal government - along with financial services and military technology - as the winners of its quasi-industrial policy). In Canada and Europe, governments negotiate with pharmaceutical companies as the gatekeepers to large national markets and therefore have considerable bargaining power, which they use aggressively. No such single-negotiator exists in the United States, each insurer negotiates independently and ultimately the uninsured end up paying massively marked-up rates for prescription drugs. American legislation (2003) explicitly prohibits Medicare from bargaining in this manner to obtain lower prices for prescription drugs, although it is allowed for Veterans' Affairs and the Department of Defense. The claim that without the high-price US market pharmaceuticals would be unable to provide the research and development necessary to provide improved drugs in the future is questionable. To begin with, pharmaceutical companies are massively profitable. The major pharma companies in the US had median profits of 17% in 2002, compared to 3.1% among all other industries on the Fortune 500. Indeed, the drug industry is consistently the most profitable industry in the US, and the US market is the source of this tremendous profitability. That these high levels of profitability are necessary to continue funding R&D seems to be dubious in light of the fact that while 11-14% of revenues go towards R&D, 35% goes towards marketing and administration (the bulk of which is likely marketing) while profits represented 15-25% of revenues. Some of this marketing goes towards the creation of new diseases such as 'generalized anxiety disorder' that people then feel the need to medicate. Other funds are spent to promote the use of so-called 'me too' drugs, or those that are researched and produced to replace older versions as their exclusive patents expire even though they rarely involve more than a superficial reformulation. In the five years to 2003, for example, of nearly 500 drugs approved by the FDA, only 14% were 'actually new compounds considered likely to be improvements over older drugs' while 78% were considered to have 'therapeutic qualities similar to [those already on the market]'. Trials for these 'new' drugs nonetheless constitute the bulk of R&D funding.2 Canada, and most other countries, further reduces costs by prohibiting pharmaceuticals from direct-to-consumer advertising, on which the pharmaceutical companies spent $4.8 billion in the United States in 2007.3 Overall, it would appear that US government policy that favours the market power of medical service providers and pharmaceutical companies over that of consumers is what produces much of the inflated prices paid in that market. Fragmentation produces considerable inefficiencies and the need for larger and more expensive bureaucracies. Admittedly, however, it does appear that private insurers in the US do not have particularly high profit rates, which goes against my earlier post. EDIT - I have read that posted Slate article, but it fails to provide any statistical comparison. A search for the US law that promotes unprofitable exports of healthcare goods and service to foreign allies was unfruitful, so some evidence of that would be helpful.