[Bakary]

It doesn't work like a game of Civilization. Allocating resources to a research problem means you increase the social and material rewards for a certain type of person to work on a certain type of project. There is no guarantee of success or one to one allocation of resources. It's also not a zero-sum game when the money to one source of energy took away from another.

[imperfect_blue]

Also unlike a video game, the tech-tree dependencies are not obvious. We don't know in advance whether a tech will be a productive avenue of R&D, or if it depends on other unrelated advances in theory, material science, or computer modeling, or was actually completely unfeasible in the first place. I find wind power [1] as a case study representative, and we see similar stories for e.g. fusion, cancer research, AI

[1] https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-did-we-wait-s...