5 ms·

Large projects need resources, but who decides how those resources are deployed, to what end, and who benefits from them is the important part. All of your exa

Large projects need resources, but who decides how those resources are deployed, to what end, and who benefits from them is the important part. All of your examples are profit-driven, and not necessarily (even if we do benefit) done for the greater good of all or advancement of society. We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc. Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded project and the societal benefit would be broader and not tied to a single company's market dominance.

aleph_minus_one 1y ago
> We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc. So you prefer nation-state nations over nation-state private companies. :-)
- mstipetic 1y ago
  Yes of course
- ghaff 1y ago
  Though two of your examples (not really Manhattan Project) had very significant private sector participants.
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    I think that's unavoidable, but also not a bad thing. If we were to undertake any similar large scale public projects today, it would also have significant private sector participation. But, that drives job creation and positive effects on the economy (i.e., new deal). The main difference is, ideally, the project was voted on by the public, and is being steered as such. A public-private collaboration, with the public driving it rather than it being entirely the domain of a single private entity for their own profit.
- radlad 1y ago
  I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.) On this note, I've lived in a couple states with ballot initiative processes and while they are not perfect, I think they are absolutely necessary for citizens to truly be able to hold their elected representatives accountable (i.e. override them) and I wish we had them at a federal level.
  - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
    > I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.) You can also vote in the shareholders meeting.
    - thewebguyd 1y ago
      You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder. In a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen.
      - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
        > You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder. In a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen. In a democratic country, only the people who have citizenship are allowed to vote. In a shareholders meeting, only the shareholders are allowed to vote. You sometimes cam buy your way into citizenship. As a shareholder, it is your given right to vote in a shareholders meeting.
        Fraterkes 1y ago
        Even if you think there's no qualitative difference between the 2 (which I think is a deeply immature idea, but whatever), there's an obvious quantitative difference: In practice democratic voting power is much more socioeconomically spread and shared than shareholder voting power.
        radlad 1y ago
        Shareholders receive power proportionate to their buying power. Citizens get a single vote. > You sometimes cam buy your way into citizenship. As a shareholder, it is your given right to vote in a shareholders meeting. Maybe - depending on your jurisdiction. Just like whether you have citizenship or not.
- tavavex 1y ago
  Is that a bad thing? Democracies, even if flawed, are accountable to their citizens at least to an extent. Their power structures aren't dictatorial, like in a company, and can be steered and course-corrected. Private companies are accountable to no one, their only motivator and reason for existence is profit. If they're allowed to run our society, the outcome that we're seemingly inching towards, there will be nothing to stop their inevitable abuse for the sake of value extraction.
  - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
    > Democracies, even if flawed, are accountable to their citizens at least to an extent. Stock corporation, even if flawed, are accountable to their stock holders at least to an extent; thus your point > Private companies are accountable to no one clearly does not hold. Corporations, of course, can also be steered and course-corrected (shareholders meetings).
    - _aavaa_ 1y ago
      Corporations are in principle and practice accountable to those with more money. For all its flaws our democracy is still one person one vote.
      - potato3732842 1y ago
        >For all its flaws our democracy is still one person one vote. Which seems to just devolve to "the lizards listen to whoever/whatever has money" at the high levels where the number of voters is very high.
        radlad 1y ago
        Some governments restrict the extent to which "lizards" can use their money to gain air time, etc.
        actionfromafar 1y ago
- modo_mario 1y ago
  Might I note that we're building down nation states at a rapid rate at least in the west trough migration. The vast majority of my capital is not comprised of belgian ethnicities for example and the same will start to hold trough for a number of the other biggest cities.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
woah 1y ago
> Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded project You really think so? All of the examples you gave are military technology during wartime, which the government does tend to be able to do since the existential risk motivates the organization to root out graft and free riding. I could see some kind of alternate reality future government funded Waymo being spun out of drone tank tech from WWIII but we wouldn't have it today.
- serf 1y ago
  automating logistics lines does have military potential -- a waymo doesn't have to be holding bob and sara on the way to mcdonalds, it could also be long-hauling thousands of pounds of troop equipment and logistics needs. the lack of public funding towards automated cars isn't due to a lack of potential, it's due to a lack of focus and lower-hanging-fruit.
  - philipkglass 1y ago
    As I see it, the lineage of modern automated cars started with public funding from DARPA, with the first signs of success appearing in 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge After the DARPA Urban Challenge of 2007 I naively thought that commercial self driving urban vehicles were about 5 years away. It actually took until 2020 for Waymo to offer services to the public, and just in one city to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo That's a long timeline from "tech demo" to usable technology. I don't know how to maintain government funding for that long in a democratic system. No president, senator, or representative goes that long without fighting for re-election. Any technology that still isn't working after 12 years is likely to be considered a dead end and canceled. The big impressive government projects of the 20th century delivered results faster; there were only 7 years between Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon" speech and NASA actually landing on the moon. Companies with large resources can behave more like "planned economies" that aren't subject to short term whims of the electorate. Of course they can also exhibit even more short-term orientation -- the notorious "next quarter's earnings report" planning horizon.
billy99k 1y ago
"All of your examples are profit-driven, and not necessarily (even if we do benefit) done for the greater good of all or advancement of society." Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for the 'greater good'. "We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc." Yes, for defensive or offensive military purposes. Not much beyond this. Even big pharma supplies the world. The rest of the world with socialized medicine create knock-offs at a fraction of the cost, because they didn't have to spend decades going through testing and billions of dollars developing it.
- computably 1y ago
  > Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for the 'greater good'. The reason that governments have such a restrictive budget in the first place is people are individually profit-motivated. Governments do invest in projects for the greater good - you yourself note "big pharma" research, and in fact historically the US gov provided more than half the funding of all basic research nationally. > Yes, for defensive or offensive military purposes. Not much beyond this. Shinkansen. Anyways, governments across the world are driven by incentives that do recognize long-term economic/strategic interests. You can see it with AI, with climate change, even with the broad desire to create a "homegrown" Silicon Valley.
  - elevation 1y ago
    > The reason that governments have such a restrictive budget in the first place is people are individually profit-motivated You've got the cart before the horse; the government would not have a budget at all if people were not individually motivated to generate taxable events. Profit is the practice of accumulating more resources than you immediately need in the anticipation of their future use and enjoyment. Without a government, a profit makes the bearer a target for anyone who can overpower you. So the essential purpose of a government is the preservation of profit by opposing the forces that would destroy or carry it off: criminals, scammers, foreign militaries. Governments did not command the invention of penicillin, powered flight, electric light, transistors, the blue LED, or the majority of software products that are essential to society today. But it protected individuals to invent with the knowledge that their work could be rewarded on some timeframe rather than being immediately destroyed by an interloper.
vmg12 1y ago
> but who decides how those resources are deployed The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate. > We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples? Since when has throwing money at systems that haven't shown success worked? And you are suggesting that we take money from others to throw it at a system that doesn't work.
- Daishiman 1y ago
  > The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate. The current system selected people that have maximized shareholder value and financially engineered it into other financial assets that provide power under the capitalist system. This includes private equity services that have simply squeezed money out of consumers for no increase in quality of life, or companies that managed to avoid the consequences of the externalities of their economic activity. > And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples? Regulatory capture and lobbying that attempts to force a profit motive behind every large government initiative when the profit motive substracts value away from society at large.
- hansvm 1y ago
  "Allocated resources effectively" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your description. The current system also rewards large-scale cons and rent extraction with the political power to do more of the same.
  - jongjong 1y ago
    Yes exactly. Also, we should stop pretending that the money supply is fixed and that everyone exists on the same monetary playing field. Arguments about efficient allocation are laughable when you consider that someone who is socially 6 steps removed from an institutional 'money printer' lives in a monetary environment where money is 10 times more scarce than it is at the source (due to taxation between each hop). Few people are so far removed in practice but the effects are still very powerful even with less distance. Taxation brings all economic activities closer to the government and banking sector. In competitive industries were profits are paper thin, monetary asymmetry can fully determine business outcomes. The company receiving government contracts on the side has a massive upper hand over its competitors during a monetary contraction. Same can be said about companies which operate in environments where their customers have access to large amounts of credit by virtue of their highly valued collateral. Their success has little to do with optimal allocation and a lot to do with socio-economic positioning and monetary system design.
nradov 1y ago
Major weapons development (or dual use) programs — especially for weapons of mass destruction — probably have to be government run due to national security concerns. But the notion that governments can effectively manage technology R&D projects is ludicrous. Look at what happened when Japan's MITI tried to run a Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) project: total failure and waste of tax money. In general, economic central planning is a dead end. People keep trying to claim that it would be more efficient or benefit society but it just doesn't work. Bureaucrats and politicians can't be trusted with resource allocation decisions.
inglor_cz 1y ago
Greater Good of All is a bit nebulous, and quite often translates into rather concentrated good of a few well-connected players. When you mention the space race, you should also add that once the Moon landing was over, the government-supported part of space activity got mostly bogged down in cost-plus boondoggles (see: Space Launch System, also called Senate Launch System), and without a vibrant private sector with deep pockets, the US would be launching maybe some twenty rockets a year now, more likely twelve, each at an extreme cost and without much technological progress. And American capability of supporting human spaceflight would be tenuous at best, or possibly nonexistent. (NASA is not at fault here. The politicians which command it, though... they seem to love giving Boeing et al. expensive projects.)
thegrimmest 1y ago
> for the greater good of all or advancement of society I'm not sure we agree enough on the definitions of these things to justify a democratic redistribution of resources towards them. Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny after all. The nice part about private enterprise is that it's hard to argue they didn't earn their money. Google, Apple, et al provided some value to some folks who volunteered to pay for it in a free exchange. Their claim to use their earned wealth as they see fit is much easier to substantiate than a government intervention which is neither voluntary nor obviously providing value to the people who pay for it.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
astrange 1y ago
> or being controlled, by nation-state private companies You don't need to publicly fund something to "control" it. You can pass laws about it, you're the government! I always find this kind of rhetoric from Western socialists strange, it's like they've forgotten they aren't libertarians. The other issue being that they've forgotten there are downsides to owning something, because you don't always want to own all the risk. eg if you're a tech employee and paid in your employers' shares, you own some of your means of production. But you /shouldn't/, it's way too risky! You should sell it as soon as you get it and put it in an index fund.
panick21_ 1y ago
Adam Smith points out that it doesn't matter if things are done for the greater good or not. Them existing will improve lives for everybody either way. The problem with government funded large project is that they often monopolize. In the Soviet Union to much investment was flowing into the wrong stuff. And small scale innovation didn't get the resources to grow. While mistakes on a high level lead to total stagnation. For example NASA building the Shuttle crowed out almost everything else, and because the Shuttle was the wrong way to go the US has spent 50 years doubling down on that. If a large company makes a really, really big bet on something, they can pay a very large cost if they are wrong. And this has been historically the case, large projects that don't get anywhere are canceled. Governments can double down almost forever. So I think we do need everything, innovation from maverick individuals, innovation from smaller companies, large innovation form big companies, innovation from government project, innovation from private/government funded universities. There is no perfect 'this is the way to get innovation' that we have yet discovered.

