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This notion that people can't pick winners is, in my opinion quite inaccurate. The need for light weight electronics for aerospace systems, and the view that s
by zevets 14y ago
This notion that people can't pick winners is, in my opinion quite inaccurate. The need for light weight electronics for aerospace systems, and the view that semiconductors were 'the answer' to this problem led to a massive amount of government funding (50% of all R&D funding) and support (the government was far and away the largest customer for semiconductor devices) almost directly led to the creation of the Silicon Valley we are all so proud of [1].
Second, the notion that prizes can solve this problem is simply unreasonable. If a major goal (ie a cure for cancer) takes 20 years to develop, no organization can pursue the goal without intermediate funding. In order to provide intermediate funding with some semblance of accountability, you essentially create the existing R&D structure that exists in America today.
The other advantage to government funding is that with proper open access protocols, innovative ideas aren't trapped in the organizations that created them. There's no doubt that companies like SpaceX could have achieved what they have without the backbone of research done by NASA and published in NASA's amazing technical report series.
1. A nice article on the history of government support for the transistor industry. http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~business/bhcweb/publications/BEHprint/v024n2/p0133-p0166.pdf http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~business/bhcweb/publications...
- jskonhovd 14y agoI think everyone on this thread would agree that people can pick winners, but some would argue that the government has been inefficient about picking those winners in the past. I personally think that there is a lack of scientifically literate people in our government, outside of Steven Chu, compared to the VC community who can pick winners.
- _delirium 14y agoDoes the VC community actually have a better record than the government does in picking winners? A lot of VC funds do quite poorly. Of course, you could say that good VC funds do, and choose what you count as good VC funds in hindsight, based on returns. But then you could also say that good government programs and agencies have good records, if they're also chosen in hindsight.
- zevets 14y agoWhile it's hard to make a data driven argument in this field, I think the US government has been incredibly successful in picking winning new technological ideas, judged by my notion that the vast majority of the scientific and technical advances in the last 60 years have occurred here in the United States. The US government has long had a tradition of picking winners in science and technology, and I don't think the fact that we are also the leader in science and technology is simply coincidental to that. Looking for counterexamples, ie technical advances that have occurred outside of the US due to lack of government support, the only one that comes to mind is the failures in green technology, but I think that small failures there are minor compared to the other successes. I also think looking for scientific literacy in the executive positions of government is less relevant in the highly bureaucratic world of government funded research, as there executives have less control on individual funding than they would in the private sector. As long as the the executives respect the technical expertise of their bureaucrats, (and the workforce is knowledgeable), then individual domain knowledge is less critical than it would be in the private sector.