I think that you are missing the point of why judges shouldn't be elected. Say you're accused of a high profile murder. Do you want your case tried by a judge who is following her or his own conscience? Or one who is trying to convince voters that he or she is tough on crime?

Say you are going to court in a civil case. Do you want your case tried by a judge who is secure in office? Or someone who has accepted campaign contributions from your opponent in the past and could really use more for the current competitive election?

Even if politicians appoint worse judges than elections would provide, elections cause active pressure on judges to change behavior. This makes elected judges exceptionally bad during the election period or leads to good judges getting kicked out for not being responsive enough to voters.

It's also worth noting for the purpose of this thread that not all elections occur in even years. For example, the governors of Virginia and New Jersey were elected in 2009. Also, some governors serve two year terms (e.g. New Hampshire) or serve four year terms that roughly coincide with the presidential terms.

It's not uncommon for odd year elections to be used for local elections (mayor, township commissioner, etc.) but that too is not set federally.

Sure...until someone figures out that if you just stamp the application Approved or Rejected without reading it, you can process it much faster and get a bigger bonus. Perhaps their system would catch that particular problem, but I'm sure that there is some way to cheat on doing the work in favor of getting faster completions. I'd rather encourage good work than quick work. Unfortunately, it can be hard to distinguish good work from bad work. Quick is easier to measure but not nearly as valuable.

The part about giving a bonus for being quicker than others is especially egregious in a system that relies on averages. It encourages people to find ways to quickly dump patent applications that are complex to evaluate. This makes the whole system slower while making that examiner's stats look better. It also discourages people from looking deeper into applications that mostly fit a particular narrative but which would require a much longer period to evaluate properly.

Why would it make low-risk drug development more profitable? I'm assuming you mean the minor variants when you refer to low-risk drugs. Currently they get the full patent period for minor variants, since they are already authorized to sell them. This makes minor variants ridiculously more profitable than new drugs. Under my system, the minor variants get a much shorter patent period while the original drug gets a longer patent period. Well, a longer sales period.

Note: it's interesting that the original post describes the opposite problem (at least in wording). The article is about high-risk drugs being favored over low-risk drugs. This is because high-risk drugs succeed or fail quickly. Low-risk drugs take longer to test. Therefore the system is biased towards dangerous drugs. I'm guessing that you meant business risk rather than medical risk, as otherwise, your post makes no sense to me.

I'm also unclear as to why "socialized costs for prescription drugs" causes minor variants to be favored over new drugs. Yes, it causes new drugs (both variants and original drugs) to be less expensive to the user than they otherwise would be. It discourages doctors from making a trade off between cost and efficacy. But looking purely at the variant/original issue, I don't see how it matters. This is not to say that I don't agree with making prescription drugs bought by end users. I like that idea, although I suspect that it would be politically unpalatable.

Now if you want to raise a new issue of new drugs being encouraged in areas where there are already perfectly good old drugs, then that's a separate issue. My suggestion won't help with that, as it's completely orthogonal to that issue. It's not intended as a cure all. It's focused on two problems: the favoring of minor variants over original testing and the corporate disincentive to test fully.

It's possible that the FDA's standards are arbitrary and could be relaxed, but even if they are, it doesn't solve the problem. Currently, if a company finds a problem in testing, they are highly incented to avoid doing additional testing to explore the problem. Additional testing both increases their costs and reduces their revenue. Under my system, it would only increase their costs and potentially reduce their liability costs. Revenue would be unaffected (although delayed). This might even help with arbitrary FDA rules, as I expect some of them exist to cover over the disincentive for companies to extend testing.

Perhaps, but this is still addressable by changes in the patent system. In particular, they could change pharmaceutical patents to have three periods: testing, restricted use, open use. The testing period would last as long as necessary, perhaps longer than patent periods are currently. The restricted use period (primarily for antibiotics) would last as long as the approving agency desired. The open use period would last for a defined length of time (perhaps eight years). The effect would be to increase the open use period for new drugs and decrease it for retreads.

