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Do you really think we don't have the human capital to do science? From what I can see, it's more that we have a shortage of plain old capital, and there are p
by gozur88 10y ago
Do you really think we don't have the human capital to do science? From what I can see, it's more that we have a shortage of plain old capital, and there are plenty of would-be scientists who take jobs in Wall St or at Twitter clones because there's no money for the science.
- lern_too_spel 10y agoYou only need one person if your bar is merely to "do science," but if you want to do more science, you need more people. Do you really think that if we increased the number of people who could be scientists by 10X that scientific advancement wouldn't significantly increase in velocity? Just look at how primitive modern medicine still is.
- gozur88 10y agoWhere is the money for this 10x increase?
- lern_too_spel 10y agoFrom the GDP lift caused by lifting large populations out of disease and poverty. Thought experiment: how fast do you think our scientific knowledge would advance if 90% of the US were living in poverty and spent most of their day simply figuring out how to survive?
- gozur88 10y agoSure, but the only way to lift large numbers of people out of poverty is growth. That's not something you can do by fiat.
- lern_too_spel 10y agoYou can't do it by fiat, but you can do it by redirecting funds to things that have larger impact on solving disease and poverty, which is what Gates is doing. At the end of WW2, ROK was one of the poorest countries in the world with one of the lowest rates of literacy. Now it produces a large portion of the world's consumer electronics and has top quality research centers, in spite of never solving government corruption that whole time. This is mainly due to how well war reparations from Japan and aid from elsewhere were used to develop the country.