In the Presence of Nobility

The best talk was saved for last at the Africa health conference yesterday. Sir David King (you know it's gotta be good if he's been knighted), the chief scientific advisor to the UK government, spoke about the government's role in African development and how science comes into play. A couple of interesting things came out of his talk.

He gave a pretty neat definition of wealth, a way to measure the resources of a nation. To him, wealth is comprised of manufactured capital, human capital, natural/environmental resources, and institutions. This is a far cry from the narrow view we often take of a nation's wealth as GDP, and it does in fact encompass many important parts of a society in an sustainable framework. However, its inherent inability to be quantified makes this system rather unlikely to be widely used, as politicians and economists, etc., might have difficulty comparing and contrasting different modes of operation.

Sir King also noted an interesting fact about higher education in India. India has a small number of extremely prestigious technical institutes - think MIT or Caltech...but much harder to get into. For every available spot, 1,000 students apply! That would be an acceptance rate of 0.1%, good for quite a jump up the US News and World report rankings, I would think.