The current system makes it difficult for a pharmaceutical company to extend the testing phase. Each additional year in testing is a year lost from being able to actually sell the drug. This produces bad results, as companies are terrified of extending the testing period. If the patent period were shorter but only started *after* testing was finished, this perverse incentive could be removed.

Back during the agency model, some eBooks were more expensive than the associated *hardback*. This is obviously absurd. The thing was that if Amazon was paying the publisher the same amount for the eBook as the hardback and was required to mark up the eBook by 43% (so as to give 70% of the gross to the publisher), that was a natural result. Amazon doesn't get a 43% markup on their hardbacks (at least not in the best sellers section).

The problem that small book sellers have isn't that eBooks are priced lower than hardbacks. The problem is that Amazon's markup is so much lower than theirs. Amazon sells books close to the price that small book sellers *pay* (presumably because Amazon buys direct from publishers rather than through third parties like Ingram Micro). Now, for hardbacks and paperbacks, at least the book sellers can offer immediate gratification. But if they are competing with eBooks, they lose that advantage. That's why publishers are trying to make eBooks more expensive than the associated paper books.

This is especially egregious with modern books. The publisher receives a digital copy of the book. They have to do extra work to convert it into a printable form. Yet they act like it is harder to convert their digital copy into one readable by Kindle or an ePub device. And then the book is digitized forever, giving them a steady revenue stream for the ridiculously long copyright period.

The other thing that Scalzi ignores is that publishers can't have legitimate reasons for maintaining the relative prices of paper and digital books. That's illegal. They already lost that case.

Ideally, publishers will realize that they should charge slightly less for a digital copy than a paper copy of a book but pay authors the same either way. That will cover their lower costs on a digital copy (no printing, shipping, or returns costs). The net result should be eBooks that are slightly discounted relative to the paper books sold on the same site.

We don't know what's happening inside the Amazon/Hachette negotiations. There's some evidence that Amazon wasn't previously asking for a digital discount. Their launch price was to pay the same for digital copies as for paper copies. Are they still doing that? Or has Amazon been trying to insist on deeper discounts?

The problem is that it's not clear what happens when the minimum wage increases. It's also not clear whether something different happens when a city or state does it versus a national change.

Case in point: thirteen states increase the minimum wage and employment increases faster (on average) in those states than in those that do not increase the minimum wage. The presumption in the post is that the causality is that increasing the minimum wage causes employment increases. What if the causality goes the other way? Increasing employment could make states more willing to raise the minimum wage. Correlation does not indicate causality, so economists can't differentiate between the two explanations.

There's actually been quite a bit of study of the effects of raising the minimum wage. The problem is that it's impossible to produce a real double blind study. Without that, there will always be reasonable doubt. In one study, they won't be able to eliminate the possibility that employment would have gone up faster without the change. In another study, they won't be able to tell if people are moving from the comparison area to the change area for the higher wage jobs. In another study, perhaps employment increases occur because kids drop out of school to take jobs.

Economics isn't anywhere near as mature a science as physics or chemistry. It doesn't lend itself to repeatable experiments. Without objective data, subjective opinions take a far greater role.

Actually, these actions seem driven by them not having a contract rather than chosen by Amazon. Without a contract, Amazon can't be sure of filling pre-orders at the promised price. Without a contract, Amazon can't return unsold books. The result is that they can't allow pre-orders or order books they aren't sure they'll sell. It also may be that Amazon normally gets credit for warehousing books with limited sales.

This is what the business looks like when selling without a contract.

Without an actual look at the contract negotiations, it's hard to say who's to blame for the lack of a contract. Perhaps both are. Perhaps authors are to blame for not demanding better contracts (authors often make less for digital books than print books, even though publishers charge Amazon more for them). The only thing that we can say externally is that book prices are often ridiculous. There is no reason for the digital copy of a new bestseller to be more expensive than the print copy.