Here's a win-win development that's ripe for demogogic denunciation: Pharmaceutical companies are moving drug testing to India, where well-educated doctors are plentiful and costs are low. Moving tests to India promises to speed drug development while building yet another relatively high-value industry for the still-poor country. Atul Sathe reports for the Financial Express from Mumbai:
Pharma outsourcing to India has the potential to pick up due to several distinct factors. In US, the time to get the drug to market has increased from 7.5 years in 1970s to 12.5 years in 1990s. This is less by as much as 30-40% if done in India. Moreover, administrative costs incurred by pharma companies in India are 30-50% lower than those in the West.
AT Kearney Inc vice-president & managing director, Andrea Bierce attributes the attractiveness of India as an outsourcing destination to various aspects. "India has a huge pool of talented doctors. 20,000 new doctors graduate every year in India. There is also a distinct wage arbitrage in India. The regulatory requirements in this country are not as strict as those in US." said Ms Bierce. Lower R&D costs is another major advantage.
However, the regulatory issue is considered to be a little controversial. Pharma companies may find India attractive for activities like clinical trials because of the presence of many diseases. But the industry and the government need to work in tandem to balance the interests of the people and the outsourcing opportunities available.
GSK has one of the largest presence in India among all foreign companies. They have a five year arrangement with Ranbaxy for drug discovery and have a clinical research centre. The company has five manufacturing plants and is also into bio-informatics and DNA sequencing.
It is learnt that Astra Zeneca, which has a very focussed strategy on drug discovery on tuberculosis (TB), is likely to begin clinical trials on TB in India by 2006. Conversely, Indian biotech major, Biocon, which has a diabetics focus, is expected to get into a joint venture/partnership in the US in future.
Ms Bierce added that pharma outsourcing operations in India can be categorised into four types. There are independent service providers and pure-play IT companies. The latter include TCS and Infosys that have gone into bio-tech. There are Indian pharma companies and there are global pharma companies that have captive outsourcing operations here. From an estimated $20 million worth of pharma outsourcing at present, India has the potential to reach about $1.5 billion in 8-10 years.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 07, 2004 • Comments
I don't expect other voters to think like I do. They never have and they probably never will. I don't therefore conclude that I live in a country full of wicked, stupid people. I don't think the Westside of Los Angeles is a cesspool of idiocy and evil because it's full of people who vote over and over for Henry Waxman, whose hyperregulatory policies, demonization of various businesses, and love for ever-expanding Medicare entitlements I detest.
The presidential election was even less polarizing than my old home's congressional politics. Though I was a Bush supporter, I have plenty of friends with about the same political views who opted for Kerry. I understood their calculations, even though I thought they were risking a disatrously Carteresque foreign policy and serious damage to the pharmaceutical industry, to name just two possible outcomes. We simply attached different probabilities to different possible scenarios, and reasonable people can disagree.
But now I'm finally starting to feel like a red state voter. The combination of paranoia and hatred coming from disappointed Democrats is more than a little scary. To take a relatively mild example, this sort of rhetoric is not only fearsomely intolerant but seriously detached from reality. It's not about the actual George Bush, his actual policies (love them or hate them), or his actual supporters. It's a strange emotional exercise, whipping up hate and fear while feeding a Mean Girls sense of superiority.
I got fed up with Republicans in the late-90s because their loudest voices seemed to hate America. They turned me off, and they turned off a lot of other voters. Here's what I wrote after the 1998 midterm elections:
I told you so. The party that hates America will lose. The party that imagines no positive future, offers no "vision thing," will lose. The party that thinks it is better than the American people, that makes large segments of the voting public believe they are its enemy, that convinces people it wants the government to boss them around and destroy the things they love, will lose.
On November 3, that party was Republican. The GOP went down to humiliating defeat, losing close race after close race, plus many that weren't supposed to be close. The party lost its solid grip on the South and collapsed in California. It managed to lose seats in the House, an extraordinary result that even Democratic pundits failed to predict.
And it deserved to lose. Republicans sold out their economic base, invested all their hopes in scandals involving a president not on the ballot, and ran as the party of scolds, pork, and gloom. No wonder their voters stayed home.
