We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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The future according to 1954 Austin Meyer, author of the X-Plane flight simulator, has posted a picture showing a mockup of a home computer from 1954. I particularly like the “easy to use Fortran interface”. But then I would… I started off as a Fortran hacker.
I must admit thinking this is what the (one, only) home computer of 2004 would have looked like had it been a government operation as space flight has been.
Ooops: I got taken in, as did Austin: Snopes had it. Found out minutes after hitting the publish button. We catch things fast here on the net! But it is a cute image and my final point does still stand, faked photo or not.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Yes, it’s quite obvious that states cannot produce technology properly and it is best left to the market. For example, the government-run DARPA did something called the “Internet” in the 1980s, which never got anywhere, in contrast to Compuserve’s privately-owned network which went from strength to strength.
On a similar note, since some open source software is state-funded, it is obviously inferior to the stuff Microsoft produce, so I’m surprised this website runs Apache.
I’m not very tech savvy but can someone explain why it has a steering wheel?
Did people expect to drive their computers somewhere?
Did someone take the phrase “information superhighway” a little too seriously?
What Phil said.
It is unlikely the home computer would have come into existence anything like as fast as it did without significant state funding for the development of military computers. The internet is an expanded version of a military system, and modern computers derive from state funded machines used for code breaking, artillery control and rocketry.
Going further back, we might look at Babbage’s efforts with the computer. Although it got state funding, it didn’t get anywhere for a variety of reasons. The design is sound and not only does it actually work but it could easily have been made with the machine technology of its time. Funny how the market didn’t pick it up when the state dropped it, eh?
A great many of the technological things we take for granted these days would not exist, or would exist only in a much less developed form, were it not for significant (and sometimes truly enormous) state investment some years or decades previously. Generally for the purposes of war, but there it is.
Whilst it is perfectly true that the private market has many advantages over the state FOR SOME THINGS, it is also true that the state has advantages over the market for others – notably very large scale investment and long term development projects of a highly speculative nature. This “state bad, market good” stuff is all very well but it is naive and certainly isn’t always true.
EG
Speaking as someone who has been on the internet from perhaps 1973-76 and then continuously from 1984 onwards, (and the TechDir of an ISP from 94-97) I think I can safely comment that the internet really took off when the private sector took over. In those early days it took back door favours to get your company on the net. Once it all went private, it really exploded.
So Tymshare and others had to adapt. Closed systems and closed standards do tend to backfire. The internet grew because it had open standards that anyone could join. Those standards, called RFC’s, are written by people from all sorts of backgrounds. Many of them were in university computer science departments in the early days. I too have worked under DARPA research funding and I have little problem with the approach they take… they are quite interested in things being realized commercially.
We could also argue that all research could be better done privately, but that is an argument that would take a long time and no one would agree at the end anyway.
That is not however the argument of this article. When the State, develops, owns, controls and operates something, it develops at a linear pace. Take the same base research and put it into the private sector and you will get an exponential pace if the area is commercially viable… and if it is not, it will quickly become an historical footnote without need for years of public funded life support.
I might add that the vast majority of Open Source is written by persons like myself, using their own resources, or in some cases by companies who see an advantage in having something they have done become a global standard. The operating system I am typing this from was written as a personal project by a Finnish student with the help of other programmers spread around the world who just found it interesting. The browser I am using is the open sourced version handed over to a global volunteer team for further, parallel development to the commercial brother. The computer language I most commonly use was designed and written by Larry Wall as his own project because he wanted a better scripting language.
There is very little signs of the State in what I use on a day to day basis.
Turing would have done the work he did anyway if the state had not been there… and he might have lived longer as well.
It’s one thing developing and refining something that already exists or is proven to work. The market is really good at that – provided there is a paying market for the good or service, of course. However, to get there from here, as it were, sometimes requires huge speculative expenditure with no guarantee of an adequate (or even any) return. The market is not good at this, but that nasty old state is more than capable of it.
It may be argued that the state expenditure is funded through coercive taxation, and this is a point of view. However, without that coercive taxation in the past, not to mention the wars and savage political and military competition between states, you would not now be able to discuss this online, nor would anyone be remotely interested in the X Prize winning spacecraft because the technology required to make these things work wouldn’t exist.
Considering spaceflight, whilst it is valid that private industry can now develop the technology to (in time) provide cheap, efficient and reliable suborbital travel, it is extremely unlikely that it would be in a position to do so without the huge state expenditures in Europe, the USSR and the USA in past decades to develop military rocketry and semi-civil spaceflight for strategic reasons.
Sapceship 1, or whatever it is called, requires a relatively small investment of a few million dollars. The market can do this. But before anyone had gone into space, before the first ballistic missiles (German, military project) or satellites (Russian, military-strategic project) had been launched, would the market have come up with the billions needed to see if it was even possible? Somewhat unlikely, to say the least.
EG
I have a personal experience with government-designed and manufactured personal computer. See here: http://www.homecomputer.de/pages/f_info.html?Novy_Bor_IQ151.html
What a pathetic machine it was. With the performance of Sinclair ZX-81 it was many times heavier, bigger and expensive. You could make hot coffee on it. Note the metallic case.
