Re:Larry Page: I’d Rather Leave My Billions to Elon Musk Tha...
by wpietri on Thursday March 20, 2014 @04:51PM
(#7438667)
One clarification: What I wrote could be read as suggesting that education and public health have a low ROI. That's true for VCs. But it's false for society as a whole: having an educated, healthy populace is excellent for wealth production. It makes sense for governments to invest heavily in that because government can easily capture some of that created value just by taxing everybody. Which they are already doing.
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Re:Larry Page: I’d Rather Leave My Billions to Elon Musk Tha...
by nickff on Thursday March 20, 2014 @06:04PM
(#7439178)
The only problem is that government investment has led to mixed (and often disastrous) results in the past.[1][2][3][4][5]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elusive_Quest_for_Growth
[2] http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/ca...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union
Re:Larry Page: I’d Rather Leave My Billions to Elon Musk Tha...
by wpietri on Thursday March 20, 2014 @07:15PM
(#7439556)
If you know of an approach that succeeds 100% of the time, I look forward to hearing about it. But choosing North Korea as your counterexample in opposition to modest government investment in long-term poverty reduction/capital creation efforts like education and health care is a ridiculous straw man. No statistics are available, but they surely must be one of the worst.