“Monopolies drive progress. The promise of years or even decades of monopoly profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate.” http://www.technologyreview.com/review/531491/the-contrarian...
Sounds like a reasonable definition of progress.
Maybe monopolies refine innovations?
AT&T: telecommunications company that employed Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kerninghan to figure out software to play chess. Dudes created C language and UNIX OS in the process.
Which low margin cash-strived company will do extravagant stuff like that for kicks?
The only argument that comes to mind is that it would create a disincentive against the drive towards monopoly that Theil apparently claims is beneficial. However, that seems to be something like the kind of the world we are in now.
I'm not sure there are any clear solutions to this problem - balancing incentive and the avoidance of corruption is just hard.
Much more than that, actually. From Wikipedia:
Researchers working at Bell Labs are credited with the development of radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, the charge-coupled device (CCD), information theory, the UNIX operating system, the C programming language, S programming language and the C++ programming language. Eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded for work completed at Bell Laboratories.
An analogous argument can be made that war is good because DARPA funds research. We don't need war to have government sponsored research.
Because these occurred in one location under the umbrella of single entity doesn't make them better than if they were singular accomplishments by hundreds of organizations.
The older I get, the more I like incremental progress that leads to inventions (like this Internet doohickey that lets you and me have an interesting conversation across barriers of time and place) that hardly anyone thought of in the 1960s, and which have developed from a mixture of government research projects and private investment. I don't really care if not a lot of big-deal things happen in the next thirty years, as long as plenty of little-deal things happen like a continuation of the ongoing increases in healthy life expectancy at all ages.[1]
"Optimistic science fiction does not create a belief in technological progress. It reflects it. Stephenson and Thiel are making a big mistake when they propose a vision of the good future that dismisses the everyday pleasures of ordinary people -- that, in short, leaves out consumers. This perspective is particularly odd coming from a fiction writer and a businessman whose professional work demonstrates a keen sense of what people will buy. People are justifiably wary of grandiose plans that impose major costs on those who won’t directly reap their benefits."
Hear. Hear. Let's keep working away at making our own lives better, and our children's lives better, and as everyone does that, the whole world's lives will be better.
[1] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...