The East European governments were unable to design their own microprocessors, so they copied the Intel 8080 instead.
I would argue that far from enabling SpaceShipOne, the State has prevented it from happening decades sooner. Rutan is just the one with the good fortune to make it over the bar after 25 years of behind the scenes warfare by previous ventures and by space activists like myself who fought to get the NASA juggernaut out of the way. If Chuck Divine stops by, he can perhaps provide his opinions from his time on the inside. I do know there were strong political and economic (read pork barrel) reasons why the Iron Triangle (NASA+Congress+Aerospace Ministries… er companies) worked against private space companies.
A woman I know was present in a meeting in the 1980’s where there was open discussion about the problem of these upstarts.
Things have changed, but it has been a long hard fight to get to the place where a Rutan can get there.
Hell, OTRAG might have provided cheap LEO access in 1979 if not for the international intrigue that took them down.
Three years before that machine was made, I was using a Cromenco Z80 powered thing the size of a filing cabinet with less than the processing power of my (now) mobile phone. The Czech machine isn’t actually all that backward for 20 years ago – western school and home computers of the time weren’t much more advanced.
Decades I doubt, but years certainly. My point though is that before state funded exploration of near space nobody knew if it was even possible (in practice as opposed to theory). Would the free market have funded Apollo? Mercury? Sputnik? Vostok?
The thing is that until it got beyond a certain proof-of-concept and viability stage, space flight had no commercial application and therefore would not have attracted private funding. SS1 can develop this now, but that model of doing things would never have crossed the initial obstacle.
EG
Somebody showed me this picture some weeks ago and I immediately told him it was a hoax (before Snopes confirmed it). Hell, in 1954 nobody even dreamed about HOME computers. Same for the 60ies.
Even in the mid 70ies, when the IBM head was told about the home computer the two Steves were building in their garage his reaction was: “What would people want a home computer for ? ”
On government involvement in space exploration – maybe government accelerated and jump started space exploration (probably), and maybe it also hindered farther space exploration (probably true, too) – so what ?
I, for one, would prefer that it refrained from engaging in space exploration, that it stayed out. We could have got, through private innitiative, all the space exploration we wanted or needed, at the time we wanted or needed it.
On the other hand – space is closely related to defence, so, maybe leaving government out of it was not an option.
How? Go back to the 1920s, assume no war and no state interest in space, and think about how and why the market would do this.
EG
Well, at least it doesn’t have obvious Microsoft Word fonts at the bottom.
EG, have you read the year of manufacture correctly? It’s given as 1984 – by that time, the standard for home computers was much better – ~64/128k memory, colour, sound etc. The spec as given is actually inferior to the ZX81 (originally manufactured 3 years earlier) in one respect – ROM size; the ZX81 had 8k ROM.
Within a year the first Amigas and STs were available – with 16/32 bit processors, 512k memory, 3.5″ hard drives as standard, GUIs as standard, etc.
I have a co-worker who spend 4 years in a Los Angeles Class nuclear submarine, and he confirms that this display panel is the one for the engine room of a United State nuclear sub. Granted, the display is older than Los Angeles Class sub, but the basic layout is the same. ’bout 1/2 of the display are for steam pressure and electrical output.
Actually, this is false according to snopes:
Although the photograph displayed could represent what some people in the early 1950s contemplated a “home computer” might look like (based on the technology of the day), it isn’t, as the accompanying text claims, a RAND Corporation illustration from 1954 of a prototype “home computer.” The picture is actually an entry submitted to an image modification competition, taken from an original photo of a submarine maneuvering room console found on U.S. Navy web site, converted to grayscale, and modified to replace a modern display panel and TV screen with pictures of a decades-old teletype/printer and television (as well as to add the gray-suited man to the left-hand side of the photo):
Ah… 8″ floppy disk drives… happy memories!!!
It’s given as 1984 – by that time, the standard for home computers was much better – ~64/128k memory, colour, sound etc.
The only thing I can say to that is -ish-. I started working for Rumbelow’s as a Saturday job in 1984 selling computers. 64K was the norm or even 32/48K (Electron, Spectrum and Oric). At school we had Reseach Machines 380Z and 480Z which were basically the size of small filing cabinents and had 8K and 16K respectively. I had a Spectrum myself, my friends had a BBC-B, Sinclair QL, TRS-80, a Dragon and a Commodore 64.
We got our first real network in 85/86 which were a bunch of RM PC clones running DOS and Windows 1.X.
The standard of home computers in 1984 was definately much higher than school computers, but there was also a fight going on in schools over ownership of the computers and the purpose for them. Ours were in the Maths block, something the physics teachers hated. The maths teachers wanted us to work with computers more like they had used at Univeristy to “get us ready” so the machine would boook to a bare bones OS and we’d have to load a compiler to write code.
I went to University in 1987 and the Uni then were using a network of dumb terminals attached to 6 Prime mini-computers, each about a metre and a half high by two deep – they didn’t get a PC network until I came back from industrial placement in 1989.
Technology change has been rapid in recent years and we foorget the ubitutous PC on the desk is recent. When I started working in engineering in 1991 we had either an IBM PC or a dumb terminal between 8 engineers and you’d need to book time on them. I didn’t get a dedicated work PC on my desk until 1996.
