How Does Human Progress Come About? My Long Read QA WIth Jason Crawford

Ed Comment:"....This sparks a lot of food for thought. I wish I had a lot more time to write. Unfortunately these things go into the database and get lost for lack of time. I think all the do-nothing professors and medical research that has advanced old age fro 75 to 85 because the gov is willing to pay for that and not just private people, has helped drained productivity growth. I think people fear the future despite enormous historical progress because of unimaginative creativity. We're it imaginable, it would already be created. Without these insights, we run the camera forward and we bump into lots of constraints, global warming for example, without any apparent cures. I dont thing first movers necessarily get first mover advantages. Pioneers often get killed by the Indians. It's the person who commericalizes successfully, who satisfies customer needs more effectively than competitors, who gets rich. I like the acknowledgment that the consensus won't fund long term projects. That's indicative of why signing up more UIs to vote is surely bad for society despite all the Democratic BS. I do think some tech is bad: surveillance, AI in the long run, and misdirected medical research. Gov shouldn't be naive, but they will surely f it up. Economists assume talent is unconstrained and call for more R&D funding, more medical research, more manufacturing engineers. They don't see that their ideas come with opportunity cost. I don't see how we can allocate talent effectively without market prices. Talent is the nearest resource. When talent is the constraint perhaps America should demand Europe develop some expertise..."
".... Basic science and basic research operate on very long time horizons— much longer than the typical 10-year VC fund. It’s hard to capture value in basic research. If you’ve discovered some fundamental law of physics or biology and put it out there, it’s not something you can patent, and it’s not something you should be able to patent. And so, how do you capture the value? How do you recoup your investment on that? So instead, we funded these things with nonprofit models, whether that is government — there has been a ton of government funding for science since World War II — or that’s through nonprofit private foundations. But I’m concerned that the incentive structures in the nonprofit world, whether it’s private or public, are not aligned with the “social value” that we get out of research. Again, there’s a really high value to the world in being the first backer early in some project when it is not obviously going to succeed. And yet, I don’t think that there’s a way in the nonprofit world that the people who are right early get orders of magnitude disproportional credit for what they did, whereas early seed investors do get that kind of credit in the for-profit world….. I mean, I think there are some obvious ends that technology can achieve that most people would agree on. Improved health; the reduction of disease; the extension of life; the ability to communicate and learn; the ability for everybody in the world to get knowledge and experience arts and culture; the ability for us to travel, visit each other, see the world and other cultures, and conduct commerce; and et cetera.Ultimately, I judge progress on a humanistic standard. What is good for human life, health, happiness, and flourishing? What is good for education, arts, and commerce? What gives us more capabilities and more options in the world?..."