Why Our "Leaders" Are More And More Uninformed About Progress Occurring Everywhere Around Them.

Quote: “We are in a golden age of medical innovation—but not in the sense that this is a shining era upon which historians will look with fondness (like the great age of classical music) distant decades from now. In free markets, every glittering age of technology is succeeded by another that is even more glittering."

Source: Calfee, John. “The Golden Age of Medical Innovation.” The American. March/April 2007

Every day, medical breakthroughs are occurring that don’t make the news. This is one reason politicians and government bureaucrats seem increasingly uninformed about the health care industry and other parts of the economy.

For example, a drug called Lucentis, produced and marketed by Genentech, stops and reverses degenerative blindness in older people. It is a product of applying biotech methods to genetically engineered bacteria and has been successful in 95 percent of clinical cases. Macular degeneration, which affects millions of people, had previously been incurable. My father suffered from blindness due to macular degeneration for the last 27 years of his life. We had hoped that something like this would have come along before his death last year. But now it is finally here.

Back in October of 1987, the day after U.S. stock prices had fallen 23 percent to 1,738, Sir John Templeton, of mutual fund fame, was asked in New York where the stock market would go now. Templeton predicted that by the year 2000, the stock market would hit 10,000. The reporters were incredulous. One asked, “How can you say that? Isn’t capitalism broken?” Sir John replied that of all the scientists, engineers, researchers, and technicians who have ever lived on the planet, 99 percent of them were alive today, and they were all connected electronically. How could there not be an ever-increasing number of great new opportunities to invest in?

As he predicted, the stock market exceeded 10,000 by the year 2000. We are in a strange situation today. Each day, increasing technological improvements are occurring throughout the economy. And each day, the so-called leaders in the media and academic and political establishments who only look for bad news are more and more out of touch with progress being made everywhere.