Not that much better. Remember that was the age of 8-bit processor, generally with a 64K memory space and lots of nifty tricks needed to get more addresses. The ZX Spectrum (I had one) had a base 16K RAM in 1982, expandable to 48K, the venerable Commodore 64 was in use for a long time afterwards despite its limitations.
It’s true that the first Amigas (had one of them too) and STs were about to come out, but recall that they were *very* expensive then and it was some time before many homes or schools had that kind of kit.
For a non-specialist school PC of 1984, the Czech machine is a little backward but really not all that much. In 1983 (the year I left), my school had a BBC micro (no GUI), an Apple II (nifty green screen) and the aforementioned Cromenco room-heater, I mean computer (monochrome, ASCII only). The BBC was new that year.
EG
Arlye: Yes. Note that you missed the Snopes link in the article.
Home computers. Well, there was a 6502 kit built machine and the Altair hobbyist computer available by 1978 I believe. I was working with the Intellec-8 packaged 8008 development systems in 1974 and the commercial PROM’s, RAM and 4004 processors in summer 1972. I’m rather more intimately familiar with these at the soldering iron level than most.
I might also add that a co-worker of mine circa 1979, a Russian Jew who got out in the late 70’s, showed me the computer manual he brought with him: the Russians also did a copy of the IBM 360. An exact, completely reverse engineered copy.
All of the 1960’s and 1970’s computer technology was private, commercial development. It was Intel that took LSI from the university to the marketplace and it was the market place that sustained Moore’s law.
I will also note that Moore’s law is a near straight line on log graph paper, all the way back to the Hollerith card. If the State had any effect at all, one would have expected to show up in the curve. It doesn’t. That tells me there was something more basic going on. If there had not been Collossus, there would have been something similar around the same time.
Also note that the researchers at the base ofthe computer revolution existed in the days before the State tried to absorb the R&D function into itself. WWII may have speeded some things up, but the thing about exponentials is that early acceleration doesn’t really change the results very much once you get off the bottom step. So perhaps we’d have to have waited until next year for a commodity 500GB disk drive. BFD.
Euan: I think your school had some rather backward equipment. I was doing commercial Real Time systems back then; I’d played with the Applie IIe at one point and decided it was a toy (1982) and was busy developing a process control system around the original IBM-PC. Why even the first killer-apps were out by then: I had the original spreadsheet program to play with.
By 1984 we were into second generation machines; I think the Apple Lisa came out about then; DEC had awoken too late and was trying to get back in the game with PDP-8 clones in small boxes; the Commodore-64’s were widespread and in networks.
Personally I mostly worked with DEC-11’s, DEC-10’s and VAX-11’s back then. My own ‘personal computer’ in 1982 was an LSI-11 with 512kb of RAM and a used Centronics 102a line printer. Used computer gear was real cheap at the time since the micro revolution was starting to kick in.
I can’t speak for the US but Euan’s recollection matches mine for 1984. Schools didn’t have the budget in the UK to spend on computers. My Spectrum, which I bought in 1982 was better than the 2 school machines and I don’t think our school was actually exceptional. Just in 1984 computers still weren’t seen as all that important.
I was still using BBC-B’s in 1988 for the machine control modules of my engineering degree. They were great. You could drop straight into 6502 assembler in the middle of BASIC and activate the control ports. They made for great, simple controllers.
I’m not convinced by the argument about the state holding back space though. Building and playing with computers (once the Industrial Military complex had given us transistors and ICUs 😉 ) was something that anybody with a low budget could do at home. Even the “low budget” new entrants to the space arena are hardly comparable to Hewlett Packard and their shed.
Space isn’t attracting the big money because the investors don’t see the big returns yet, and might never see them. Nanotechnology on the other hand is receiving billions in funding despite not even being close to offering any actual real technology.
The issue here is that a nanotech start up with a $5m round can do more than a space start up could. That might change, but if SS1 is as good as it gets (and I suspect it is) then Rutan will have needed over $50m before he can even be in a position to start covering the costs. That assumes a lot of stuff remains equal too.
True, but the point is that first you have to actually find the bottom step, figure out that it’s possible in theory to climb it, figure out how to do this is practice, and then actually do it. In the case of spaceflight, there would be no commercial reason to do any of this, therefore a distinct lack of private capital to pay for any of it. I repeat the question I asked before – would the market, with no state encouragement, have raised all the cash to pay for the early space programs like Mercury, Sputnik, Apollo, etc?
Computers are a different thing, and of course there is a clear series of gradual refinements as time passes. Nobody is doing anything radically different. On the other hand, I’d think the technological boost coming from the wars greatly enhanced the rate of development – the military need for artillery control, anti-aircraft prediction, code-breaking and so on paid for a lot of development that would otherwise have come only very slowly. I suspect that without the 20th century wars we’d still have electro-mechanical computers. Remember what the early “modern” computers were developed to do – was there a comparable commercial need for them that could speed things along just as much?
I think the idea that we’d only have to wait another year for 500Gb hard drives is a tad optimistic. A couple of decades, more like.
