India, April 5 -- The waiting has a price, and economists are beginning to put a number on it. Benjamin Jones and Lawrence Summers, in a 2021 NBER working paper, calculated the social return of all US public R&D investment (every NIH grant, every DARPA programme, every public university laboratory) and arrived at a conservative estimate of $4 spent, with a benefit-to-social gains for every $1 spent, with a benefit-to-cost ratio of 5. When health benefits, inflation bias, and international spillovers are properly accounted for, the social return climbs to over $20 per dollar spent and an internal rate of return of approximately 100 per cent. These are not numbers from a utopian model. They are backward-looking estimates derived from the ob...