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The trouble is, there is a huge difference in the work involved in writing a novel, which might take on person 3 months, as opposed to developing new medicines, which takes hundreds of people years.
Research needs to be done and isn't cheap. Selling the drugs they come up with and are successful is how they fund research for new drugs.
Patents, which only last 14 years at most, are a more or less balance between driving innovation and helping the greater good. (Not like copyright, which now locks things up forever, basically)
So basically you have one thing that takes a lot of research and is protected for a limited time, vs something that is relatively easy to create and locked up forever. Not a great comparison, IMHO.
(And as to China, they've pretty much doomed themselves with their 1 child policy. Their future is essentially Japan's. The Japanese just stopped having children - most of the West has done so, but Japan took it to a whole new level. And in China's case, because people only only had 1 kid, but would selectively only have boys, the ratio there is pretty screwy)
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