Even I had believed the oft repeated mantra that integrated circuits were a result of a spinoff of the Moon Race. According to George Guilder, at the end of Chapter 5 of “Microcosm”:
Like TI before it, Fairchild achieved its breakthroughs with virtually no government assistance while its largest competitors — chiefly the vacuum tube companies — were receiving collectively hundreds of millions of dollars in grants. But when the government needed a way to miniaturize the circuitry for its Minuteman missiles and its space flights, it did not use micromodules or any of the other exotic technologies it had subsidized. It turned first to Fairchild rather than to its early favorites and beneficiaries. Fairchild’s lack of military entanglement in the late fifties finally allowed the company to get the bulk of military and aerospace contracts in the early 1960s.
I begin to wonder if the government is actually responsible for the introduction of anything whatever. About the only thing left are a few DARPA projects and on most of those, other than the Internet itself, it is too early to tell.
Just the other day I had that old canard about NASA and teflon (PTFE) thrown at me by an irredeemable leftie. It wasn’t invented by NASA, it was invented (discovered by accident) at a subisidiary of DuPont Chemical in 1938, and it was first put on frying pans by a frenchman whose wife suggested it to him, and who started Tefal.
They didn’t invent Tang either. John Glenn just happened to like it.
The internet was not the result of gov. invention, but of intervention. The idea of a wide-area computer network was not concieved in a state supported laboratory, but many people came to that separately: so many that the internet used to have competitors. In the early 90s (does someone remember it? those were the times) there were many more-or-less independent but interconnected networks: the FidoNet (cheap, truly decentralized and still operational today), the CompuServe, GEnie, and many more… But only the internet got the subsidies of the US Gov, and so a large userbase from its universities. The other networks slowly died off — what a pity. Fortunately, the ‘net is now biting the had that once fed it.
Glad you like Gilder’s Mircososom, its a great book. You should also check out his “Life after Television” which debunked the statist case for “Industrial Policy” which was so popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Remember the line “The Cold War is over and the Germans and the Japanese won.”
The ironic thing is that most of the “government” inventions that lefties tout are, even if you believe their claims, the result of looking for military applications, the one part of the State the lefties seem to hate.
Isn’t Big Government responsible for GPS (used to target weapons more accurately)?
Government funded development is like most technical development – some is done well, some not so well.
The difference lies in how programs are funded. A private program is ultimately limited by someone refusing to risk, or continue to risk, his own money and power.
A government program spends other peoples money. That supply is limited only by the willingness of government administrators to allot to the program.
In government there is no personal incentive to stop anything; stopping creates enemies who will remember. However there are reasons to continue; doing so will increase allies and power.
We are now enduring the consequences of a mutation of private funding. That lately practiced by Wall Street and banking. The industry convinced itself that risks could be kept trivial while rewards could rise without limit. If that were true their actions were quite logical.
When it proved not true the taxpayers were told they must take the losses.
More should be made of the superiority of private enterprise in terms of ground breaking technology.
When Lieutenant Belenko of the Voyska PVO (Soviet Air Defence) defected to Japan in 1976 with his MiG-25 Foxbat, the boffins were surprised to discover that the world breaking speed and hight record holding interceptor was essentially just a steel airframe containing two huge gas guzzling engines and a basic avionics system with a radar about as good as a 1960s F-4 Phantom. It was a rather special airframe, however.
Its developers had found that the only available material that would stand up to the heat generated by the Mach 3 airflow was stainless steel, so the aircraft was built from this instead of aluminium alloys, and consequently weighed so much that its operating airbases had to have their runways torn up and rebuilt to take the weight. Also, the interceptor required an area as large as Syria to complete a high speed turn, during which it could be brought down by carefully placed SAMs or opposing interceptors.
In contrast, Lockheed, when developing their SR-71 Blackbird as a private venture, earmarked Titanium as a potential material for the airframe, in spite of there being no established techniques or tooling at the time for working with this strange element. Undeterred, they single handedly developed definitive and ground breaking tools and methods, buying up the entire world production of Titanium (ironically Soviet dominated) in the process.
