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Daniel_Burfoot comments on The Onrushing Wave - Less Wrong
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To elaborate on this point, consider that the aggregate market cap of Apple, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Intel, Qualcomm, Cisco, and Facebook is about 1.5e12 dollars. Conservative estimates for the cost of the US war on terror since 2001 is about the same. It's not an exact comparison, but it's an order of magnitude sanity check on my claim that wealth increase due to technological advance is on the same order of magnitude as wealth decrease due to institutional failure.
Market cap only represents the value those tech companies have managed to capture, though. I rarely click on Google's ads and therefore contribute little to their market cap, but access to search engines like Google has had a tremendous impact on my life.
Although the US didn't capture all of the losses from the War on Terror, either!