[FRIAM] for the optimists

[Curt McNamara]

The transistor came out of bell labs. Perhaps a third place, neither public
nor private? An argument can be made that  deForest used similar resources
for the invention of tubes.

It is generally agreed that a lab which can explore ideas independent of
applications will produce good stuff.

Few would disagree that the interwebs and miniaturization were the
originators of our current economy. And both arose from govt programs.

The point about all the useful stuff being invented before the 50's seems
correct.

There is a related topic: does design discover what Bucky called
generalized principles? And then science codifies.

The 'tech' we need nowadays seems to be social innovations. More and cooler
stuff won't save biodiversity.

     Curt

On Thu, Jul 1, 2021, 11:44 AM uǝlƃ ☤>$ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> Your Book Review: Where's My Flying Car?
> https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-wheres-my-flying
>
> Is the following claim made by the author of the book (Hall - seemingly
> accepted by the author of the review) largely accurate? I ask because it's
> a common liberal talking point that publicly funded R&D has resulted in the
> majority of the tech we rely on in *modern* life. I'm terrible at history.
>
> > Hall blames public funding for science. Not just for nanotech, but for
> actually hurting progress in general. (I’ve never heard anyone before say
> government-funded science was bad for science!) “[The] great innovations
> that made the major quality-of-life improvements came largely before 1960:
> refrigerators, freezers, vacuum cleaners, gas and electric stoves, and
> washing machines; indoor plumbing, detergent, and deodorants; electric
> lights; cars, trucks, and buses; tractors and combines; fertilizer; air
> travel, containerized freight, the vacuum tube and the transistor; the
> telegraph, telephone, phonograph, movies, radio, and television—and they
> were all developed privately.” “A survey and analysis performed by the OECD
> in 2005 found, to their surprise, that while private R&D had a positive
> 0.26 correlation with economic growth, government funded R&D had a negative
> 0.37 correlation!” “Centralized funding of an intellectual elite makes it
> easier for cadres, cliques, and the politically skilled to gain control of
> a field, and they by their nature are resistant to new, outside,
> non-Ptolemaic ideas.” This is what happened to nanotech; there was a huge
> amount of buzz, culminating in $500 million dollars of funding under
> Clinton in 1990. This huge prize kicked off an academic civil war, and the
> fledgling field of nanotech lost hard to the more established field of
> material science. Material science rebranded as “nanotech”, trashed the
> reputation of actual nanotech (to make sure they won the competition for
> the grant money), and took all the funding for themselves. Nanotech never
> recovered.
>
>
>
> --
> ☤>$ uǝlƃ
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