Coupled with two of the most high tech engines ever developed at the time by Pratt & Whitney, the aircraft used a specially developed fuel and required a specialist KC-135 tanker for refuelling. It leaked fuel permanently while on the ground as a result of the tolerance requirements of the titanium airframe, which, when heated by friction during supersonic flight, closed up the holes and stopped the leaks!
The book is a great read, and amply demonstrates the potential of private entreprise led by dynamic executives with no or little state interference.
The Chip (Paperback) by T. R. Reid
The government can introduce a whole lot of cool new stuff, under some very limited circumstances. Most obviously, total war – it sweeps away most of the bureaucratic nonsense and inertia(being at least half the reason why government tends to fail), and also makes it so that if anything new is developed, the complete governmental hammerlock on the economy means that the government can claim the credit. Thus, everything from the jet engine to the atomic bomb can rightfully be claimed as a government invention – even if private enterprise would have done the same thing under the same circumstances(which, likely, they would have with the jet and would not have with the bomb), the government can, rightfully no less, claim the credit.
Secondly, if they deem something valuable enough, they can usually do it by throwing ten times as much money and effort at it as private enterprise. Things like space travel are a good example here – NASA isn’t a very efficient body, and $10 million from the X-Prize did as much to spur human travel to low Earth orbit as $100 billion from NASA, but they did get there.
Note that I’m not trying to defend government engineering here – it’s far worse than the private equivalent. But while it is a failed policy, it has had some genuine successes. I’d take Bell Labs over it any day, but your criticism is undeservedly harsh.
I’ll confess can’t see the point of this exercises. At least this way. Many things were made with Government money, that is not surprise they have the power to arrest trillions so it is not surprising that something goes well. The question is how many more good things would happen if the money would be will be in the people instead of state.
I have the opinion that if not for Communism and its desert of ideas we would probably have already a cure for cancer and many other advancements. We need only to think what the brains of a billion of persons would have brought if they wern’t with poisonous communism.
“. Also, the interceptor required an area as large as Syria to complete a high speed turn”
Any Mach 3 interceptor needs that.
Mig-25 had titanium in some parts more exposed to heat.
George Gilder may be right in this particular instance but as a whole I think it is best to ensure that you find other sources to verify any story he tells. In my experience he tends to wildly extrapolate from his data .
Mr Gilder was one of the people who were popular internet/telecom pundits in the late 1990s and his grasp of that industry and those technologies never impressed me even when he praised the company I worked for (Nortel – now bankrupt).
Yes, but whose money? They can throw 10 times as much money as the private sector because it is stolen arbitrarily from the productive private sector, which in spite of this loss, outperforms the public sector.
For the duration of Soviet Russia, the state financed pharmaceutical research during a period in which 100% – every single active ingredient during that time, was discovered by scientists in the private Western sector, and none at all, zilch, in Communist research labs. This was due to incentive, competition, and good old capitalism.
I need to respectively disagree here.
I am a limited-government, liberty-is-best guy, but one (alleged) example of the development of computer technology does not make your case, I’m afraid.
The integrated circuit itself was invented at Bell Labs in the 1950s, which WAS supported by U.S. government funds (Fairchild ultimately went bankrupt due to mismanagement btw).
In any case, most other forms of engineering were either developed initially, or progressed substantially, due to government funding (mostly as a result of military r&d), including:
-the jet (advanced to subsidies employed during the 2d World War)
-the airplane itself (World War I subsidies)
-the automobile (again, due to reseach into improving tanks and other motor vehicles during the World Wars)
-broadcasting (research funds set up during World War i)
I would say this is only the most prominent examples of government-funded (mostly military-funded) progress in engineering.
Granted, if these technologies had been commercialized by the (relatively) free market, government would not have been able to make them available to the masses. However, the role of the state in subsidizing their initial development (or their development at later, crucial stages) is just a reality.
