FDA: Standing Between You and Promising Cancer Care

Sent to you via Google Reader

FDA: Standing Between You and Promising Cancer Care

The promise:

MelaFind is a handheld scanner meant to provide an objective aid to doctors applying to the standard visual tests for melanoma. Because melanoma is such a killer, doctors tend to biopsy every skin flaw that looks suspicious but they still miss one melanoma for every three or four they catch. In a clinical trial involving 23 practitioners around the country, MelaFind caught 98% of melanomas among the targeted suspicious lesions, while equaling or besting the top docs in avoiding unnecessary biopsies.

The obstacle:

When an FDA advisory panel met in November to review the device, the experts narrowly voted eight-to-seven in favor.

Eight to seven? Yes. Eight to seven. Final decision yet to come.

Daniel J. SmithSent via mobile phone
Oloffson Weaver Fellow of Political Economy
Department of Economics
George Mason University
Email: smith.dan.j
Website: http://www.danieljosephsmith.com

Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie? The Supply of New Recorded Music Since Napster — by Joel Waldfogel

Sent to you via Google Reader

Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie? The Supply of New Recorded Music Since Napster — by Joel Waldfogel

In the decade since Napster, file-sharing has undermined the protection that copyright affords recorded music, reducing recorded music sales. What matters for consumers, however, is not sellers’ revenue but the surplus they derive from new music. The legal monopoly created by copyright is justified by its encouragement of the creation of new works, but there is little evidence on this relationship. The file-sharing era can be viewed as a large-scale experiment allowing us to check whether events since Napster have stemmed the flow of new works. We assemble a novel dataset on the number of high quality works released annually, since 1960, derived from retrospective critical assessments of music such best-of-the-decade lists. This allows a comparison of the quantity of new albums since Napster to 1) its pre-Napster level, 2) pre-Napster trends, and 3) a possible control, the volume of new songs since the iTunes Music Store’s revitalization of the single. We find no evidence that changes since Napster have affected the quantity of new recorded music or artists coming to market. We reconcile stable quantities in the face of decreased demand with reduced costs of bringing works to market and a growing role of independent labels.

Daniel J. SmithSent via mobile phone
Oloffson Weaver Fellow of Political Economy
Department of Economics
George Mason University
Email: smith.dan.j
Website: http://www.danieljosephsmith.com