aleph_minus_one 1y ago

> We can still accomplish big innovations without those innovations coming from, or being controlled, by nation-state private companies. We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc. So you prefer nation-state nations over nation-state private companies. :-)

mstipetic 1y ago
Yes of course
ghaff 1y ago
Though two of your examples (not really Manhattan Project) had very significant private sector participants.
- thewebguyd 1y ago
  I think that's unavoidable, but also not a bad thing. If we were to undertake any similar large scale public projects today, it would also have significant private sector participation. But, that drives job creation and positive effects on the economy (i.e., new deal). The main difference is, ideally, the project was voted on by the public, and is being steered as such. A public-private collaboration, with the public driving it rather than it being entirely the domain of a single private entity for their own profit.
radlad 1y ago
I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.) On this note, I've lived in a couple states with ballot initiative processes and while they are not perfect, I think they are absolutely necessary for citizens to truly be able to hold their elected representatives accountable (i.e. override them) and I wish we had them at a federal level.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > I do, when citizens have the ability to steer their nation state (i.e. the ability to vote.) You can also vote in the shareholders meeting.
  - thewebguyd 1y ago
    You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder. In a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen.
    - aleph_minus_one 1y ago
      > You have to buy your way into voting as a shareholder. In a democracy, it's just your given right as a citizen. In a democratic country, only the people who have citizenship are allowed to vote. In a shareholders meeting, only the shareholders are allowed to vote. You sometimes cam buy your way into citizenship. As a shareholder, it is your given right to vote in a shareholders meeting.
      - Fraterkes 1y ago
        Even if you think there's no qualitative difference between the 2 (which I think is a deeply immature idea, but whatever), there's an obvious quantitative difference: In practice democratic voting power is much more socioeconomically spread and shared than shareholder voting power.
      - radlad 1y ago
        Shareholders receive power proportionate to their buying power. Citizens get a single vote. > You sometimes cam buy your way into citizenship. As a shareholder, it is your given right to vote in a shareholders meeting. Maybe - depending on your jurisdiction. Just like whether you have citizenship or not.
tavavex 1y ago
Is that a bad thing? Democracies, even if flawed, are accountable to their citizens at least to an extent. Their power structures aren't dictatorial, like in a company, and can be steered and course-corrected. Private companies are accountable to no one, their only motivator and reason for existence is profit. If they're allowed to run our society, the outcome that we're seemingly inching towards, there will be nothing to stop their inevitable abuse for the sake of value extraction.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > Democracies, even if flawed, are accountable to their citizens at least to an extent. Stock corporation, even if flawed, are accountable to their stock holders at least to an extent; thus your point > Private companies are accountable to no one clearly does not hold. Corporations, of course, can also be steered and course-corrected (shareholders meetings).
  - _aavaa_ 1y ago
    Corporations are in principle and practice accountable to those with more money. For all its flaws our democracy is still one person one vote.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      >For all its flaws our democracy is still one person one vote. Which seems to just devolve to "the lizards listen to whoever/whatever has money" at the high levels where the number of voters is very high.
      - radlad 1y ago
        Some governments restrict the extent to which "lizards" can use their money to gain air time, etc.
        actionfromafar 1y ago
modo_mario 1y ago
Might I note that we're building down nation states at a rapid rate at least in the west trough migration. The vast majority of my capital is not comprised of belgian ethnicities for example and the same will start to hold trough for a number of the other biggest cities.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

