Saturday, September 24, 2011

Class Ten

1.       How safety is? How much has our living standard changed. Are we happier or not?
Other interesting trends:
i.                     Improvements that are hard to quantify: human rights
ii.                   Mechanical Power
iii.                  Computational
iv.                  More than half of the world’s population lives in cities.
*3D printing:
The application of technology does not necessarily make country rich: most innovative inventions have already appeared before it make country rich. Here we ask two questions:
i.                     What leads to the innovation’ appearance in that very country?
ii.                   What helps them became commercially beneficial?
Other trends:
l  The costs of sequencing a Genome are falling even faster than predicted by Moore’s law.
l  War and the “Great Pacification”:
Why do less people die in a war? Shoot less? Or better medical care?
The abundant resources today are cheaper, even makes global inflation.
2.       Whys:
i.                     The resources we dedicated to environment skyrockets with those we dedicated to medical care, education. Because we CAN, we can AFFORD it.
ii.                   Suicide rates remain the same: why? We’re happier! Economists ask what changed. The benefit of killing yourself is increasing.
3.       What changed?
People say: industrial revolution, which is not correct. We use “commercial” revolution, the transition from stagnation to accelerating growth.
*Real economic success is measurably by far more than dollars and cents.
*Lucas and demographic shift
 The Demographic and Economic “Transitions” : why so long? Why not globally?
4.       What happened? Consider 2 theories of production:
i.                     The Classical Theory:
We “use up” our increased productivity with more people.
ii.                   The Modern Theory:
Continuous improvements in technology, knowledge and human capital allow productivity to outpace population growth

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