Whatever we, as prospective participants unaware of our specific features, would desire society to be like is what, morally speaking, we ought to institute.

If the Health Impact Fund were to be instituted, a single company would be in charge of a medical product all the way from its conception to the health improvements realized by actual patients. The company would be paid for health impact, and it would have to arrange the entire pipeline in between - all the steps of invention, of clinical testing, of getting marketing approval in many different countries, of wholesalers and retailers and prescriptions and so on - in a holistically optimal way.

We should not think of poverty eradication as a matter of collecting money and giving it to the poor so much as of reforming the global rules that are disadvantaging the poor and making it impossible for them to fend for themselves.

It is for the poor people's sake, above all, that we urgently need more unity and better organization and need to concentrate our reform efforts in order to really to achieve reforms, one by one.

In the domain of pharmaceuticals, we need a metric for health impact, and with this metric we can then assess the value of the introduction of a new product and pay its innovator accordingly, say on the basis of the product's measured health impact during its first ten years on the market. In exchange, innovators must of course renounce the usual rewards they are otherwise entitled to, namely the patent-protected markup on the price of their product.

Domestic and supranational regulatory capture leads to two things: on the one hand, to an inequality spiral where the rich get richer because they can influence rulemaking and rule application in their favor; on the other hand, it also leads to instability. This is so because the relatively few organizations capable of influencing supranational rulemaking through the lobbying of major governments have diverse interests. This will, in some cases, lead to compromises. But it will also lead to spheres of influence.

Critical journalism has gone out of fashion, or rather, it has been bought out. And so, we have much less of it than we did during the Vietnam era, where there was very critical reporting on the Vietnam War and a lot of disagreement among the media. Now you find that the media are much more homogenous, converging because they all must cater to the same community of advertisers. It's sad to see.