Re:Can Economic Growth Last?
by petra on Monday September 14, 2015 @10:02AM
(#10215081)
Healthcare is currently ~20% of the economy and rapidly growing. But the end game is probably highly effective drugs, highly effective diagnostics, high degree of automation ,and maybe even life extension - and those will probably offer great solutions to most major medical problems.
And after patent expiration, many of those technologies could become very cheap - because they are either dealing with information(i.e. labs on chip) which generally has moore's law like economics, or dealing with giving minute quantities of materials to people - and making that is either very cheap today - or synthetic biology would probably make it very cheap.
So i'm not sure healthcare will be a growth engine.But maybe living to 150 or forever will offer a lot of growth.
And after patent expiration, many of those technologies could become very cheap - because they are either dealing with information(i.e. labs on chip) which generally has moore's law like economics, or dealing with giving minute quantities of materials to people - and making that is either very cheap today - or synthetic biology would probably make it very cheap.
So i'm not sure healthcare will be a growth engine.But maybe living to 150 or forever will offer a lot of growth.