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Comment by rndmind | Hacker News Reader

You speak in absolutes, but the world is not black and white.

Look at the publicly funded Bell Labs in the 1940's - 1970's

They invented everything from the transister, tcp/ip, C language, satellites, cellphones, and the list goes on ... they were not-for-profit because the government allowed ma bell to be a government sponsored monopoly.

Look at that incredible work done, which would not have occurred if they had been forced to churn a profit each and every quarter.

It is a tragedy what happened to Bell Labs when they finally were cut off from being a non-profit in he mid 1970's. The shell of Bell Labs remains, iirc the buildings are now owned by Nokia, but it is a very sad result for the company that pioneered our modern society.

A great book on Bell Labs is called The Idea Factory, highly recommend that.

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What on earth? Bell Labs wasn't publicly funded. Talk about turning things around. Bells Labs is the best example of the universal rule that just about every good piece of science for the last 70 years was produced by the private sector.

Every time I see something along the lines of "<so and so> tech wouldn't exist without government funding because...." I do some research and it turns out that the article was based on one person working for the government who contributed about 1/100'th of the important work, meanwhile the other 99% of the work being done by the private sector doesn't get mentioned. Sometimes the government also takes credit because they funded 50 million out of a 5 billion dollar budget, or something equally ridiculous.

As for Bell Labs, I remember watching a documentary about Shockley and co inventing the transistor. The military decided they needed that technology and managed to get their hands on some samples from Bell Labs. They set up a team to try to work out what Bell Labs was doing. Even having all of the Bell Lab's work in front of them, and knowing what to do, they couldn't keep up. They interviewed the military scientists much later for the documentary and they were all very depressed by the whole situation because for every one month of work the military group did catching up, Bell Labs had pulled 3 months further ahead.

The government can't even keep up with the private sector when they are copying them, let alone actually initiating that kind of research. It isn't a coincidence that almost all the best research in the world is done at privately run American universities. At best, good research can get done at public universities when they receive industry funding.

I've heard a UK story (from 19 century I believe), when someone gave a talk about government role in economy, and as example said that if not government, no one would have built lighthouses.

Someone checked that argument, and found out that out of thousands British lighthouses, not a single one was built by government. They all were built by various associations of mariners or traders.

Check out:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lighthouse_in_Economics

Ronald H. Coase is one of the most brilliant scientists ever and he just recently died in 2013. He was literally still productive at 100 years old.

Btw, the famous Coase Theorem is actually not be Coase and he didn't like the way it was used.

Here an interview with him just 1 year before he died:

https://www.econtalk.org/coase-on-externalities-the-firm-and...

Here some other interviews from the same podcast about him:

https://www.econtalk.org/wally-thurman-on-bees-beekeeping-an...

https://www.econtalk.org/boudreaux-on-coase/

https://www.econtalk.org/robert-frank-on-coase/

> They invented everything

They also basically employed a gigantic number of PhDs. I don't remember the exact number but at point in time they basically hired a high % of all PhD in the country.

The question is what would all these people have done if not for Bell Labs.

And Bell Labs has nothing to do with SLS. SLS is LITERLLY the opposite of giving freedom to smart people to innovate. Its lets use old technology so we can pork fund the existing contractors.

Bell Labs were owned by Western Electric and AT&T.

AFAIK they weren't directly public funded. You can argue that AT&T being a monopoly amounted to indirect help, but that still does not it itself generate enough money for research itself, neither does it ensure that the entity will be even willing to do and finance more research than absolutely necessary. They could have spent all the revenue on executive bonuses and campaign contributions to their congressmen.

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