Reading (For Dummies)

The Law of Diminishing Returns

Last night I proposed two theses to my old man. The Law of Diminishing Returns as it applies to science and politics.

In the realms of science, we get a lot of the early, useful information cheap. As time goes on, it takes more and more money to discover facts, and those facts are less and less useful.

Take two scenarios: In the first, we have the discovery of the basic laws of nature. Isaac Newton didn't have to spend very much money to figure out the gravitational constant; it just took dropping some weights and timing some things out. What he learned has become fantastically important when calculating the interactions of any two masses.
More recently, Syracuse University and a few companies invested around $5 million to send an experiment up on Columbia. The experiment was to determine if ants build their colonies the same when in zero-gravity for prolonged periods of time. The shuttle blew up, so the total cost of the experiment was a few lives, probably somewhere in the range of $5 billion. What did we learn from the experiment? Not much...what would we have learned if it was successful? Also not much. Not a very good experiment. I guess scientific discovery will become less and less useful as a function of time.

In my second rant I said that politics work the same way. In the beginning (ie when the US was set up), there were a lot of important decisions to be made and important laws to make regarding civil liberties, etc. These laws didn't take much time to create, because there was nothing for them to conflict with. Lawyers didn't have to say, "Does freedom of speech violate the constitution?" because the constitution was pretty small then. After a while, the important laws were established, bolstering the size of the legal document. Lawyers and politicians created a self-supporting enterprise through legal interpretation and re-interpretation. Now they cost a lot of money because they have to dig through such a huge knowledge base to create and defend so many useless rules...

So what else does this fabulous economic model apply to?