1. The externalities argument works in theory, but it's unclear whether the relevant elasticities are large enough in practice such that American growth > catchup growth/global health. E.g., Tom Davidson at Open Phil compares R&D spend to cash transfers/health interventions here (https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/social-returns-to-productivity-growth/) and his toy model favors the health interventions on a straight $ for $ comparison. Since political advocacy is much more leveraged than direct R&D spend, spending on YIMBY and immigration advocacy could plausibly dominate both, but I'm guessing the answer is highly sensitive to your P(Advocacy succeeds).
2. The location where the innovation occurs is not neutral to the success of technological diffusion/size of positive externalities. There's evidence that innovation from more similar country-industry pairs diffuses more completely and quickly (https://scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.edu/files/moscona/files/appropriate_entrepreneurship.pdf, https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/moscona/files/it_final_nov2022_0.pdf). To me this says that boosting growth and/or innovation in a low-middle income country with a great research ecosystem (read China) could be better than doing so in the US. There may be significant political constraints to OpenPhil funding progress studies in China (from both the Chinese and American governments), but do you agree that this would first best absent political constraints?
Oh boy, here we go peddling the same tired trickle-down fantasies that enrich monopolists while leaving the rest of us to pick up the pieces. Worshipping at the altar of unfettered U.S. corporate expansion conveniently ignores how American economic "progress" was built on extracting resources and exploiting labor from the Global South.
Instead of learning from the subprime mortgage crisis, where deregulation benefited Wall Street while crashing the real economy, we're supposed to double down? Give me a break. Calling that a failure of "state capacity" is rich - more like regulatory capture by entrenched interests lining their pockets.
This myopic growth-obsession treats innovation as an end itself, rather than a means to improving actual human welfare and flourishing. Pushing an ideological paradigm that protects rentier monopolists over social and environmental wellbeing is a path to oblivion, not progress.
We can't simply hand-wave away the hard biophysical limits to infinite expansion on a finite planet. Nor can we ignore the inequality, alienated labor, concentrated private power, and erosion of public luxuries that come with hypercapitalist policies.
Rather than cheering deregulation and privatization, we need public investments to restructure and democratize economic rents more fairly. Innovation is valuable, but not detached from humanistic priorities like ecological sustainability, decent work opportunities, and a more egalitarian distribution of social product.
Accelerating a U.S-centric, capital-intensive growth model divides the world further into developed/underdeveloped, immiserating the poorest under an ideology that conveniently protects corporate conquests from Seattle to Shenzhen. We need a balanced development approach respecting labor, communities, and planetary boundaries - not deifying an extractive oligarchy.
Two quibbles:
1. The externalities argument works in theory, but it's unclear whether the relevant elasticities are large enough in practice such that American growth > catchup growth/global health. E.g., Tom Davidson at Open Phil compares R&D spend to cash transfers/health interventions here (https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/social-returns-to-productivity-growth/) and his toy model favors the health interventions on a straight $ for $ comparison. Since political advocacy is much more leveraged than direct R&D spend, spending on YIMBY and immigration advocacy could plausibly dominate both, but I'm guessing the answer is highly sensitive to your P(Advocacy succeeds).
2. The location where the innovation occurs is not neutral to the success of technological diffusion/size of positive externalities. There's evidence that innovation from more similar country-industry pairs diffuses more completely and quickly (https://scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.edu/files/moscona/files/appropriate_entrepreneurship.pdf, https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/moscona/files/it_final_nov2022_0.pdf). To me this says that boosting growth and/or innovation in a low-middle income country with a great research ecosystem (read China) could be better than doing so in the US. There may be significant political constraints to OpenPhil funding progress studies in China (from both the Chinese and American governments), but do you agree that this would first best absent political constraints?
Oh boy, here we go peddling the same tired trickle-down fantasies that enrich monopolists while leaving the rest of us to pick up the pieces. Worshipping at the altar of unfettered U.S. corporate expansion conveniently ignores how American economic "progress" was built on extracting resources and exploiting labor from the Global South.
Instead of learning from the subprime mortgage crisis, where deregulation benefited Wall Street while crashing the real economy, we're supposed to double down? Give me a break. Calling that a failure of "state capacity" is rich - more like regulatory capture by entrenched interests lining their pockets.
This myopic growth-obsession treats innovation as an end itself, rather than a means to improving actual human welfare and flourishing. Pushing an ideological paradigm that protects rentier monopolists over social and environmental wellbeing is a path to oblivion, not progress.
We can't simply hand-wave away the hard biophysical limits to infinite expansion on a finite planet. Nor can we ignore the inequality, alienated labor, concentrated private power, and erosion of public luxuries that come with hypercapitalist policies.
Rather than cheering deregulation and privatization, we need public investments to restructure and democratize economic rents more fairly. Innovation is valuable, but not detached from humanistic priorities like ecological sustainability, decent work opportunities, and a more egalitarian distribution of social product.
Accelerating a U.S-centric, capital-intensive growth model divides the world further into developed/underdeveloped, immiserating the poorest under an ideology that conveniently protects corporate conquests from Seattle to Shenzhen. We need a balanced development approach respecting labor, communities, and planetary boundaries - not deifying an extractive oligarchy.