Tag: Acquisition

Profits, Production, & Acquisitions

Profits, Production, & Acquisitions

Posted on by jabittan
I listened to the latest episode of The Readout Loud from Stat News yesterday, and the hosts of the show said that bio-tech companies have a huge amount of cash available as 2022 starts. The hosts stated that they are interested to see if any major acquisitions are announced by bio-tech companies at this year’s JP Morgan Chase Healthcare Conference.
 
 
This short discussion about mergers and acquisitions from the podcast came to mind when I re-read a short quote from Yuval Noah Harari on capitalism in his book Sapiens. Harari writes, “in the new capitalist creed, the first and most sacred commandment is: the profits of production must be reinvested in increasing production.”
 
 
Bio-tech companies, which range from major pharmaceutical companies to start-ups using artificial intelligence to better diagnose disease, seem to have a lot of money at their disposal (at least the major companies do). This suggests that companies have not been following Harari’s capitalist creed. Rather than reinvesting in their own production, companies are sitting on capital, waiting to purchase a smaller company. It is interesting to consider that major companies are expected, by journalists and shareholders, to use their money in this way. They are not expected to invest in their own research and development, but in an acquisition of a smaller company. As an example, the hosts quickly mentioned a few companies with blockbuster drugs that will soon be loosing their patent protections, meaning another manufacturer can begin making those medications. When that happens, the companies will need a new drug to bring to market to maintain profits. That new drug is expected to come from a smaller bio-tech company with a break through medication or treatment technology that could be absorbed by the larger existing pharmaceutical or bio-tech giant. 
 
 
In the capitalist system that Harari described, acquisitions doesn’t seem to fit with the idea that profits need to be reinvested to increase production. Following that model, companies wouldn’t sit on cash produced by patent protected drugs until they could acquire a new company. Instead, they would continually put their profits back into their own systems to increase productivity of their manufacturing process, supply chains, and their own drug development. Instead, what we see is cash and funding infused into smaller start-ups that can drive a particular technology or product to a point of success, and from there a larger company buys out the start-up, flushing the initial investors in the start-up with profits. This model seems to work fine, but it is distinctly different from the capitalist system that Harari describes, and which most of us probably think about when we consider what capitalism is.

Acquisition Responsibility

Posted on by jabittan
We are not always responsible for the acquisition of our virtues and vices. For some of us, being good natured and virtuous toward other people comes naturally, and for others of us, being arrogant or closed-minded comes naturally or was pushed onto us from forces we could not control. I think it is reasonable to say that virtues likely require more training, habituation, imitation, and intentionality for acquisition than vices, so in that sense we are more responsible for virtue acquisition than vice acquisition. It is useful to think about becoming versus being when we think about virtues and vices because it helps us better consider individual responsibility. Making this distinction helps us think about blameworthiness and deservingness, and it can shape the narratives that influence how we behave toward others.
In Vices of the Mind Quassim Cassam writes, “a person who is not responsible for becoming dogmatic might still be responsible for being that way. Acquisition responsibility is backward-looking: it is concerned with the actual or imagined origin of one’s vices.”
In the book, in which Cassam focuses on epistemic vices, or vices that obstruct knowledge. Cassam uses an example from Heather Battaly of a young man who is unfortunate enough to grow up in a part of the world controlled by the Taliban. The young man will undoubtedly be closed-minded (at the very least) as a result of being indoctrinated by the Taliban. There is little the man could do to be more open minded, to avoid adopting a specific viewpoint informed by the biases, prejudices, and agendas of the Taliban. It is not reasonable to say that the man has acquisition responsibility for his closed-mindedness. Many of our epistemic vices are like this, they are the results of forces beyond our control or invisible to us, they are in some ways natural cognitive errors that come from misperceptions of the world.
When we think about vices in this way, I would argue that it should change how we think about people who hold such vices. It seems to me that it would be unreasonable to scorn everyone who holds a vice for which they have no control over the acquisition. Being backward-looking doesn’t help us think about how to move forward. It is important to recognize that people hate being held responsible for things they had no control over, even if that thing lead to serious harms for other people. An example might be people who have benefitted from structural racism, and might like to see systems and institutions change to be less structurally racist, but don’t want to be blamed for a system they didn’t recognize or know they contributed to. Being stuck with a backward-looking view frustrates people, makes them feel ashamed and powerless, and prevents progress. People would rather argue that it wasn’t their fault and that they don’t deserve blame than think about ways to move forward. Keeping this in mind when thinking about how we address and eliminate vices for which people are not acquisition responsible is important for us if we want to continue to grow as individuals and societies and if we want to successfully overcome epistemic vices.