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Top-level
 How much is it worth to be able to read Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Mayan stelae, and the cuneiform tablets of Ashurbanipal's library? If Disney had held the copyright to the complete works of Rumi and Shakespeare for the last 800 or 500 years respectively, how much would they have raked in? 🧵 2/n 8 comments
All these non-rivalrous, non-excludable goods that we've accumulated over centuries are a huge portion of humanity's stock of real wealth. If we had to choose whether to start over either with no knowledge and all of our physical capital, or all of our knowledge and none of our physical capital, which would we prefer? Which one is worth more? 🧵 4/n Or put a different way, which of these situations would you rather be in? A small band of paleolithic humans dropped on a modern but suddenly depopulated Earth? A small band of space explorers stranded on Earth as it was 125,000 years ago (but sans humans) with a functional ship's computer that can teach you anything we've ever known about human history, technology, governance, sociology, fundamental science, math, agriculture, etc. 🧵 5/n This whole train of thought is just a side-note when he's really talking about national accounting practices, and how GDP is different from Gross National Income (which also accounts for inflows/outflows of money) and how neither of them accounts for depreciation of traditional capital assets (which is often significant!) never mind "depreciation" of natural capital. 🧵 6/6 @ZaneSelvans (I understand this is a thought experiment but:) in terms of personal survival, I might take the paleolithic group. in the short term, assuming they have their practical knowledge and social system, they’d be better positioned to take advantage of physical capital (shelter) in mutually advantageous ways and survive from nature. the moderns would be stuck in an initial ‘knowledge trap’. yes, it’s great to know electricity comes from magnets, but… (1/3) @ZaneSelvans …good luck mining & smithing enough material to be useful before first winter. over time, assuming the social structure doesn’t collapse, I’d put money on the moderns because of the compounding quality of knowledge. abstract knowledge _is_ a general good, but it is only immediately useful in the context of physical capital and labor; it’s just a map toward something, not the something. and/or the knowledge we have today is embedded in the structures of the day. (2/3) @ZaneSelvans perhaps to illustrate what I'm thinking: if an advanced alien spaceship landed tomorrow with the galactic encyclopedia with a thousand years worth of more knowledge, how long would it take us to put that into practical use? not forever, but maybe it'd take us 50 years to build the first fusion drive needed to power the asteroid mining machines that use the nanorobots, etc. (3/3 and hopefully not annoying 😬) @ZaneSelvans I wonder if paleolithic humans actually had sophisticated cultural assets, but they were lost since they had no writing systems. |
Gregory's Server
How much is it worth to understand the Milankovitch cycles and Dansgaard–Oeschger events? The faint young sun paradox? The great oxygenation event? Snowball Earth? Plate tectonics? The end-Cretaceous Chixulub impact? 🧵 3/n