| Going into the specifics of what motivated Mike Mansfield requires going beyond the conversation we're having about R&D into the domain of politics and ideology. I want to stick to relevant realities related to people in technology: 1) This killed research in the United States. This killed the program that paid for Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart's PhDs. This has led to or is at least heavily correlated with the decline in technology and science innovation that has occurred since the beginning of the neoliberal assault. In 1961 we get SketchPad at the University of Utah. In 1968 we get the Mother Of All Demos. What's been developed since with the same kind of impact? I'd argue, "not a whole lot." 2) This has inevitably led to a decline in the public's enthusiasm for technical innovation. I remember the early 1990's World Wide Web. I remember the feeling that a non-marginally better future was, "months away." Now the government and Google collude to spy on me and my family. Now I have a short-form video feed that is paid to deliver content meant to extremize me as a young adult. The Mansfield Amendment is the technical glitch that may have cancelled a better future for technologists and especially technology literate young adults. It's difficult to say and we may never know. My feeling is that some day some country might achieve a level of social democracy where-in, "we get back to that." Time will tell. The irony is that it's the Adam Smith Societies pushing the hyper, "privatize everything agenda" that reifies the problem. Adam Smith actually advocated for strong public institutions- especially educational institutions. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x https://knowledge.essec.edu/en/innovation/the-worrisome-decl... https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/12/03/survey-shows-... https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56eddde762cd9413e151a... |
Still unanswered questions:
• Which Mansfield amendment is wing referred to? Namong the year would be suffiicnetly identifying
• What were Mr. Mansfield’s goals in pushing his eponymous amendment.
And I would like to ask a follow-on, once again in appreciation of your response: • Among the people (usually academicians in my experience) who express unhappiness with (one of) the Mansfield amendments, why don’t they express at least equal level of unhappiness with the NSF not being allocated a larger budget with mandate to fund the future Engelbarts & Kays? Or why don’t they advocate the standing-up of a National Engineering Foundation, or a peacetime non-weapons version of the OSRD to fund the next Engelbart, as vociferously as they express discontent with Mr. Mansfield’s amendment?