woah 1y ago

> Waymo could still happen, only it'd be a publicly funded project You really think so? All of the examples you gave are military technology during wartime, which the government does tend to be able to do since the existential risk motivates the organization to root out graft and free riding. I could see some kind of alternate reality future government funded Waymo being spun out of drone tank tech from WWIII but we wouldn't have it today.

serf 1y ago
automating logistics lines does have military potential -- a waymo doesn't have to be holding bob and sara on the way to mcdonalds, it could also be long-hauling thousands of pounds of troop equipment and logistics needs. the lack of public funding towards automated cars isn't due to a lack of potential, it's due to a lack of focus and lower-hanging-fruit.
- philipkglass 1y ago
  As I see it, the lineage of modern automated cars started with public funding from DARPA, with the first signs of success appearing in 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge After the DARPA Urban Challenge of 2007 I naively thought that commercial self driving urban vehicles were about 5 years away. It actually took until 2020 for Waymo to offer services to the public, and just in one city to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waymo That's a long timeline from "tech demo" to usable technology. I don't know how to maintain government funding for that long in a democratic system. No president, senator, or representative goes that long without fighting for re-election. Any technology that still isn't working after 12 years is likely to be considered a dead end and canceled. The big impressive government projects of the 20th century delivered results faster; there were only 7 years between Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon" speech and NASA actually landing on the moon. Companies with large resources can behave more like "planned economies" that aren't subject to short term whims of the electorate. Of course they can also exhibit even more short-term orientation -- the notorious "next quarter's earnings report" planning horizon.

billy99k 1y ago

"All of your examples are profit-driven, and not necessarily (even if we do benefit) done for the greater good of all or advancement of society." Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for the 'greater good'. "We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects - Manhattan project, the space race & moon landing, ARPANET, etc." Yes, for defensive or offensive military purposes. Not much beyond this. Even big pharma supplies the world. The rest of the world with socialized medicine create knock-offs at a fraction of the cost, because they didn't have to spend decades going through testing and billions of dollars developing it.

computably 1y ago
> Without profit as a motive, innovation would be decades behind (if not longer than this). Governments can barely afford crumbling infrastructure maintenance as it is. I seriously doubt they are going to invest in projects for the 'greater good'. The reason that governments have such a restrictive budget in the first place is people are individually profit-motivated. Governments do invest in projects for the greater good - you yourself note "big pharma" research, and in fact historically the US gov provided more than half the funding of all basic research nationally. > Yes, for defensive or offensive military purposes. Not much beyond this. Shinkansen. Anyways, governments across the world are driven by incentives that do recognize long-term economic/strategic interests. You can see it with AI, with climate change, even with the broad desire to create a "homegrown" Silicon Valley.
- elevation 1y ago
  > The reason that governments have such a restrictive budget in the first place is people are individually profit-motivated You've got the cart before the horse; the government would not have a budget at all if people were not individually motivated to generate taxable events. Profit is the practice of accumulating more resources than you immediately need in the anticipation of their future use and enjoyment. Without a government, a profit makes the bearer a target for anyone who can overpower you. So the essential purpose of a government is the preservation of profit by opposing the forces that would destroy or carry it off: criminals, scammers, foreign militaries. Governments did not command the invention of penicillin, powered flight, electric light, transistors, the blue LED, or the majority of software products that are essential to society today. But it protected individuals to invent with the knowledge that their work could be rewarded on some timeframe rather than being immediately destroyed by an interloper.

vmg12 1y ago

> but who decides how those resources are deployed The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate. > We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples? Since when has throwing money at systems that haven't shown success worked? And you are suggesting that we take money from others to throw it at a system that doesn't work.

