Who’s working on the major advances? (Page)
May 23rd, 2008 | Published in Economics, Life, Technology | 1 Comment
If you ask an economist what’s driven economic growth, it’s been major advances in things that mattered—the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, and things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that. People are not working on things that could have that kind of influence…. How many people are working on things that can move the needle on the economy or on people’s quality of life? Look, [for example,] 40,000 people a year are killed in the US in auto accidents. Who’s going to make that number zero or very, very small?
—Larry Page, Google co-founder
May 23rd, 2008 at 12:49 pm (#)
I think our society is only organized around sustaining itself. To that end, there are people working toward bettering our quality of life, fixing the floundering economy, and developing improved safety features for automobiles. Perhaps it doesn’t receive the same media coverage as Apple’s latest tech toy, but that is only a reflection on our priorities as the general, consumer public.
As an aside, you have to consider there are nearly 300,000,000 passenger vehicles registered in the United States. According to NHTSA, 1.46 people died for every 100 million miles driven in this country. In 2003, the number was 1.48. In 1966, 5.5 people died per 100 million miles driven. You can see, then, that there are people working on these things.
Or maybe people just don’t run red lights anymore. Either/or.