I must disagree on aircraft. The first successful aircraft was built by a pair of Ohio entreprenuers; they beat on the well funded Smithsonian efforts of Langley. Aircraft development in the US got entangled in the lawsuits between the Wrights and Martin, but in Europe it was the golden age of the Prize. Newspapers, you name it, put up prizes that pushed aircraft development ahead rapidly.
The Jet Engine? Read the story of what Whipple went through to get them to even look at his invention and how he had to develop it almost in spite of the British Government.
Bell Labs was not a major federal lab, and in any case they did not invent the IC, they invented the transistor. That was with private money.
The automobile was invented by tinkerers of various sorts around the world in the 1870-1880’s.
Wireless was invented by Marconi and was in use long ago. The Titanic was sending out wireless messages asking for help if you remember.
All of your examples have to do with existing, well known technologies that were pushed forward rapidly by throwing money at them. The same developments would likely have happened over a bit longer time frame without the wars.
Now you could have made the case that nuclear weapons and fission came about because of WWII. I would agree that it is probably the case that fission power would not have occurred for another decade and bombs might not have been built at all. Certainly we would not have had the nuclear industry set back decades because they used commercialized submarine reactors instead of designs by Dyson and others that would not have had the problems associated with them.
I would go further than I did in the article. Government intervention in many cases seems to push something ahead, but all it really does is push us so far down the wrong road that it is half a century before technology advances to where we can afford to correct the problem.
Government is not your friend. Not in life and not in technology.
thanks for your response Dale.
Please, though, I didn’t say these examples of engineering were all INVENTED by governments; only that they were essential to their technological developments.
Bell Labs was not a federal lab, but to my knowledge was subsidized greatly by u.s. federal government spending;
The jet engine was invented privately, but without military r&d it would not have developed as far as it did (Whittle also said, in an essay I believe he published on Eject! on Jan 2008 that Soviet MiG fighter technology was superior to that of the u.s., at least during the Korean war);
again, the motorcar was a private invention but it would have remained at the Model-T level of sophistication if not for the intervention of government spending (for tanks and other motor transport) during the World Wars;
as for the airplane: see the automobile. Without government involvement, the airline industry would never have developed as far it did (which includes subsidies of jet-engine technology for military purposes). Even Warren Buffett said that the prudent course for an investor at Kitty Hawk in 1903 or whatever, would have been to shoot down the `first’ aircraft. What he was saying was that airplanes are net destroyers of wealth.
I don’t recall mentioning the wireless (telegraph).
Now, you say, that these technologies could have been developed better by the private marketplace. Maybe so, but I don’t think so. It is my contention that almost all examples of engineered technology have been crucially aided by the state initially, or at some crucial stage of development.
I think the best example is the subject upon which this entry was based: that is, astronautics. The private sector had no interest whatsoever in developing space technology for the good reason that there is no profit to be made from it. The first satellite was developed, after all, by the Soviet Union when u.s. rockets would crash immediately upon lift-off, or soon thereafter.
I was reminded of the above point after reading Ayn Rand’s `Apollonian and Dyonisian’ in `Anti-Industrial Revolution’, in which she compared unfavourably the half-million who attended the Woodstock festival in Aug 1969 with the same number who watched the liftoff of Apollo a month earlier.
I said to myself, Wait a minute: Woodstock was a product of the free market that Rand praised more so than anyone else; the Apollo programme was of course a government programme, the type that Rand usually had not a good thing to say about.
In conclusion, I’ll just reiterate that I know government isn’t my friend. But if most engineered technology is the result of government action, is engineering liberty’s friend thus?
thanks
Astronautics is specifically the industry that government set back 50 years or more. The Apollo program was magnificent but it was the way of the Dinosaur, not the entrepreneur.
My friends have been battling the tenders of those Dinosaurs since the late seventies and only now is technology reaching the point where we can finally slay the State space program, or at least have it buying tickets on SpaceX and renting rooms at the Lunar Bigelow Hotel and perhaps head on to Mars with BlueOrigin.
Of course they develop good technologies. But the cost is too high to be worth the result.
