by Öner Tulum, William Lazonick, and Ken Jacobson The success of the worldwide COVID-vaccine rollout depends on decisions regarding the utilization of available production capacity made both independently…
Tag: William Lazonick
#2. How effectively is global capacity being utilized? Is there any idle capacity to press into service?
by Öner Tulum, William Lazonick, and Ken Jacobson Despite vaccines’ significant public-health benefits, sales of all vaccines accounted for less than four percent of $872 billion in prescription-drug…
#1. Is there enough production capacity available for the vaccine supply to meet urgent demand in 2021?
by Öner Tulum, William Lazonick, and Ken Jacobson As COVID-19 vaccines receive regulatory approval, the world has a powerful weapon to fight the coronavirus. But at what pace…
4 Burning Questions on the Global Vaccine Rollout
Warnings of “corruption and incompetence coming together,” as economists William Lazonick and Öner Tulum study the race to end the pandemic.
As the pandemic continues, the rich are getting richer than ever before — and economists are getting concerned
“If the COVID-19 pandemic has produced winners and losers, then young Canadian billionaire Tobias Lütke is definitely a winner. Since the start of the pandemic in March, the 40-year-old CEO of Ottawa-based e-commerce company Shopify Inc., has watched his personal…
A Most Dangerous Intersection: Revisiting Race and Class in 2020
“In June, David Leonhardt in the New York Times noted that “the black-white wage gap is roughly as large today as it was in 1950.” One driver of this is that a huge number—a third of Black men ages 25-54—remain outside the…
CEOs Gorged on Buybacks for Years. Now They Want Bailouts.
“Congress is poised to impose restrictions on stock buybacks as a part of the multi-trillion-dollar recovery package that is being voted on this week. To understand why those limits are necessary, look no further than the airline industry, which is being singled…
The Economist Who Put Stock Buybacks in Washington’s Crosshairs
In 1984, an economics professor named William Lazonick joined the faculty at the Harvard Business School, just in time to witness a shift in economic thought. Lazonick, who is seventy-four, had grown up in Toronto and earned a Ph.D. in…
US Pharma’s Financialized Business Model
By William Lazonick, Matt Hopkins, Ken Jacobson, Mustafa Erdem Sakinç and Öner Tulum ◊ Price gouging in the US pharmaceutical drug industry goes back more than three decades. In 1985 US Representative Henry Waxman, chair of the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, accused the pharmaceutical industry of “gouging the American public” with “outrageous” price increases, driven by “greed on a massive scale.” Even in the wake of the many Congressional inquiries that have taken place since the 1980s, including one inspired by the extortionate prices that Gilead Sciences has placed on its Hepatitis-C drugs Sovaldi since 2013 and Harvoni since 2014, the US government has not seen fit to regulate drug prices. UK Prescription Price Regulation Scheme data for 1996 through 2010 show that, while drug prices in other advanced nations were close to the UK’s regulated prices, those in the United States were between 74 percent and 181 percent higher.
China as an Innovation Nation
By Yu Zhou, Yifei Sun and William Lazonick (Editors) This volume assesses China’s transition to innovation-nation status in terms of social conditions, industry characteristics and economic impacts over the past three decades, also providing insights into future developments. Defining innovation as the…