Bizarre reasoning by Tyler Cowen

Tyler Cowen reviews the new book of Ben Goldacre, Bad Pharma and says (in the comments)

if you don’t know whether a path will produce good or mediocre drugs, and if suddenly you profit less from mediocre drugs, you will invest less up front in going down these paths overall. (…) A simple test is whether the best pharma companies would favor your proposals, or rather think it raised their costs. I predict the latter. I don’t doubt that your proposals also bring benefits, including greater accuracy and less over-use, and I do very clearly cite that in my review above. But your analysis is not considering this trade-off (among others).

A commenter said, properly:

I think Tyler’s reasoning is bizarre. A farmer may want to market the Lemons in its harvest as Strawberries and sure this might make an average Strawberry a little cheaper but what of all those Lemons that got sold at essentially Strawberry prices?

All in all, it seems clear to me that whenever you are attached to a bad argument due to your ideology, you will in general make silly statements to defend it.

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