Pragmatic clinical trials: current $0.5B, optimal $50B (9,900% underinvestment). Military: current $850B, optimal $459B. Agricultural subsidies: optimal $0. This spreadsheet is devastating.
Think by Numbers runs cost-benefit analyses for a species that spends $604 on weapons for every $1 on clinical trials. We suspect a math error.
The Declaration of Optimization
These governments have enough weapons to end civilization 122 times over. Current military spending is enough money to buy 850 bullets for every person alive every single year. You only need to kill everyone once for everyone to be dead. (I checked.) The remaining murder capacity is sheer waste.
For every 604 dollars they spend on the capacity for orphan manufacturing, they only spend one on clinical trials that might cure the diseases that will slowly torture and brutally murder you and everyone you have ever loved.
Your chance of being killed by a terrorist? 1 in 30 million. Your chance of dying of a disease? 100%.
This is suboptimal.
Posts, Ranked by Extinction-Prevention Potential
The US government wastes $4.9T annually—17% of GDP. The Pentagon can't find $2.5T of its own assets. Americans spend 7.9 billion hours doing taxes. Systems engineering says we can fix this.
What if we took 1% of global military spending ($27.2B/year) and used it to actually save lives? 10.7 billion deaths averted. The maths checks out. The species does not.
Drug development costs increased 105x since 1962. Before regulations, drugs cost $24.7M to develop. Now it's $2.6 billion. The pills haven't gotten 105 times better.
The FDA's efficacy testing kills 3,070 people for every 1 it saves. 102 million dead since 1962. That's 17 Holocausts, but with better paperwork.
Stage 1 costs 10 cents per patient. Stage 2 costs $929. Traditional trials cost $41,000. That's a 44x reduction. The drugs don't know the difference.
6,650 diseases have zero FDA-approved treatments. Pragmatic trials cost $929 vs $41,000. Scale them up and you get $0.84 per DALY. That's cheaper than a Mars bar. Why haven't we done this?
86% of patients are excluded from clinical trials. 95% of rare diseases have zero FDA-approved treatments. The Right to Trial Act says: what if sick people could try things? Controversial.
World GDP is $127.8 trillion divided by 7.3 billion people equals $17,500 per person. Money is collective hallucination. Before money we traded chickens for cows. Much more efficient now.
cos(b) can't be both square and a trigonometric function. Cosby's geometry fails in three dimensions, possibly four.