Pharma shrinking, Proroguing the inevitable

For some reason, the Montreal Gazette has a piece from the Windsor Star on the website this morning, and it freaks me out. The headline runs: "Workforce expert predicts future jobs." Which is a little like a meteorologist predicting that the future will have weather.

Apparently she's been waiting for a long time for appointments in offices that contain 5-year-old copies of The Economist; arguing that economic growth will depend on local people training and upgrading their skills. "You can't deny the importance of the knowledge economy," she is quoted as saying. The article also says she offers the pharmaceutical industry as a growth area for job seekers.

Now we'll leave alone the fact that we have more people with university degrees than our economy knows what to do with, and just point out that last year alone, Pfizer cut 19 500 jobs. This is the 2nd time in three years they've topped the pharma charts; in 2007 they cut another 10 000 jobs. This past year, Merck cut another 16 000 jobs; Johnson & Johnson slashed almost 9 000; and AstraZeneca lost about 7 500. Between the top 6 job cuts in the industry, over 63 000 jobs went to the big market in the sky.

The reason for this is that the pharmaceutical industry is scrambling to make money right now. There are no blockbuster drugs waiting for approval from the FDA, no huge breakthroughs that promise huge profits. Without the ability to provide any goods, big pharma is reduced to making money in the way that corporations usually do it: mergers, acquisitions and cuts. This is bad news for the workers, none of whom have the advantageous situation of, say, a GM employee.

All that to say that big pharma is not a growth industry in real terms, and anything decent in "little" pharma is going to get its intellectual property snapped up by one of the big boys, leaving little but empty infrastructure and unemployment in its wake. Not what I would describe as a strong market.

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A couple of words on prorogation.

Proroguing Parliament is nothing new. Everyone has done it, from Sir John A to Jean Chretien. Normally, however, Parliament is prorogued to start a holiday break or to end a session. Harper's prorogations have been special, certainly in the modern Parliament (last 30-40 years).

Last time, Harper prorogued Parliament because he was facing a vote of confidence that he thought he might lose, and that a coalition of opposition parties might form a government. So he asked the Governor-General if he could buy some time while he talked with various parties long enough to let the coalition run its natural course: failure. This was annoying, but it was smart politics.

This time, however, the reasons for prorogation are less clear. There is a scandal before the government regarding Afghan detainees, the Olympic Games in February, and another vote of confidence coming in March (the budget). However, these issues don't seem overwhelming - not while important bills are waiting before the House (the anti-crime legislation that is an integral part of the Conservative platform, for example).

This prorogation comes during a scheduled break from Parliament. This is pretty much unheard of, and extends the break from 39 days to 76 days. It is disingenuous for Harper to say that this is a routine procedure: the only other prorogation that lasted this long since 1968 (as early as I checked) was Chretien's 82-day prorogation in 2003-2004; executed mostly to avoid Sheila Fraser's report on the Sponsorship Scandal and inquiries into military conduct in Somalia. For the Conservatives to criticize Chretien's move while defending Harper is outright hypocrisy.

Which shouldn't surprise me, I suppose. What does surprise me is that something was worth wasting political capital on prorogation. What's waiting in the wings when Parliament resumes in March?

Blowing Ourselves (another bubble)

I was amused a couple months ago by this comic from Jorge Cham at phdcomics.com, which depicts a graph of changes in enrollment to grad studies over time superimposed over the unemployment figures. The correlation is incredible.

Being all in fun, you'd be excused for thinking the artist was just exploiting a quirk of statistics to get a laugh. But then you see Nature reporting exactly the same thing last week and realize that it's not funny, thousands of people think that getting a Ph.D. is worth money. Many people accept this as true, but I think you'd have a hard time convincing Bill Gates or Warren Buffet of that. Or me, for that matter.

For their sakes, I hope that a good portion of these thousands are working on M.B.A.s rather than Ph.D.s, particularly in science. Nature also had a feature last week about two very successful US scientists closing their labs because their funding has simply dried up. An editorial in the same issue points out that "The career crisis is especially stark in the biomedical fields, where the number of tenure-track and tenured positions has not increased in the past two decades even as universities have nearly doubled their production of biomedical doctorates. Those who do land jobs in academic research are struggling to keep them..."

All that to say professors doing academic research in their ivory towers are being as hard hit by the budget cuts, loss of endowment funds and general financial crisis as anyone else. And they don't get severance packages in the millions of dollars. Even still, I guess starting a doctorate is a bit like signing a 4-6 year contract at a meagre (but fairly secure) salary, and maybe some kind of health coverage, which is better than a lot of American citizens can say.

Maybe it is the smart move. Presumably, you set yourself up for a better job by working on an advanced degree during the recession, which will be a couple years long anyways. Good jobs should become available as we begin blowing ourselves another economic bubble to drive unsustainable expenditure - I predict some kind of -tech bubble, be it bio-, nano- or green-. Plus, it won't be long before some genius figures out a new way to create money out of nothing now that subprime mortgages are bust.

But bubbles always burst. That's why they're bubbles. When the economy crashes, it does so like a plane. It doesn't care if you're Richie Valens, the Big Bopper and Buddy Holly; or how many fancy-pants letters there are after your name. There will be blood.

Garneau vs. Goodyear

The Opposition Liberals have named their new Science critic, and it is former astronaut and generally awesome guy Marc Garneau. This is a good move by the Libs, as Garneau actually has a Doctorate in engineering and therefore knows something about science. Oh yeah, and he was the first Canadian in space, with almost 678 hours over three trips total. That's mad geek cred right there.

Gary Goodyear may not be as well-known as Marc Garneau, but is our newly-appointed Minister of State - Science and Technology (I know, what kind of title is that?). Wikipedia lists him as a physiotherapist and doctor of chiropractic, having graduated from an established college that engages in multidisciplinary research and involves about 4500 hours of coursework. However, I couldn't find him in PubMed so I don't think that he's ever actually performed research.

I'd like to see some more Ph.D.s in our legislature's ranks. People that actually understand the cutting edge of their science and can talk about research in a meaningful way. Harper's treatment of science hasn't been cruel, but it hasn't been kind, either. But I'd like to see someone that can actually sell the importance of research through their experiences to the Prime Minister and the Canadian people. It will be interesting to hear Garneau defend the Canadian Space Agency from further budget cuts.

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Economics rant. Feel free to skip.

Bush was at the G20 summit last week talking about how free markets need to remain free, and that this is how global economic progress will be made.

Let me point out three perfectly obvious things. First of all, the U.S. is not interested in free markets. That's why we have things like NAFTA, to make sure that American economic interests get certain advantages. This is not necessarily a bad thing (for the US, at least), but it is definitely not a free market. Secondly, the government is spending up to $700 billion to bail banks out of bad business practices. The very definition of capitalism and free markets demands that governments not engage in massive market manipulation. Thirdly, the only way to have prevented the current economic meltdown would have been to actually regulate the banks and what they were doing, which is also not a free market approach.

Alan Greenspan, former head of the Federal Reserve (and by extension the US economy) said he made a key error during his tenure - "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others... were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms." In other words, he assumed that the banks would follow base capitalist economic assumptions: turn profits, perform due diligence, cover their asses. But they only got one out of three on that quiz, and a suddenly socialist US government is now paying them truckloads of money - skyscrapers full, actually - for this colossal failure to do their jobs.

This is not a free market approach, which just goes to show that capitalism and free markets don't work, and never have. Not that socialism does, but I'm sick of hearing about the power of free markets when 1) there aren't any, and 2) the closer we go towards a free market, i.e. the less closely government regulates, the worse things get.