Re:We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised ...
by MichaelMoser123 on Tuesday March 10, 2015 @10:08PM
(#9182114)
> Where are Xerox Park and Bell Labs today?
Bell labs was financed because AT&T had a monopoly status on landlines; whatever the costs, AT&T could just raise fees for a cent and cover all expenses. AT&T lost its monopoly so it could no longer pay for Bell labs.
so this monopoly status was good for Bell Labs, but it also covered up the many gross inefficiencies of a monopoly body and it did limit competition - and growth.
> I believe the green economy merits much more funding than it is currently receiving by government
I suspect that this is a value based judgment.
Who is to know if the next growth period will rather be based on nano technology, or maybe will be based of artificial intelligence? I guess that civil servants are in a bad position to make such judgments, because they bear little personal responsibility for their decisions.
If one looks at the internet boom, then one can discern many stages here:
- first was the fundamental research that explored the subject of packet switching networks; this was funded by the US military
- next was the gradual development of networking technology, which took some ten-fifteen years.
Here there were many actors, part of them from research and part from industry
- next came the first boom-bust cycle of the nineteens; whatever one thinks of it, it helped to build the required networking infrastructure for wider adoption and it helped to create many technologies that were important for the next stage.
- next came the present growth based on targeted advertising / private sector surveillance based on social networks.
No one actor could have directed this process; public sector did facilitate basic research, it created the prerequisites for growth, but actual growth was still several steps away from that; at any of these stages it could have been stopped by some misguided policy decision.
Prof. Mazzucato seems to underestimate the risks that entrepreneurs had to take during this process;
Research financed by the public sector is a prerequisite for growth, but state dirigims would not have led to it either;
Dirigism in France created the minitel network, but that is not quite the internet of today.
Bell labs was financed because AT&T had a monopoly status on landlines; whatever the costs, AT&T could just raise fees for a cent and cover all expenses. AT&T lost its monopoly so it could no longer pay for Bell labs.
so this monopoly status was good for Bell Labs, but it also covered up the many gross inefficiencies of a monopoly body and it did limit competition - and growth.
> I believe the green economy merits much more funding than it is currently receiving by government
I suspect that this is a value based judgment.
Who is to know if the next growth period will rather be based on nano technology, or maybe will be based of artificial intelligence? I guess that civil servants are in a bad position to make such judgments, because they bear little personal responsibility for their decisions.
If one looks at the internet boom, then one can discern many stages here:
- first was the fundamental research that explored the subject of packet switching networks; this was funded by the US military - next was the gradual development of networking technology, which took some ten-fifteen years. Here there were many actors, part of them from research and part from industry - next came the first boom-bust cycle of the nineteens; whatever one thinks of it, it helped to build the required networking infrastructure for wider adoption and it helped to create many technologies that were important for the next stage. - next came the present growth based on targeted advertising / private sector surveillance based on social networks.
No one actor could have directed this process; public sector did facilitate basic research, it created the prerequisites for growth, but actual growth was still several steps away from that; at any of these stages it could have been stopped by some misguided policy decision.
Prof. Mazzucato seems to underestimate the risks that entrepreneurs had to take during this process; Research financed by the public sector is a prerequisite for growth, but state dirigims would not have led to it either;
Dirigism in France created the minitel network, but that is not quite the internet of today.