There’s more to James Hamilton’s blog than high-quality energy economics. His latest is an incisive analysis of an Americans with Disabilities related lawsuit:
If Boone was indeed fired because she was blind, is it a relevant fact that her replacement, Pamela Shaw, is also blind? Apparently not to Mr. Scolforo, who omitted this detail from the AP account. Nor was it deemed relevant to the 100 other news outlets that Google News says carried this story last week, but none of which Google claims also included the name “Shaw”. I only found the fact from the pajama-clad bloggers at Overlawyered.com.
And now the big picture:
Elsewhere in the news, drug maker Merck, which other juries are destined to plunder for many, many billions of dollars, announced it will eliminate 7,000 jobs and close or sell 5 manufacturing facilities.
Not to worry. This is just an example of what Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. As soon as we can get those former Merck employees retrained as lawyers, they’ll be doing something that society values more than developing medicines that ease pain or cure disease.
The market has spoken. Who am I to argue?
If you’re sarcasm-impaired, read the whole post.
READER COMMENTS
Ian Lewis
Dec 6 2005 at 7:08pm
One of the major problems with Journalists is that they care much more about telling a story than telling the truth.
Their jobs should be, theoretically, very similar to that of a research scientist or historian. Lots and lots of research that will turn up the truth. And this truth may or may not be popular.
But this is not their interest. The people who go into Journalism have much more in common with writers. Heck, they even talk about getting the story.
Rudi Cilibrasi
Dec 7 2005 at 2:47pm
The people have spoken clearly: science and facts gave way to politics and opinion. I wonder if the prevailing attitude will change after the next pandemic. it is quite absurd that we go on with the Tamiflu patent restriction despite a well-publicized and life-threatening shortage at this very moment. How is it the free market is able to coordinate commodity futures deliveries but cannot manage to cooperate to create enough of our best medicine while we still have time to stockpile? This is economic madness and spiritual bankruptcy in so many ways. We seem not to realize what a rare and special place we occupy in space and time at this very moment.
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