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Neal Stephenson On 'Innovation Starvation'
Geoffrey.landis writes "In an essay discussing the space program, author Neal Stephenson suggests that the decline of the space program 'might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done.' He suggests that we may be suffering from innovation starvation: 'Innovation can't happen without accepting the risk that it might fail. The vast and radical innovations of the mid-20th century took place in a world that, in retrospect, looks insanely dangerous and unstable.'" Though the context is different, this reminds me of economist Tyler Cowen's premise that the U.S. has for decades been in a Great Stagnation.
Really? Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were proponents of "big government welfare statism" were they?
Yes. Reagan called it 'military spending', while Thatcher increased welfare spending during her time as Prime Minister; and, even if they hadn't been welfare statists, they were only in power for a few years of the last forty.
But don't let reality spoil a good rant.
I don't see the evidence. I see plenty of cases where we can't get things done because the "rules" don't allow it. All they way down to the girl down the street can't open a Day Care or a Hair Salon because compiling with Government requirements written in by existing rent seeking industry or liberals who put risk avoidance ahead of basic pragmatism always seeking to eliminate any personal responsibility from everyone.
We have never ever "deregulated" anything! Financial deregulation did not make it any more possible for me and few neighbors to get together and open bank! What it did was simply remove oversight from a group "winners" government had already picked, and continued to preserve them with barriers to entry.
Real deregulation would be just that it would be repealing laws, WITHOUT writing new ones. Its never been tried, on any kind of scale. Still everyone points at "deregulation" as some failure of libertarian policy ideas when what the "deregulation" that has actually occurred does not even remotely resemble what and real libertarian would call deregulation!
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
But at the same time, I don't like the idea that if I spend a year of my time developing something, someone else can spend 2 weeks making a slight improvement and start selling it.
If your idea is so simple that someone else can copy it and improve it in two weeks, why should you have the armed might of the state preventing them from doing so?
If I also spend a year of my time developing the same idea, but complete my work a week after yours, why shouldn't I have the same rights you do? I spent all that time and now you're saying I can't use my own invention just because you finished a few days earlier?
To be fair to damburger, the OP's baseless rant is repeated so many time by brain dead people who can't be bothered with facts that it is easy to become testy after refuting it a few thousand times. It starts with creating a fantasy enemy that bears no relation to anything in reality and applying a label used by people who disagree with you, in this case 'liberals'. Then you claim the fantasy enemy did some horrible thing that never happened, in this case "taking over" the education system.
So damburger's response may be blunt, but it is totally correct to ask for even a tiny shred of evidence to support the outlandish claims.
I don’t think it is as much an issue of innovation as resource outlay. We live in a world where profit is the prime motive, and thus the prime value. This is fine for markets, but this mindset has overreached markets themselves and become the default value system for societies as a whole.
In the past societies invested in large scale visions for reasons that aren’t always easy to articulate, but that were certainly not limited to economic gain. Whether it’s space exploration or building cathedrals and monuments, large scale projects require massive resources and corporate (as in group) commitment. Our epoch is dominated by self-interest (some might argue enlightened self-interest), market forces and market mentalities. Obviously, there is no incentive for corporations to outlay massive resources for projects that are either risky and/or that offer limited or negative ROI. But that’s not really the issue; I wouldn’t expect them to do so. The problem is that the market mentality has so thoroughly usurped dominance across all facets of society, the common opinion is that everything should be run like a business.
If you run government like a business, or put differently if you govern your society as though it was a giant company, society has no place for grand vision. We are constantly told that only markets know what society needs and are best equipped to efficiently provide those needs. Of course it isn’t profitable to engage in these kind of projects (or not obviously profitable), so markets will not engage in them. Moreover, if government engages in them, it will require resources, i.e. taxes revenues, and we are constantly told that taxes destroy markets (though the actual data doesn’t bear this out). Anyway, I could follow this tangent into a political debate, but salient point for this thread is that we have become a market society and a market only values grand vision if it leads to obvious monetary profit. If the same resources can be spent toward a greater profit elsewhere it would ‘be foolish’ not to spent to spend it elsewhere.