And it’s not just WW2. Suppose there had been global perfect libertarian peace since the end of the American Revolution – just how advanced do you think we would be right now?
It was a *school* for God’s sake, not a computer business.
EG
It may be argued that the state expenditure is funded through coercive taxation, and this is a point of view. However, without that coercive taxation in the past, not to mention the wars and savage political and military competition between states, you would not now be able to discuss this online, nor would anyone be remotely interested in the X Prize winning spacecraft because the technology required to make these things work wouldn’t exist.
But you exist in the paradigm that they do exist and exclude what would have been created, or the liberty people would have enjoyed, but for the State interference. I’ve never said that Good has never come from government, but at what cost? One would have to a priori assume that that which the government fostered is superior to what the market would have created.
We might not have computers at all and we would not be having a discussion, but is that a great loss?Also, for that matter, but for Statism, I likely wouldn’t exist either (I’ll spare the details), and much else would be very much different. But my existence does not condone the Statist reality that brought it about and nothing excuses coercive use of Force when life or property is not at risk regardless of the perceived benefits. Quite simply, there would still be people living their lives in a manner they see fit regardless of its nature.
Life would have carried on without home computers or pens that can write upside down. Communication existed prior to the computer. And for that matter, perhaps the world would have been much better without all the other Statist outputs of polarizing technology to its purposes. The only thing that is really gained or lost is individual liberty, for good or ill.
EG,
For 1981, the Czech machine would have been a bit backward – for 1984, it was very backward. Since we’re trying to compare public and private, school computers aren’t a particularly good yardstick for the private sector.
IIRC, in 1982, models of the Spectrum were available with 48K RAM; by 1984 this had increased to 128K RAM. Yes, this required some fancy tricks (RAM paging) – this is called technological advancement.
The question of pricing is significant – those STs (I had one a few years later!) and Amigas may have been expensive to start with, but even in 1985 I think they were cheaper than the (State-approved) RML 380/480Zs. Yes, I went to school in the UK in the early ’80s too…
It would be difficult to work out the equivalent price of the Czech computer, but given that the website describes it as very rare, I suspect it was a comparatively “expensive” item. (Rationing substituting for price increases in a command economy.)
toolkien:
What you say is perfectly true, but rather misses the point. It doesn’t address the issue of whether or not the state can be beneficial in boosting advanced technology. The question is really whether the state can get the ball rolling, not whether it is best suited to picking the thing up and running all the way with it.
In the case of spaceflight, it is hard to see why the private market would spend billions of dollars on a series of speculative ventures when there was no guarantee that any of them would even work, let alone have a market. Not thousands, not millions, but billions of dollars. There simply wouldn’t be a space industry today without a history of vast state expenditure in the field and the hot and cold wars that prompted it.
It is not comparable to, say, the early development of powered flight. That was, in relative terms, pretty small beer. Any sufficiently inventive bod with a workshop and a few bucks to spare could try his hand at building a plane, and many did. However, not just anyone can develop orbital rockets. Can you imagine a wholly private Apollo program?
Many people here are excited at the prospect of private industry developing space transport, but the point is that had everything always been left to private interests there would be no space industry because the initial investment is vast and the returns doubtful for a very long period. Now that it is proven possible, and the technology is sufficiently common and cheap, it makes sense for a competitive market to develop things further since they will do this far more quickly and efficiently than the state. Equally, though, the state can give the impetus to develop new technologies that the private sector wouldn’t think twice about because there’s no profit to be made for decades, if ever.
Of course, it isn’t just spaceflight itself, but also the side benefits that flowed from the expenditure and research. The advances in materials science, medical technology, communications, and so on would not exist or would at best be much less developed than they are. That would of course be a perfectly valid world, but without states and more particularly war and military rivalry it would be markedly less technologically advanced.
EG
what’s with the big wheel?
I’m sitting here watching Ghostbusters 2, and I must say that the plot line of the movie is closer to reality than some of the argument I am seeing in this thread.
The disastrous effects of the statist monstrosities that were planted in the reactionary theories of the 19th century, and bore such poisoned fruit in the 20th century, are still being dealt with today.
Tuchman wrote a book about the 14th century, the era of the black death, and called it “The Calamitous 14th Century”. One of the theses was that there was a direct comparison with the 20th centuries’ state led slaughter, which had previously only been approached by a horrendous natural catastrophe.
To be blunt, the possible beneficial results of having a few more gadgets, or rockets, arrive on the scene some time earlier than might have been is a small reward for the deaths of tens of millions, and the warping effect that statist ideology has had on human culture.
One of the hardest points to get across to the devoted statist is that the necessity of responding to the very real external threats of fascism and communism does not mean that there would have been no better route to have taken over the past century than decades of national emergency and militarization.
The contorted shape of the government of the US, and especially its all encompassing, and all consuming, regulatory and beaurocratic apparatus, would not have evolved without the dangers of military and ideological conflict.
It is a small consolation that we were able to leave some artifacts on the moon when the cost has been the creation of Frankenstate.
