Economists point out that the lives and value lost to consumers by the FDA’s long processing times are unseen. If I take a drug and die from it you see the dead body and the drug that caused my death. If I die because the FDA is processing a drug that saves my life, you wouldn’t be able to connect my death as a necessary result of the FDA’s processing time. It is a simple point which should make people value the FDA less. But in the real world, people seem to respond by evaluating the benefits of the FDA all the more in order to preserve the total net value of the FDA.
There is a counter-point; we don’t always see the lives that would have been lost by not having the FDA approve unsafe drugs. If I don’t take an unsafe drug because the FDA stopped it, then the FDA just saved my life.
The problem with this is that with the first example, the public respond to the uncertainty of the unseen by necessarily overvaluing the FDA. People currently assess the number of people the FDA kills at 0. But with the second example, it is hard to see how the public could be responding to the uncertainty of the unseen by undervaluing the FDA. Everyone I’ve ever met thinks that the world would end without the FDA. They tell me that without government food and drug approval, nothing could stop big business from selling hazardous products. Really? Nothing? They believe with all their heart the story that once upon a time we had unrestricted capitalism, so foods and drugs were very unsafe, so the FDA was put in place, it bound capitalism and made it into the server of safe consumables.
Sounds really good if you buy into post hoc tales, but we have this great big other variable called general economic growth. Risk reductions are a good like any other good, so they have a price, general economic growth raises incomes and so people can afford to purchase less risk.
Given the ignore economic growth completely fallacy, it is hard to see how people are underestimating the benefits of the FDA. Radical pessimism is not a reasonable way to respond to uncertainty. I’d say that they’re probably overestimating it. I mean, when you take the vision people have of the world without the FDA, how much worse could the world get?
