Dominic Cummings: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I’m curious why the opposite thing isn’t more common, where you have all these generals who have seen World War I, maybe they’re better at fighting World War II as a result? I mean, Hitler was a World War I officer. The World War II generation did seem special. Did the World War I experience help them in any way? I don’t know, and I’m not an expert but it’s striking that the view of contemporaries was that lots of the best young people were killed, and that’s why now a lot of the senior echelons are not up to the job. One thing you’ve emphasized a lot over your writing and throughout your entire career is the need for basic research as a way to move England forward and maybe move the west forward. But when you look at England’s GDP per capita, it’s far behind the US. And one thing I was wondering about is maybe it makes sense for the US to be doing a lot of basic research to expand the frontier. But Britain doesn’t even seem to be on the frontier. If it’s just about economic growth, at this point shouldn’t it just be copying the things that already work in the US instead of doing a whole bunch of basic research and hoping in like 20 years or something, it contributes to productivity growth or something.…

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