EG-
We may be missing each other’s points, I don’t know. But I still read in your view that such endeavors as spaceflight are an a priori Good – that space flight is a manifest Good that requires a collective solution. I have a different perspective, and that if spaceflight IS necessary, it will be dealt with through market forces. It will be as a result of finding the least costly way of providing goods and services. Otherwise it is done as an oblique, and I assert, senseless desire to do Good despite what the sum total of personal choice would yield through trade. It clearly smacks of “fork it over for your own good – you just don’t have the capacity to know it yet” which is the foundation of all Transfer Statism. I have a hard time seeing a difference between a spaceflight program or a food kitchen or socialized medicine. And as I’ve declared before, if there has to be confiscation, I’d much rather it go to support living human beings who already exist versus contributing to some fanciful speculation such as spaceflight (primarily interstellar flight which is fairly impossible).
I see the market as the juncture point of individual and THEIR values, not the values of bureaucrats. Edison produced many advancements, mostly through private initiative. Many of his inventions are still with us, mostly unchanged. With the ramping of Statism in the last 100 years or so came a confiscation of money and the seizing the initiative viz technology. A systematic take over of resources, technology and Big Education has left the State as the Prime Mover. A huge amount of resources polarize to its will, or more correctly, the bureaucrats who make it up, from private ownership and the diverse values of individuals. I can only speculate what such a world would be like, and probably is wasted effort. But I do wish that it be whittled down again. Supporting old Statists thrusts because of certain advancements only encourages Statists even more. I accept what already exists, but we need to roll it back and allow markets to function as they should.
It has evolved because, like most other countries, you have a redistributive welfare system. When you have such a system, you need a comprehensive set of rules, regulations and controls to limit abuse (people being nasty, selfish and greedy), which in turn leads to more regulation to deal with the people avoiding the first set of regulations, then regulations to mitigate the effects of the other regulations, and so on. The more generous the system, the more Byzantine regulation is needed – compare the relatively lightly regulated US with the heavier regulation and control in western Europe, for example.
A private insurance company controls abuse and greed by means of weighting the premium it charges. The redistributive state cannot do this, so it has to resort to regulation. The regulation inevitably is tighter than the fiscal regulation the market would impose because the demand on a “free” state system is for all practical purposes infinite. Couple this with vote-yourself-cash democracy, particularly under a universal suffrage and behold! – the regulatory state.
Britain in the Napoleonic Wars experienced more or less total warfare, within the limits of the technology available at the time. This did not make it an excessively regulating state, however – that came much later with the Welsh Windbag’s welfarism and, later, the extension of the franchise. Indeed, Britain managed to conquer a fifth of the world’s surface and become far and away the greatest military and economic power of its time on the back of what is by current standards a laissez-faire society. A fair amount of war and conflict was involved in this process, of course.
Bugger all to do with war, lots to do with misguided social engineering.
EG
That’s not what I was getting at. My point was that a collective effort is necessary *to get it started* but after that market exploitation is more efficient. I think it highly unlikely the market would ever invest the billions needed over several decades to make the first steps into space, but equally that the state, once having shown that space travel is possible, is not the best organisation to carry it forward. Whether space travel is good or not is a separate issue.
I do not mean that the state is a necessary first mover in any technological advance. But for some things which require enormous investment over long periods with no firm prospect of success, let alone profit, the state fills the role in a way that the market cannot. Spaceflight is a classic example.
This is the thing. In the case of spaceflight, starting off is not the least costly way of doing anything – in fact, it’s horrendously expensive in time, material, money and potentially life. Ultimately, however, it becomes economically feasible once the initial steps are taken. Rocket motors become cheap, reliable and simple, materials technology improves, science learns how to make people survive in an extremely hostile environment and so on.
Really what I’m getting at is that for some (but by no means all or even most) endeavours, the first hurdle is too high for the market to ever clear. As I said before, I cannot envisage a wholly private sector Apollo program – and that’s a necessary first step on the way to making settlements on the Moon, for example, which free enterprise can provide (but only as long as there is a profit, not just for the sake of knowledge).
I don’t. The first is reaching a technological goal the market will not consider for lack of profit. The second is nationalised charity (which private charities can do better). The third is redistributive welfarism (which the market can do perfectly well through insurance).
Me too. I think there is a valid role for the state in doing things which markets cannot or will not do, or can’t do effectively because there is little or no profit. I think also, though, that there is no need for the state to get involved in owning and running schools & hospitals, redistributing wealth, etc.
EG
Euan: The mistake you are making is an easy one to make. The wrong turn in space exploration is one that goes at least back to Kennedy. You are right. The private sector would NOT have built a Saturn V rocket and gone to the moon in 1969. The space program as you know it would not have happened. But let us assume a slightly different world; one in which the US had limited itself to those few functions (defense, courts, police) that most would call the only common goods. Yes some will argue the others too, but that is not the argument here.
Spaceflight would then have proceeded very differently. We’d have stayed with the X-15; we’d not have signed onto the ’67 Treaty or at least would have rejected Article II and some other items. Without the huge regulatory state, aviation would have been regulated strictly by the market. I would not be surprised if Boeing had attempted an SST; without the huge regulatory worries (look at the problems the Concorde had in getting landing rights), it might have been tried. It might have flopped too, but then 80% of everything in business fails so that is to be expected.
