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A thought experiment: How CRAN saved 3,620 (working) lives

Given the vast amount of R packages available today, it makes sense (at least to me, as a trained economist) to ask a simple yet difficult question: How much value has been created by all those packages? As all R stuff on CRAN is open-source (which is a blessing), there is no measureable GDP contribution in terms of market value that we can use to provide a quick answer. But all of us R users know the pleasant feeling, if not to say the excitement, of finding a package that provides exactly the functionality we have been looking for so long. This saves us the time of developing the functionality ourselves. So, apparantly, the time saving is one way to estimate the beneficial effect of the package sharing on CRAN. Here comes a simple (and not too serious) approach to estimating this effect.  (Side note: I am well aware of the extremely high concentration of capable statisticians and data scientists in the R community, so be clement with my approach, I am, as you will see shortly, no
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