Chemical Engineer <[email protected]> wrote: > > Government should fund basic research across universites and nail down the > science ($thousands and $millions) > Government should fund private, pilot scale projects and R&D grants > ($millions not $billions) and nail down the scale-up costs, etc. > Government should back off on Billions in DOE loan guarantees for large > capital projects and let venture capitalists and major corporations fund > them. If it is REAL THEY WILL COME. >
Somewhere I have a quote from 1840s, when the British and U.S. governments were subsidizing steamships. I can't find it, but when you change a few words it said the same thing you are saying here. The government should not be playing winners and losers. Governments do not understand business. If steamships are real they will come on their own. Etc., blah, blah. I have a similar set of quote for the canals that governments were building all over Europe and the Erie canal in 1817, and the railroads they soon subsidized, and the Transcontinental Railroad built with Uncle Sam's loans in the 1860s, and later the transatlantic cable (mainly a British government project) the automobile industry, electrification, the highways, the airports, transistors, integrated circuits, the Internet, the aerospace industry, weather satellites, nuclear power, and all the other massive investments made by governments in infrastructure and technology. >From 1700 to the present day, just about every big-ticket, risky technology has been subsidized or directly built by the government. I do not mean the R&D, I mean the physical machinery. In every case, there have been massive losses in technology that did not pan out, such as the first two attempts to lay a transatlantic cable. (It was the British government hearings and funded research that finally fixed that.) There have been other losses from corruption in things like the Transcontinental Railroad. In *every single case* there has been a chorus of conservative people saying "the government should not be picking winners and loses. If it is real, it will come on its own." Maybe they were right, but most of those technologies might have been delayed by 20 to 50 years. In every case, the overall investments made by governments has paid back many times over. Individual ventures failed but overall the projects succeeded. The Transcontinental Railroad was arguably the best investment in history. People had been trying to build it for 15 years before the Civil War. They were getting nowhere. San Francisco multi-millionaires who bet $100,000 on poker (in 1855 dollars!) would not invest $1000 in a railroad going back east. They had too many easy ways to make money to run any risks. Finally, Lincoln stepped in and funded the railroad, with massive loans and giveaways. If Lincoln had not done that, it might have taken another 15 years. If the government has not spent millions building ENIAC and the other early computers, there is no telling when computers might have emerged. If NASA and the DoE had not poured billions into semiconductors from 1955 to 1970, it would have take far longer for the industry to grow and for things like microcomputers to emerge. The government invested huge sums in dead-end computer technology, and in short-lived but valuable machines such as the $700 ASR-33 terminal beloved of early microcomputer programmers such as Gates and me, which was mainly designed and built for a U.S. Navy contract. - Jed
