And so people were asking, could the Chinese have built a steam engine? And the basic answer, is: No, unless they had discovered what the Europeans discovered in the 17th century, which is the existence of an atmosphere.
Later,
my example of a very small invention for which we could ask this question is anesthesia. So you go to somebody who is about to have surgery and you ask him, How much would you demand to be paid if I took out your appendix without anesthetizing you, without putting you to sleep? Nobody would agree. The sum would be infinite. What can anesthesia contribute to GDP when it was introduced in the 1850s and 1860s? Russ: Could not be very much. Guest: Nothing. It’s very small. But that is exactly the kind of thing we fail to account for in our calculations. So that’s why I gave that whole list of things; and we could make this list infinitely large. It is the small things that actually don’t amount to an awful large part of our income and product that actually have improved life a great deal and that we really wouldn’t want to do without any more.
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Anesthesia would be small but operations which weren’t performed before, and survival which would be much enhanced would be large, though still limited until antibiotics. Survival would enlarge the population but usually both producer and consumer so larger markets and faster growth but minimally per capita though if your capita, all the difference.
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