With the emphasis on the rocketplane route into space, things would have gone more slowly at first… but we’d have built up an infrastructure for small manned vehicles that operated from normal airports (albiet ones with rather long run ways). There would have been some ongoing advancement with the artillery rocket because we did have a nuclear threat; those smaller rockets would have delivered small payloads if operated as satellite launchers. Someone almost certainly would have done so. Without the NASA giantism (one big rocket that can put up tons), there would have been a need for more launches to do things. We might well have gone for an Iridium type system with a lot of cheap satellites put up by unreliable and not too pricey small rockets. Simply because GEO would not have been possible or affordable.
I believe that would have been enough to kick off a competitive private market in small rockets for cargo and via the pure military side would have led to success by some of the early space entrepreneurs by the 1980’s.
Yes, I do assume there is some defense spending; we live in a dangerous world. What I do not assume is a ‘space program’ or any other non-defense state funded research.
The case can also be made that we could have done it without even that; but then we have to go back deeper into history and I am not quite so sure of my facts as I am with this particular alternate history.
EG-
I don’t know how else to put it. I guess you distinguish between start-up investment and on-going investment. I don’t. Even under the first there is a confiscation of property from the holder to put to a collective purpose. But it must ultimately be other individuals who decide what use those resources are put to. Which means that theirs must be a higher level of value, a collective value, which trumps the individual’s. It is that notion, no matter how it presents itself, that I abhor.
Also, looking at it another way, what is the logic of having collective base research to which everyone presumably contributes (under Force) but leave its use and exploitation to market distribution? This is merely one avenue of the creeping of Statism. There are plenty of Statists who feel that if the technology is publicly generated, then its distribution is pretty much State owned. This will only continue until all intellectual property can be traced to a State source. That, coupled with de facto ownership of resources, will leave the concept of individual property rights in the dust.
Suffice it to say that ‘scale’ still must be left to the cumulative effect of individual value judgements. Markets must always work from the individual upward, not bureaucracy downward. Your logic is patently collectivist, and if I were to buy into it, I would necessarily have to buy into all such creeds.
Every Statist has their logic for confiscating huge sums of money, and it always is for the betterment of mankind in some way. And yet the net collective experience really doesn’t change all that much. Again, all that disappears is individualism and liberty.
I know this thread has gone off in a different direction but I have an amusing anecdote. When I was 11 my father befriended the people operating a computer that ran a nitrating plant. The computer had a lot of idle time because the demand for TNT was declining with the U.S. pulling out of Vietnam, so they taught my dad to code and they did the usual things with the computer: chess, poker, checkers, Snoopy calendars, biorythms, and The Mona Lisa in grayscale. So one day my dad takes me to see the computer. I don’t think I was sufficiently impressed, It took up a rather long wall, consumed a lot of electricity and produced a lot of heat, required an air conditioned environment and two operators to deal with all the problems that could arise. Two months later my dad bought an HP-38C, it fit in the palm of your hand, ran for many hours on batteries, withstood the dust and heat and moisture of construction sites and would literally perform mathematical miracles at the touch of a few buttons. I was VERY impressed.
Even that wouldn’t have happened under a purely commercial space program. What is the commercial payoff? The X15 was also a state program, funded in large part for military-strategic reasons.
The only commercially successful SST was an Anglo-French state funded venture. The American SST ended in ignominy because state funding was withdrawn and it was seen as commercially non-viable. Why, then, would private cash have done it anyway? Why did not the private sector carry on with the American SST project? Why have the only working civil SSTs been state projects? If it was all private, perhaps these things would happen – eventually. Maybe.
If low speed supersonic transports like Concorde are expensive and only commercially viable when the development costs are written off by the state, why on Earth would hypersonic suborbital transport be any more commercially attractive? The development costs are even higher.
Because in some cases the initial development costs are too high and the potential returns too low (or even non-existent) for the market to be interested. This is the whole point I’m making.
Rubbish. As I have said, perfectly clearly and unambiguously, I think it is quite in order for the state (through coercive taxation if you insist) to fund the development of technologies which the market won’t look at because the cost is too high. Once this is done, however, as I also said quite clearly, the best mechanism to exploit and carry forward the technology is the free market.
I know, and I think they are wrong.
Why?
You cannot in practice have absolute individual liberty. Even in the free market you cannot, because you must cede some of your individualism and liberty to the corporation which owns about half of your waking time. Indeed, companies are often rather more restrictive about what you can and cannot do. Civil society is no different, you cede some of your liberty in return for a degree of order you cannot achieve on your own.
I think that if you were to have absolute individual liberty you’d be sitting in a fortified home, heavily armed and waiting for the next bugger to exercise his individual liberty by forcibly taking it all away from you. The point of society is to stop that kind of thing happening by enforcing certain rules which enable you to have property as long as you earn it, and once you have it to allow you to keep it as long as you can afford it.
This is more efficient than absolute individual liberty, since instead of you wasting lots of your time and effort personally fending off those who would pinch your property, you pay other people to provide protection on a full time basis. Since this only practically works when the same rules apply to everyone, you need some overall enforcing body which must ultimately have recourse to force even if you personally disagree with the exercise of it in a specific case. Whether this organisation is private or state is not so much the point. The point is that in any plausible scenario you have to sacrifice some of your liberty and individualism to receive other benefits you could not otherwise obtain, such as public order and the rule of law.
