This is interesting, especially the conclusion from the “How valuable is medical research?” post that the cost/benefit of medical research is, to “a rough 90% confidence interval, of between $2,000 and $36,000 per (Quality-Adjusted Life Year)”. It would be interesting to look at medical research’s effect on maximum life span—how long the most long-lived person has lived—because medical advances tend to reduce mortality, not increase the life span record (see this Stanford Center of Longevity talk).
A simple model of economic growth (see Mankiw, “Macroeconomics”) is that growth in Output (e.g GDP) is the sum of growth in Capital, Labor, and Total Factor Productivity. A case study in this text argues that South Korea’s boom from the 1950s to the 1990s was due to investment in capital (rebuilding after the Korean War) and in labor (large increases in education), and technology improvement did not significantly affect economic growth.
My naive reading is that Capital (e.g. factory equipment) and Labor (e.g. workers) are both limited by resource availability on Earth but offer relatively large returns when resources are available, while Total Factor Productivity (e.g. technology) can improve without limit but is relatively expensive. Thus, someone wanting to min/max the global economy would go for a lot of population growth and infrastructure projects until the carrying capacity of the Earth was reached, then would invest the remaining capacity in R&D. Unfortunately, this becomes a political and coordination problem: how do get people to agree with your definition of “effectiveness”, and how do you motivate millions of people to tackle a shared goal while avoiding corruption, oppression, etc.?
This is interesting, especially the conclusion from the “How valuable is medical research?” post that the cost/benefit of medical research is, to “a rough 90% confidence interval, of between $2,000 and $36,000 per (Quality-Adjusted Life Year)”. It would be interesting to look at medical research’s effect on maximum life span—how long the most long-lived person has lived—because medical advances tend to reduce mortality, not increase the life span record (see this Stanford Center of Longevity talk).
A simple model of economic growth (see Mankiw, “Macroeconomics”) is that growth in Output (e.g GDP) is the sum of growth in Capital, Labor, and Total Factor Productivity. A case study in this text argues that South Korea’s boom from the 1950s to the 1990s was due to investment in capital (rebuilding after the Korean War) and in labor (large increases in education), and technology improvement did not significantly affect economic growth.
My naive reading is that Capital (e.g. factory equipment) and Labor (e.g. workers) are both limited by resource availability on Earth but offer relatively large returns when resources are available, while Total Factor Productivity (e.g. technology) can improve without limit but is relatively expensive. Thus, someone wanting to min/max the global economy would go for a lot of population growth and infrastructure projects until the carrying capacity of the Earth was reached, then would invest the remaining capacity in R&D. Unfortunately, this becomes a political and coordination problem: how do get people to agree with your definition of “effectiveness”, and how do you motivate millions of people to tackle a shared goal while avoiding corruption, oppression, etc.?