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There is an opinion piece in The Atlantic highlighting how important hands-on building (i.e. manufacturing) is for long-term innovation. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/science... """The U.S. remains the world's R&D factory, but when it comes to building, we're plainly going backwards.""" """For many decades, the American government has focused overwhelmingly on discovery rather than deployment.""" """And then, around 1980, we basically stopped building,” Jesse Jenkins, who researches energy policy at Princeton, told me. In the past 40 years, he said, the U.S. has applied several different brakes to our capacity to build what’s already been invented. Under Ronald Reagan, the legacy of successful public-private partnerships was ignored in favor of the simplistic diagnosis that the government was to blame for every major problem. In the ’70s, liberals encouraged the government to pass new environmental regulations to halt pollution and prevent builders from running roughshod over low-income neighborhoods. And then middle-class Americans used these new rules to slow down the construction of new housing, clean-energy projects—just about everything. These reactions were partly understandable; for example, air and water pollution in the ’70s were deadly crises. But “when you combine these big shifts, you basically stop building anything,” Jenkins said.""" Note: If you skim the above article, be aware that "Bush" refers to Vannevar Bush (not George #41 or George #43) in several places. |