The rules are
open to question.

A price, a threshold, a budget constraint. Encounter them often enough and we learn to treat them as features of the landscape. This blog tries to set them in motion again: to see choices where public discourse shows us only necessity.

Pharmacoeconomics offers tools for comparing costs and outcomes. Here we will also use them to question the boundaries of the comparison: which alternatives are included, who gets counted, which future is assumed to be possible.

A method, a position.

Technical claims have sources you can consult. Interpretations are argued through. Where evidence is lacking, the question remains open. An explicit political position makes the relationship with data more demanding.

The notebook moves between short notes, examinations of methods and opinion pieces. It starts with a word or a detail and follows the consequences: through to services, people and the material conditions of care.

The name.

Punk has an uncertain etymology and a history marked by contempt. In the English of earlier centuries it referred to a prostitute; later it was applied to people deemed worthless, young delinquents and shoddy things. A word that assigned indignity before it became the name of a culture.

With the movement of the 1970s, that insult becomes a name to reclaim. Do it yourself, fanzines and independent networks show that culture can be made without waiting for the blessing of those who control access to it. In pharma-punk, this history meets a discipline that measures value. Who decides what counts? Whose needs go unheard when the market dictates the terms of care?

On the history of the term: Merriam-Webster and Collins. On fanzines and DIY: Teal Triggs, 2006.

Guido Condorelli

I write from the point where the language of economics meets the experience of people who need care. I am interested in the moment a budget constraint enters a life: the time spent waiting, the work of those providing care, the possibilities that narrow. There, a decision presented as technical reveals its political history.

I read health through work, culture and the forms of power. Suffering is often told as a private matter; I try to reconstruct what that account leaves out. The way we learn to desire the future, or stop doing so, also has material consequences.

Articles and books grow out of this inquiry. I see them as attempts to loosen the present’s apparent inevitability: to follow a contradiction long enough to glimpse where a collective possibility might open.