This is the Katori Daily Podcast for Thursday, December 28th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown. The FDA's slow role to approve

contraceptives in the 1960s, probably substantially delayed women entering the labor force.

But the ways in which the FDA holds up access to new drugs occurs in many contexts, and

improving American health care necessarily means giving Americans

greater control over their own health. Michael Cannon is author of the new book

Recovery. It's available now. So Claudia Golden, an economist, won the Nobel Prize for Economics in

2023, in large part because of her work on what has affected women's

outcomes in the labor market and what has affected women's outcomes in the labor market and what has helped women achieve

greater economic equality with men.

And it turns out that one of those things was the introduction of reliable

contraceptives. Reliable contraceptives allowed women to delay childbearing and to remain in school, pursue more education, and

spend more time in the workforce accumulating human capital, and therefore contraception allowed them to narrow

the wage gap that exists between men and women. There's this public policy story

here and the news is not very good,

which is that when the government set itself in the position of deciding

what drugs could and could come onto the market,

when Congress created the FDA and then steadily

increased the regulations that the FDA enforces that they create barriers to entry

for new medical products to come onto the market.

What that ended up doing was it ended up inhibiting women's ability to achieve economic

gains and to achieve greater economic equality with men by delaying the

...