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Any long term (5-10 years) stock market conclusions we can draw from this? I would love for there to be an all-country ETF focused on genetic engineering, but I

by tormeh 9y ago

Any long term (5-10 years) stock market conclusions we can draw from this? I would love for there to be an all-country ETF focused on genetic engineering, but I haven't found one.

gwern 9y ago
Hard to say. Within 10 years there can't be any immediate consequences simply because even super-prodigy kids won't make any real contributions to anything before age 15 or so, but the financial markets can still price in future returns. On the other hand, scaling up is a huge challenge - even if 100% of East Asian parents wanted to do embryo selection and were willing to pay full price up front and plan reproduction around it, it simply wouldn't be possible because there aren't enough fertility clinics or trained doctors, and they struggle to keep up with regular fertility demand just from the usual aging & demographic transition trends. Genetics strikes me as probably going to follow Amara's law: everyone is overestimating the effect in the short run ('China is engineering genius babies right now! Panic!') and underestimating it in the long run (I don't know what 2050 looks like, but I have a hard time envisioning a world with access to 30 years of CRISPR and 20 years of genome synthesis which is still much like ours and where the biggest change is that your smartphone weighs a tenth as much and Siri doesn't make any funny mistakes...). For short-term 5-10 year bets, AI is probably more important.
- tormeh 9y ago
  >On the other hand, scaling up is a huge challenge - even if 100% of East Asian parents wanted to do embryo selection and were willing to pay full price up front and plan reproduction around it, it simply wouldn't be possible because there aren't enough fertility clinics or trained doctors That's what I want to get in on. Whoever can offer genetical engineering to Chinese parents first is going to be the new Google.
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    Hopefully they won't be called VersaLife.

by tormeh 9y ago

Any long term (5-10 years) stock market conclusions we can draw from this? I would love for there to be an all-country ETF focused on genetic engineering, but I haven't found one.

gwern 9y ago

Hard to say. Within 10 years there can't be any immediate consequences simply because even super-prodigy kids won't make any real contributions to anything before age 15 or so, but the financial markets can still price in future returns. On the other hand, scaling up is a huge challenge - even if 100% of East Asian parents wanted to do embryo selection and were willing to pay full price up front and plan reproduction around it, it simply wouldn't be possible because there aren't enough fertility clinics or trained doctors, and they struggle to keep up with regular fertility demand just from the usual aging & demographic transition trends. Genetics strikes me as probably going to follow Amara's law: everyone is overestimating the effect in the short run ('China is engineering genius babies right now! Panic!') and underestimating it in the long run (I don't know what 2050 looks like, but I have a hard time envisioning a world with access to 30 years of CRISPR and 20 years of genome synthesis which is still much like ours and where the biggest change is that your smartphone weighs a tenth as much and Siri doesn't make any funny mistakes...). For short-term 5-10 year bets, AI is probably more important.

tormeh 9y ago
>On the other hand, scaling up is a huge challenge - even if 100% of East Asian parents wanted to do embryo selection and were willing to pay full price up front and plan reproduction around it, it simply wouldn't be possible because there aren't enough fertility clinics or trained doctors That's what I want to get in on. Whoever can offer genetical engineering to Chinese parents first is going to be the new Google.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  Hopefully they won't be called VersaLife.