NASA, DARPA, and CERN would like a word with you.
Also most of the private sector innovation was due to public funding and tax code incentives (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc).
So basically technology, science, medicine, and social programs must either not count as progress for your hypothesis to hold... or it's bunk.
And the public sector growth that I view as harmful is growth in social welfare programs and regulations restricting business activity.
>Especially as almost all the major innovation in that time started with tech developed from public funding.
Quite a bold statement..
Basically your idea of progress is “pure unrestrained corporatism” which is pretty horrific.
Thank god your reality doesn’t exist - we’ve seen what happens when it gets closer to that and the human cost is disgustingly high.
Progress my ass.
How are you measuring progress there? If you mean economic growth then now might be a good time to point out that correlation does now imply causation. Otherwise perhaps increasing life expectancy also causes a larger public sector? ;)
Do you have any evidence of that at all? Because I have evidence showing the opposite: eg China has an estimated public sector value of between 29% and 50%[1] and it is generally regarded as a high-growth economy (6.5%+ growth(, while somewhere like Greece (22% public sector, 0% growth) isn't.
In-fact, eyeballing that table doesn't show much apparent correlation at all. There are high-growth, high-public sector countries, high-growth, low public sector countries, low public sector, low growth AND low public sector high growth countries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_se...
China has substantially lower levels of social welfare spending. Its healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP is 5.5% for example [2].
Labour regulations are also much less onerous. You can use IQ tests to filter candidates for example, which would be extremely illegal in the West.
[1] http://ime.bg/uploads/335309_OptimalSizeOfGovernment.pdf
[2] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.TOTL.ZS?locations...
The federal Department of Education was created in 1980, so there was no DoE to eliminate in 1960. The growing centralization of education policy in the hands of ever-higher levels of government and ever more monopolistic public sectors has not worked.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-gates/bill-gates-school-p...
[2] https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839...