Meanwhile people say capitalism drives innovation.
How much is nvidia single handedly holding back innovation and new discoveries?
How much is nvidia single handedly holding back innovation and new discoveries?
This is ignoring two very important things.
The first is the number of government-funded projects that burned a mountain of cash and led to nothing. Unfortunately this is the rule rather than the exception in modern times because modern government has been captured by interest groups that divert money from where it's supposed to be going to themselves, which makes everything cost ten times more than it did when the government was funding the Apollo program and ARPANET. So you can't just say "government fund more stuff" without fixing that first.
And the second is that private companies inventing stuff only to see somebody else successfully commercialize it is still causing it to be invented. And the overlap between invention and commercial success can be very little and still cause people to do it, because the reward when it happens is very large.
The saying is really that free market competition drives innovation.
Obviously patents and copyrights are government-issued monopolies, and monopolies are by definition lacking in competition.
The theory is that by granting the monopolies we get more innovation. Often the theory is wrong.
Especially when we allow the company to leverage the monopoly on the thing they actually invented into a monopoly on ancillary things that are only used in combination with that class of product.
Sent from my iPhone.