As a friend of mine, Jim Muncy says, “If we can go to the Moon… why can’t we go to the Moon?” The answer is of course that the government ran it the first time for political reasons and in so doing created an industry with such a high entry level and with a market built around it with a set of built in assumptions such that it was impossible for decades to supplant it.
It’s happening now and it is no thanks to the State… which has gone from a mind set of ‘how to stop those trouble makers (not kidding, paraphrased from a friend who was in a meeting she shouldn’t have been in) back in the 1980’s, to a grudging acknowledgement that they may not have any choice but to use our ilk because their method is just about to go kaput as the Ares-I slips into the far future and the white eleshuttle has them gargling Maalox every time it flies again before retirement.
some responses –
*Astronautics is specifically the industry that government set back 50 years or more. The Apollo program was magnificent but it was the way of the Dinosaur, not the entrepreneur.*
Dale, could you explain this statement? how does state subsidy of astronautics `set back’ private enterpreneurship in that same field? In fact, no private investor became invovled in astronautics (to repeat) for the good reason that it’s a lousy investment. Why go to space? What’s there? What’s on the moon? The answer: space, more space, and a huge rock. This is, btw, a value judgement on the space programme, which of course, the Soviet Union (a command economy) was initially more successful at than the u.s. – because the state subsidized research into this field.
*My friends have been battling the tenders of those Dinosaurs since the late seventies and only now is technology reaching the point where we can finally slay the State space program*
bingo! technology has reached the level where it is (potentially) profitable for the free market because of its development by the state…
*Of course they develop good technologies. But the cost is too high to be worth the result.*
and this is where I agree with you: the cost of engineered technology not supported by the free market (ie. the democratic wishes of buyers) are too high.
I really am puzzled by the Wayne v. Dale exchanges.
By Wayne’s standards the government can be credited with everything because they deliver mail to everyone.
Government can try things the private sector can’t afford. Sometimes in doing so the government botches matters up and sometimes we get some pretty good stuff from the projects.
The key is cost. I have enough money to have custom cabinets built in my kitchen. That is my private sector. I do not have enough money to provide cabinets to millions of people.
Power matters. By definition government is our Supreme Referee. When the Referee sees no reason to act the games can proceed in the private sector.
But when the Referee decides to intervene the government may simply take over and exclude the private sector. Or partly exclude.
I would say that happened with broadcasting. All the frequencies of known practical use were allocated by government to end confusion.
The government remained relatively uninterested in circuitry the radio engineers devised for transmitting or reception. Circuitry was not broadcasting, it was electronics.
Did government improve radio or TV? Maybe.
Mostly they stopped the confusion when multiple broadcasters used overlapping frequencies. So was that an improvement or a regulation?
Now, look at another matter. NASA.
Goddard is generally credited with the liquid fuel rocket. The history of the solid fuel rocket is less certain.
Goddard got money in irregular amounts from various well wishers, tinkerers, and discretionary funds. If a Professor gave him $100 did that mean a university developed Goddard’s rockets?
Size matters. Goddard could do some things but not everything. No one was going to build the V2 except a government. And no one was going to send men to the moon except governments. The task was too big and uncertain for a private venture.
Time matters too. Today private travel to the moon might be possible for Bill Gates. The methods are tested and he has the money to build the vehicle. He hasn’t shown a desire to do so.
But in 1968 Howard Hughes, one of the richest of men, could not have funded his own trip to the moon. In 1968 it was too costly, by 2009 it isn’t.
We can see that time matters, cost matters, and the interests of government matter. There are, and have always been, activities where time mattered most, ditto cost, ditto government interests.
Taking credit. All government agencies now have advertising departments. Their job is to endlessly think of arguments praising that agency. And reasons that agency must grow. All mankind depends upon the agency, it is the True Grail.
Of course they will try to take credit for everything and mold history into praise. Some private firms, mostly very large ones, do the same. But the consequences differ.
Private firms are limited by law and can run into severe or fatal problems when they print outright lies.
