I really miss the physical sciences though. Is the problem that anticipated returns on investment are so far in the future that investors don’t think they would

I really miss the physical sciences though. Is the problem that anticipated returns on investment are so far in the future that investors don’t think they would see any benefit in their lifetime? Or is it that we’ve already obtained all the low hanging fruit and what’s left is incredibly difficult? When speaking about investors, one has to differentiate between passive capitalists (i.e., the people whose money is being invested) and the career decision-makers. They have very different sets of incentives. As for what passive capitalists want, it doesn't matter all that much, 95 percent of the time. They have objectives (X amount of annual income, Y growth rate of principal) but don't really care how those goals are achieved. It's important not to piss them off, but they don't decide on strategies. The career decision makers, notably, are optimizing for their own career goals. Corporate capitalism would be bad enough if it were oriented toward profit maximization (paperclip maximizer) and from the outside, it looks as it's so; but the internal experience of a worker in capitalism shows something else entirely--that managers and executives care about one thing--staying in charge, advancing their personal reputations--more than anything else. A twenty-year investment might make sense to a company or to a nation-state, but it makes no sense at all for an individual manager, whose definition of success is to be two levels higher than he currently is in one quarter of that time. He can't make the case for himself as someone who deserves (whatever that means, in this degenerate context) to be a career decision maker if it's going to take 20 years (or even 2 years, in many cases) to know how his decisions played out. In any case, for a project of that size and duration, attribution becomes difficult: it's impossible to know whether the results (whether successful or otherwise) were caused by one set of decisions and circumstances vs. another one. In sum, it doesn't matter what passive capitalists (the principal investors) think, and the decision makers (agents) aren't interested in long-term wins because there's no career benefit. I don't know how to fix this. Capitalism is obviously a dead end--invariably, it becomes corporate capitalism (corruption), which itself becomes managerial capitalism (stagnation). However, in terms of proposing what will be better, we are to some degree speculating. A gradual transition to democratic socialism (as in Scandinavia) seems optimal, but (a) the world right now is going the other way (toward inequality and nondemocracy), and (b) there's no guarantee that fixing our social and economic problems will suffice to restore Cold War levels of innovation and dynamism.