If you don’t, you and everyone else will waste so much time and effort protecting yourself, your family and your property that you will have significantly less time and effort available for economically productive activity. Society as a whole would be significantly less developed and a great deal poorer. Perhaps some people see this as a price worth paying – I don’t. I don’t object to a little regulation in return for a life eased by a little technology.
The trick, of course, is to find the optimum level of control and regulation (whether by the state or by private interests) such that maximal development is achieved at minimum sacrifice of liberty. I think it has gone too far towards regulation and control now, but I also think there necessarily has to be some regulation and control.
The alternative is not perfect libertarian anarcho-capitalism, it is chaos. The rule of law, public order, and dealing equitably and effectively with offenders REQUIRES constraints on the liberties of EVERYONE. To pretend otherwise is a delusion akin to the belief that if only the means of production and distribution were owned collectively then all economic problems would disapppear.
EG
The only thing you need billions of dollars for in starting a space program is to support a space agency. Very, very little of what those billions have been spent for has resulted in things that are of direct use to building today’s rivate spacecraft. Composites came out of aviation; the simulation tools comes out of the cross of aviation with the commercially available office computer; off the shelf electronics and computer hardware and avionics give us most of the instrumentation we need. All of the new startups are designing their own engines from scratch because non of the government ones are cheap and reliable enough.
You make the mistake of thinking a rocket engine is hard and complex. It isn’t. It may not be the simplest bit of engineering in the world, but you have bought into the mystique that space is hard and expensive and only governments can do it. This was an incorrect statement in 1960 and it is an incorrect statement today.
Only governments can build white elephants and engines big enough to put them into orbit; only governments can afford to build enough redundant on redandant over-designed systems on top of each other and supply armies of workers to check them out… in order to overcome initial government committee mandated design flaws.
Only governments can spend billions on developing systems like that Saturn V and the Nerva rocket engines… and then just walk away from them without even attempting to recoup any of the sunk costs.
Government is not the solution to space. It is, and has been THE PROBLEM.
Yes, we have to act nice to our 900 pound gorilla so lons as we are within it’s reach or until we get to be 900 pound corporate gorillas ourselves… but that is tactics, not love.
EG,
You have veered from the space exploration theme to general principles. I agree with you, but let’s get back to space.
You argue that space exploration would not have started at all without government involvement. Dale says it would have started, only differently. These are all hypotheticals, we cannot know what would have happened in an alternate universe.
Let’s assume that, indeed, without gov. there would have been no space exploration. Toolkien’s point, and mine, is: so what ? Space exploration would have happened when enough people had deemed it important and useful. Maybe that would not have been in the 20th century. Maybe it would have happened in the 21st. So what ?
Government activity (using force and abridging individual freedom) should be limited to those areas where it is strictly necessary and undisputably beneficial. Space exploration is not one of those areas.
Euan,
there’s one point I forgot to mention. In the Communist economies of the 1980’s, home computers were produced, but were not available in retail market. Even if they were sold, nobody would have purchased them. There was a flourishing grey market: Sinclairs, Commodores and Ataris were readily available at a fraction of the government-produced “home” computers.
Interestingly enough, the first computer I worked at secondary school in 1983 was Sinclair ZX-81.
No, I don’t. I know perfectly well that rocket engines are in principle very simple machines. The hard part is not in the concept, which has been known for centuries, but in the materials and fuels needed to build high performance, reliable rocket engines at low weight with good and accurate control. Uncontrolled solid fuel rockets have been used for military applications in the west for over 150 years now, but the controlled, throttled, reliable and relatively safe liquid fuel rocket is a pretty recent innovation.
No, I haven’t. How many times, FGS? I am NOT saying only states can “do” space, I am saying that the INITIAL investment and development is expensive with little sign of any practical return – and hence not the sort of thing the market is much good at dealing with – but that thereafter the market is the best thing to use for enhancing and exploiting workable technology.
I return to the point of the SST – if there is a demand for high speed global travel, why are the skies not criss-crossed with private SSTs? The concept works, the technology is proven, it’s not actually that hard NOW to design and build a Mach 2 airliner – but nobody is doing it. Why not? If it is because there is not enough demand to make it commercially viable, then why would there be enough demand to make hypersonic suborbital flight viable? If it isn’t commercially viable, why would the market develop it?
The point I’m making is not to glorify the state, or to say only the state should do certain things, or that state endeavours are necessarily superior to private ones. It is simply that in SOME fields, the returns are so small for so long and the necessary investment so great the private interests are very unlikely to explore them as quickly as the state might, if at all. Space travel is I think one such example. I think that if various states had not forced the advance of space technology for military-strategic reasons then there would be no space industry today, nor probably tomorrow.
And as a result, we know for certain that it is possible to create viable habitats on the Moon, that man can survive better than expected in space, and so on. This in turn yields a commercial opportunity which can be exploited by private companies, but would we have ever discovered this through strictly private enterprise means? The state may be the problem NOW in space exploration, but I think that state involvement was necessary at the start.
