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This is the same Treasury that just had its top civil servant and minister replaced, specifically in order to allow a massive splurge of borrowing and money pri

This is the same Treasury that just had its top civil servant and minister replaced, specifically in order to allow a massive splurge of borrowing and money printing on an ahistoric scale? That Treasury? The UK's problem is not government unwillingness to spend money. The US tech sector was primed and bootstrapped almost entirely without government money after the wall fell, and even before that it was largely independent of government funding. And there just isn't the same culture there of people expecting grants or handouts from the government - even in the cases where the US tech industry was helped by USG spending it was all via military/intelligence research projects.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> The US tech sector was primed and bootstrapped almost entirely without government money This is mostly wrong, if you read the enterpreneurial state.
- TMWNN 4y ago
  origin_path is correct. US government money (i.e., defense spending) postwar largely went into directly military-applicable areas like aircraft and missiles. Bell Labs didn't create the transistor using defense money. TI and Intel didn't create the microprocessor using defense money. In turn, the major postwar defense advances—hydrogen bomb, nuclear submarine, ICBMs, satellite recon—were all developed pre-microprocessor; only stealth technology is a post-1970 development that would probably not be possible without massive computing power. ARPANET was one of many separate networking projects being designed around the US, and the others were corporate and/or academic. That's not to say that US tech companies did not benefit from government spending; they did. But government was a big customer, and not the magic sugar daddy without which Silicon Valley and Route 128 and the Texas Triangle would not exist.
  - pasabagi 4y ago
    I think the US is probably the worst model for any state to follow, because it's just so different to every other state on the planet. The UK's historical position as global hegemon pushes the UK towards maintaining institutional attitudes and policies that only make sense if you are the global superpower, and the success of the US compounds this tendency, but the problem is, the UK is a middle-size state that just has none of the inherent positional or material resources the US has, so it results in lackluster economic growth. Which is what we've seen in the post-war era. Trying to repeat the Silicon valley, when you have none of the massive geographic and historical advantages Silicon valley had, makes no sense, and I wish the UK would stop trying to copy what it cannot be (the massive global empire) and started trying to copy what it can be (all of the dynamic middle-size economies, like SK, Germany, or even Finland).
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    You are missing the foreat for the trees. Everyone is always taling about companies - guess what, they are made up of individual people with skills. All the people who built wonderfull military technology were trained on the government payroll and after the war they were avaliable for employment by corporations. Loom at how microwave was invented
    - TMWNN 4y ago
      >Everyone is always taling about companies The usual claim is "Silicon Valley was created by the US military", or "Silicon Valley was created by US government contracts". That just isn't true. Again, >Loom at how microwave was invented That has nothing to do with Silicon Valley. Microwave ovens were * accidentally created during work on military microwave communications, yes, but * it was commercialized by existing industrial and appliance companies, as opposed to new Silicon Valley startups

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> The US tech sector was primed and bootstrapped almost entirely without government money This is mostly wrong, if you read the enterpreneurial state.

TMWNN 4y ago
origin_path is correct. US government money (i.e., defense spending) postwar largely went into directly military-applicable areas like aircraft and missiles. Bell Labs didn't create the transistor using defense money. TI and Intel didn't create the microprocessor using defense money. In turn, the major postwar defense advances—hydrogen bomb, nuclear submarine, ICBMs, satellite recon—were all developed pre-microprocessor; only stealth technology is a post-1970 development that would probably not be possible without massive computing power. ARPANET was one of many separate networking projects being designed around the US, and the others were corporate and/or academic. That's not to say that US tech companies did not benefit from government spending; they did. But government was a big customer, and not the magic sugar daddy without which Silicon Valley and Route 128 and the Texas Triangle would not exist.
- pasabagi 4y ago
  I think the US is probably the worst model for any state to follow, because it's just so different to every other state on the planet. The UK's historical position as global hegemon pushes the UK towards maintaining institutional attitudes and policies that only make sense if you are the global superpower, and the success of the US compounds this tendency, but the problem is, the UK is a middle-size state that just has none of the inherent positional or material resources the US has, so it results in lackluster economic growth. Which is what we've seen in the post-war era. Trying to repeat the Silicon valley, when you have none of the massive geographic and historical advantages Silicon valley had, makes no sense, and I wish the UK would stop trying to copy what it cannot be (the massive global empire) and started trying to copy what it can be (all of the dynamic middle-size economies, like SK, Germany, or even Finland).
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  You are missing the foreat for the trees. Everyone is always taling about companies - guess what, they are made up of individual people with skills. All the people who built wonderfull military technology were trained on the government payroll and after the war they were avaliable for employment by corporations. Loom at how microwave was invented
  - TMWNN 4y ago
    >Everyone is always taling about companies The usual claim is "Silicon Valley was created by the US military", or "Silicon Valley was created by US government contracts". That just isn't true. Again, >Loom at how microwave was invented That has nothing to do with Silicon Valley. Microwave ovens were * accidentally created during work on military microwave communications, yes, but * it was commercialized by existing industrial and appliance companies, as opposed to new Silicon Valley startups