The Costs of Economic Growth, by Charles I. Jones, Stanford GSB and NBER, August 18, 2009: 1. Introduction In October 1962, the Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of a nuclear holocaust. President John F. Kennedy put the chance of nuclear war at “somewhere between one out of three and even.” The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., at the time an adviser of the President, later called this “the most dangerous moment in human history.”1 What if a substantial fraction of the world’s population had been killed in a nuclear holocaust in the 1960s? In some sense, the overall cost of the technological innovations of the preceding 30 years would then seem to have outweighed the benefits.
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