Michael Kremer: prediction

Transcript context

…If there’s some constraint out there limiting the benefits from larger market size, what is indeed the constraint you would wish to target? You’re Michael Kremer. You’re put in charge of everything, and you can target the constraint that’s slowing down growth. What’s the first thing you look at? The first thing I would look at is the thing that we have the most control over, which is the institutions we use to try to advance technology. If you believe Chad — and I do — there’s just something fundamental about the progress of technology, which means that it’s getting harder over time to have a constant growth rate of technology. We invent more technology. We don’t increase the growth rate over time. That’s just something inherent about technology. Obviously, that could change. It could be that when we get AI working well enough, we actually get to an incredibly virtuous cycle, and then we head off to a singularity where the AI gets smarter and smarter over time. We don’t know whether that’s a fundamental constraint, but whether that’s a constraint or not, there’s not much we can do about it. What we can do is, we can think about the myriad institutions. We talked about IT institutions. There’s also research-funding questions. Should we be funding research the way we do? Or should we be saying, “Look, it’s not a matter of writing the grant proposal. Once you’re five years past the PhD, we’re going to fund you based on what you’ve accomplished, not based on your grant proposal.” That’s one example. I have no idea what the answer is to that. Should the committees be a different size than they are now? Should we say that we’re going to fund something as long as somebody really likes it rather than take the average of the committee view when we’re thinking about government grants? There’s a bunch of questions about what the optimal way to do research funding is, and I think we should be experimenting with this, trying to learn more about how do we set up institutions. There’s questions about research publication process. That’s the thing that we can control, and that should be a priority for anybody who cares about economic growth. Let’s say the current Michael Kremer sets up another high school in Kenya. What is it that you would do that the current high schools in Kenya are not doing? What would you change? You’re in charge.…

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