Questions of the Day

OK, I know that preliminary research often looks promising in medicine, and that “more research is needed”—blah, blah, blah.

But even so, here’s a question for you infrastructure enthusiasts.  Which would do more for global utility in 2050, if you had to pick just one:

1. Having the government spend $80 billion on a single (sort of) high-speed rail line from LA to the Bay Area?
   
2. Funding 80 different research labs all over the world that are studying treatments for superbugs, at the tune of $1 billion each.
   

Another question:  Does it makes sense to go after China for “stealing” the idea behind an 80-year old Snow White film, based on a 200-year old European folktale, while constantly bashing the drug companies for high prices?

That is from Scott Sumner at TheMoneyIllusion.

More importantly still, what are the world’s biggest problems? Do high-speed rail, treatments for superbugs, or intellectual property suits even make the cut? How do answers to these questions impact what we choose to focus on in schools?

If we cared so little about the relative importance of different problems in our personal life, it would look like this.

Just to be clear, the intellectual property suits mentioned above are the analogous coriander, the high-speed rail is the apron, the treatments for superbugs is the oven, and if you bothered to click the link to the world's biggest problems, we'd have to zoom out from the above picture to see the entire house on fire as the analogous example for climate change, biosecurity, or risk from artificial intelligence.

​Relative importance and perspective matter.