Bell Labs levels of excellence don't normally show up in projects that are just for compliance or government relations. This can't be the whole story.

I once attended a talk by Ron Graham (mathematician who'd once worked at Bell Labs) where he explained that they had applied graph theory to minimize the distance of cable runs to minimize the amount of copper they had to buy.

And, transistors are certainly cheaper and more reliable than the vacuum tubes they replaced.

Economics is still a factor in regulated environments.

Bell Labs are also ran by the scientists themselves, with AT&T largely not caring because it has to spend that money anyways.

You can get a good grip of what's going on in the lab in Brian Kernighan's <Unix, A history and a memoir>. It's a good read.

For an idea about telecom monopolies, read Tim Wu's book The Master Switch.

The profit motive spurs innovation.

This assumes peopleare only motivated by greed. That's wrong. In the current class climate it would be fair to say that desperation is feeding innovation. Whether peoplecan be a more innovative when they're not desperate, stressed out, overworked, and surrounded by people worse off than them is a fair question but I suspect that's not where you were going.

Anecdotally, I'm not a fraction creative or innovative when I'm desperate. My risk tolerance increases but that's a disingenuous measure of innovation.

The conflation of greed and profit is disingenuous.

profit, or economic surplus is a requirement for innovation, doesn't matter if it's private, or public spending, what matters is that day to day costs to operate a business or society at large are met before money is spent on risky R&D.

Every rational entity does this, you take your revenue, and spend it on necessities to sustain yourself (like food and shelter), sustain your income (transport etc), and then only spend the surplus on higher risk items (stocks, vacation, luxury foods etc).

If you were on an island, and grew your own food, I assume you would also follow the profit motive, keeping a healthy excess in production for a drought or taking Sunday off to relax, or fixing your dwelling.

We can have a rational discussion about how a company and society at large distributes it's profits, whether it's internally back to employees, R&D or explicit focusing on shareholder value, or using taxes to fund R&D.

But what I assume most people have a problem with is not economic profit, but prioritizing excessive shareholder profit, over everything else. Using shareholder value as an excuse to ignore the real needs of your employees or customers, or even the long term sustainability of the company.

We also have to remember that value is subjective, and when economists talk about profit, they're talking about something subjective. someone who collects stamps for fun, is profitable if they maintain a surplus of stamps. Just like one might buy GME stock to gain in something like social capital.

That might be one of many things they spurs innovation, but the neoliberal idea that greed is the only human impulse that matters is false, primitive, and very sad.

Yes Newton, Darwin, and Einstein came up with their theories for that sweet profit. /s