That assumes that people are playing a long game. If you're looking for your payday and exit, and there are many people out there who are only looking for the next payday, this argument falls apart.
> Moreover, a relatively small number of dangerous flops will tank your reputation with consumers.
One success the anti-vax people have achieved is to muddy the waters around this. Your public reputation is no longer correlated to actual performance.
> Liability means that you are incentivized to be quite cautious in pushing a potentially dangerous product
There's a long list of people throughout history who do not have this caution at all.
You seem to be taking a theoretical economics approach. Reality is different. People are not perfectly rational actors, and consequences are not consistent.
Look at what actually happens in reality.
[–] ch4s3 16 hours ago
What are you talking about? Shareholders are looking for sustainable projections of growth. Killing a bunch of people will tank your stock which is how executives get paid. You really need to think beyond their first thought o nstuff like this.
> There's a long list of people throughout history who do not have this caution at all.
None of them run pharmaceutical companies.
>You seem to be taking a theoretical economics approach. Reality is different
No I'm describing reality and you're arguing from populism.
[–] fc417fc802 15 hours ago
Then why are there so many examples of PE destroying things to make a (relatively) quick buck?
[–] ch4s3 11 hours ago
PE is short for PRIVATE equity, there are no public shareholders in PE, no share price. When I critique that people here often don't understand basic things about the economy this is what I mean.
Payday and exit is pretty hard in biotech as you need to conjure up billions of dollars in capital, which doesn't often flow to people who payday-and-exit.
What happens in reality is that people try really hard to make safe and effective drugs, they mostly fail, and the ones that are approved are generally safe and effective.