Quote of the day

Markets are short on poetic justice, but long on irony.--Bryan Caplan

This was after reflecting on Alex Tabarrok's Forbes piece, which I posted on yesterday:

[T]here are only about 6 million scientists and engineers in the entire world, nearly a quarter of whom are in the U.S. Poverty means that millions of potentially world-class scientists today spend their lives trying to eke out a subsistence living, rather than leading mankind's charge into the future. But if the world as a whole were as wealthy as the U.S. and were devoting the same share of population to research and development, there would be more than five times as many scientists and engineers worldwide.

In short, many of the American protectionists of today will one day be alive thanks to Chindian technology.