Move 1% of the $2.7T bomb budget to medicine: $27.2B for trials, $114B saved from fewer explosions. Your worst case is the largest medical funding increase in history.
Think by Numbers runs cost-benefit analyses for a species that spends $604 on weapons for every $1 on clinical trials. We suspect a math error.
The Declaration of Optimization
These governments have enough weapons to end civilization 122 times over. Current military spending is enough money to buy 850 bullets for every person alive every single year. You only need to kill everyone once for everyone to be dead. (I checked.) The remaining murder capacity is sheer waste.
For every 604 dollars they spend on the capacity for orphan manufacturing, they only spend one on clinical trials that might cure the diseases that will slowly torture and brutally murder you and everyone you have ever loved.
Your chance of being killed by a terrorist? 1 in 30 million. Your chance of dying of a disease? 100%.
This is suboptimal.
Posts, Ranked by Extinction-Prevention Potential
You run 200,000-year-old brain software optimized for hoarding rocks and fearing strangers. You've given it nukes. 5% of your decisions are conscious. Your amygdala handles the rest. This is your owner's manual.
You replace 330 billion cells daily, 3D-print windpipes, and reprogram skin into brain cells. Your body is a machine. Death is a maintenance failure. You've been writing poetry about it when you should have built a wrench.
46,000+ country-years of policy data. 3,500+ US state-years. Centuries of natural experiments we've never analysed. The OPG just asks: what worked? Then suggests doing that.
The US spends 3% more of GDP on government than Switzerland yet lives 6.5 fewer years. What if we just... looked at what works elsewhere and did that? Causal inference says yes.
Voter preferences have near-zero effect on policy. Citizens want 45:1 medical research vs military spending, but get the reverse. RAPPA fixes this with a slider and a dream.
What if saving millions of lives was a good investment? IABs pay 272% ROI to investors who bribe politicians into doing their jobs. Global household wealth is $454T. Opposition is $5T. Do the maths.
Civilization runs at 51.9% efficiency. The governance gap costs $101 trillion/year—$50,500 per household. We're leaving $1.16M per person on the table because meetings run long.
A manual for ending war and disease using financial incentives, pragmatic trials, and the radical assumption that humans respond to money. Spoiler: they do. 10.7 billion lives at stake.
The maximum cost to reform all US policy is $25.5 billion. The return is $84.8 quadrillion. That's an 84.8 million:1 ROI. The real question isn't can we afford it, but why haven't we bought it.