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> (employers!) Oh please. "In the movie Steve Jobs, a character asks, “So how come 10 times in a day I read ‘Steve Jobs is a genius?’” The great man reputatio
by bergstromm466 6y ago
> (employers!)
Oh please.
"In the movie Steve Jobs, a character asks, “So how come 10 times in a day I read ‘Steve Jobs is a genius?’” The great man reputation that envelops Jobs is just part of a larger mythology of the role that Silicon Valley, and indeed the entire U.S. private sector, has played in technology innovation. We idolize tech entrepreneurs like Jobs, and credit them for most of the growth in our economy. But University of Sussex economist Mariana Mazzucato, who has just published a new U.S. edition of her book, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, makes a timely argument that it is the government, not venture capitalists and tech visionaries, that have been heroic.
“Every major technological change in recent years traces most of its funding back to the state,” says Mazzucato. Even “early stage” private-sector VCs come in much later, after the big breakthroughs have been made. For example, she notes, “The National Institutes of Health have spent almost a trillions dollars since their founding on the research that created both the pharmaceutical and the biotech sectors–with venture capitalists only entering biotech once the red carpet was laid down in the 1980s. We pretend that the government was at best just in the background creating the basic conditions (skills, infrastructure, basic science). But the truth is that the involvement required massive risk taking along the entire innovation chain: basic research, applied research and early stage financing of companies themselves.” The Silicon Valley VC model, which has typically dictated that financiers exit within 5 years or so, simply isn’t patient enough to create game changing innovation."
Source: https://time.com/4089171/mariana-mazzucato/ https://time.com/4089171/mariana-mazzucato/
- chrisseaton 6y agoWhat are you arguing here, though? That every company can be traced back to the state if you look far enough? So they should all be owned by the state?
- watwut 6y agoThat following is untrue: > Second, most research projects are funded by grants not from the state - it comes from industry and places like that. It does not imply everything should be owned by the state al all. It however imply that people really like to lie about this point for ideological reasons and in order to demonize everything state.
- chrisseaton 6y agoSorry I don't understand how 'Second, most research projects are funded by grants not from the state - it comes from industry and places like that' can imply 'that people really like to lie about this point for ideological reasons'. Can you explain that?
- watwut 6y agoOn itself it does not. In the context of thread where people claim exactly that and in the context of hacker news where that particular claim is frequent, it does.
- musicale 6y agoI expect the reason why the US government currently owns Google is that NSF funded Larry and Sergei's page rank research. ;-) (Presumably it's the university that actually owns any patents from grad students or faculty [though they do share revenue with faculty inventors I believe] and they in turn license them to Google or other companies. So it's more of a transfer of wealth from the government to universities than to companies.)
- dekhn 6y agoGoogle paid Stanford to license the page rank patent. Stanford executed the research as part of a paid contract with the NSF. The contract did not state that the US government owns the results of the research- Stanford does. This is an intention incentive created by the government to grow the overall enconomy, rewarding the risk takers (universities that hire PIs that do world-changing research).