November 4, 2004
A FAITH-BASED INITIATIVE FOR THE SECULARISTS:
Suckers for 'Science': How to talk California taxpayers out of $3 billion. (Wesley J. Smith, 11/15/2004, Weekly Standard)
THE PASSAGE OF PROPOSITION 71 in California (the Stem Cell Research and Cures Act) was an acute case of electoral folly. As Californians plunged headlong into a $6 billion quagmire of debt in a quixotic quest for "miracle cures" from human cloning and embryonic stem cells, they simultaneously rejected Prop. 67, an initiative that would have added a modest tax to phone bills to keep the state's endangered emergency rooms and trauma centers from shutting down.This is a remarkable and disconcerting development. It wasn't long ago that California's trauma centers were the pride of the state and a model for the world. In the heyday of the trauma center movement, emergency rooms throughout the state were upgraded to ensure that critically injured people could receive quality care within the "golden hour," a 60-minute time frame that dramatically increases a person's chances of survival. Needless to say, such centers are very expensive. Which made them politically vulnerable after the dot-com bubble burst and the California legislature's spending binge led to a collapse of the state's finances.
The bitter irony here is that while Californians refuse to fund treatment centers that could make the difference between people living and dying today, they are pursuing treatments and cures that, if they come at all, are likely a decade or more away. What could explain such folly? Blame the awesome power of big money, big celebrities, and big hype.
It isn't about science or health--it's about Reason. Posted by Orrin Judd at November 4, 2004 4:29 PM
It's not about reason, it's about clueless nitwits who vote in our elections.
Oops Perhaps I should rephrase that, being as how they showed such wisdom in electing George Bush.
Posted by: h-man at November 4, 2004 4:53 PMBrian
My flustration unfortunately sometimes bursts forth with all voters, not just Californians.
I guess you could say I don't trust the whims of the masses.
It will be interesting to see exactly how much gets spent. Assuming they set up a decent peer review system, there is no reason to believe they should come anywhere near spending the $3B. The Feds have spent less than $300 M on all stem cell projects in the last four years. The truth is that the science is coming in very slowly.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at November 5, 2004 3:09 AMIt's only getting the attention it is because it's been made a political football.
Don't expect panaceas any tie soon.
Posted by: M Ali Choudhury at November 5, 2004 5:16 AMI work at a biotech company. Everyone here is eagerily awaiting our share of the California boondoggle.
Posted by: Timothy at November 5, 2004 3:00 PMSetting aside the moral dimension for a moment, here is a good example of a recurrent dilemma: How do you distribute your investment between short-term, certain payoffs and bigger, but more doubtful long-term ones?
Go back to 1950. Was it foolish to raise millions and millions for the Sister Kenny Foundation to put up all those sanatoriums for people in iron lungs? Or should that part have been skipped in the expectation that Salk would improve the lousy vaccine he'd developed in the '40s?
Orrin likes to talk about compound interest, but he never says anything about present value. When I studied accounting, we considered both.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at November 5, 2004 4:07 PMPresent value means nothing if you're not retiring for forty years.
Posted by: oj at November 5, 2004 4:33 PMExcept, of course, that you've deferred consumption.
Every expenditure involves present value considerations. There ain't no free lunch.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at November 5, 2004 10:09 PMHarry:
Nope. You juist keep buying and socking it away in your account regardless of the daily stock numbers--in forty years it will be way up regardless of what it's at now.
Posted by: oj at November 6, 2004 8:22 AM