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It's an interesting industry that needs billions to bring a new drug to market. At the same time it creates a lot of value to a patient. But the manufacturing of a single dose is usually tiny.

Now how do you price that? The profits here will reward pharma investors and enable more investments in RnD of new medicines. I feel that's mostly fair.



Some types of software aren't too far from that paradigm.


The 'risk' here is often carried by publicly funded research. ~6.2 billion for glp

The private 'investment' comes in manufacturing, scale and marketing.

Novo Nordisk has spent 41% more on shareholder enrichment (buybacks and dividends) than on R&D over the past five years.


> Novo Nordisk has spent 41% more on shareholder enrichment (buybacks and dividends) than on R&D over the past five years.

So they are good stewards of their funds and know they can't deploy as much as they have? Berkshire Hathaway does the same thing.


Is Berkshire Hathaway able to monitize the output of government funded research as effectively?


The typical other solution for this is government grants for research.

It could work but there are problems in (1) the amount of money required and (2) the funding research -> getting votes pipeline is borked (credit assignment in general is borked).


Incentive is would be research forever without any results. See how expensive NASA programs were.


They went to the moon - that's not no results.




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