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There's a big difference between funding research, particularly defense-related research, and playing VC, guaranteeing hundreds of millions in loans to build fa
by twoodfin 14y ago
There's a big difference between funding research, particularly defense-related research, and playing VC, guaranteeing hundreds of millions in loans to build factories. I don't think individual DARPA grants approach that size within an order of magnitude.
What exactly was "blue sky" about Solyndra or A123? Why trust politicians rather than the market to figure out how we'll generate and store energy in the future?
- rayiner 14y agoIndividual DARPA grants are indeed much smaller ($10m is a good sized contract), but it's also free money. Guaranteeing a $100m loan is a much lesser commitment, on average. As for the market--the market is good at figuring out how to extract maximum efficiency from existing profitable technologies. It naturally under-invests in forward-looking R&D. I'm pretty sure there was a paragraph about this in my Econ 101 textbook in college, in the context of Singapore's massive public investment in R&D and associated massive GDP growth.
- msgilligan 14y agoI would argue (as I do in a separate comment) that A123 seems to fall more in the first category of increasing efficiency in existing profitable technologies (autos and batteries) than in the second category of (pure) R&D. It wasn't a research project. It was a company seeking to introduce a some new applied technology into an existing market (autos.)