In contrast, an agency can pretty much say whatever it wants. On rare occasions there may be a reprimand. But such a setback will not be severe, no one will go to jail and probably no one will be fired or demoted. Then operations will resume as normal.
It is very good to be the King. And also quite good to work for one.
This is getting too long. The purpose of government is not efficiency or ingenuity. When they happen anyway it amazes people.
The efficiency and ingenuity of private initiatives varies wildly. But all are limited by resources and law in a way that government is not.
Wayne Whig mentions `Apollonian and Dyonisian’ in one of his comments above. Have a look at that link ladies and gents, if you are wondering exactly what agenda our dear Wayne is claiming to represent.
Got caught out there didn’t you Wayme, you gimp. Yes, someone here has followed this, so don’t pretend to be some random libertarian sympathiser who is interested in anything Ayn Rand may have stood for because you have been exposed.
Get back to where you came from with my boot up your arse.
While we are at it, let’s use Ayn Rand’s methods here, why not?
Who pays for government projects? – blank out.
You tit.
And let’s get it straight that Rand is on record at some length as railing against the US expropriation of its citizens’ private property to pay for the Apollo program, I will supply references if anyone objects.
if anyone has time to listen to the audio file in my link they will see that her point is to do with the Enlightenment values of Apollo compared with what she saw as the corrupt social values of Woodstock.
Like all evasive moochers, Wayne thought he could misrepresent this obscure reference.
TomC. Your language is totally out of order. Argument by obscenity and loud noises is not allowed here. I do not agree with the posters thesis, but this is a place of reasoned, civil argument.
Please abide by the rules.
I do apologise, Dale. Here is a revised edition:
Wayne Whig mentions `Apollonian and Dyonisian’ in one of his comments above.
If I might use one of Rand’s replies here –
Who pays for government projects? – blank out.
Rand is actually on record at some length as railing against the US expropriation of its citizens’ private property to pay for the Apollo program, I will supply references if anyone objects.
if anyone has time to listen to the audio file in my link they will see that her point is to do with the Enlightenment values of Apollo compared with what she saw as the corrupt social values of Woodstock.
I hope this will provide some context as to exactly where Wayne is coming from and what his intentions might be.
quote – …if anyone has time to listen to the audio file in my link they will see that her point is to do with the Enlightenment values of Apollo compared with what she saw as the corrupt social values of Woodstock.
Mr. Evasive Moocher here: It’s a valid point to say that Rand was praising a massive, multibillion-dollar government programme – the Apollo mission – whilst deriding the `corrupt social values’ of Woodstock, which no matter what you say, was staged as a profit-making event (that it made no profit, and turned into a logistical disaster, does not take away from the point).
But not only that: Woodstock 69 was saved from utter catastrophe by the actions of the u.s. government, ie. declaring the concert site a disaster area such that emergency provisions could be moved into the area.
Dale, Tomc, I agree with Rand about the social values of the `Woodstock nation’ – I am in very broad agreement with libertarian values generally (although I hate that term, `libertarian’). I disagree with her, however, over the value of sending rockets to a big ball of rock 250,000 miles away. that is what the Apollo programme was: the world’s most expensive science experiment, paid for by the taxpayer.
I just don’t think there is a case to be made that the free market has been crucial to engineering technology; that it was the state that is crucial to the improvement of engineered technology.
But here’s my real point: this being the case, is engineered technology a friend of liberty?
thanks for your thoughts on this matter – and by the way, thanks for the link as well to Apollonian and Dionysian…
ps – as I was writing this, `For Yasgur’s Farm’, the Mountain song about the Woodstock festival, started playing on mediaplayer. Funny.
Even Hayek (I think) argued that government should be “limited to” basic research that might not attract funding at all otherwise.
I never understood why!
Even Hayek (I think) argued that government should be “limited to” basic research that might not attract funding at all otherwise.
I never understood why! Surely this is exactly the sort of producers’ good that stands at the very far end of Boehm-Bawerk’s production chains and which entrepreneurs exist to discover.