> This comes from our capitalist economic model. Definitely, as culture is in hefty ways influenced by (and itself influences -- dialectic!) political economy.

> This comes from our capitalist economic model. Definitely, as culture is in hefty ways influenced by (and itself influences -- dialectic!) political economy. > To change this "culture", you have to change our economic model for how we allocate resources in the world. Yes, but the severity of this change is open to interpretation. Part of the "culture" I was referring to was a business culture that emerged in the late 70s and called for viewing shareholder value as the sole purpose of corporations. This was not necessarily the received wisdom in the prior decades -- decades which gave us places like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, and the decades in which, arguably, the biggest qualitative leaps in computing occurred. It's worth noting that most of these leaps in computing come from the ARPA research culture and/or from Bell Labs, the latter of which was a government regulated monopoly and not the case study of a normal private company doing basic research. Ditto for PARC, which was more or less an extension of the ARPA group at a time when the government funding was threatened. The lessons from this (for basic research in computing) are simple: fund people and not specific projects, while having a general overall vision; fund at the appropriate timescale of half to full decades; don't interfere.