Basically, I think your initial premise that nothing works if the state does it is invalid in certain areas, space travel being one of them (perhaps the most obvious).
EG
A browse around the rest of the site which holds the Czech coffee-warmer shows that this isn’t entirely true, at least in the case of the USSR…
It also seems that kit and copy computers were pretty popular in the 80s USSR, just as they were here in the west.
EG
It’s conceivable that Communist countries deliberately produced low-spec home computers for fear of putting too much power into the hands of dissidents.
Remember that when the USSR had computer-controlled guidance systems for missiles, it was still licensing typewriters so the KGB could identify samizdat authors.
Luniversal,
It’s more likely (= this is the reality) that the USSR did not have as advanced semiconductor technology as the west. Then again, this is not to say they were incapable of producing high tech engineering.
They did, after all, build the first satellite, put the first man into orbit, the first woman into orbit, the first probe onto the moon, the first space station into orbit, built the first supersonic transport to fly, got the first pictures of the dark side of the moon and launched the first interplanetary probe (to Venus).
Hmm. What was Dale saying about the state and space exploration… 😉
EG
I don’t really see why government investment is necessary to get the ball rolling for anything, space included. Was the state necessary for the first railways? The first internal combustion engines? No, it wasn’t.
The whole principle with something like, say, SpaceShipOne is that it’s basically an airplane that flies really high. Given the technology of powered flight, and given the materials science advances that give composites with high strength:weight ratios, an airplane that flies high enough to be considered a spaceplane is a very logical development.
Now, why would markets develop such a thing? Well, transportation comes to mind. When that payload really needs to get to the other side of the planet in half an hour. Also, commercial satellites, microgravity factories, etc; there are all sorts of reasons why the market would have developed orbital capabilities on its own, once it became economical to do so.
In fact, my contention is that the growing private sector interest in space would have happened (likely around the same time) regardless of whether or not the U.S. had ever launched its moon shots. It’s all about a confluence of materials science, electronics, and aerospace engineering, technologies that have been developing on their own (with the government more in the position of customer than producer) for much of the last century.
Someone mentioned the concorde not being profitable. That wasn’t because of the market; that was because no government would allow the concorde to fly through its airspace, wishing to arrogate to their air forces the right of supersonic travel (though I think the excuse was to prevent noise pollution due to supersonic booms, which is just silly: by the same token, railways should be prohibited, as anyone who lives next to one can attest.) The obvious result: the concorde is limited to transatlantic flights and thus becomes a white elephant. Had it not been for this ridiculous legislation, concordes wouldn’t only still be around, they’d be fairly common.
I wasn’t suggesting the government should *produce* these things, but the fact remains that government action in *buying* them (generally for military purposes and particularly in wartime) significantly boosted the state of the technological art. Like it or not, war leads to progress. Without states and war, our level of technological progress would not be as high today as it is.
So why didn’t American private companies develop their own SST to compete on the trans-Atlantic routes with the French and the British? There’s always been plenty of business on those routes, after all.
EG
Several things. First, Russian electronics. They copied chips from the West down to the mask-makers personal signature on the chip. I kid you not. Computer technology was always far behind but they made do because Russian programmers were very,very good. VERY, VERY good. You must also understand that a command system can indeed accomplish a few things at a time better than a free market, but at the expense of everything else. At the end of the cold war Russia was economically little more than a 3rd world country, despite being blessed with natural resources, vast lands and highly educated people, including some of the top scientists and engineers *anywhere*.
Now the more difficult one. SST’s. It is a complex issue and you have to know a good bit about what was going on at the time. The French-British effort meant that whoever entered the game was facing competition totally underwritten by governments. So Boeings’ SST had to be state subsidized or else they couldn’t go ahead with it. With state monies flowing into those projects (plus into Concordski, the Tupelov model) the SST market was not defined by capitalism but by national interests. Concorde was far and away the leader, but with the complex agreements and the requirements to split everything with the french… you had better believe the development costs were driven through the roof. That is above and beyond the fact that it was a difficult proposition and probably 10 years ahead of its time.
To recoup the investment, the Concorde had to be sold in reasonable numbers. Not huge, but reasonable. Important routes were ones going to the Far East from Europe; there were of course the trans-atlantic ones as well. It was here that the US government (and also local NY environmental groups) got in the way. They refused to authorize landing rights. Eventually approval was given for NYC and DC, but after years of delay… and in the mean time other players dropped out and did not buy. Overflight was denied in many countries and the proposed sales collapsed. The limitation of landings to the two airports also affected sales to US airlines. They all cancelled. The US Congress cut the funding on Boeing’s SST, and other branches of government helped prevent the subsidized competition from getting a foothold in the market vacuum.
Now I will not prophesy whether SST’s could have been financially viable even with the R&D costs fully on the corporate books. I am sure someone would have tried it at some point. Most likely it would not have happened for another decade, or even two. Modern materials and computer design and building systems would have made it feasible to fund the construction; whether the business model would have worked I cannot tell you.
Until Margaret Thatcher cut the umbilicle, the SST was never a business venture. It was a State run fiasco that drained billions out of the French and British treasuries.
All that said though… God, was it a thing of beauty in flight!