I don't think there is an Imaginary Property issue, it's not a legal or economic term I've heard and I don't think a book's content should be considered imaginary property. As for more R than D, the difference between the two is very vague off paper, its generally and ongoing process that often uses a lot of the same people. The R and D are not really distinct in R&D, it's a term with its own meaning in going from an idea to a product.



Their profits aren't that huge, the numbers I've seen that I consider reliable are 12-20%, you'll see lower and higher but every time I saw one outside that range it involved a lot of cherry-picking and selective calls on what profit was, like noticing a 50 million was spent on Drug X and they turned 37x on it compared to that and conveniently ignoring all other costs or how Drug Y resulted in 200 million in R&D and got yanked with millions in lawsuits on the table, while Drug Z got canceled after 50 mil in research and never had human trials. 12-18% is nothing to laugh at but when you're cushioning against a possible 5-year dry spell as patents expire and some research fails to work out you're looking at profits that are very comparable to what someone might pay on broad insurance for a risky undertaking, which is basically what they do. As for marketing, even gov't programs advertise, complaining someone is marketing a new drug is like complaining if the gov't runs an ad campaign for dialing 9-1-1 or sends out pamphlets to rural households telling them about deductions for for solar and wind and how costs stack up compared to running and maintaining power lines to their isolated house. Drug companies seem to operate like pretty much every other company, I think their bad rep boils down to the strong and often desperate need for the item and the absurd price difference between individual pill manufacture and final cost. Fortune 500, who is probably objective for our purposes, places them as the third most profitable major industry at 19.3%. If you look at the other top 10, which are the only ones running above 10% profit, most of them have a heavy component of R&D, either constantly having to make new stuff or in a market that's pretty new, like #2, Internet Services and Retailing, which Google tops out followed by Amazon, and its not unusual for companies like that to have been the lone survivor of a hundred or so original companies, enjoy huge profits for a couple years, then find itself topped out or even gone five years later. For some reason railroads are #5 at 12.6% and I would guess that 'reason' is gov't subsidy, mining and oil are #6 at 11.5%, and they engage in non-stop surveys and often find themselves eating the bill when some rig or deposit turns out to be a cost-to-benefit crap fest or country X has a rebellion and takes their stuff. The single most profitable industry is network equipment, at 20.4% (wow, the gouging!) and that's placing like Cisco who make network routers and can flop under if someone beats them to a cheaper better hub or whatever 2 years later or snatched the ball on something like wireless. The whole list only has 53 entries down Airlines at -13% and 11 though 43 all run at .6% to 8.7% profit. There's no industry out there selling stuff for twice what it cost them to make, or even a quarter more, so accusing them of rampant profiteering never makes much sense to me. And one can hardly claim Fortune's figures are low since Pharma's gonna being giving them the highest profit figure they can in hope of attracting investors, I mean they'd call them up howling and claiming it was 24.3% not 19.3% if they thought the claim had enough credibility.