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by potato3732842
610 days ago
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Shipping got containerized without a significant amount[1] of tax breaks or handouts for that purpose. Rail standards were developed without significant preferential treatment as were the early electrical standards. Without subsidies of specific tech we'd likely see more balkanization and partial standardization of the grid. Perhaps the grid would have remained less reliable longer. In all likelihood things would "mostly" be the same on a medium-long timeline. Remember, prior to the 1960s and 1970s expansions of the federal bureaucracy the government didn't really get as proactively involved in this sort of thing as they are now. Though there were several cases in which they lit a pile of money on fire and kept feeding it until they got the results they wanted (I can't think of an example of this that wasn't directed at defense tech though). I think it would likely be a lateral move, or close enough to lateral that we can't really say with a high degree of certainty whether it would have turned out better or worse. I think it's very possible that without tax breaks we'd have gotten more solar earlier but with a slower adoption curve after that if none of this stuff was subsidized. [1] I know of none but I don't want some nit picker to find some case where someone got a $2k research grant in 1961 and act like that invalidates the point here. |
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