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A review by bearunderthecypresses
Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek by Manu Saadia
4.0
Nice choice Mom! Thank you for the recommendation!
"Live long and prosper" thus alludes to another kind of prosperity, the kind that arises from the cultivation of the mind rather than from greed, that antiquated and vulgar practice. It is an active sentence. Instead of "long life and prosperity," it is a grammatical imperative directed at the recipient. Long life and prosperity do not befall you out of the heavens, they are not random outcomes from the lotteries of birth or of life. You must live long, and that is the condition. It does not mean that you will prosper: the "and" is not a logical conjunction. You may or may not succeed. Furthermore, the phrase points to the unfinished nature of the imperative. Spock's father, Ambassador Sarek, who has arguably lived very long and prospered beyond many of his Vulcan peers, is still served the greeting. The work and the challenge to go on living and to prosper are never concluded." (p. 241.)
"...free riding on public goods is much more of a threat to our continued welfare than the physical scarcity of raw materials. Public goods are always at risk of exhaustion because of their nonexcludable, nonrival nature. It would seem that in the absence of some form of regulation or contract, or any other agreed-upon system of pricing or rewards and penalties, free riding on public goods will inevitably occur. Designing and implementing regulation on such a scale is itself a very involved process whose ultimate success is far from guaranteed. In many ways, depressing as it may sound, in our world free riding is a feature, not a bug." (p.129.)
"I do not understand the motives of those who advocate space exploration as a way to unite the world, as a sort of cultural crusade for peace through engineering. They are noble. So, what if we first used our resources to lift a billion people out of poverty? How many Einsteins or von Neumanns could we get out of that? Heck, we don't even need Einsteins -- we just need thirty or forty million more engineers and programmers and medical scientists out of this one billion. That is 4 percent, tops. There is no telling what could be achieved with such an increase in raw human capital. The returns of knowledge grow and accumulate incommensurably fast." (p.218 - 219)
"Live long and prosper" thus alludes to another kind of prosperity, the kind that arises from the cultivation of the mind rather than from greed, that antiquated and vulgar practice. It is an active sentence. Instead of "long life and prosperity," it is a grammatical imperative directed at the recipient. Long life and prosperity do not befall you out of the heavens, they are not random outcomes from the lotteries of birth or of life. You must live long, and that is the condition. It does not mean that you will prosper: the "and" is not a logical conjunction. You may or may not succeed. Furthermore, the phrase points to the unfinished nature of the imperative. Spock's father, Ambassador Sarek, who has arguably lived very long and prospered beyond many of his Vulcan peers, is still served the greeting. The work and the challenge to go on living and to prosper are never concluded." (p. 241.)
"...free riding on public goods is much more of a threat to our continued welfare than the physical scarcity of raw materials. Public goods are always at risk of exhaustion because of their nonexcludable, nonrival nature. It would seem that in the absence of some form of regulation or contract, or any other agreed-upon system of pricing or rewards and penalties, free riding on public goods will inevitably occur. Designing and implementing regulation on such a scale is itself a very involved process whose ultimate success is far from guaranteed. In many ways, depressing as it may sound, in our world free riding is a feature, not a bug." (p.129.)
"I do not understand the motives of those who advocate space exploration as a way to unite the world, as a sort of cultural crusade for peace through engineering. They are noble. So, what if we first used our resources to lift a billion people out of poverty? How many Einsteins or von Neumanns could we get out of that? Heck, we don't even need Einsteins -- we just need thirty or forty million more engineers and programmers and medical scientists out of this one billion. That is 4 percent, tops. There is no telling what could be achieved with such an increase in raw human capital. The returns of knowledge grow and accumulate incommensurably fast." (p.218 - 219)