[pjc50]

> the innovating countries that were smarter in their policies

Such as? Are "we" now going to say the state is better at innovating than the private sector? Under what conditions?

(I'm inclined to believe that it could work - it was after all the model that gave us Concorde - but there are also a lot of ways in which it could go wrong and I absolutely do not trust the government with a track record of bunging corrupt money at shell companies.)

[rkangel]

I think you are going to want a mix of both.

The miniaturisation and cost reduction of electronics achieved as a result of continual investment by the phone industry is almost miraculous. A lot of innovation has happened to fit a supercomputer into your pocket.

The WWW example in a sibling comment is a great example of the contrasting sort. It benefits humanity as a whole, and would be very unlikely to be invented privately. We want more decentralised technology solutions - really standards rather than products - and government research have a different set of incentives that might make them better placed to deliver that sort of innovation.

That said, I work in telecomms. A large number of self interested telecomms companies have got together and agreed standard over the years (this is obviously not unique to telecomms), including making patents available (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminat...). The technology is not decentralised, but it is interoperable.

[mensetmanusman]

I mean incentivizing private companies to do R&D...

[paganel]

> Are "we" now going to say the state is better at innovating than the private sector? Under what conditions?

At greater scale the State is definitely better at innovating compared to the private sector. Look at the internet itself and at www (CERN is basically a state project), and if we want to go even larger look at the war industry.

There's no way a "private entity" would have had the gall to build some rockets in order to bomb out London and its environs, and without the V2 rockets we probably wouldn't have had NASA and we wouldn't have had two private persons ~70 years later (Musk and Bezos) trying to build and innovate in private and with lots and lots of money what the Nazi regime did in 1943-1945 while being bombed out to hell and back by the Allies.

And then there's the entire nuclear industry which wouldn't have happened without Nagasaki and Hiroshima, both state-run (killing) projects.