This election was a test of the notion that Republicans can scorn anyone who talks about freedom, treat issues as matters of bribery rather than principle or vision, alternate between patronizing and ostracizing immigrants and women, regularly denounce American culture, and generally act obnoxiously toward the country they supposedly represent--and still win, because the Democrats are worse and Clinton is a sleaze.
Rallying around GWB in 2000 was the Republicans' way of repudiating the cultural pessimists. Bush was a Washington outsider who hadn't engaged in Clinton-baiting. He was religious without being self-righteous or finger-wagging, a sunny Sunbelt politician who celebrated the open society and didn't wax nostalgic about bridges to the past. I can certainly understand why people oppose his policies, but Bush (like Bill Clinton, another personable politician not far from the political center) makes a strange devil figure.
Back during this summer's Democratic convention I blogged that "now it's the hard-core Democrats who think the country is going to hell--but at least they blame the administration, not the general public." Post-election, alas, they blame their fellow Americans. And when voters feel hated, they respond by voting in droves for the other guy. (Just ask Pete Wilson.)
As Jacob Levy noted during the Democratic convention, the Dems have their own sunny side. But we haven't heard much of it since last summer.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 07, 2004 • Comments
Even though I supplied a link, many readers simply did not believe my post below noting that, according to the exit polls, 60 percent of voters nationally (and 49 percent in the South!) support either gay marriage or civil unions. As usual, I was bucking the conventional wisdom. (If you agree with the con-wis, why waste the time repeating what everyone already knows?)
David Brooks's smart and much-linked-to column on Saturday pointed out the same thing, of course. And this piece by Gary Langer, director of polling for ABC News, was a big "I told you so" about the problem of incredibly vague language in the exit polls. Dianne Feinstein and Bill Bennett may think "moral values" means "opposition to gay marriage," but it's just as likely--more, in my opinion--to mean "the candidate's character."
If he can resist the comic temptation to make wild generalizations, Brooks could spend the next several months explaining the complicated reality of middle America to the parochial readers of the NYT.
As for gays, the most depressing aspect of the election is how quickly big-shot Democrats want to run away from gay-friendly policies.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 07, 2004 • Comments
7-Eleven's coffee cup poll--coffee buyers could pick between Bush and Kerry cups--proved remarkably accurate: 51.08 percent for Bush, 48.92 percent for Kerry.
"Our popular vote was absolutely right on," Jim Keyes, the chain's head honcho, told the Dallas Morning News. "We sell a million cups of coffee every day, so our sample size was huge."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 07, 2004 • Comments
Exit poll data are here, and you can drill down for specifics by state or regions.
As I mentioned earlier in the post about Lupe Valdez's election, the results aren't as bleak for supporters of gay rights as you'd think from listening to triumphant social conservatives or despairing gays.
Nationally, gay marriage is a loser, but civil unions are a big winner, with 35 percent support (and 32 percent in the South). Assume that the 25 percent who back marriage rights (17 percent in the South), and you've got a clear majority (and a slim lead even in the South, where Bush won 32 percent of gay voters). The public is squeamish about "gay marriage," but not about giving gay couples public recognition and legal rights.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 03, 2004 • Comments
My new NYT column, written while voting was still going on, looks at why the parties may have abandoned the center on religious issues. Here's the opening:
Have religious issues become more important in politics because too few Americans go to church?
That is the surprising suggestion of a new working paper by the Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser and two doctoral students, Jesse M. Shapiro and Giacomo A. M. Ponzetto. (The paper, "Strategic Extremism: Why Republicans and Democrats Divide on Religious Values," is online at http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty /glaeser/papers.html.)
The paper starts with a puzzle: In a majoritarian system like ours, political economists generally predict that candidates will converge toward the center of the spectrum, so as to attract as many votes as possible. This is the "median voter theory." But it doesn't seem to describe what's happened in American politics. On divisive religious issues like abortion, the two parties aren't hugging the center. They're abandoning it.
While most people know that the Republican Party has taken an increasingly strong anti-abortion position, the authors note that the Democratic Party has simultaneously moved in the opposite direction.
