Your Book Review: Where's My Flying Car? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-wheres-my-flying
Is the following claim made by the author of the book (Hall - seemingly accepted by the author of the review) largely accurate? I ask because it's a common liberal talking point that publicly funded R&D has resulted in the majority of the tech we rely on in *modern* life. I'm terrible at history. > Hall blames public funding for science. Not just for nanotech, but for > actually hurting progress in general. (I’ve never heard anyone before say > government-funded science was bad for science!) “[The] great innovations that > made the major quality-of-life improvements came largely before 1960: > refrigerators, freezers, vacuum cleaners, gas and electric stoves, and > washing machines; indoor plumbing, detergent, and deodorants; electric > lights; cars, trucks, and buses; tractors and combines; fertilizer; air > travel, containerized freight, the vacuum tube and the transistor; the > telegraph, telephone, phonograph, movies, radio, and television—and they were > all developed privately.” “A survey and analysis performed by the OECD in > 2005 found, to their surprise, that while private R&D had a positive 0.26 > correlation with economic growth, government funded R&D had a negative 0.37 > correlation!” “Centralized funding of an intellectual elite makes it easier > for cadres, cliques, and the politically skilled to gain control of a field, > and they by their nature are resistant to new, outside, non-Ptolemaic ideas.” > This is what happened to nanotech; there was a huge amount of buzz, > culminating in $500 million dollars of funding under Clinton in 1990. This > huge prize kicked off an academic civil war, and the fledgling field of > nanotech lost hard to the more established field of material science. > Material science rebranded as “nanotech”, trashed the reputation of actual > nanotech (to make sure they won the competition for the grant money), and > took all the funding for themselves. Nanotech never recovered. -- ☤>$ uǝlƃ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
