![]() ![]() government may have understated the true rate of inflation - perhaps by ignoring the runaway inflation in government itself, notably in education and health care (where much higher spending has yielded no improvement in the former and only modest improvement in the latter) - then one may be inclined to take gold prices seriously and conclude that real incomes have fared even worse than the official data indicate. Indeed, if one shares the widely held view that the U.S. If one believes the economic data, then one must reject the optimism of the scientific establishment. Taken at face value, the economic numbers suggest that the notion of breathtaking and across-the-board progress is far from the mark. Like Alice in the Red Queen’s race, we (and our computers) have been forced to run faster and faster to stay in the same place. To a first approximation, the progress in computers and the failure in energy appear to have roughly canceled each other out. The single most important economic development in recent times has been the broad stagnation of real wages and incomes since 1973, the year when oil prices quadrupled. In the next three years, the large pharmaceutical companies will lose approximately one-third of their current revenue stream as patents expire, so, in a perverse yet understandable response, they have begun the wholesale liquidation of the research departments that have borne so little fruit in the last decade and a half. Looking forward, we see far fewer blockbuster drugs in the pipeline - perhaps because of the intransigence of the FDA, perhaps because of the fecklessness of today’s biological scientists, and perhaps because of the incredible complexity of human biology. When any given field takes half a lifetime of study to master, who can compare and contrast and properly weight the rate of progress in nanotechnology and cryptography and superstring theory and 610 other disciplines? Indeed, how do we even know whether the so-called scientists are not just lawmakers and politicians in disguise, as some conservatives suspect in fields as disparate as climate change, evolutionary biology, and embryonic-stem-cell research, and as I have come to suspect in almost all fields? In relation to concerns expressed here about evaluating scientific field soundness: He warns that this stagnation will undermine the growth that past policies have relied on. SIAI benefactor and VC Peter Thiel has an excellent article at National Review about the stagnating progress of science and technology, which he attributes to poorly-grounded political opposition, widespread scientific illiteracy, and overspecialized, insular scientific fields.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |