which path will you choose if it were not a game

I have this tendency of always getting very excited every time I hear my friend Murray (he's on my friend list!) speak....i mean I am almost instantly all charged up to enact my fantasy scenario game....based on what he just wrote in one of the blogs:

"That is brilliant! I know pharmaceuticals can have terribly high prices
on their often cheaply made medicines..."

Well, in my opinion, the possible dichotomy that exists between leveraging intellectual property as an outcome of innovation on one hand and creating generic drug companies pave the way to create affordable medicines for the ma**** on the other hand.

when companies like pfizer (which invents a molecule) selling an aids vaccine for 80 US dollars in Africa (at 10x value), they make profits (part of which goes for CSR) which employs your mum and dad, pays for the house in a leafy suburb (say Chelsea in UK or Darling Point in Sydney) and gives you the elbow space to walk up to an upper class 'organic only' vegetable store to buy "fair trade" organic fresh produce at prices higher than mass produced veggies air lifted from Africa.

Or, generic drug company Wockhart (in Bangalore but still US FDA accredited) manufacturing the generic version of the drug at 8 US dollars (at X price or 1/8th of what Pfizer sells) to mass affected poor Africans suffering from aids but can't afford medicines at 8X the price for original but the African government negotiates with Wockhart to acquire them at 8 dollars (generic version) and makes it reach to people who need them. This happens till Pfizer realises that billions spent in R&D costs and amortized earlier in books of accounts can't be recovered. While strategists at Pfizer weighs various options (soft PR by Clifford Chance + nasty PR by Burson Marstellar + lobbying firm (will not name) to pressure EU Trade Commissioner to start blackmailing African Dictator (say Mugabe) to stop buying generic drugs + starting a new CSR prgram overnight for frica + Trade loans + Counter trade special tariff reductions in Priority imports into EU + special countervailing duties on other Generalized Non Priority Imports+ employing i-banks (Lazard) to look at ways to create a possible merger with Wockhart - one point agenda: create competitive advantage again for Pfizer by corruption, negotiation, generosity, blackmail, seduction and delusion.....just whatever it takes....and if that fails, there is a merger with a similar company somewhere across the Atlantic and the combined entity some time in the next two year time horizon prepares to take over Wockhart....and for the moment, there is 'right sizing' of throwing out some thirty thousand moms and dads out of jobs in EU whohave no idea how to pay for mortgage, credit cards, weekend dinners, golf and annual self healing yoga trips to India....oh I forgot....the children have no idea how to pay for their private education and yes they have to give up the 'fair trade' ethical, fresh, gourmet veggies and "adjust" or "micro-manage" themselves for new realities....

underlying economic principles: chaos theory, Nash equilibrium, game theory, decision choice models, price elasticity, comparative advantage, cost leadership and many more....

the real issue still remains: what can we do if what THEY SUFFER everyday is WHAT WE may suffer from tomorrow....??? THINK

Ideology will go out of the window and we will create leaders that support no more global trade and commerce, no mobility of services, no equal opportunity on a global scale, more protectionism, more foreign aid but no tecnology transfer, more meeting and seminars in Dorchester & Mayfair London over fresh salmon over crostini & single malt Balveni, highly paid NGO senior staff and government civil servants discussing "accountability and monitoring frameworks" for oversight of charity money (to make sure hush money is specifically paid to a specif african leader whose son would start the next fall semester at London Business School to study sustainability, innovation and of course macro economic theory all part of an MBA...while businesses (big and small) suffer, farmers suffer, people suffer for lack of any feasible practical framework for imagination, innovation or inspiration....and we have more and more people signing up on Evoke for winning the GAME (whichever way they can) so that the top 2 percent (wheat) can do something transformational (we hope they do) while the rest and I think quite a bit of them just feeling happy that they have finally got a world bank certificate through awareness and writing about stuff from their nifty
little notebooks while sipping fair trade coffee.....and imagining circa 2020....if wishes were horses.....

This scenario seems ideal for a 'renaissance' game designer of Jane McGonigal's talent to devise new parameters based on Shell Directional Policy Matrix and other strategic frameworks of scenario planning (will not name) that evolutionary game designers can always perfect in collaboration of researchers using mathematical models inspired by bio-mimicry, viral recombinant probabilities and evolution that are currently developing in Tel Aviv university, IIT Kanpur & MIT & at DARPA

And Oprah will soon call the best and the brightest agents to come and sit beside none other than Nobel winner for Peace for 2010 and urged to EVOKE how a senseless US Health Care plan based on the promise of audacious hope (read: election manifesto) be finally resuscitated as one last try before we write its obituary....while social researchers and ethnographers crating another round of focus group why Europe issuddenly embracing socialism....PEACE....

caveat: do not take this seriously...it is fictional...just a game after all.....