Mike Mandel has been writing persuasively about how technological stagnation endangers America for years--first at
Business Week and now as a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. His work, which echoes the work of Robert Solow, William Baumol and many other economists, reminds us that the single biggest driver of economic growth is scientific discovery and technological innovation. A recent post from his blog,
Innovationandgrowth, shows how the decline of US innovation has real consequences--the chart above shows how the once-steep decline in the death rate of Americans aged 45-54 has been basically flat for the last decade. We might that Americans aged 45-54 are likely to be in the prime of their working and child-rearing lives. So these premature deaths are not only personal tragedies, but they also represent an enormous loss of human capital.
As
noted here at SMS, the Serious Medicine Crash is not just an abstruse dispute--it has real consequences.
So what to do? Mandel offers some concrete suggestions, such as a Regulatory Improvement Commission to operate the same way as the
BRAC process. As Mandel puts it,
"If we want growth and rising living standards, we need to avoid adding on well-meaning regulations that drive up the cost of innovation."
Indeed. And we'll live longer and better, too.
