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Comment by sevenless | Hacker News Reader

Automation and IT in the US has little to do with free markets and a whole lot to do with enormous government expenditure, often war related. The internet is the obvious one. But if you go to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, you can see the first integrated circuit, which so happened to be built by Fairchild for the USAF, and the first computers, which were built in Silicon Valley for the Army. The same story is everywhere: About all the tech we take for granted owes its existence to state funding.

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Simply because something was invented to satisfy a government contract does not mean that it would never have been invented otherwise. Government spending simply shifts the preferences of goods arbitrarily away from what would have arisen through market processes.

The government has been hiring the bulk of PhD-level researchers for the purposes of war (and surveillance). Imagine what those minds would have done with their ingenuity and initiative in the private sector the last 70 years.

One of the few things that probably would never have been created by the private sector is nuclear weapons, since there is no profitable use of such devices.

Now that the cold war is over, it seems that everyone is working to make people click on ads. I'm not sure it's much of an improvement.

Single data point: in my field of aerospace engineering, many of my colleagues are going to government labs and aerospace contractors.

Sure, that's fine. But that's not those folks being unleashed and creating things even more amazing than the space program and such. Which is what clarkmoody was suggesting would have happened had the big bad government not sucked up all the smart people and set them to work on bombs, etc.

"...probably would never have been created by the private sector is nuclear weapons, since there is no profitable use of such devices."

As of now, maybe. They're going to be quite useful once we get around to asteroid mining.

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