Another example of government funded invention being converted to dollars using capitalist innovation. People still don't understand how much our government is involved in bringing us the tech we have now. government invests and about 10-20 years we see it in our homes.
Good. Name one major technological innovation that was not largely or wholly a product of government subsidies. The only ones I can think of were out of Bell Labs and Bell was a government backed monopoly so they don't really count. They were so profitable and protected they could spend like a government.
Nothing new is ever profitable until you get past the early prototype and scaling stages. For big capital intensive stuff only government historically has pockets deep enough to burn enough money to get big stuff off the ground (sometimes literally). Rockets, jet engines, microprocessors, huge scale power grids, the Internet, genomics, supercomputing, nuclear power, solar power, the list goes on and on.
Private investors just have too low a risk tolerance and too short a time horizon.
I actually wish this weren't so, but it is so.
It's also terribly hypocritical to bash Elon for taking government contracts when everyone does it. Why do you think Amazon's HQ2 is going to be in the DC area?
Still true today. Except the original capitalists in the case of the computer industry was the government, not VCs. Almost every major technology you use everyday in your computer originated with a government grant or program. Those HD LCD screens? They were originally developed for the Abrams XM-1 tank in the First Gulf War. Google was first funded by a DARPA grant. The Internet itself was a large DARPA project. The integrated circuit, you name it.
First world nations become that way by government-led expansion. The private sector comes along later to make a profit after the fact in almost every case.
Even then, the govt pays for the basic research from which any number of consumer products are derived. The government is essentially producing the technology, they just are shrink wrapping it and making a buck off of it.
Then what does? Most of the innovation we have witnessed and enjoy in our society for the past 20-30 years has not been driven by governmental money or agencies but by private money.
I'd just like to point out that the internet was government-funded innovation. As well as the massive amounts of R&D we do in the military space. Another area in which we lead the world. To assume that government-funded equates to lack of innovation is false.
This is a meme that has been adopted by leftists wholesale. The basic premise is that since any innovation can be somehow tracked backed to government investment, the government is somehow responsible for most innovation.
It disregards the whole process that is required to take insights from research into a real product.
Yes, the internet was developed by the military. Only when private enterprise took over did it become valuable to society as a whole.
Yes, the iPhone builds on technology that originated from public research, just like all the cellphones before it. However, it wasn't a government committee that decided how to assemble all these technologies into something that people were ready to pay $1000 for.
We have lots of evidence that that the government is in fact a terrible entrepreneur that builds terrible products and services. One can point at the awful primary/secondary education, or at the DMV, or perhaps at the rollout of healthcare-dot-gov.
Even the "communist" Chinese government understands that private enterprise is the way to economic prosperity, it just disagrees on the degree of state control.
The post you're responding to doesn't even mention government investment; it simply says it's silly to be skeptical of a technology because you don't know that it will work at commercial scale before trying it at commercial scale, because this is true of literally every technological innovation ever, regardless of whether it's publicly or privately funded.
I'm tired of these articles. Seriously. Government has funded hi-tech through the military for the last 70 years. That's not a secret and we wouldn't have what we have now with out it. The government knows this and the large corporations who benefit from it know it.
Corporations are not willing to take on the risk to sink billions of dollars to develop a technology which may or may not pay out. Plus once it does pay out, who is to say China isn't going to steal the tech and then undercut the very thing they just developed.
He cites SpaceX as this idea of private investment, completely overlooking the fact that the government is subsidizing the whole endeavour. Please....
Check out the book Doing Capitalism In The Innovation Economy for a defense of the government encouraging exactly this sort of thing. I reviewed it on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/review/R2SCHS5SXNDF30.
Point being, we want exactly this sort of thing, but it's foolish to expect the market to make this sort of investment very often.
Government lays out the foundation upon which innovation can take place. They build out shared infrastructure and provide research funding to universities, which private corporations get to use to create profitable things in the real world.
Using your examples, Ford wouldn't have been successful without the massive government investments in our roads, and the internet companies wouldn't have been successful without all the publicly funded computer science research over the past half century.
We're probably overdue for some wide-scale government investments in renewable tech, and I'd personally love to see a substantial government initiative to not only modernize our digital infrastructure (the average household internet connection in the U.S. is ~7 Mbps), but really push it into the future, whether it's via fiber, public wifi blankets over dense urban areas, cell towers, satellites, or some combination thereof.
This is a libertarian talking point. The idea is that government control of money leads to less private innovation. We had the industrial revolution in the late 19th century while on the gold standard and now with government-controlled money, most of the long term innovation like renewable energy, nukes, the internet are all funded by the government.
pretty much every piece of tech you mentioned had decades of government investment. Maybe what makes those places possible is government policy. Not many governments are as rich as USA.
Fine article, but it seems to credit the technology companies of the 90s with the massive wealth creation.
They deserve plenty of credit, but it never would have happened without core investment in science and engineering research in the 60's, 70's, and 80's. Much of this research was funded by the (gasp!) government.
It's crazy how much technology comes from government investment, yet people continue to assert that private industry can somehow fill the gaps. With quarterly cycles being what they are, the only one thinking long term is the govt. They're the only ones who engage in fundamental scientific research or even near term research and are responsible for much of the innovation that private industry loves to claim.
Even things like semiconductors benefitted massively from government research and funding. They’ve certainly taken off from there, though.
I’m trying to think of what industries this might not be the case for. Research thin industries like entertainment and media? Has the development of things like OLED mostly been by private companies? I guess finance? Seemingly if it involves engineering the government at least made the seed investment.
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