Of course! Happy you found it useful.

You’ll have to forgive me if my answer isn’t super satisfying - it’s possible, but I’d want to see patents under these conditions empirically validated.

Some things you might find interesting - the author(s) make various arguments such as:

1) Ranking (by various metrics/criteria) the most impactful medicines and making the case that the ones developed independently from patents are both over represented and more impactful. (There was some stuff around what kind of medicines are incentivised with each regime)

2) I don’t exactly remember what they say about R&D costs increasing with time (aside from (1)-style skepticism), but they did talk how as time went on, logistics/distribution/marketing technology has grown immeasurably, so the window one has before the copycats come in can be exploited with a lot more gusto.

3) Reverse engineering of medicines + especially their industrialisation takes longer (and requires more capital) than people think, and there’s a bit of a conundrum where, because you don’t know which medicines will be commercially successful, you have to wait to see how they perform on the market… but the longer you wait, the more (2) happens (and the more you have to fight first mover advantage, established marketing etc)

The points are more rigorously covered in the book - (2)+(3) had papers that quantified the stated effects in question.

I will stress again though that while the “counter-narratives” are interesting and may help build some intuition, I would set the gold standard to some econometric/shock-analysis of patents in action.