Meeting notice: The 03.May.20 meeting will be held at 7:30 P.M. 
at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from 
the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave.  If you're new and can't 
recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. 
More details below.

Suggested topic: Technical Innovation and Health Care

One of the roads we hope will take us to NT leads through 
investment in health care.  However, there are nuances to be 
considered. Health care is not an socially productive investment 
as these things are reckoned, since its beneficiaries are for the 
most part retired, and therefore in no position to make a return 
to the society at large.  (Of course individual companies can 
make profits selling products and services.)  Health care 
spending transfers wealth from the non-HC regions of society into 
the sector without increasing wealth as a whole, like gambling or 
defense. 

Second,  new products and services in health care increase sector 
spending.  In other sectors a new product redistributes a 
constant basket of dollars.  However, the more effective a new 
health care product is, the higher the expectation by the public 
that it will be made generally available, ie, that it will be 
covered by insurance. The extensive direct and indirect 
government support of such insurance significantly lightens the 
degree of price scrutiny such products would otherwise receive in 
the marketplace.  The effect is that the total cost of health 
care rises, displacing spending in other sectors.  This has an 
autocatalytic effect: each increase attracts more investment, 
that investment sends the aggregate spending totals higher, and 
so on.

You trace these dynamics far enough and you end up with
a vision of a society that invests all its money in health care
while being stagnant and impoverished in all other respects.

There are days when it seems hard to believe that we aren't
headed right through that door.   Or into it.

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Link of the week: :

http://www.wordspy.com/words/globalecophagy.asp

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In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the moon.

				-- Jules Verne, 1865

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Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.

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Legend:

"NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group.  The Group meets on the first and 
third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which refers to a restaurant 
located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  

The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little else. 
If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a sample via a 
forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg'  to majordomo@world.std.com.  Unsubs 
follow the same model.  

Discussion should be sent to nsg- d@world.std.com, which must be subscribed to 
separately.  You must be subscribed to nsg-d to post to it and must post from 
the address from which you subscribed (An anti- spam thing).

Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com.