Also during war patents are shared between all companies in one country or ignored all together. I think this is an under appreciated fact of why wartime creates all sorts of innovation.
Woah, I never thought about that. Do you know where I might be able to read more about copyrights / patent enforcement (or lack thereof) during wartime?
As did lots of awesome materials. The material science advancements that happened with WW2 and the space race (fueled by the cold war) are pretty amazing. Nylon among many others came out of those drives.
Edit: someone corrected me about nylon. It was invented between 1927 and 1938 my Dupont. But it was still a commercial Enterprise doing the r&d for it.
nylon did not. you’re probably thinking of teflon, which also did not, but is at least a common misconception, unlike nylon, which is widely known to have first been used for women’s ‘nylons’ in the 30s.
My pet theory is that the best innovations come from contexts where loss of human life is acceptable - war being one such case.
The flip side of greater consumer safety is that there's less room to get things wrong, which in turn means it's harder to meaningfully innovate.
If my theory is correct, I expect the next paradigm shift will come from a country with less consumer/worker/civil protection. China (and to a lesser extent, India) are on my watch-list.
When I say this, people sometimes pigeonhole me as an anti-regulation nutcase, but that's not me. I don't know how I feel about this. There's a real Kantian dilemma, here.
The best innovations come without profit-driven motives. The thing about defense research is that it's more popular with the public than, let's call it, nerd research.
It's having money without trying to optimize solely on future money.
It's probably just as easy to say that funding comes from the war economy rather than research. However, I am also not entirely surprised that it's the high levels of funding combined with the adversarial nature of war that pushes the envelope of things getting bigger, smaller, faster, higher, etc.
However, while we do see this trickle back into civilian life, I imagine that if funding were directed towards solving civil needs instead (housing, food, water, environmental contamination, energy, community centers, schools, etc) we'd see very different things produced, and often more well suited for peaceful purposes.
What about the fact that some of the most prosperous times for average people come after epidemics and such which result in massive population declines?