Daishiman 1y ago
> The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate. The current system selected people that have maximized shareholder value and financially engineered it into other financial assets that provide power under the capitalist system. This includes private equity services that have simply squeezed money out of consumers for no increase in quality of life, or companies that managed to avoid the consequences of the externalities of their economic activity. > And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples? Regulatory capture and lobbying that attempts to force a profit motive behind every large government initiative when the profit motive substracts value away from society at large.
hansvm 1y ago
"Allocated resources effectively" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your description. The current system also rewards large-scale cons and rent extraction with the political power to do more of the same.
- jongjong 1y ago
  Yes exactly. Also, we should stop pretending that the money supply is fixed and that everyone exists on the same monetary playing field. Arguments about efficient allocation are laughable when you consider that someone who is socially 6 steps removed from an institutional 'money printer' lives in a monetary environment where money is 10 times more scarce than it is at the source (due to taxation between each hop). Few people are so far removed in practice but the effects are still very powerful even with less distance. Taxation brings all economic activities closer to the government and banking sector. In competitive industries were profits are paper thin, monetary asymmetry can fully determine business outcomes. The company receiving government contracts on the side has a massive upper hand over its competitors during a monetary contraction. Same can be said about companies which operate in environments where their customers have access to large amounts of credit by virtue of their highly valued collateral. Their success has little to do with optimal allocation and a lot to do with socio-economic positioning and monetary system design.

nradov 1y ago

Major weapons development (or dual use) programs — especially for weapons of mass destruction — probably have to be government run due to national security concerns. But the notion that governments can effectively manage technology R&D projects is ludicrous. Look at what happened when Japan's MITI tried to run a Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) project: total failure and waste of tax money. In general, economic central planning is a dead end. People keep trying to claim that it would be more efficient or benefit society but it just doesn't work. Bureaucrats and politicians can't be trusted with resource allocation decisions.

inglor_cz 1y ago

Greater Good of All is a bit nebulous, and quite often translates into rather concentrated good of a few well-connected players. When you mention the space race, you should also add that once the Moon landing was over, the government-supported part of space activity got mostly bogged down in cost-plus boondoggles (see: Space Launch System, also called Senate Launch System), and without a vibrant private sector with deep pockets, the US would be launching maybe some twenty rockets a year now, more likely twelve, each at an extreme cost and without much technological progress. And American capability of supporting human spaceflight would be tenuous at best, or possibly nonexistent. (NASA is not at fault here. The politicians which command it, though... they seem to love giving Boeing et al. expensive projects.)

thegrimmest 1y ago

> for the greater good of all or advancement of society I'm not sure we agree enough on the definitions of these things to justify a democratic redistribution of resources towards them. Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny after all. The nice part about private enterprise is that it's hard to argue they didn't earn their money. Google, Apple, et al provided some value to some folks who volunteered to pay for it in a free exchange. Their claim to use their earned wealth as they see fit is much easier to substantiate than a government intervention which is neither voluntary nor obviously providing value to the people who pay for it.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

astrange 1y ago

> or being controlled, by nation-state private companies You don't need to publicly fund something to "control" it. You can pass laws about it, you're the government! I always find this kind of rhetoric from Western socialists strange, it's like they've forgotten they aren't libertarians. The other issue being that they've forgotten there are downsides to owning something, because you don't always want to own all the risk. eg if you're a tech employee and paid in your employers' shares, you own some of your means of production. But you /shouldn't/, it's way too risky! You should sell it as soon as you get it and put it in an index fund.

panick21_ 1y ago

Adam Smith points out that it doesn't matter if things are done for the greater good or not. Them existing will improve lives for everybody either way. The problem with government funded large project is that they often monopolize. In the Soviet Union to much investment was flowing into the wrong stuff. And small scale innovation didn't get the resources to grow. While mistakes on a high level lead to total stagnation. For example NASA building the Shuttle crowed out almost everything else, and because the Shuttle was the wrong way to go the US has spent 50 years doubling down on that. If a large company makes a really, really big bet on something, they can pay a very large cost if they are wrong. And this has been historically the case, large projects that don't get anywhere are canceled. Governments can double down almost forever. So I think we do need everything, innovation from maverick individuals, innovation from smaller companies, large innovation form big companies, innovation from government project, innovation from private/government funded universities. There is no perfect 'this is the way to get innovation' that we have yet discovered.