In 1976, the Democratic platform said, "We fully recognize the religious and ethical nature of the concerns which many Americans have on the subject of abortion," while terming a constitutional amendment overturning Roe v. Wade merely "undesirable." In this year's platform, by contrast, Democrats declared that they "stand proudly" for a woman's right to an abortion, "regardless of her ability to pay."
For the explanation of why this is happening (or at least a good theoretical model of why it may be), read the rest here.
There's neither new Great Awakening, the favorite conservative spin, or "a huge fundamentalist Christian revival," Andrew Sullivan's fear (as usual, he omits the hugely influential Catholic element). What's different today is that fewer, not more, Americans go to church.
Here's a chart that didn't make it into the paper. Thanks to reader Mark Draughn for the HTML coding.
| State |
Percent attending church at least monthly | Increased probability of voting Republican* |
| California |
37.9% |
10.7% |
| New York |
47.5% |
9.6% |
| Illinois |
51.2% |
6.9% |
| Texas |
56.2% |
-1.3% |
| South Carolina |
61.8% |
4.2% |
*in the previous presidential election, given monthly church attendance, holding other factors, e.g., race, constant
The data are from 1972-2000.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 03, 2004 • Comments
One of the most interesting results of yesterday's voting has gotten almost no attention outside Oregon. Voters there passed an initiative that would require governments to compensate property owners when new regulations reduce the value of their land, or to waive those land use rules. Here's the Oregonian's decidedly anti-initiative report
Critics say Measure 37 abandons land-use policies that have defined Oregon as a place that puts a premium on its farms, forests and quality of life.
The measure's approval may reflect a seductive ballot title more than it reflects a movement against land-use planning, said Tim Raphael, spokesman for the no-on-37 campaign.
"When we have to choose between paying landowners or overturning community protections, that's going to be a tough decision for Oregonians," Raphael said. "It will cause us to revisit the question about what our values are and what our approach is."
The measure's passage marks a significant victory for activists who have long opposed Oregon's land-use planning system, one of the most far-reaching in the nation.
They'll have just 30 days to wait until cities, counties and the state are required to start evaluating property owners' claims.
"People understood we can have planning and treat people fairly at the same time," said David Hunnicutt, director of Oregonians in Action. "That's been what's missing."
The law will allow property owners affected by land-use rules to apply for a waiver or compensation for any drop in value. Evaluating landowners' claims -- not counting any payouts -- is expected to cost state and local governments from $54 million to $344 million a year.
We could use a law like that in Dallas, where the local paper's editorial board literallly sees playing with other people's property as a game. Even from the DMN, the cavalier tone of this editorial shocked me. You know, I have a lot of good ideas about how to run a newspaper. Maybe the city should empower me to apply them.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 03, 2004 • Comments
I agree Glenn: Nominate Professor "Be In Their Face, With a Breath Mint" for the Supreme Court. It would be a great test for the loyal opposition as well.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 03, 2004 • Comments
This blog is one of 10 nominees for best English-language journalistic blog in Deutsche Welle's International Weblog Award--the "Best of the Blogs" or BOB awards. You can vote here.
I'm also delighted that editor Steven Pinker selected one of my Substance of Style-related essays, originally published in Men's Journal, in this year's edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004.
Both the book and the Best of the Blogs competition are worth checking out for their diverse and interesting offerings.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 03, 2004 • Comments
A smart, interesting friend who works in a "right wing" think tank writes in response to the item below about Fareed Zakaria's column:
Fareed is right about the media pressure for guests to be partisan team players. I just got canceled out of what would have been one of my highest-prestige TV bookings ever because (they told me) top producers had decided I was not firmly enough committed to either side in the election.
Zakaria is certainly right about TV bookers. They're only interested in partisans. (Even Katrina vanden Heuvel, who's far to the left of the Democratic mainstream, plays a partisan Democrat on TV. Ditto Pat Buchanan and the GOP.) But my friend's own experience demonstrates an error in Zakaria's argument: Ritualistic partisanship doesn't come from ideological think tanks, which are in fact quite diverse. It reflects what works in the political and news-as-entertainment markets--or, at least, what TV bookers think works.
I did notice an exception to the partisan rule election night. At least on ABC, if you have a Newsweek column, they'll let you on.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on November 03, 2004 • Comments