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>Many world-changing industries have not needed $10^8 loans or $5,000 per-unit consumer subsidies to take off. Industries such as what? If you don't throw sub

>Many world-changing industries have not needed $10^8 loans or $5,000 per-unit consumer subsidies to take off. Industries such as what? If you don't throw subsidies at key industries (energy, automotive, aerospace, computers), some other countries will, and those countries will inevitably come to dominate. Most countries that do this might try to hide it, but they still do it.

twoodfin 11y ago
The typical home PC was not bought with a tax credit. If government-directed industrial policy were the deciding factor in a sector's success, we'd all be in awe of the massive, globally dominant Japanese software industry, or the French Minitel business.
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  >The typical home PC was not bought with a tax credit. A tax credit isn't the only way to give a subsidy. In the case of the microelectronics industry, much like aerospace, subsidies were (and still are) supplied via enormous levels of government spending on military/space technologies - all the way from the Manhattan project, to defense funded Bell labs projects, to the space race. No NASA and no ARPA and no Bell labs = no PC. >If government-directed industrial policy were the deciding factor in a sector's success, we'd all be in awe of the massive, globally dominant Japanese software industry No, we'd be in awe of the massive, globally dominant Japanese automotive industry. Oh wait... >or the French Minitel business. Minitel may very well have been the dominant 'internet' today had it been an open technology like Arpanet. The technology landscape of the time is littered with the corpses of companies who tried to own the Internet.